How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems PDF
Preview How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems
How the Anglo-S axons Read Their Poems Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM HOW THE ANGLO-SAXONS READ THEIR POEMS DANIEL DONOGHUE UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress PhiladelPhia Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM Copyright©2018UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia,Pennsylvania19104-4112 www.upenn . edu / pennpress Printed in the United States of Ameri ca on acid- free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names:Donoghue,Daniel,1956-author. Title: How the Anglo-Saxons read their poems / Daniel Donoghue. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description:1stedition.|Philadelphia:UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress, [2018]|Series:TheMiddleAgesseries|Includesbibliographical referencesandindex. Identifiers:LCCN2017037677|ISBN9780812249941(hardcover:alk.paper) Subjects:LCSH:Englishpoetry—OldEnglish,ca.450-1100—Historyand criticism.|Oralinterpretationofpoetry—History—To1500. Classification:LCCPR203.D662018|DDC829/.1009—dc23 LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2017037677 Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1.HowtoRead 11 Chapter 2.FromOralitytoPunctuation 44 Chapter 3.VerseSyntax 85 Chapter 4.EyeMovement 128 LessaConclusionThananOpeningUp 155 Notes 175 Bibliography 213 Index 231 Acknowledgments 237 Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM This page intentionally left blank Unauthenticated Download Date | 9/23/18 1:47 PM Introduction The conventions governing the display of verse today are so well established that it takes some effort to recognize their utter arbitrariness. Flip through any classroom anthology or consult the latest New Yorker and you will find poems with a line break for each line of verse, usually flush left with a ragged right- hand margin, and conventional En glish punctuation. To be sure, the long per sis tence of counterexamples like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” Emily Dickinson’s eccentric dashes, e.e. cummings’s typography, or Jorie Graham’s blanks on the page reminds us that the manipulation of these conventions is nothing new, but their innovations would be pointless unless the conventions were well established in the first place. In this regard things have not changed much over the past seven centuries: most poems published today still bear a vis i ble resemblance to medieval manuscript copies of, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Although it is less likely today than it was a century ago, for example, that a capital letter will begin each line of verse, the start of sentences and proper nouns will usually be capitalized in almost any poem. The basic format has been remarkably stable. While exceptions are not hard to find, even the most experimental layouts achieve their effects within the confines of the convention. By contrast, few bodies of lit er a ture can defamiliarize the apparent naturalness of t hese conventions as can the earliest written poems in En glish, which to our eyes do not look like verse at all. A poem like The Wanderer, for example, is written out from margin to margin in the Exeter Book with scant punctuation, few capitals, and no use of space to separate verse lines or paragraphs. In a deft allusion to this practice, Seamus Heaney includes a poem called “The Wanderer” in his 1975 pamphlet Stations. In it a teacher congratulates the schoolboy Seamus, who has just won a scholarship, by awarding him a coin in front of his classmates.1 In drawing attention to the Old En glish Wanderer with the verbal echoes of “ring- giver” and “benches,” Heaney’s poem links the modest schoolroom ceremony to an ancient tradition Brought to you by | University of Cambridge Authenticated Download Date | 5/26/18 11:01 AM 2 Introduction of gift- giving that permeates the Old En glish poem, in which the anhaga or “wanderer” keenly recalls the pleasures of the mead hall. Heaney reaches for a diff er ent kind of allusion in making his “Wanderer” a prose poem, with the lines written out from margin to margin, which mimics the appearance of The Wanderer in the Exeter Book. It is not a question of form imitating form because the Old En glish alliterative verse conventions are quite dif- fer ent, as Heaney well knew, but the margin- to- margin printing of “The Wanderer” is a poet’s nod to the manuscript appearance of the medieval poem. The long lines of Heaney’s “Wanderer” effectively reverse the convention observed by editors of Old En glish poems, who confidently move from the spare manuscript pre sen ta tion to produce editions with all the modern typo- graphic conventions we associate with verse: lineation, paragraph indenta- tion, punctuation, and capital letters for proper names and the opening of sentences. These edited texts are the versions that we have come to know of The Wanderer, Beowulf, and other poems. Even though every Anglo- Saxonist is aware of the under lying manuscript pre sen ta tion, the transition to the modern format has drawn relatively l ittle comment. We simply accept it, and in accepting it draw the silent conclusion that the two formats are somehow equivalent. Scholarly discussion of the manuscript layout rarely moves be- yond description to ask why the poems should be displayed with such sparse visual cues in the first place, but it is worth considering how a medieval reader could recognize and read these lines as a poems. To say the Anglo- Saxons simply knew how to read their poems is merely to restate the question of “how” because it is not at all obvious what that knowledge consists of. Yet somehow the manuscript pre sen ta tion was adequate to the task for the first generations of readers. It is not as though Anglo- Saxon scribes w ere encumbered by primitive scribal practices at their disposal and could pro- duce only a compromised text. On the contrary, they had equivalents to the same vis i ble cues we associate with poetry today— verse lineation, capitals, a system of punctuation, and vari ous uses of space— each of which found a use in other kinds of writing. Old En glish verse was diff er ent. A central con- cern of this book is the scribes’ collective choice not to incorporate most of these available cues— when they clearly could have done so—as they tran- scribed many thousands of lines of their vernacular poems. Their practice presupposes a reader who brought a robust set of expectations to the task and who honed t hose expectations through a lifelong participation in tradi- tional poetics. In asking how the Anglo- Saxons read their vernacular poems Brought to you by | University of Cambridge Authenticated Download Date | 5/26/18 11:01 AM Introduction 3 in manuscript, this study poses a question more complicated than it may first appear. The act of reading, then as now, has always been more than a slow crawl of the eyes across the line of writing; it is more than the mechanical pro cess of picking out letters and words and stringing them together into half- lines that alliterate. A pro cess like this certainly forms part of it, but it oversimplifies the complex mental activity that allows readers from any period to comprehend a written text, especially a work of verbal art. In many ways this book’s topic is old, at least as old as the editing and printing of Old En glish poems. To the first editors the manuscript’s seem- ingly haphazard pre sen ta tion could be rendered intelligible only through he- roic effort— simpler in scale but not unlike deciphering Greek fragments on papyri or Assyrian cuneiform on clay tablets. The field’s longstanding schol- arly consensus has been that the earliest readers of t hese manuscripts knew the language and the poetic conventions with enough intimacy that they could construe the lines despite the sparse graphic conventions, even though it made the pro cess of reading laborious. This extra effort, according to some, compelled readers to utter the words aloud. Moreover, leaving a blank, ragged right- hand margin would be a waste of precious vellum, especially for verna- cular poems, which carried less prestige than the Latin lit er a ture whose codices filled medieval libraries. This consensus is largely correct as far as it goes, but it leaves too many questions unanswered. Take punctuation, for example. We know that some scribes who wrote out the poems might also transcribe Latin poems and Old En glish prose texts, both of which used punctuation with greater regularity. Why did the scribes refrain from intro- ducing the same marks of punctuation to their vernacular poems? It would have taken little effort to do so and would have added little to the physical length of the text. The question deserves a fresh look. In focusing on the oldest survivals of poetry in the En glish tradition, my approach is insistently historical, but in other re spects it is synchronic or even transhistorical, because what is often taken to be historically contin- gent (such as s ilent versus oral reading) turns out to be fairly widespread across many centuries and many cultures. To broaden my theoretical ap- proach, I have turned to the subfield of cognitive psy chol ogy known as eye- movement studies, which examines the complex choreography between the eyes and brain while we read. Although eye- movement research typically involves living languages and con temporary readers, a number of the basic princi ples of reading apply to earlier centuries and other cultures. The field has taken off in the last thirty years, but its discoveries are l ittle known outside Brought to you by | University of Cambridge Authenticated Download Date | 5/26/18 11:01 AM
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