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The Old English verse saints’ lives : a study in direct discourse and the iconography of style PDF

192 Pages·1985·9.53 MB·English
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The Old English Verse Saimts Lives A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style Critics have traditionally treated the Old English poems about saints - Guthlac A, Guthlac B, Juliana, Elene, Andreas - as individual, autonomous works, relating but little to one another except in a broadly generic way. Robert Bjork challenges this traditional view with an examination of the major structural feature that all the poems share: direct discourse. Syntactical and rhetorical analyses of the five poems reveal a con- sistent use of speech in creating stylistic norms or ideals - stylistic icons - in spiritually perfect figures. In all the poems the speech of the saints is formal, rhetorical, and balanced, the stylistic analogue both of their immutable faith and of the Christ-saint figural connec- tion. The speech of all other characters is measured against this standard; their ability or inability to meet the saintly ideal in lan- guage reflects their level of spiritual awareness. The consistency with which these patterns appear sheds new light on the conventions of Old English poetic hagiography. ROBERT E. BJORK is a member of the Department of English, Arizona State University. MCMASTER OLD ENGLISH STUDIES AND TEXTS 4 Alvin A. Lee (General Editor) Laurel Braswell Maureen Halsall Prudence Tracy (University of Toronto Press) The Old English Verse Saints' Lives A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style ROBERT E. BJORK U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press 1985 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-2569-2 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Bjork, Robert E., 1949- The Old English verse saints' lives (McMaster Old English studies and texts; 4) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-2569-2 1. Anglo-Saxon poetry - History and criticism. 2. Direct discourse in literature. 3. Hagiography. I. Title. II. Series. PR203.B571985 821'.! c85-o98937-x Publication of this book was made possible by grants from McMaster University and from the Publications Fund of University of Toronto Press. TO D A N I E L G. C A L D E R boca gleaw, larum leoj?ufaest Quid enim mutabilitas nisi mors quaedam est? Gregory Moralia xn, xxxiii, 38 Social charmers daren't invite comment And a chatterbox doesn't; in Speech, if true, true deeds begin. W.H. Auden 'A Short Ode to a Philologist' Contents Preface / ix INTRODUCTION / 3 ONE Old English Words as Deeds and the Struggle towards Light in Guthlac A I 28 TWO Saintly Discourse and the Distancing of Evil in Cynewulf's Juliana I 45 THREE Judas with a New Voice: Revelatory Dialogue in Cynewulf's Elene I 62 FOUR The Artist of the Beautiful: Immutable Discourse in Guthlac 6 / 9 0 FIVE Typology and the Structure of Repetition in Andreas I no CONCLUSION / 125 Abbreviations / 134 Notes / 135 Bibliography / 161 General Index / 173 Index of Lines / 178 PLATES Pages from ms Junius xi / 23 This page intentionally left blank Preface This book has a dual purpose: to provide an approach to Old English poetic hagiography, showing unified conception and technique in the five verse lives, and to advance the new field of stylistic analysis of Old English, showing how such analysis illuminates the poetry. Two assumptions under- lie my argument, and I freely admit them here. First, though the Old Eng- lish verse saints' lives do not always reach the highest literary plateaus, I assume that they are always carefully crafted because of their status as reli- gious artifacts. While they may seem tedious, na'ive, primitive, or in some other way unsatisfactorily conceived, they are seldom unsatisfactorily exe- cuted. And second, even though direct discourse in the lives has until now received negligible critical attention, I assume that each life invests it with considerable meaning. The device looms large in all the poems, and its 1 sheer bulk, like the monsters' in Beowulf, argues for its importance; my study elaborates that importance, showing ultimately that oratio recta in the Old English verse lives is a major hagiographic convention and plays a much more functional, more thematically crucial, and less ornamental role 2 3 than such critics as Andreas Heusler, Walter M. Hart, Adeline Courtney 4 5 Bartlett, and N.F. Blake have allowed. In organizing the book I have entertained three decreasingly tenable sys- tems of arrangement, none supporting a coherent thesis, though all happily coinciding in some respects. The first is chronology: I have addressed the five poems in what scholars generally feel was the order of their com- 6 position. The second is developmental order, the underlying assumption being that direct discourse waxes and wanes in use: it seems tentatively and abstractly exploited in Guthlac A, brought to full power in Juliana, Elene, and Guthlac B, and then becomes relatively lifeless and inexact in Andreas. And the third is typology. Each life figurally represents one aspect of

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