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

192 Pages·1985·9.53 MB·English

by  Robert E. Bjork

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
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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