The Ireland Prophecy

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “The Ireland Prophecy: Text and Metrical Context,” appears in Studies in Philology. The article provides a first critical edition and verse-historical contextualization of a little-known late fifteenth-century alliterative verse prophecy found in seven fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. Here I reproduce brief selections from the edition and commentary:

New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) 366.5/2834.3/3557.55 is an alliterative verse prophecy extant in six fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript copies. The Ireland Prophecy, as I title it, has received scant critical attention and has never been edited. The poem combines the tradition of vatic, anti-Saxon prophecy inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (ca. 1138) with oblique references to mid-fifteenth-century politics. The work offers at least one first-rate literary effect, the compound adjective bryght-breneyd ‘clad in bright chain-mail coats’ (62a). Another remarkable feature of the poem is an acrostic spelling out I-R-L-A-N-D ‘Ireland,’ over the space of two lines (ll. 83–4). In one manuscript the acrostic is ciphered in early Arabic numerals, where A=1, B=2, and so on. The Ireland Prophecy furnishes important evidence of the circulation of alliterative verse and the development of alliterative meter in the sparsely documented period after 1450. The meter of the Ireland Prophecy also testifies to the continuity of the alliterative tradition across the Old English/Middle English divide, as I will argue. In what follows I introduce the manuscript texts of The Ireland Prophecy and present a critical edition of the poem with textual notes. The second section contextualizes the metrical form of the poem in terms of the durable poetic tradition to which it belongs. The third section draws out the literary-historical implications of this metrical contextualization.

[…]

S m[u]sid in [m]i[n]des     [a]n[d] merk[e] [ther] a P
The tothe correctid   [ther] tides mikel tene
S sett by hymself    in set an I.          throne sæte
With [t]rayn they be tynt    trowe [þ]ow non oþer
Þese liouns bees lusked    and lased on sondir          struck; bound
And thair landes [l]ost    for longe tyme
Thair men shal be mangled    and mordred with moode
Without any mercy    robbed on rowe
Thair wodys shal be wasted    wit thow it wele
The donne dere in thaire denne    be dryven to þe dethe
Þair fforestes be foreyd    þair flockes awey ffett
Þair stedys shal be stroyed   and stoln fro þayr steddes
Þair castells shal be cnocked    thair knyghtes cast in care
Þair tresore shal be trussed    and trilled with trayne          loaded up; wheeled off <ON
With brybory and with bragge    bost shal men blow
And mykyl tor[vell]e and tene    shal tyde in þat tyme          trouble <ON torveldi
But þis bale and þis boste    blowyn til an ende.
[…]

Having suggested a post-1450 date for The Ireland Prophecy on historical grounds, I turn now to consider its metrical form. The Ireland Prophecy is in the variety of alliterative meter characteristic of the last phase of the alliterative tradition, before its disappearance from the active repertoire of verse forms around 1550. Recent developments in the study of alliterative meter can serve to contextualize the poetic form of The Ireland Prophecy; the meter of the poem, in turn, can clarify and consolidate progress in Middle English alliterative metrics. In what follows, I summarize the consensus view of Middle English alliterative meter, compare it to the meter of The Ireland Prophecy, and point to one avenue for future research.

Recent studies have gone some way toward solving the riddle of Middle English alliterative meter while at the same time uncovering evidence of continuity between Old English meter, Early Middle English alliterative meter, and Middle English alliterative meter. The new metrical scholarship refocuses questions of literary history, poetics, and the cultural meaning of meter. In particular, the alliterative tradition appears to have been both more durable and more dynamic than proponents of a so-called Alliterative Revival supposed. These recent studies have focused on the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the period to which most of the extant Middle English alliterative poems can be referred. Alliterative meter after 1450 remains less well understood. Yet if the conclusions of this recent scholarship hold, late alliterative poems like the Ireland Prophecy belong to the same centuries-long trajectory of formal development that links Beowulf (?eighth/tenth c.) to Lawman’s Brut (ca. 1200) and the Brut to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Here is a companion site for this essay, part of a larger digital project.

Here are images of the Ireland Prophecy in manuscript context (not included in my publication):

London, Society of Antiquries, MS 101 (late fifteenth c.)

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 441C (olim Williams 219) (sixteenth c.)

Cole and Galloway, Companion to “Piers Plowman”

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My review of The Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), appears in Speculum. Here’s the opening of the review:

This volume is the second of its kind. A Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, 1988), marked a high point of sophistication and diversification in the study of this challenging Middle English poem. Following in the tradition of Alford’s volume and capitalizing on research progress since 1988, Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway’s Companion offers a panoptic view of major issues in the historical and literary interpretation of Piers Plowman.

The contributions are organized into three parts: “The poem and its traditions” (Helen Barr, Ralph Hanna, Steven Justice, and Jill Mann), “Historical and intellectual contexts” (Robert Adams, James Simpson, Matthew Giancarlo, Cole and Galloway, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari), and “Readers and responses” (Simon Horobin, Lawrence Warner, and Nicolette Zeeman). The volume’s tripartite arrangement (for a medieval poem obsessed with trios and trinities) invites linear reading, leading, in a familiar critical arc, from the poem qua literature, to its wider historical contexts, and finally to its importance for subsequent histories. At the same time, each essay is designed as a self-contained introduction to the poem.

listening to syntax

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

At Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference in Madison, CT, I participated in a critical seminar called “Listening to the Line.” My gratitude to Natalie Gerber for the invitation, and for organizing and leading the seminar. What follows is a modified version of the opening frame and closing paragraphs of my paper, “Listening to the Syntax of Alliterative Poetry.” This paper is not a fully developed critical argument but an attempt at an exposition, for a non-medievalist audience, of a historical perplexity from my area of specialization:

Historical background

The term ‘alliterative meter’ denotes the unrhymed meter used in Old English poetry, as in Beowulf (?eighth/tenth century); in Early Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Lawman’s Brut (c. 1200); and in Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century). This verse form does not survive to the present day: sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, the alliterative meter was deselected from the active repertoire of English verse forms.

Modern scholars inevitably approach the alliterative meter with expectations molded by the experience of scanning accentual-syllabic poetry. Such expectations are generally unhelpful for appreciating the historically significant aspects of the alliterative meter, however. A useful opposition for capturing the difference between accentual-syllabic verse forms and the alliterative meter is deductive/inductive. Deductive meters, such as iambic pentameter, consist of the concatenation of perceptually similar metrical units (feet, syllables, etc.). As a result, they have a predictable beat (hence ‘deductive’), even if this beat is only ever notional. Inductive meters, such as the alliterative long line, consist of the juxtaposition of perceptually dissimilar metrical units. As a result, they have no predictable beat, not even a notional one. Instead, the pattern of each metrical unit must be discovered on a case-by-case basis through the application of specialized rules for the assignment of metrical stress (hence ‘inductive’).

Weird syntax

Just as Middle English alliterative meter disrupts many of the expectations that modern readers have learned to bring to modern verse, so too the syntax of Middle English alliterative poetry disrupts the syntactical expectations involved in parsing canonical English poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to Robert Frost. From a modern perspective, the syntax of Middle English alliterative verse can seem weird, unnecessarily complex, or archaizing. This perception captures something important about the syntax of alliterative verse, but it is also the result of left turns and blind alleys in literary history, which have alienated modern commentators from the alliterative tradition. In this sense, the strange syntax of Middle English alliterative verse measures the historical distance between fourteenth- and twenty-first-century literary cultures.

[…]

Conclusion

Readers will have noticed by now that syntactical inversions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight cluster in the second half of the line, and often at the very end of the line. There is a metrical reason for this asymmetrical distribution. While syntax may seem like its own, independent domain, in alliterative verse meter and syntax are best understood as two expressions of a single internalized metrical grammar. Many of the inversions discussed here occur in part for metrical convenience. So for example, “as I in toun herde” “as I heard in town” (Gawain 31) avoids a pattern with two long dips (*as I herde in toun). Patterns with two long dips were not part of the metrical system of the second half of the line in fourteenth-century alliterative verse. Thus meter and syntax work together to create normative lines. There is an analogy to be made to the way that Donald Wesling describes the interface of meter and syntax in modern accentual-syllabic meters (Wesling, The Scissors of Meter).

Syntax also takes on a life of its own in Middle English alliterative verse as a marker of poetic artifice. Even if they strike modern readers as unnecessarily complex, syntactical inversions in Middle English alliterative poetry seem to have signaled a high and serious poetic style. And alliterative poetry is nothing if not serious: in addition to the gold-and-tinsel Arthurian antiquity of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the corpus includes the apocalyptic/homiletic/satiric masterpiece Piers Plowman, the luridly anti-Semitic Siege of Jerusalem, the high-chivalric Destruction of Troy, and a number of allusive political prophecies inspired by the Prophecies of Merlin embedded in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138). There are no straightforwardly comedic or celebratory alliterative poems, or at least none that have survived. The affect of alliterative narrative is characteristically high-minded and sententious. Encoding and deciphering elaborate syntactical inversions made up an important part of the cultural value of composing and reading (or hearing) this poetry.

Finally, we might inquire why Middle English alliterative verse exhibits the stylized syntactical inversions that it does. To answer this question requires comparing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to earlier alliterative poems. Such a comparison reveals that syntactical inversions had always characterized the alliterative tradition. In the openings of Beowulf and the Brut, we find, e.g., “þrym gefrunon” (prose order “gefrunon (þone) þrym” “heard of the might”) (Beowulf 2) and “at æðelen are chirechen” (prose order “at are æðelen chirechen” “at a splendid church”) (Brut 3). Neither of these arrangements was characteristic of Old English or Early Middle English prose syntax, and thus, inferentially, neither was characteristic of the poets’ normal spoken syntax. The syntax of fourteenth-century alliterative verse, then, shows historical pressure from earlier phases of this metrical tradition. If so, the often contorted syntax of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight expresses a relation of belonging in metrical tradition. Writing “baret þat lofden” instead of “þat lofden baret” “who loved battle” was not only syntactically permissible and metrically expedient; it also amounted to a prise de position in late medieval English literary culture. By contrasting the syntax of Middle English alliterative verse with that of other Middle English literature (where such inversions are rare to non-existent), we can begin to delineate the cultural stakes of alliterative meter and its weird syntax.

Drout, Tradition and Influence

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My review of Michael D. C. Drout, Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature: An Evolutionary, Cognitivist Approach (New York: Palgrave, 2013), appears in Speculum. Here’s the opening of the review:

This book introduces a meme-based theory of literary tradition and influence. Through a combination of data visualization, analogies to evolutionary biology, and case studies in Old English literature, Michael Drout explores the processes behind the composition, transmission, and reception of literary works in cultural history. In its theoretical approach and its literary focus, the book is a direct extension of Drout’s first monograph, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Tempe, 2006).

The book is structured around a sequence of theoretical issues of increasing abstraction. Chapter 1 defines tradition as “a particular kind of influence in which the entities that are influenced persist in a chain of similar forms” and introduces a general theory of tradition and influence based on Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme, which “is [sic] small unit of culture that reproduces in minds” (11). Chapter 2 integrates this theory of tradition and influence with lexomics, a computational method for measuring affiliations between chunks of text, using various long Old English poems as examples. Chapter 3 applies the meme-based theory of tradition to aesthetics and poetic genre, using the Old English Fortunes of Men, Gifts of Men, and Precepts as examples. Chapter 4 takes up the biological metaphor of the adaptive landscape to conceptualize the developmental trajectories of memes in evolutionary time, and chapter 5 uses this metaphor to interpret generic features in a group of Old English poems from the Exeter Book. Chapter 6 applies the meme-based theory of tradition to the problem of authorship, using the Old English Homiletic Fragment II as an example; the chapter concludes with a memetic exegesis of three literary-critical concepts of authorship and the six “revisionary ratios” of poetic influence posited in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence.

Despite its title, then, this is not primarily a book about medieval English literature. […]

counting and the heart of a poem

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

At the MLA conference in January, in a roundtable session entitled “Rhythm and Rhyme,” the poet-critic Simon Jarvis offered the following general observation: “Counting can often take us quite quickly into the heart of a poem.” Jarvis titled his paper “In Defense of Numbers,” with a pun on the historical meaning of ‘numbers’ (‘verses of poetry’).

In my own critical practice, I find Jarvis’s observation to be profoundly true, and in a way that often goes unremarked in the larger conversations about the study of poetry. I thought I would record some of my reactions to Jarvis’s statement here, with examples drawn from my own research on medieval English verse. This post can then function as a summary of my modes of investigation as well as a medievalist Defense of Numbers.

My research into medieval English meters involves a lot of counting. First, I count in order to define a study corpus. The distinction between alliterative and non-alliterative Middle English poetry, for example, is crucial to my research program. One way to appreciate the distinction is to read a list of alliterative and non-alliterative poems generated by a certain set of criteria. Counting is a way to understand what counts in a given critical paradigm.

Second, I count in order to define a research problem. For example, I might search through the text of Piers Plowman B for lines ending in the word gold. (Hooray for concordances.) I might want to make such a search because the rules of Middle English alliterative meter, as these are currently understood, prohibit monosyllabic words like gold from appearing at the end of the line. (And of course meter is itself another form of counting.)

Third, I count the attributes of a given dataset. For example, the quantity, distribution, grammatical structure, and poetic context of the lines ending in gold in Piers Plowman B might all be relevant to their interpretation. This stage of research generally involves Excel spreadsheets with multiple columns.

Finally, counting in poetry almost always involves discounting: whatever interpretation or explanation I offer for lines ending in monosyllables in Piers Plowman B, it will likely cover some but not all of the verses in the dataset. I think this might be the phenomenon that Jarvis most had in mind when he wrote that “counting can often take us quite quickly into the heart of a poem.” As soon as one recognizes multiple instantiations of a poetic form pointing to contradictory critical conclusions, one has begun the work of understanding a poem as a poem.

It seems to me there are two critical objections to counting-as-interpretation that successful counting must answer. From the right, counting appears less as an interpretive process than as an objective truth discovery mechanism. Adopting the language and rhetoric of the hard sciences, certain strands of philology tend to view data as given information that must be carefully counted, after which time the truth becomes apparent to all reasonable observers. This sort of methodology tends to underestimate the extent to which critical paradigms serve to create ‘the data’ by shaping the questions we ask of available evidence. Saying this need not amount to solipsism or relativism, as the work of Thomas Kuhn shows clearly.

From the left, counting comes under fire as scientism or solutionism, the quantification of qualitative phenomena. Adopting the language and rhetoric of French philosophy, certain strands of poststructuralism tend to regard statistics in general with suspicion. This sort of methodology tends to emphasize the uniqueness and irreducible historicity of each individual poetic text. And yet counting need not imply an escape from the individual poetic text as such. On the contrary, “counting can often take us quite quickly into the heart of a poem.”

What the empiricist and poststructuralist objections share is the assumption that counting should be understood as an inductive process involving little or no subjective self-reflection. For the empiricists, this is what is so valuable about counting; for the poststructuralists, this is why counting is always suspect.

Of the two challenges to counting as a vehicle for transporting oneself into the heart of a poem, the poststructuralist critique is the more fundamental. In modern English departments, it is also the more prevalent. This is, I presume, why Jarvis styled his paper a Defense of Numbers (rather than, say, an Exposition of Critically Aware Counting). Yet I would like to raise one final caution about poststructuralist critiques that have supposedly done away with previously important theoretical concepts in the study of poetry (such as ‘foot’ or ‘volta’ or ‘lyric’). The kind of critical practice that ought to please structuralists and poststructuralists alike (indeed, the kind of critical practice that the structuralists always intended: see Culler’s Structuralist Poetics) is one that engages in counting but also remains aware of its limitations. Counting can often take us quite quickly into the heart of a poem, but to understand where we are when we get there, scholars must appreciate counting as an occasion for critical reflection.

Postscript: It turns out there are five lines ending in gold in Piers Plowman B. Two primary types of interpretation recommend themselves. On the one hand, one might view these five verses as asystematic, that is, nonconformant with general metrical principles. The reasons for asystematic verses might be historical (such verses were once conformant but have become nonconformant as a result of ongoing metrical evolution) or perceptual (such verses express a poet’s or scribe’s overgeneralization of metrical principles). In favor of this interpretation is the rarity of such lines: gold appears at line end in Piers Plowman in only five of its 22 occurrences in the poem, or a total of 0.07% of all lines in Piers Plowman (more counting). On the other hand, one might seek to salvage these verses as metrically systematic. For example, all five instances of gold at line end in Piers Plowman B are the objects of prepositions: while inflectional –e‘s, inherited from Old English case usages, are not generally counted in modern scansion of Middle English alliterative meter, the example of gold might be a reason to count at least some of them. In favor of this interpretation is the spelling of gold: in all five cases, gold is spelled golde in several manuscripts, even though it is spelled without –e in normal scribal practice. Both of these possible explanations, negative and positive, would teach us something important about the historical poetic practices in which William Langland and his audience engaged.