alliterative meter after 1450

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay, “Alliterative Meter after 1450: The Vision of William Banastre,” appears in an edited volume devoted to early English poetics, edited by Lindy Brady and M. J. Toswell and published by Medieval Institute Publications. My essay provides a first critical edition and verse-historical contextualization of a previously unremarked late fifteenth-century alliterative verse prophecy found in two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. Here I reproduce brief selections from the edition and commentary:

New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) 1967.8 is a verse prophecy extant in two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. The Vision of William Banastre, as I title it, has received no 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 early fourteenth- and mid fifteenth-century politics. The work offers at least one first-rate literary effect, an extended simile comparing a hopeless siege to sailing upwind with no rudder (ll. 7–9). The organization of prophetic language into an interview with God, conducted by Sir William Banastre, has its own pleasures. The Vision 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 Vision also testifies to the continuity of the alliterative tradition across the Old English/Middle English divide. In what follows I introduce the manuscript texts of the Vision, present a critical edition of the poem with textual notes, and contextualize the metrical form of the poem in terms of the durable poetic tradition to which it belongs.

[…]

Part of þe visioun of Sire William Banastre knyght

“Lord, sey me for þe mayden love     that thou þi modir calles
What shall worthe of our kyng     lord, yf it be þi wyll?”
“I shall [þe tel], William     and haue sone done:
Ther shall a kyng prik westward     propirly with pride
And gedir hym an herd     fast al out of towne                                     army <OE hired
And set hym in a seege     til a full sory walle
But þat shall be as nedelese     þat þey seile þedir
Als he þat buskes to a bote     þat broken were þe rother
And þe wynd of þe west     were went hym agayne.
[…]

Having suggested a post-1450 date for the Vision on historical and textual grounds, I turn now to consider its metrical form. The Vision 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 Vision; the meter of the Vision, 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 Vision, and point to one avenue for future research. I conclude by addressing the position of alliterative verse in late medieval literary culture more broadly.

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 Vision 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 (late fourteenth c.).

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

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

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 56 (late fifteenth c.). Photo credit: Jessica Brantley.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.813 (mid sixteenth c.)

a note on Beowulf 2910a

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My note, “Beowulf 2910a ‘leofes ond laðes’,” appears in Notes and Queries. This note proposes a new syntactical interpretation of one verse in a problematic passage in Beowulf. I argue on the basis of this new interpretation that the Beowulf poet does not suggest an equivalence between Beowulf and the dragon to the extent that some scholars have supposed. Here’s the text of the passage in question and the opening frame of the note:

                        Wiglaf siteð
ofer Biowulfe,     byre Wihstanes,
eorl ofer oðrum     unlifigendum,
healdeð higemæðum     heafodwearde
leofes ond laðes.

(Beowulf 2906b-2910a)

Critical discussion of this passage has focused on the form and referent of the rare word higemæðum. The word is traditionally interpreted either as an adjective with the poetically understated meaning ‘weary of mind (i.e. dead)’, parallel with unlifigendum ‘not living (i.e. dead)’, or as an otherwise unattested noun higemæð(u) ‘weariness of mind’ or ‘mind-honor’, used quasi-adverbially to describe Wiglaf’s state of mind. Eduard Sievers proposed emendation to nominative singular higemeðe ‘weary of mind’, applying the adjective to Wiglaf. Sievers’s suggestion was accepted by a few editors before being withdrawn by Sievers himself. In their textual note, the editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf wisely resist the temptation to posit a hapax legomenon or engage in an ad hoc emendation in order to solve a difficult passage. The precise agreement in syntax, sense, and poetic connotation between unlifigendum and higemæðum, and the undoubted use of the same adjective elsewhere in Beowulf (2242a hygemeðe), strongly support the adjectival interpretation. In 2442a, hygemeðe must mean ‘wearying the mind’ rather than ‘weary of mind’. However, as the editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf observe, ‘many poetic compounds are nonce constructions rather than fixed terms, and thus they need not have the same meaning in all contexts’. Indeed, as the editors also note, ‘weary of mind’ would be the expected meaning for an adjective hygemeðe and ‘wearying the mind’ the more unusual one.

There is an additional difficulty in this passage which has gone unrecognized, but which affects the interpretation of higemæðum. The editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf follow previous commentators in taking leofes ond laðes to refer to Beowulf and the dragon, ‘the beloved (one) and the hated (one)’. Yet this interpretation causes at least three problems. […]

Lawman in verse history

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay, “Lawman, the Last Old English Poet and the First Middle English Poet,” appears in an edited volume devoted to this late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century poet, edited by Marie-Françoise Alamichel. The essay collection, published by L’Harmattan, grew out of a 2012 conference at the Sorbonne. My essay is a version of the third chapter of my first book. Here’s the opening frame of this chapter:

Alliterative poetry of the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries rarely refers to the Norman Conquest of England (1066). Every sour note has been wrung for maximum effect in modern criticism, but the implied contrast with pre-Conquest poetry is unconvincing. The Death of William the Conqueror (1087-1121) is alone in criticizing the Normans, which it does in a ham-fisted way that calls to mind a few spoiled monks, not the righteous indignation of the peasantry. The sense of a way of life coming to an end in Durham (1104-1109) and the First Worcester Fragment (late twelfth c.) has precedents in a variety of Old English poems. It is superfluous to add contemporary politics to the list of reasons why poets employed the topos. The pivotal event for post-1066 alliterative poetry was not the Conquest, but the publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (c. 1138). To judge from the extant corpus, alliterative poets’ fascination with the Arthurian past began in a Worcestershire priest’s massive verse translation of the Historia material, extant in two copies and now known as The Brut (c. 1200).

Scholars have always had the impression that the Brut is metrically “loose” in comparison with earlier and later alliterative poetry. In what follows this impression will be rejected. Careful study of alliterative meter yields a clear developmental arc connecting Beowulf to the Brut and the Brut to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth c.). The new account of the evolution of alliterative verse advanced in this book challenges the view of Early Middle English poetry as the refuse of a more glorious tradition. When metrical change is seen as the predictable result of the passage of time rather than a symptom of decadence, alliterative meter can be appreciated as a dynamic institution rather than a gradually eroded edifice. This chapter clarifies recent scholarship on the meter of the Brut and extends it to other Early Middle English alliterative poetry. I show Lawman’s meter to be highly organized, directly related to Old English and to Middle English alliterative meter, and unrelated to Ælfric of Eynsham’s ‘rhythmical alliteration.’ Through consideration of particular words and passages, the second section demonstrates how Lawman’s conservative style resembles that of his Old English predecessors, how the two manuscript versions of the Brut represent two different visions for the future of alliterative verse, and how Lawman’s treatment of the Arthurian past anticipates Middle English romance. By implicating Lawman and other Early Middle English alliterative poetry in a long verse history, I seek to answer recent calls for a revaluation of the twelfth century in English literary history.

phantom syllables

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Phantom Syllables in the English Alliterative Tradition,” appears in Modern Philology. This article lays the groundwork for my first book by comparing and connecting phenomena in Old English meter and Middle English alliterative meter. Less obviously, the article is a first attempt to generalize and operationalize the key concept of ‘metrical phonology,’ i.e., the stylized linguistic forms that inhabit meter. Here’s a representative paragraph, followed by the concluding paragraph:

Carried out with the help of electronic concordances and graphing software, these often perspicacious metrical analyses tend toward notational abstraction. But medievalists interested in the entwined fates of poetry and language ignore meter at their peril. Tucked away in R. D. Fulk’s compendious History of Old English Meter (1992), implicit in the conclusions drawn therein, is the premise that poetic meter is a reliable criterion for establishing absolute chronologies, that developments in verse form follow straightforwardly from developments in the spoken language. A metrical history of comparable scope and polemical density has yet to be written for the Middle English poems, but the seeds have been sown or, rather, the lines of battle have been drawn. It is a battle that must be fought on metrical grounds, for whatever one might like to say about the revivals, survivals, or deaths of poetic traditions, one must in any case confront a burgeoning cache of hard data excavated from the very stuff of metrical language and therefore not directly beholden to the standard accounts of linguistic change or dialectal variation.

[…]

The story of alliterative poetry is neither one of decay and neglect nor of the inevitable triumph of a language or a culture. At each moment, poets must have had access to an array of metrical attitudes ranging from the avant-garde to the nostalgic, full of sounds newfangled, familiar, outdated, and all but forgotten. Future scholarship on alliterative verse would do well to attend to the poetry’s motley meter, built of past language states but not reducible to any one of them; in constant development but never caught up with the times; forever at play with invisible friends, old sounds that had disappeared without going obsolete.

puns and poetic style

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay on wordplay in the Old English poem Exodus appears in Etymology and Wordplay in Medieval Literature: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, edited by Mikael Males. This collection, published in the Brepols Disputatio series, grew out of a 2013 conference at the University of Oslo. The essay, entitled “Puns and Poetic Style in Old English,” asks a historical question and uses poetic style to begin to answer the question. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of the first section:

English poetry written in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries comes down to modern scholars with little secure information about date of composition, authorship, or place of composition. The Old English poetic corpus comprehends an array of genres and topics, from brief monologues to riddles to lengthy biblical narratives. Cutting across these categories is a single poetic metre and a highly conventionalized poetic style. Old English verse, characteristically sententious, utilizes paronomasia and wordplay to achieve particular literary effects. Yet writers from this period have left behind no ars poetica recording their perceptions of English metre or poetic style. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. As such, the best available evidence for the cultural status of vernacular poetry in this phase of English literary history may be the poetry itself. This essay identifies extensive wordplay in one Old English poem and reads this wordplay as an index of the tastes and aims of a long-lost interpretive community.

After surveying the evidence for the dating, circulation, authorship, and localization of Old English poetry, this essay assesses older and newer critical approaches in Old English studies, with special attention to work on wordplay and poetic style. In light of the scant evidence for traditional categories of contextualization afforded by most Old English verse, I argue that poetic style can sometimes provide more precise answers to pressing literary-historical questions. The second section identifies and discusses several puns on nautical terminology in the Old English Exodus, a 590-line narrative poem very loosely based on Exodus 13. 18—14. 31 and attested uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 (late tenth c.). Junius 11 also contains Genesis and Daniel, longer and more straightforward versifications of those biblical books, and Christ and Satan, an imaginative dialogue in verse. I direct consideration of wordplay in Exodus toward an understanding of the genre and purpose of the poem, in order to begin to answer the question posed by Roberta Frank in 1988, ‘What kind of poetry is Exodus?’

[…]

Despite sustained attention to this topic within Old English studies, the meaning of paronomastic strategies remains incompletely understood. What, precisely, were puns thought to accomplish, and by what means did authors signal them or audiences apprehend them? The following investigation of nautical puns in Exodus will not answer these questions directly, but I hope to offer both a reorientation of the problem in terms of poetic style and an illustration of the ways in which the study of style, in a fragmentary corpus, can reveal the practices of otherwise unknowable literary communities. I read wordplay in Exodus as an indication of its author’s attitudes toward language and knowledge. At the same time, I seek to extrapolate from literary practice to textual interpretation and from interpretation back to practice, confirming the importance of wordplay for the interpretation of Old English poetry in general but also suggesting some ways in which a particular composition may be seen to reflect its (now lost) literary-cultural context. In the process, puns in Exodus will emerge as significant literary strategies and crucial historical evidence. In comparison with other Old English poems, wordplay in Exodus seems to me at once more insistent and less obviously derivative of Latin exegetical modes. For that reason it may repay the individual treatment it receives in the remainder of this essay.