Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

<i>Spolia</i> in Old English verse

Denis Ferhatovic

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526131652
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526131676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts – especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts – yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.

1
Encyclopedic miniatures: Combinatory powers of loot in the Exeter Riddles

Introduction: Part-to-the-whole, part-to-part, part-to-itself

The Exeter Riddles stand apart from much of the surviving poetic corpus in Old English because of their range of tones and the sheer variety of their subjects. They appear in three clusters in the Exeter Book, a late tenth-century miscellany of verse that includes, to mention only the best-known texts today, The Ruin, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, and The Husband's Message. Many of the artefacts and concepts presented in the vernacular enigmas have not been witnessed elsewhere. The riddles are encyclopedic in their method and subject matter.¹ ‘The extreme heterogeneity of the compilation’² is evident from proposed and largely accepted solutions that involve natural phenomena, weapons of war, all matter of everyday tools, nautical equipment, food, alcoholic beverages, sexual references, birds and other animals, musical instruments, scriptorium paraphernalia, even the problematic biblical patriarch Lot and a one-eyed seller of garlic. The Exeter Riddles commonly focus on appetites hidden in texts like Beowulf that avoid references to the twinned temptations of food and sex,³ and they may hold hints to stylistic registers of Old English vocabulary other than the predominant high poetic idiom.⁴ Whereas other Old English texts, verse as well as prose, avoid giving detailed descriptions of artefacts, the riddles describe material culture enigmatically but accurately enough for many of the clues to add up to a convincing solution. They present a markedly different side of war, domestication, and production, as they give voice to the downtrodden, enslaved, and unrooted, featuring exploited plants and animals, women and Welsh slaves, even if only in a few lines that could give way to a ‘safe’ solution in the end.⁵ Critics have repeatedly turned to the riddles in order to illuminate lived realities of Anglo-Saxon England,⁶ especially those of the monastic orders and ordinary people. Without these texts, we might even have concluded that the early English had no sense of humour other than the stoic, dying-in-battle type or dark understatement.

The Exeter Riddles expose and problematise many cherished binaries in Anglo-Saxon scholarship. We desire to find glimpses of Anglo-Saxon everyday life so stubbornly denied us in other literature from the period, but we may find artistic transformation of that life rather than conventions of realist fiction or photographic reportage (mediated representations, as well). We grapple with orality and literacy, with vernacularity and Latinity, in an attempt to calibrate these important factors in relation to the enigmas. We see reverberations of an aristocratic way of life in riddles describing the feasts and battles, warriors like those in heroic verse carving out a space within the monastic culture. Or we imagine monks reshaping their early Germanic vernacular literary culture to uphold the lifestyle of intellectual investigation and religious devotion in a transition from ‘tribal’ to ‘scribal’.⁷ Scholarly fashions change, as we invoke transhistorical folk or early medieval Latin enigmatic traditions to help us situate and interpret the Exeter Riddles.⁸ I would go beyond saying that these varied, miniature texts engage with both larger traditions in Anglo-Saxon England while being recognisably a separate body of work: I would say that they variously encourage and challenge attempts to place them in both frameworks, whether they translate Latin enigmata or, more commonly, reshape the material from them. The riddles display awareness akin to the self-consciousness of other vernacular early medieval English work that exhibits features possible only in the mother tongue,⁹ but they go even further since they mark their difference from other Old English verse.

The relationship of a part to the whole – a fragment to the framework – is implicated in such discussions on more than one level, as scholars struggle with textual boundaries between individual enigmas or connections between them and other poems in the Exeter Book, such as The Husband's Message that comes immediately after Riddle 60 (‘Reed’) in the manuscript.¹⁰ I will mention below passages where I suspect the riddles hint at themes from poems from different codices, such as Beowulf and Exodus; though direct links cannot be established, because of the shared poetic vocabulary and our lack of knowledge of exact literary-historical connections, alluding playfully to epic verse would not seem too alien to the enigmas.

Beside part-to-the-whole, the dynamics of part-to-part and part-to-itself consistently emerge attended by doubling and accumulation. Within the compilation the riddles form particular clusters, by physical proximity and/or thematic resemblance, so that we can speak of implement, ornithological, scriptoria, sexual, and other sets of riddles.¹¹ Some of them appear coupled, such as the oyster and crab (77 and 78, as solved by Salvador-Bello); some delight in double entendre. Some of them would require a pair of solutions, such as Riddles 29 (‘Moon and Sun’), 42 (‘Cock and Hen’), or 43 (‘Soul and Body’). Others have two related but distinct concepts expressed by the same word in Old English, such as ac for ‘oak’ and ‘ship’ (Riddle 74).¹² Some of them have actual doubles or triples, with apparently identical solutions, such as Riddles 12 and 72 (‘Ox’); 14 and 80 (‘Horn’); 25 and 65 (‘Onion’); 40, 66, and 94 (‘Creation’); and 26, 92, and 95 (‘Book/Bible’). While clusters and pairings may aid decoding of individual texts, a grand organising structure behind the compilation would go counter to the genre as ‘the topics of consecutive riddles must not be too closely related or else the game is spoiled!’¹³ The collection needs to create the dual effect by suggesting an entire world, orderly and meaningful, and yet refusing to give us an illusion of having a complete control over its resplendent poetic mystery.

It is apt that the enigmas constantly frustrate our attempts to contain them in distinct categories, for this type of resistance inheres in their very nature. James Paz writes, ‘these riddles are designed … to force the reader or listener to question the conceptual categories they take for granted, to force us to ask what we mean when we say something is dead, especially when that thing is nonhuman’.¹⁴ In invoking and complicating such binaries as past/present, present/future, oral/literate, Germanic/Latinate, heroic/monastic, local/global, micro/macro, textual/visual, animate/inanimate, and overt/covert, the Exeter Riddles parallel important effects that I argue spolia have. Spolia, too, prompt the readers or observers to interrogate the ready-made categories. Moreover, a number of Old English enigmas prominently feature examples of plunder, revealing their participation in a similar poetics. Self-consciously recycled artefacts become coherent when fixed in a larger, new context, but at the same time gesture towards something outside of it, temporally, spatially, and existentially. They enable startling changes of scale. Spolia interconnect while remaining distinct. They bespeak the dangers of survival and accumulation. A sense of loss and a feeling of excess inhere in them side by side.

In the remainder of the chapter, I will first focus on Riddles 14 (‘Horn’), 20 (‘Sword’), and 29 (‘Moon and Sun’) to uncover a new thematic cluster within the collection that suggests, taken together and through its individual components, multiple and shifting dimensions of plunder. Then I will move on to three enigmas that display the impulse to accumulate quite ambiguously. On one hand, Riddles 49 (‘Bookcase/Oven’) and 40 (‘Creation’) feature the speakers who, despite the uplifting solutions, underline bound, debased, down-to-earth realities of hoarding. On the other hand, Riddles 60 (‘Creation’) and 95 (‘Book’) suggest ways of escaping, the former by keeping only the broadest contours of its subject and the latter by teasingly foregrounding the fleeting nature of text. Riddle 40 is a close rendition of Aldhelm's ‘De Creatura’, and Riddle 60 is a version of Riddle 40, a transcreation of a translation. Interactions within the Old English literary tradition and between it and its Latin counterpart provide another type of spoliation. In all these cases, the riddles betray intense consciousness of craft and creativity, showing that the act of creation links makers and artefacts, humans and non-humans alike, through its exhilarating, dangerous energy.

A sketch of the plunder cluster: Riddles 14 (‘Horn’), 20 (‘Sword’), and 29 (‘Moon and Sun’)

Riddle 14 speaks of a thing that changes its appearance and function, being ornamented and deprived of its contents, sometimes kissed, other times calling men to battle or feast, travelling over sea and land, and hanging on the wall. Scholars agree that the solution is horn in its different incarnations as a body part of an animal, a drinking vessel, and an instrument.¹⁵ The text describes an object that starts off as plunder and can easily become plunder again. After it grows on a bovine's head, someone takes it from its owner, the animal. What is strange in the riddle is that the thing is caught in cycle of war from the very beginning. The cow or bull wields it as ‘a weapon’ to protect itself or to attack, a ‘warrior’ by nature. The cycles are indicated by the repeated hwilum [at times], ten times in the poem of nineteen lines, giving a rhythm to narration.¹⁶ Sometimes it appears in quick succession, once each in four adjacent lines (3–6). About a mid-point through the riddle, in line nine, the horn explains what happens to it in its incarnation as a drinking vessel. After someone, presumably another warrior, at a feast like those in Anglo-Saxon heroic verse, drinks its contents in one go, the horn says, ‘ic bordum sceal, / heard, heafodleas, behlyþed¹⁷ licgan’ [I must lie on the table, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Powerful fragments: Ruin, relics, spolia
• 1 Encyclopedic miniatures: Combinatory powers of loot in the Exeter Riddles
• 2 Architecture of the past and the future: Transformative potential of plunder in Exodus1
• 3 Animated, animating: Bringing stone, flesh, and text to life in Andreas1
• 4 Zooming out, cutting through: Resistance to incorporation in Judith
• 5 A hoard full of plunder: Paradoxical materiality of loss in Beowulf
• Afterword Resistant material remnants in Old English and beyond
• Bibliography
• Index