Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England

Ruth Wehlau

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781580443678
• eBook ISBN: 9783110660487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Guthlac, The Junius Manuscript, The Wonders of the East, and The Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and perception. The volume investigates the intersection between the burgeoning interest in trauma studies and darkness and the representation of the mind or of emotional experience within Anglo-Saxon literature.

Part 1

Darkness

Chapter 1

Sweart as Sin: Color
Connotation and Morality in
Anglo-Saxon England

Amy W. Clark

THE RAVEN IN OLD English literature is a creature in need of what we might, today, diplomatically call “rebranding.” Sent by Noah over the waves of the Flood, the raven did not return; for this, as Adrian recounts to Ritheus, he became “swa sweart þe ær wæs hwit” (as black as he had been white before).1 Warriors at the Battle of Brunanburh leave the “hræw bryttian / saluwigpadan, þone sweartan hræfn” (“dark-coated, black raven to break up the dead,” 60b–61b), while the Soul of Soul and Body I tells her body “ne eart ðu þon leofra nænigum lifigendra ... þonne se swearta hrefen” (“you are no dearer than the black raven to anyone alive,” 52a–54b).2 Not, it would seem, the bird to invite to one’s next dinner party. Yet in this decidedly negative context, Beowulf’s sunrise raven cuts a surprising figure: “hrefn blaca, heofones wynne, / bliðheort bodode” (“a black raven, blithe-hearted, announced heaven’s joy,” 1802a–1803a).3 Following on the heels of a hero’s victory, and signaling the moment of Beowulf’s triumphant return to his people, this raven is different—and not just because he is good, but because, unlike all but two other attestations in the extant Old English corpus, he is blac.

In this chapter, I address the connotative differences represented, in part, by the blac raven and his sweart counterparts through a quantitative exploration of these two color terms within the Old English corpus. From William Mead’s declaration in 1899 that “blackness and darkness meant to the primitive German mind something fearful and terrible” to Filip Missuno’s more recent assertion that “shadow words” connote “extreme otherness and disquieting monstrosity,” the link between dark colors and negative cultural associations in Anglo-Saxon England has been widely acknowledged.4 Yet in spite of (or perhaps due to) the seemingly self-evident nature of this connotative link, which continues into Middle and Modern English, blæc and sweart have rarely been studied together, or in a larger context that might offer more precise insight into how and why these negative associations arise. I aim to address that contextual gap, tracking color-referent collocation within the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (henceforth the DOEC) in order to better understand the semantic role of blæc and sweart in Old English texts, both generally and in relationship to one another. My results suggest that while blæc is frequently listed as the “standard” or dominant term for Modern English “black” within the corpus, and has a more neutral valence overall, its easy confusion with blac (bleached; bright, shining) makes it less popular in contexts where denotative ambiguity would be problematic. Conversely, sweart has such a strong association with sin and damnation in poetry and religious prose that it appears to have had limited applicability outside these genres; only when blæc cannot provide an appropriate level of denotative clarity is sweart called upon to take its place. When taken together, the variation in the use of each term across genres—sweart’s omission from charter boundary clauses, and blæc’s relative infrequency in poetry and religious prose, for example—become evidence of a kind of dual lexical ecology, in which the two color terms have come to occupy distinct connotative and generic niches within the Old English language.

To discuss this ecology in full, however, we must begin with the data that displays it. In the case of sweart, 61 percent of attestations (shown in Table 1.1) display an association with sin or religious damnation; an additional 8 percent (included as part of Table 1.2) occur in negative but not explicitly sinful contexts. In tracking these associations, I have taken both grammar and narrative into account. Most frequently, sweart agrees grammatically with a sinful/ negative referent; deofol, hellegrund, gæst, and lig, for example, are among the most common nouns described by sweart’s adjectival forms in the DOEC, usually as part of the landscape of hell. In other cases, however, a color term’s negative implications only arise within a larger narrative context. The phrase “black as a raven,” for example, connotes little beyond hue to the modern reader—and ravens are, at a denotative level, black. Yet when this phrase appears in the DOEC, a closer examination of context reveals a devil in disguise: “[H]im cumað togeanes his sawle twegen englas, oðer bið Godes encgel, se bið swa hwit swa snaw, oðer bið deofles encgel, se bið swa sweart swa hræfen oððe silharewa” (Two angels shall come to him together with his soul; the one shall be God’s angel, and is as white as snow, while the other is the Devil’s angel, and is as black as a raven or an African).5 When this wider net of collocational and narrative associations is taken into account, a clear cultural relationship between sweart and damnation begins to emerge from the corpus. Yet it is a relationship limited by genre and form: sweart primarily collocates with these negative/sinful referents in verse, homiletic prose, and glosses of Christian Latin texts, while the remaining 31 percent of attestations for this term are more neutral or ambiguous, and occur most frequently in the leechbooks, charters, and law codes.

Table 1.1. Sweart: Negative Moral Valence

Table 1.2. Sweart: Neutral Moral Valence

Table 1.3. Blac/Blæc

In contrast to sweart, blac/blæc is relatively evenly dispersed across genres within the DOEC. It is also more connotatively neutral, with only 9.8 percent of attestations having a textual association with sin or damnation (usually in the context of hellfire). Yet part of that neutrality arises not from the need for a positive term for darkness, but from blæc’s orthographical interchangeability with blac (bleached; bright, shining) within the corpus. As the two lexemes are essentially homonyms due to the variability of scribal spelling, I have incorporated them into the same database and simply attempted to note, where possible, when context demands a pale or a dark hue denotation.6

While cultural color associations for blac and sweart are demonstrably present within the Old English corpus, they do not result in the uniform treatment of these lexemes across the genres of poetry, prose, charters, and glosses assigned by the DOEC. Instead, the formal and contextual environment of the text appears to affect the collocational grouping of color terms. These generic divergences have influenced my study in two ways. First, they have led me to split the DOEC “prose” category into two distinct sections during the process of analysis: religious and homiletic prose, labeled R-prose; and secular prose, including lapidaries and medical texts, labeled S-prose.7 Second, they have proven amenable to contextualization within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis. In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, M. A. K. Halliday describes variation in collocational distribution as a feature of register:

[C]ollocations are often fairly specifically associated with one or another particular register, or functional variety of [a] language. This is true, of course, of individual lexical items, many of which we regard as “technical” because they appear exclusively, or almost exclusively, in one kind of text. But it is also noteworthy that perfectly ordinary lexical items often appear in different collocations according to the text variety. For example, hunting, in a story of the English aristocracy, will call up quarry and hounds; ... in an anthropological text, words like gathering, agricultural, and pastoral; as well as, in other contexts, bargain, souvenir, fortune and suchlike.8

In Halliday’s grammatical model, collocation is part of a group of discursive tools, inherent to spoken and written language, which produce and maintain lexical cohesion. Register, in turn, exists on what Halliday calls a “cline of instantiation,” which refers to the process by which a system of grammar is use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Darkness in the Universe, Darkness in the Mind in Anglo-Saxon Literature
• Part 1: Darkness
• Part 2: Depression
• Part 3: Descent
• Notes on Contributors