Old English Literature

A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings

John D. Niles

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780631220572, 9780631220565
• eBook ISBN: 9781118598849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline.

• Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature
• Reinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studies
• Addresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and theme
• Embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

Part I
Main Currents in Twentieth-Century Criticism

1
Old English Studies 1901–1975

Literary criticism is scarcely an autonomous enterprise; rather, it is intimately connected with the intellectual currents of the era when it is produced. About these currents several things can be said. One is that they are usually in a state of flux and turbulence. Another is that they are a bit obscure to most persons until they have become passé. At that point they will become increasingly subject to stereotyping by the thinkers of subsequent generations, who will often find it comforting to gaze back at those ideas with a mixture of condescension and contempt. This state of affairs is likely to continue until such time as the ideas in question have been dead and buried so long as to merit an act of archaeological recovery, at which point someone will rediscover them, with mild fanfare, as noteworthy contributions to intellectual history.

Regardless of the truth-value of these propositions, the criticism of Old English literature can be most meaningfully understood when it is seen as a development of – or, sometimes, a reaction against – trends that were influential at an earlier moment in history. The same comment applies to those prior trends. The present guide to criticism will therefore approach its subject by adopting a motto that is ignored at one’s peril in literary studies: namely, ‘Always historicize.’

Before considering some aspects of the criticism of Old English literature published during the last forty years or so, then, I will first review some leading work dating from the first three quarters of the twentieth century. The writings of the scholars of that period are of interest in their own right. If their work is ignored these days, then that may be owing less to its intrinsic merits (though it cannot all be said to be equally brilliant or meritorious) than to the fact that neither the students of today nor, far less, their teachers, can be expected to have read everything about everything.

The Earlier Twentieth Century

In all respects but one, Anglo-Saxon scholarship was on a fairly sound footing by the beginning of the twentieth century.¹ By that time, the Old English language could be studied under trained professionals at more than four dozen universities located on at least two continents.² By the 1930s and 1940s, moreover, the foundations of the field were beginning to look rock solid. Philological scholarship undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic had gone far to establish the basis for understanding Old English texts at least as far as their linguistic and formal features were concerned. The close relationship of Old English religious literature to the much larger body of Latin Christian literature of the early Middle Ages had been fairly well charted as well, though more nuanced work of this kind remained to be done. Also well charted, as much as could be done given the scattered nature of the evidence, was the deep well, or whirlpool, of stories from the Northern past to which the allusions to legendary history in Beowulf, Widsith, The Fight at Finnsburg, Deor, and Waldere pertain.

By this time, the great majority of Old English texts that had survived into the modern period had been made available in reliable scholarly editions, thanks in part to two comprehensive series of editions of verse and prose undertaken in Germany, where the Anglo-Saxon period was approached as a branch of Germanic philology. These were C.M.W. Grein’s Bibliothek der angelsächische Prosa and his and Richard P. Wülker’s Bibliothek der angelsächische Poesie.³ Moreover, certain of the freestanding scholarly editions that date from approximately this same period exemplify editorial practices that have stood the test of time. An example is Felix Liebermann’s parallel-text edition of Anglo-Saxon laws, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen.⁴ This magisterial three-volume resource has remained in standard use for over a century, though a consortium of scholars associated with the Early English Laws project currently plans to replace it.⁵ Likewise, the scholars Albert S. Cook, Frederick Tupper, and R.W. Chambers produced outstanding editions of poems from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry, thus setting high standards for the editing of verse. These editions covered respectively the first three items in the Exeter Book (known today as the Advent Lyrics, Cynewulf’s signed poem The Ascension, and Christ in Judgement); the complete set of riddles; and Widsith.⁶ Each of these editions remains a treasure-trove of information sifted by a scholarly mind of great distinction. When one takes into account as well that Eduard Sievers’s authoritative German-language grammar of the Old English language, his Angelsächsische Grammatik, had been in existence since 1882;⁷ that a complete and, for that time, an authoritative dictionary of the Old English language was at last completed in the year 1921, when T. Northcote Toller brought out the second volume of his and Joseph Bosworth’s An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary;⁸ and that in 1934 Ferdinand Holthausen brought out a reliable etymological dictionary of Old English, one that has since been supplemented though never replaced,⁹ then it is clear that Old English philological research was solidly anchored by the end of the first third of the century.

The quality of historical scholarship, too, reached a high level during roughly this same period. This is true both of research focusing on textual sources (chronicles, charters, wills, and other documents) and work in such ancillary fields as archaeology, art history, material culture, and place-name studies. Exemplary research in all these areas was conducted in Germany and Scandinavia.¹⁰ The most influential continental scholar to be writing on Germanistik during this period – that is, on Germanic antiquities studied along the capacious philological lines established by Jacob Grimm by the mid-nineteenth century – was Andreas Heusler, a philologist and literary historian of the first rank.¹¹ Indispensable guides to research in this area were provided by the entries in Johannes Hoops’s Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, a four-volume encyclopedia featuring articles on all aspects of Germanistik. This publication has now been replaced by a magnificent collaborative second edition published in no fewer than thirty-five volumes.¹² Another major contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies in this wider sense was Vilhelm Grønbech’s three-volume study Vor folkeæt i oldtiden (The Culture of the Teutons), published in Danish in 1909–12 and translated into English somewhat later.¹³ This wide-ranging inquiry into ancient social institutions such as the feud, marriage, and gift-giving has retained much of its value despite being based on an obsolete concept of the essentially unitary culture of the early ‘Teutonic’ (or ‘Germanic’) peoples. Of additional importance was a study of Beowulf by the Swedish scholar Knut Stjerna, published posthumously in 1912, that correlated that poem’s references to material culture to finds in prehistoric Swedish Iron Age archaeology, thus filling out our knowledge of ‘the world of Beowulf’ while at the same time confirming the credibility of the poet’s descriptions of weapons and other material objects.¹⁴ Recent discoveries have extended such archaeological connections as these well beyond Swedish soil.

In England, steady advances in historical scholarship pertaining to the Anglo-Saxons reached a high water mark with Frank Stenton’s 1943 landmark study Anglo-Saxon England.¹⁵ Stenton (1880–1967) was educated at Keble College, Oxford, and was later appointed professor of history at Reading University (1926–46), where he also served as Vice-Chancellor. His detailed account of the period from late Roman Britain up to the establishment of the Norman state was then – and remains today – a remarkable work of synthesis, based as it is on the author’s competence in political and constitutional history, social and economic history, the history of Christianity in early Britain, and such other sources as numismatics and place-name studies. One can scarcely conceive of an historian living today who could write a book of similar scope without being dependent on Stenton at many points. Complementing Stenton’s historical research was that of Dorothy Whitelock (1901–82), whose year of birth happened to coincide with major celebrations held in Winchester in 1901 to commemorate the millennium of the death of King Alfred the Great. The edition of Anglo-Saxon wills that Whitelock completed in 1930 demonstrated her mastery of early medieval documentary sources.¹⁶ Equally at home in both literary and historical scholarship, Whitelock was appointed Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge in 1957, holding that post until her retirement in 1969. Leaving aside her other significant publications, her book The Beginnings of English Society is admired by many as the best short social history of the Anglo-Saxon period.¹⁷ A third English scholar of this period to make invaluable contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies was N.R. Ker (1908–1982), who has been characterized as ‘the greatest scholar that Britain has ever produced’ in the field of manuscript studies.¹⁸ Born in London though of Scottish family background, Ker graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1931, and in succeeding years he was appointed successively Lecturer in Palaeography (in 1941) and then Reader in Palaeography (in 1946) at Oxford. His 1941 study Medieval Libraries of Great Britain sought to reconstruct the holdings of medieval libraries whose contents had since been dispersed or lost. His greatest contribution to Old English scholarship was to come a decade and a half later in the form of his 1957 book Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon.¹⁹ This supplanted, after an interim of 250 years, the catalogue of manuscripts containing Old English that the antiquarian scholar Humfrey Wanley had completed in 1705. Folded into the Introduction to Ker’s book is a succinct guide to Anglo-Saxon palaeography.

The contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies made by other scholars based in the UK have been celebrated elsewhere.²⁰ Work done by several of them will be noted here in due course.

Literary Criticism: A Slow Start

One area of Old English scholarship in which only intermittent progress was made during the first half of the twentieth century was literary criticism. To a large extent, persons who wrote about Old English literature were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Main Currents in Twentieth-Century Criticism
• Part II: Anglo-Saxon Lore and Learning
• Part III: Other Topics and Approaches
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors Cited
• General Index
• End User License Agreement