How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems

246 Pages·2018·4.79 MB·English

by  Daniel Donoghue

How the Anglo-S axons
Read Their Poems
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THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
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HOW THE
ANGLO-­SAXONS­
READ THEIR POEMS
DANIEL DONOGHUE
University­of­Pennsylvania­Press
PhiladelPhia
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Copyright­©­2018­University­of­Pennsylvania­Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia,­Pennsylvania­19104-­4­112
www.upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Ameri ca on acid- free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names:­Donoghue,­Daniel,­1956-­author.
Title: How the Anglo-Saxons read their poems / Daniel Donoghue.
Other titles: Middle Ages series.
Description:­1st­edition.­|­Philadelphia:­University­of­Pennsylvania­Press,­
 [2018]­|­Series:­The­Middle­Ages­series­|­Includes­bibliographical­
 references­and­index.
Identifiers:­LCCN­2017037677­|­ISBN­9780812249941­(hardcover:­alk.­paper)
Subjects:­LCSH:­English­poetry—Old­English,­ca.­450-1100—History­and­
 criticism.­|­Oral­interpretation­of­poetry—History—To­1500.
Classification:­LCC­PR203­.D66­2018­|­DDC­829/.1009—dc23­
LC­record­available­at­https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037677
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Contents
Introduction­ 1
Chapter 1.­How­to­Read­ 11
Chapter 2.­From­Orality­to­Punctuation­ 44
Chapter 3.­Verse­Syntax­ 85
Chapter 4.­Eye­Movement­ 128
Less­a­Conclusion­Than­an­Opening­Up­ 155
Notes­ 175
Bibliography­ 213
Index­ 231
Acknowle­dgments­ 237
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Introduction
The conventions governing the display of verse today are so well established
that it takes some effort to recognize their utter arbitrariness. Flip through
any classroom anthology or consult the latest New Yorker and you will find
poems with a line break for each line of verse, usually flush left with a ragged
right- hand margin, and conventional En glish punctuation. To be sure, the
long per sis tence of counterexamples like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,”
Emily Dickinson’s eccentric dashes, e.e. cummings’s typography, or Jorie
Graham’s blanks on the page reminds us that the manipulation of these
conventions is nothing new, but their innovations would be pointless unless
the conventions were well established in the first place. In this regard things
have not changed much over the past seven centuries: most poems published
today still bear a vis i ble resemblance to medieval manuscript copies of, say,
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Although it is less likely today than it was a
century ago, for example, that a capital letter will begin each line of verse, the
start of sentences and proper nouns will usually be capitalized in almost any
poem. The basic format has been remarkably stable. While exceptions are not
hard to find, even the most experimental layouts achieve their effects within
the confines of the convention.
By contrast, few bodies of lit er a ture can defamiliarize the apparent
naturalness of t hese conventions as can the earliest written poems in En glish,
which to our eyes do not look like verse at all. A poem like The Wanderer,
for example, is written out from margin to margin in the Exeter Book with
scant punctuation, few capitals, and no use of space to separate verse lines or
paragraphs. In a deft allusion to this practice, Seamus Heaney includes a
poem called “The Wanderer” in his 1975 pamphlet Stations. In it a teacher
congratulates the schoolboy Seamus, who has just won a scholarship, by
awarding him a coin in front of his classmates.1 In drawing attention to the
Old En glish Wanderer with the verbal echoes of “ring- giver” and “benches,”
Heaney’s poem links the modest schoolroom ceremony to an ancient tradition
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2 Introduction
of gift- giving that permeates the Old En glish poem, in which the anhaga or
“wanderer” keenly recalls the pleasures of the mead hall. Heaney reaches
for a diff er ent kind of allusion in making his “Wanderer” a prose poem, with
the lines written out from margin to margin, which mimics the appearance
of The Wanderer in the Exeter Book. It is not a question of form imitating
form because the Old En glish alliterative verse conventions are quite dif-
fer ent, as Heaney well knew, but the margin- to- margin printing of “The
Wanderer” is a poet’s nod to the manuscript appearance of the medieval
poem.
The long lines of Heaney’s “Wanderer” effectively reverse the convention
observed by editors of Old En glish poems, who confidently move from the
spare manuscript pre sen ta tion to produce editions with all the modern typo-
graphic conventions we associate with verse: lineation, paragraph indenta-
tion, punctuation, and capital letters for proper names and the opening of
sentences. These edited texts are the versions that we have come to know of
The Wanderer, Beowulf, and other poems. Even though every Anglo- Saxonist
is aware of the under lying manuscript pre sen ta tion, the transition to the
modern format has drawn relatively l ittle comment. We simply accept it, and
in accepting it draw the silent conclusion that the two formats are somehow
equivalent. Scholarly discussion of the manuscript layout rarely moves be-
yond description to ask why the poems should be displayed with such sparse
visual cues in the first place, but it is worth considering how a medieval reader
could recognize and read these lines as a poems. To say the Anglo- Saxons
simply knew how to read their poems is merely to restate the question of
“how” because it is not at all obvious what that knowledge consists of.
Yet somehow the manuscript pre sen ta tion was adequate to the task for
the first generations of readers. It is not as though Anglo- Saxon scribes w ere
encumbered by primitive scribal practices at their disposal and could pro-
duce only a compromised text. On the contrary, they had equivalents to the
same vis i ble cues we associate with poetry today— verse lineation, capitals,
a system of punctuation, and vari ous uses of space— each of which found a
use in other kinds of writing. Old En glish verse was diff er ent. A central con-
cern of this book is the scribes’ collective choice not to incorporate most of
these available cues— when they clearly could have done so—as they tran-
scribed many thousands of lines of their vernacular poems. Their practice
presupposes a reader who brought a robust set of expectations to the task
and who honed t hose expectations through a lifelong participation in tradi-
tional poetics. In asking how the Anglo- Saxons read their vernacular poems
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Introduction 3
in manuscript, this study poses a question more complicated than it may first
appear. The act of reading, then as now, has always been more than a slow
crawl of the eyes across the line of writing; it is more than the mechanical
pro cess of picking out letters and words and stringing them together into
half- lines that alliterate. A pro cess like this certainly forms part of it, but it
oversimplifies the complex mental activity that allows readers from any period
to comprehend a written text, especially a work of verbal art.
In many ways this book’s topic is old, at least as old as the editing and
printing of Old En glish poems. To the first editors the manuscript’s seem-
ingly haphazard pre sen ta tion could be rendered intelligible only through he-
roic effort— simpler in scale but not unlike deciphering Greek fragments on
papyri or Assyrian cuneiform on clay tablets. The field’s longstanding schol-
arly consensus has been that the earliest readers of t hese manuscripts knew
the language and the poetic conventions with enough intimacy that they
could construe the lines despite the sparse graphic conventions, even though
it made the pro cess of reading laborious. This extra effort, according to some,
compelled readers to utter the words aloud. Moreover, leaving a blank, ragged
right- hand margin would be a waste of precious vellum, especially for verna-
cular poems, which carried less prestige than the Latin lit er a ture whose
codices filled medieval libraries. This consensus is largely correct as far as it
goes, but it leaves too many questions unanswered. Take punctuation, for
example. We know that some scribes who wrote out the poems might also
transcribe Latin poems and Old En glish prose texts, both of which used
punctuation with greater regularity. Why did the scribes refrain from intro-
ducing the same marks of punctuation to their vernacular poems? It would
have taken little effort to do so and would have added little to the physical
length of the text. The question deserves a fresh look.
In focusing on the oldest survivals of poetry in the En glish tradition, my
approach is insistently historical, but in other re spects it is synchronic or
even transhistorical, because what is often taken to be historically contin-
gent (such as s ilent versus oral reading) turns out to be fairly widespread
across many centuries and many cultures. To broaden my theoretical ap-
proach, I have turned to the subfield of cognitive psy chol ogy known as eye-
movement studies, which examines the complex choreography between the
eyes and brain while we read. Although eye- movement research typically
involves living languages and con temporary readers, a number of the basic
princi ples of reading apply to earlier centuries and other cultures. The field
has taken off in the last thirty years, but its discoveries are l ittle known outside
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