Recent Writing on Old English: A Response

By Gillian R. Overing

Copyright 1993 by the author.

Let me begin by saying that although I agree with some of Professor Shippey's characterizations of the problems we face as scholars and critics of Old English, and while there is no doubting the seriousness of the problems we face institutionally, that in spite of these, I come to this MLA in an unusual frame of mind--for I am here to celebrate. This session itself, and the reasons which occasion it, are cause for celebration. The developing body of recent critical scholarship in our field presents us with exciting perceptions and challenges, and enlivens and enriches our discipline overall, both our professional exchanges and our work in the classroom. I welcome it, and I would also add "about time." In the not-too-distant past I have been one of those who has lamented--and complained about--the tardy admission of new critical methodologies into the field of Old English. But I have changed my tune, because things have changed; we are changed by this new work. Enough scholars and teachers in our field have been inspired to respond--whether in positive or negative fashion--to this new work, while others have been revitalized by it and still others have convened and participated in this session, so that we may be assured that it has, indeed, arrived. My talk this afternoon is therefore not concerned with evaluating or justifying its relative scholarly merit. Instead, I shall be more interested in examining the effects of this new work, and the some of the ways in which we are changed by it.

After reading Allen Frantzen's most recent book, Desire for Origins,1 we don't need to keep taking up the old burden of complaints about the rejection of critical theory and the justifications for its inclusion. He mercifully and eloquently enables us to lay it down, and for this I thank him, and regret that we have not had the opportunity to hear his voice, as we have heard his work quoted so often this afternoon. As he describes the myriad varieties of historical and political interdependencies which comprise the relationship of any given "center" or "tradition" to its correspondent "margin" throughout the past and within the present of Anglo-Saxon studies, he shows us how our very discipline is founded on debate and dialectic. And of course we need philology, we cannot survive without it. It is in the nature of our business, and our dialogue with it is the subject of the recent volume of essays, edited by Frantzen, appropriately titled Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies.2 Frantzen makes plain that neither can we survive without the theoretical tools which enable us to engage with the many silences, problems and omissions which restricting scholarship to any single approach will necessarily create.3

Frantzen's and others' recent work frees us from some old and tiresome labors of justification and enables us to move on and redirect our energies, while it also--and I think this is equally important--acknowledges and speaks to our lived experience as students, scholars and teachers of Old English. And here, I am afraid, I must get personal, as it seems most honest and will put me in the least danger of overgeneralization. Having taken Old English courses for two years as an undergraduate in England, and another two as a graduate student in the US, I can say that despite the experience of vastly different environments and teaching methods, no metaphor comes closest to characterizing my experience of learning Old English than Frantzen's evocation of the "beer hall" ethos. The doom and gloom, the masochistic glories of a culture "typified on the one hand by the machismo of carousing in beer halls, of treasure-giving, longing for exile, or complaining about being in exile, and on the other hand, of piety and guilt, constant reminders of the need to repent in anticipation of the terrors of the Last Judgement" (Origins, p. 2) permeated my experience in and out of the classroom. At the time, I roamed the moors in the north of England searching for the pub that turned a blind eye to closing time (now itself an echo of the past). I hauled my beer mug--half pint though it was--and sweated long nights over vocabulary with the best and rest of them. No pain, no gain, but tomorrow we die etc. And these quite drastic self-obliterating dichotomies all seemed at the time to be a perfectly natural way to internalize Anglo-Saxon.

My experience as a student is of course connected to my sensibilities as a teacher. Pedagogy is important--indeed our professional and institutional lives now depend more than ever upon it. And I would add to Professor Shippey's list of "things we can do to improve matters" a fifth point--the active development of a pedagogy that incorporates his four suggestions. I would also add that I believe we are much further along in achieving all five of these goals than Professor Shippey implies. Such work is well underway as demonstrated by the work of Hermann and Frantzen--who, incidentally, has already commented extensively on the "Germanicism" of Anglo-Saxon studies4 and provided a comprehensive list of future goals at the conclusion of Desire for Origins. And indeed there are also many other scholars publishing on both sides of the Atlantic: Pat Belanoff, Helen Bennett, Marilyn Deegan, Marilyn Desmond, James Earl, Pauline Head, Sarah Higley, Martin Irvine, Clare Lees, Seth Lerer, Karma Lochrie, and John Tanke--to name only those that I am most familiar with.

Returning to the importance of pedagogy, I suspect that surviving some version of this "beer hall" pedagogy, whether as a student or teacher, whether as a female or simply as a critic interested in the many other points of view that it closes down, is an experience that many here may have shared or will be able to recognize.

Similarly, when I read Hermann's account of all those justifications of Old English poems that New Critical Anglo-Saxon scholarship has produced, where obscure and neglected poems "quickly became skillfully crafted little gems,"5 I laughed aloud with recognition and embarrassment, and remembered many hours spent grooming and pruning and organizing the most unruly Old English poems. But when Hermann recalls Alain Renoir's comments on the "staggering" amounts of "drudgery" and "ego-shrinking discipline" required of the Old English graduate student (Hermann, p. 207), I recall not the study of Old English, but the effort to resist theory. As a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo in the seventies, it took an active disengagement, a highly determined and controlled passivity in the face of an overwhelming intellectual barrage--an iron will, in fact--that itself demanded discipline and energy to maintain. It was exhausting. Moreover, the questions kept coming back, refusing to be held at bay by divisive barriers between what was appropriate for an Anglo-Saxonist to read and what wasn't. I gave up. I read some theory.

Some of the work we do depletes our energies and some releases and generates further energy, and in my own experience the work of schism, division and exclusion is harder and less productive than that of connection and inclusion. When I read Professor Shippey's initial categorization of the two views in circulation at the moment I admit I thought Oh no, we are going to have to choose once more, either/or, do or die, it's the present or the past--you can't have both. But I was relieved to discover this binarism somewhat attenuated and de-simplified, and I now see how it must be broken down into the even more difficult enterprise of seeing how these choices are connected.

One of the very real consequences of recent work in our field is the recognition of our connectedness, not only as Anglo-Saxonists to other forms of scholarship, but as present subjects to the past texts that we study. What we study, why and how we study it and who we are as students are indeed connected. And this new scholarship refuses to allow us to fear, deny or trivialize these connections, but rather encourages us to examine them. Early Anglo-Saxonists "misreadings" of texts, Frantzen argues, are not simply mistakes: "they are points of connection between the Anglo-Saxon and post-Anglo-Saxon world" (Origins, p. 22). In her revision of the notion of "scribal error" Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe suggests that the reevaluation of the many distinct variants and modes of scribal literacy "presses us to become conscious of the cultural assumptions and historical circumstances of our own literacy."6 Kevin Kiernan invites us to examine our own "cædmonian dreams" when we examine manuscript history.7 Hermann reminds us that oppressed "others" are not solely the province of marxist or feminist criticism; they were alive and well in Anglo-Saxon poetry and recognizably ostracized and persecuted. Moreover, he argues, these are forms of oppression in which both the medieval and modern reader may become complicit by condoning and thereby perpetuating textual methods of allegorizing conflict (Hermann, p. 78). In his work on ideology in the Old English riddles, John Tanke also identifies these "others," showing how they are constructed and feared linguistically and poetically.8

Jews and Christians, slaves and masters, women, Mermedonians, and yes, the Welsh. It's all there. We don't have to invent Anglo-Saxon issues of race, gender and class, we have only to recognize them, to make connections. And often the process of connection will involve bringing our selves into the interchange, as I have done in these remarks.

Our critical selves are everywhere apparent and especially evident in recent criticism of recent work in Old English. Although there is as yet no extensive body of critical response, in focusing on the effects of this new work and some of the changes I see it bringing, I have been particularly interested in the nature and tone of this nascent response, both in printed reviews and in conference settings. For some time it seemed that the only response to conference papers involving any kind of theory was indifference--albeit mostly polite indifference. We would sit, and wait, and shuffle slightly in the silence, but the questions never came. We were indeed "a scattering"--but we did not feel particularly wretched--to follow up on Professor Shippey's metaphor. In the last few years, such indifference has been replaced by various forms of engagement: critical selves displayed and examined, acknowledgments of bias, accusations of bias, of self-interest, or of no interest at all.

An important shift for me occurred when I gave a paper on the unmannerly Modthryth, and several respondents argued that any feminist approach must of necessity be hostile to Beowulf himself, to the masculine heroic ideal, and to the masculine world of the poem overall. I was shocked. Hostile to Beowulf? Me? Who had consumed so many half pints in his honor? Who was so fascinated by his world, and as a consequence so motivated to understand the terms of that fascination? (Indeed, one reviewer has since suggested that my excitement over the poem borders "on the genuinely hysterical"9--a point to which I shall return.) There was, shall we say, an "emotional" question period following the session, where the participants talked in terms of their own investments in the poem and the subsequent need to defend them, and where the problems of critical binarism, of having to make a choice between heroic ideal and feminist critique, became part of the dialogue.

When the accusation of "hatred of the heroic" ("Lingworms," p. 76) returned more recently in print, and when my work and much of that we have discussed today were characterized as part of a "new wave of hateful books,"10 I was once again prompted to ask where are such strong, if not dire passions coming from?

I have already suggested that our critical selves are everywhere apparent, though I have been having some trouble lately in disentangling which self from what critic from what text, a rich and interesting confusion notwithstanding. Let me try to explain through some examples. John Hermann and myself share the dubious distinction of posing a threat to culture as we presently know it: Hermann's work has been described as "cultural warfare disguised as scholarship" ("Derrida," p. 55), while my work prompts an exhortation to scholars to "defend their cultural inheritance from such selfish wrongheadedness" and to take a stand against that which is "corrupting the academic world."11 In both instances, the reviewer believes the threat is connected to what I call for purposes of simplicity and brevity "too much self." Hermann's "subject is not Old English poetry, but his own philosophy of life" ("Derrida," p. 55). In the same vein, it has been suggested of my work that it is a "sophisticated kind of temper tantrum" ("Ling-worms," p. 75), and that it produces a "critical hysteria which inevitably occurs when one's language is essentially subjective" (p. 79). It is curious to observe that I appear to be developing a more than passing resemblance to Modthryth, whom I discuss as a hysteric in terms rather different from those used by the reviewer, to whom it connotes "wildly excitable and suffering various vasomotor derangements."12 Indeed, Professor Shippey also suggests that I look into the Modthrythian mirror and find a "match" for my own critical proclivities. (Ah, poor Modthryth, was she quite mad, suffering from "confused libidinal drives,"13 or merely rather difficult?)

In an otherwise favorable review of Frantzen's Desire for Origins, one recent reviewer objects to what she perceives to be a fatal flaw, too much self, and complains that this self, the critic's own bias, is unacknowledged, calling Frantzen's critique of the "Old English establishment" a "veiled" one.14 In fact, this critique and its function and purpose are among the most consistently and clearly acknowledged aspects of the book.

The hidden critique, the disguised attack, "cultural warfare?" I agree wholeheartedly that some of this new work is both strident and challenging--not the same thing as "warfare," mind you--but its challenges are clear, declared, overt. These perceptions of the critical self sneaking about or worse still, coming out of the bushes and taking over completely and producing "critical hysteria" suggest to me that critical selves, including those of the reviewers, are very much in play, and should be included in, indeed connected to our general dialogue. Perhaps the choice of the adjective "crotchety" (Olsen, p. 65) to describe Frantzen's book might also comment on the reviewer's level of annoyance. And when one reviewer suggests as an antidote to feminists' critique of heroism that "I think they would change their opinion if, like the great Helen of Troy they use as a model, they too found men who would die for them" ("Lingworms," p. 87), we might find the remedy more revealing of the problem than of its cure.

I do not believe that the only way to critical understanding of masculine experience is through the masculine construction of the feminine experience--that is, I don't feel it incumbent upon me to find a man ready to die for me, or even for his idea of me--in order to criticize Beowulf. However, I will still claim my patrimony without resorting to it, and state at this point that, as the daughter of a Yorkshireman, I must pretty thoroughly disagree with Professor Shippey's characterizations of my work--though I am not going to take up all these points of disagreement here. I did not accept this invitation to speak in order to defend my work against such misreadings. I will draw the line, however, at his suggestion that I am determined to find women to be inevitably powerless in this male-dominated society, and refuse to join the ranks of those who would further victimize women and obliterate their presence by doing so. I examine the means by which these women are silenced. I do not call them silent, nor do I further silence them. To conflate these processes, as does Professor Shippey, is either to misread or ignore the theoretical dimensions of my arguments. I aim not to deny but to discover other means of identifying presence. And of course there is no mention of ocular tyranny and sexual harassment in the Modthryth passage. Neither did Beowulf use the term semiosis--at least, not in Klaeber's glossary. Such terms reflect my interest in the process of renaming, and of bringing new questions to language in that process. I would therefore encourage Professor Shippey to rewrite my sentences, as he says he is wont to do, but only with a clearer understanding of the linguistic and semiotic codes upon which my discourse is based.

One critical response to my work that I value highly, indeed relish, and one that seems particularly appropriate to round off this discussion, is one in which I am thanked for providing the "most stimulation" that the critic has had in some time whilst reading a book on Beowulf, but that such stimulation often resulted in bursts of anger that made him want to throw the book across the room and jump up and down upon it.15 Perhaps he would care to join Modthryth and myself among the ranks of the "wildly excitable" who are afflicted with "various vasomotor derangements"--not to mention "confused libidinal drives."

Although I have experienced, as I have said, some confusion in disentangling selves and passions in these critical responses, I welcome this intrusion and inclusion of our critical selves, and the connections to be made between who we are and what we do. As James Earl has recently argued in his psychoanalytic examination of Beowulf,16 the reader undergoes, experiences, a form of "transference" with this, and indeed with all Old English texts. Whether or not we find ourselves in the text, we are implicated in the process of analysis, inevitably connected to it.

I want to conclude by making one last connection, by observing a nice piece of symmetry that directly concerns Professor Shippey, though he may be unaware of it (in fact, I'm sure he is). It concerns my first reading his remarks on the Finn digression in Beowulf when I was an undergraduate (between half-pints, that is), when Old English Verse had just been published.17 His suggestion that the story wasn't so much about action and decision as it was about agonizing over that action and trying to make and come to terms with decision led to one of those watershed moments in which one's thinking is eventually rearranged and redirected. Although the process took some time, and I have since translated these insights on action and inaction into a discussion of the problems of binary closure and masculine desire--and I would by no means hold Professor Shippey accountable for these developments--I wish to emphasize the connectedness of our work as scholars, and once again, to celebrate the ways in which this new body of scholarship in our field validates and affirms those connections between our present and past academic history, and between our own histories and the texts we study and create.

Wake Forest University, North Carolina

NOTES

1 Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

2 Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1991).

3 See especially Frantzen's opening essay, "Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference and Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Medieval Culture," in Speaking Two Languages, pp. 1-33.

4 References to Germanic culture, tradition and scholarship are to be found throughout Desire for Origins.

5 John P. Hermann, Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 205.

6 Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe,Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge UP, 1990), p. 194.

7 Kevin S. Kiernan, "Reading Cædmon's `Hymn' with Someone Else's Glosses," Representations, 32 (1990):158.

8 John Tanke, "Wonfeax wale: Ideology and Figuration in the Old English Double Entendre Riddles," in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections,eds. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (forthcoming 1994 from Indiana UP).

9 Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., "Lingworms and Lies: Three New Beowulf Books," In Geardagum XI (June 1990):77.

10 Tripp, "Father Derrida, forgive me, I have sinned," Reviews, in Geardagum XII (June 1991):55.

11 Tripp, "Lingworms and Lies," p. 86. I note in passing that such an apocalyptic view of the role of new scholarship, one which implies the attendant supposition of the fragility of the texts themselves and of the traditional scholarly edifice in which they are housed, has resurfaced in the year since I presented this paper. In a review of my Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), Alexandra Hennessey Olsen finds the postmodern theoretical approaches that I employ to ask questions of the poem a threat to the poem itself, and hopes that they will not "destroy Beowulf for the next generation of readers" (Speculum, 67 [1992]:1026).

12 Ibid, p. 79. My use of the term "hysteric" is based on the French feminists' considerably revised and wholly revalued sense of the Freudian term (Language, Sign and Gender, pp. 75-76).

13 Larry M. Sklute, "Freoðuwebbe in Old English Poetry," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970):536. These "confused libidinal drives" deserve a further, updated note, as they continue to excite response within and without the text. In Olsen's Speculum review (cited above) I am taken to task for "misuse of scholarship" (p. 1026) because I quote from Sklute's earlier article, and not from the reprinted version in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) where this "offhand remark" (p. 1026) was deleted. A glance at publication dates--both books appeared in 1990--would have revealed that I could not have availed myself of such updated material. Accuracy in dating is important, I agree, and reviewers have drawn attention to this as a problem in Damico and Olsen's anthology where original dates are not given for reprinted articles (see Year's Work in Old English Studies, Vol. 71, 1993 for 1990, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 [forthcoming]), but far more interesting is the assumption that a remark dismissed as "offhand" would merit deletion in the first place. Although the tangle of sexuality and violence recedes somewhat with the deletion of the phrase "confused libidinal drives," Modthryth continues to evoke her share of critical incomprehension, and in my view, critical condescension, as I have already argued (Language, Sign and Gender, pp. 101-7). I quote here from the updated version of Sklute's essay where her behavior is explained thus: "The Beowulf poet says only that she had a rather violent period of adolescence" (New Readings, p. 205).

14 Alexandra Olsen, "Reviews," in Geardagum XII (June 1991):65.

15 I thank James W. Earl for permission to refer to his informal remarks posted on the ANSAXNET computer network (September 1990), and for his transcript of those remarks which I quote in full at his request. "I read Overing's book with delight. I was able at long last to read a book written in the living language of my profession. Thank you, Gillian. I fought the argument on every page, filled the margins with angry notes. That's the most stimulation I've ever had from a work of Beowulf criticism, though I seldom agreed with her. I remember throwing the book to the floor and jumping on it when I found a whole chapter devoted to considering how the poem would read if we consider the Modthryth episode its center rather than its periphery." I do not, in fact, devote a whole chapter to positing the centrality of the Modthryth episode. Rather, I offer some hypothetical suggestions at the end of the book in the "Afterword," where I wonder aloud "what might happen to the notion of a center if we bring her in from the margin and move her closer to it" (Language, Sign, and Gender, p. 112). It seems that the mere suggestion contains its own momentum and it is testimony to Modthryth's power to hit critical nerves and excite response that she has somehow independently acquired such centrality.

16 James W. Earl, "Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization," in Speaking Two Languages, pp. 65-89.

17 T. A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1972), pp. 19-30.