Recent Writing on Old English

By T. A. Shippey

Copyright 1993 by the author.

There are two views of the state of Old English studies at present in circulation. On the face of it, they are antithetical, and on the face of it, both are true. One function of this paper is to inquire how this can be so, and another is to inquire what can be done to remedy the situation.

But let me begin with the upbeat view. According to this--it's a view recently stated by Bruce Mitchell1--Old English studies are in fine shape. There's a lot of us. We read each other's papers all the time: at the 1992 Kalamazoo conference there were at least 17 sessions devoted to Old English, and at least 50 speakers. At the ESSE conference (European Society for the Study of English) four months later, there were only two sessions and seven papers, but when we emerged blinking into the light of day we discovered that other people at the conference were saying they wanted more Old English, and more English language, and more historical linguistics, on future programmes. Not only are there a lot of us, we are very well organized. Mitchell cites the Dictionary of Old English project, the microfiche Concordance, the taped Old English corpus. In the USA there's the SASLC project, on Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, and based in the UK the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici project, both designed in their way to update everything that's known about "books known to the early English." We have an International Society, a parish magazine (Anglo-Saxon England), an Old English Newsletter. We're by no means unemployed, and we're not short of funds.

That's the upbeat view, and it's true. Now consider the downbeat view, expressed recently with considerable insistency by several scholars, notably John Hermann2 and Allen Frantzen;3 but grown more topical even since they expressed it. According to this view, Old English studies have basically vacated the high ground. Once upon a time Old English was a dominant, necessary and accepted part of the English Studies curriculum, and so in a way of national life. Now it has dwindled down, as far as undergraduates are concerned, to some bits and pieces in the Norton Anthology. It's not a part of doctoral programs, and if it is, it's disliked. To revert to British experience, in the last year [i.e. during 1991] Old English has, I believe, ceased to be taught at any level at Lancaster and Southampton; its existence in universities like Hull and Newcastle is tenuous; at Oxford and Manchester, the major centres now of compulsory undergraduate Old English, there are either voices calling openly for its abolition or a determination to eliminate it silently. The subject has had a very bad press, not helped by its defenders. There is a reservoir--and here I go back to what Hermann and Frantzen say--of dislike and contempt for the field, caused one fears by decades of poor pedagogical practice. This does not exist only among the uninformed. The most dangerous sign of extinction for the subject that I saw, or foresaw, was the serious consideration given in the last few years by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to lapsing both their Chairs of Anglo-Saxon, ancient and prestigious though they are. Naturally all such consideration is secret, but Cambridge safeguarded its Chair by taking quite unusual steps; while rumor has it that Oxford decided to lapse the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair in favor of some better-supported field, their hand being held by the intervention of an anonymous donor, who gave them the UK1,000,000 needed not out of respect for the field, but out of motives of family piety. Old English studies as an Eigenkloster! And if these rumors are true, they indicate the judgement not of rebellious undergraduates, but of senior faculty in the humanities. One definite fact to emerge while this paper was being prepared was that the Quain Chair at University College, London, once held by W.P. Ker and R.W. Chambers, has been converted into a chair of modern literature.

The term used for this process, by John Hermann, is "Marginalization," and it seems highly accurate. The cure we are offered, by Hermann, and Frantzen, and others, including Ted Irving,4 is this: we must cry peccavi (Ted does this with particular skill), we must reposition ourselves within Departments of English, we must reject our professional ancestry from the philologists, we must embrace the new learning of critical theory. The image which I cannot help seeing at this point is that of Radbod, Duke of the Frisians, in the story appended to the Life of St. Wulfhramn, and dated c.720. You will remember that the pagan Radbod, on his way into the baptismal tank, stopped: and

asked of the holy Bishop Wulfhramn, binding him by oaths on the name of the Lord, whether he could guarantee that the number of Kings and Princes and nobles of the Frisian race would be greater in heaven, if he [Radbod] believed and was baptized, than in Tartarean damnation. To which Bishop Wulfhramn replied Noli errare, inclyte Princeps, "make no mistake, famous prince. The number of his elect is known to the Lord. For your predecessors as princes of the Frisian race, who died without the sacrament of baptism, are certain to have received the sentence of damnation. But he who shall believe from now on and be baptized, will live happily ever after with Christ." Haec audiens Dux incredulus (he had reached the font by then, so they say) took his foot out of the holy font and said he could not do without the society of his predecessors, the princes of the Frisians, to live in heaven with a scattering of wretches; for he found it harder to offer assent to the new teachings than to remain with those which he had followed for a long time with the whole Frisian race.
Well, in this figure Radbod is us, or some of us; his damned predecessors are the whole philological tradition; the new teachings are critical theory; and Bishop Wulfhramn, I suppose, is Jacques Derrida. And the real connection between the figure and the fact is the click of the ideological gun being cocked in both cases. Radbod, as I read it, would rather be damned than give up his past; and I am not without sympathy for his reaction. But is it really a heaven/hell choice? Are philology and critical theory really exclusive? Can we get out of this by inventing Limbo, or developing some sort of ideological Pelagianism? There is a reason for thinking that we are in fact faced with a choice, not just a compromise; we must at least develop a conscious stance, if we want to arrest and reverse our field's marginalisation.

As I see the problem, it is this. Philology was from the start convinced that it was essentially a scientific field, which operated objectively, in known facts. Bruce Mitchell is still saying that, that he deals with linguistic facts, not linguistic arguments, and in saying that he only echoes what Jakob Grimm said a long time ago, in his definition of philology: "Keine unter allen Wissenschaften ist hochmütiger, vornehmer, streitsüchtiger als die Philologie, und gegen Fehler unbarmherziger" [none of the sciences is prouder, more excellent or more adversarial than philology, and more merciless to error]. That was a boast for Grimm: it was a science of certain right and certain wrong. Now I am not going to try to summarize the bases of modern critical theory in a single sentence (you will be relieved to know), but in there somewhere there is a deep belief that the observed is affected by the observer. We have an objective ideology and a subjective ideology, and finding a border-zone between them is not easy.

In attempting to delineate such a border-zone, Allen Frantzen has suggested that maybe what I said about Grimm and philological objectivity is a pious misunderstanding--a textbook problem. Neither Bright's Grammar, he says, nor the Mitchell-Robinson Guide to Old English, try to explain Grimm's law and Verner's law as historically produced; instead they perpetuate "the misleading idea that language change is both as regular and as independent of human agency as the laws of gravity." The suggestion is that they've over-simplified; they've created a false impression not intended by the philological originators. In a way I agree with Frantzen, but just for a moment there I think he's trying to pad genuine sharp edges. I'm not sure what Grimm thought about Grimm's Law, but I'm sure I can recognize the glee in the voice of people like J. M. Kemble (who performed in England much the role for Grimm that T. H. Huxley did for Darwin). How splendid it is, Kemble wrote, to have a genuinely "iron-bound system"; how thrilling to have someone like Grimm, who knows a language so well that he can correct a wrong editorial reading to a right MS reading without even seeing the MS.5 Kemble here was attacking the incompetence of early, and he thought pre-scientific editors of Old English. But the trouble is that once you've got an "iron-bound" system, you're tempted to be systemgetreu and start writing out what ought to be in a manuscript even after you've looked at it: a characteristic activity of philological and post-scientific editors. And that is what the discipline licenses. It is in a way its major attraction: that you (the scientific observer) can see forces in operation, just like the law of gravity, which were in operation all along but unperceived by the pre-scientists of the past. Kemble said a nineteenth-century edition ought to be better than a tenth-century MS, and he meant it.

Furthermore he and his colleagues persuaded the educated world they were right. There's a revealing passage in Middlemarch (1871), where George Eliot writes that the mystic scheme of Casaubon "was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound, until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible" (chapter 48, "The Dead Hand"). In writing that she pays tribute to the contemporary prestige of philology. Its practitioners had persuaded neutral observers that they knew something vital, and that they had a method of inquiry which outclassed and outdated even the most respected prior authorities. If we could repeat that persuasion, our field would not be marginal. But we lost our authority between 1871 and now (actually, well before now).

Well, I no longer feel like Duke Radbod, more like King Alfred, looking back over his own lifetime and wondering where the rot set in, despite the fact that even in my lifetime the universities of England stodon maðma ond boca gefyldæ, together with a very fair mengeo Godes ðiowa. Is it the case that these swiðe lytle fiorme ðara boca wiston? In a way I think that it is true. I am not sure when the rot did set in, but I think it had something to do with the failure to expand philology from phonology--where it had been resoundingly successful--to semantics (where it has never produced a successful method, and perhaps never could), and to syntax, where our failure has been really rather abject. I was taught Old English out of Sweet's Primer: this didn't have a `Syntax' section till the 9th edition of 1953, and I read nothing very revealing about Old English syntax till Quirk and Wrenn's Old English Grammar, first published in 1955, but not accepted till years later. Sir Randolph Quirk then left the field and went off to be distinguished elsewhere. Meanwhile Alistair Campbell's Old English Grammar of 1959 (misleading title) was in effect an update of Joseph and Elizabeth Wright's of 1925, still 65% phonology and the rest morphology. We didn't have an Old English Syntax till Bruce Mitchell's work of 1985, and that is a work whose author had said years before that he thought modern linguistics "in many of its aspects will . . . prove to be one of the great non-subjects of the 20th century." The funny thing is that even if you try, loyally and full of ancestral piety, to teach the great achievement, phonology, out of one of these ancestor-worshipping textbooks, you can't. When I had to start teaching (instead of learning) out of Sweet's Primer in 1972, I suddenly realized that you could not explain "i-mutation", say, out of the book alone. Its final editor says that he has put the "bare outlines of relevant phonology" in, "though I fear that so concise a statement cannot be readily intelligible." Certainly my students couldn't follow it. But by this stage successive editors had "formularized" the material so much that they no longer knew when they had left a gap. You ended up learning Old English in a dialect which never existed (Early West Saxon), with no assistance as regards its syntax, and great stress placed on a phonological scheme which wasn't there any more. So a great methodological breakthrough--a new understanding on a Newtonian or Darwinian scale--dwindled down to becoming a system of ancient lore, taught because it had been, furiously jealous of its boundaries because it had no hope of extending them. I repeat, I'd like to know when this rot set in. I think it was there before 1922, and I think one guilty party was a Yorkshireman, like me, whose inheritor--just to complete the irony--I am: I still spend the interest on a proportion of his estate (or at least I did: during 1992 this right was taken away, see also above).

Well, this is beginning to sound like another peccavi, but it isn't. What I'm saying is first, and here I agree with Professors Hermann and Frantzen, that a lot of our troubles have been caused by poor pedagogical practice and poor teaching instruments--both of which we could certainly reform. But second--and here I think I'm more gloomy than they are--that just doing that will not regain for our field the mana, the prestige it had last century: to do that we would need another breakthrough achievement, as comparative philology once was. The philological tradition has then done nothing for us, at least in my lifetime. Is the logic of my position not therefore that we should abandon these claims to objectivity and scientific status, cease to clutch the rags of the past, embrace new teaching and "relativist" ideology, abjure our ancestors? Could we do it even if we wanted to?

Obviously many scholars think we should and we can. Nine years ago at this meeting, I am told, Daniel Calder answered the question, "Why should Anglo-Saxonists be interested in critical theory?" with the counter-question, "Why shouldn't they?" Well, I think I've answered that: there is a serious potential antipathy between the bases of critical theory and at least of ancestral Anglo-Saxonism, which requires more than a shrug to get over. In another context, though, Calder--or it may have been Peter Clemoes interpolating Calder--argued that theory or no theory, Anglo-Saxonists were now ideally placed to move on: "We are in a better position than our predecessors have ever been to analyse the literature, both poetry and prose, without preconceptions. To our inherited philological base we have added a much improved technical understanding" etc.6 Without preconceptions. This view has been repeated recently by several scholars, all suggesting either that bias is something that used to be endemic in Old English studies, but has now been corrected, or else that our self-consciousness is now so great that we are less likely to betrayed into self-serving conclusions. I think neither of these is true. I think we are still as full of preconceptions as Humfrey Wanley. I would repeat here a statement made by Roberta Frank in the recent Cambridge Companion, namely that "Even the most abstract and hypothetical notions can become commonplace if they are what people want to hear and what those in power want them to believe."7 But instead of aiming this, as she does, at a safely-dead ninth/tenth century audience, I would point it at us. And I would suggest that our field in particular has to confront a trauma and a taboo-area before it can get on at all with interpreting the past, objectively, subjectively, theoretically, or any other way.

This taboo-area is Germanicism. Patrick Wormald, in the Cambridge Companion, puts it very very gently when he says that in the later 20th century "Wagnerian images have acquired unhappy connotations."8 I would say that Old English studies were almost from the start embroiled with aggressive German nationalism. The violent disagreements between German and Danish reviewers over Thorkelin's edition of Beowulf were already connected with the question of Slesvic-Holstein, and were forerunners of the war of 1864. Later on philology, die deutsche Wissenschaft, as it was called, became a willing partner of deutsche ideology. I have to say deutsch there because the question of that word's meaning has been of terrible importance during my own lifetime. Are the Dutch deutsch? English people think so, some German people think so, some Dutch people thought so: I have heard that one Dutch professor of philology was removed from his post in 1945, on charges of collaboration with the Nazis--principled collaboration, not the opportunistic kind of which Paul de Man stands accused. Are the Scandinavians deutsch? Professor Andreas Haarder--a little older than me--showed me a book from his library once. It was a collection of heroic tales. It was in Danish. Beowulf was there. It had an imprimatur in the front from the Luftwaffe. It was, I imagine, intended as part of the process of recruiting for formations like the SS "Viking" or "Nederland" divisions. Beowulf had become assimilated to a racist ethic which stated that some people, including the English, the Danish and the Dutch, were part of a real Greater Deutschland whose destiny was to rule the world, if they would only stop fighting each other. This offer had more appeal to more people for many decades than is now readily admitted; it lost its appeal finally through defeat in war.

Can we now approach that ethic, that idea, without preconceptions? I don't think so. It is instructive to see Roberta Frank quietly downgrading the notion of "Germanic legend in Old English Literature," in her piece by that title in the Cambridge Companion. There's actually quite a lot of legend in Old English, it's deployed without discrimination as to national grouping, and its composition can't be dated: nevertheless, insidiously and without demonstration, we're told that Anglo-Saxon didn't use any word like deutsch, didn't have any feeling of pan-Germanicism, while the poems are late, learned, scholarly, antiquarian, just "a pleasant dream" safely distant from "daily existence." Is that a reaction to tenth-century MSS? or twentieth-century politics? It doesn't fall to me to say: but in this area I do distrust silence; the pretence of scholarly objectivity. I'd rather people came out and said what they want to hear, what they refuse to hear. I don't believe that we are capable of dispassionate aproach. In this context I would add that no book is cited more often or more approvingly in dissections of the philological tradition than Eric Stanley's attack on it, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1975) foregrounded in his first few pages by John Hermann. Born in 1923, and leaving Germany for England at some time before World War II, Professor Stanley has a clear engagement with the traumas of the century. His accusation of a tradition, retrospective as it is, could hardly be expected to be entirely detached. But my point is this: we cannot pretend any longer that the traditions of our field, disastrous as they were, simply did not happen, to be talked over like a bad smell at a cocktail-party. Doing that has bedevilled all kinds of subjects from the date of Beowulf to the history of Northern England, the nature of the Anglo-Saxon church, or the change to Middle English. In this area at least, Germanicism, we need to understand the philological tradition a great deal better, while admitting openly that if we are not part of it, we are part of the reaction to it. The stake in its heart must be honesty: not the belief that we have no preconceptions.

That takes me to another taboo-area, which is gender. Old English studies have a bad reputation here as well (rather less deserved than the last one). Perhaps the relative guiltlessness makes it easier for scholars to apologize, which they have been doing frequently. Ted Irving blames himself for having failed to see how Grendel's mother was embedded in a stereotype, "systematically reduced, ignored, discredited and deprived of the ordinary dignity any ravening monster is entitled to--because of her sex. It is important to acknowledge" (says Ted) "that the feminist movement has given us the power to open our eyes to this kind of embedding." Open them, or squint them? Nothing could be more acceptable to modern professional readers than feminist awareness; just as nothing would have been more acceptable to an earlier century than Kinder, Kirche, Küche. Is us finding the one any more reliable than them finding the other? This question (along with a lot of others) is raised by Gillian Overing's book Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf,9 which gives a section to each of the three topics mentioned. Since time is short, I will say straight out that I think Professor Overing's book imports a good deal of late twentieth-century preconception into her text--but then, you will recall, I've just said that since we're going to anyway, it's best to do it openly, as indeed she does. I often find myself rewriting her sentences, which often have a highly-rewritable gnomic quality. "No one can deny that women suffer a great deal in Old English poetry," says Overing. Hell, I reply: people suffer a great deal in Old English poetry. Yes, but she actually rejects the notion that women are to suffer and men to act; nor is she prepared to accept the numerous "strong women" in Old English poetry, like Elene, Juliana and Judith, for that "escape from passivity may only be accomplished by a denial of sexuality." Isn't this a case of starting with an ideal and turning over a literature till you find a match, in the character of Modthryth: whose habit of having men killed for looking at her is characterized as an exposé of male "oculocentric tyranny." Overing says at the start of her book that she means to "address the poem on its own terms," but the words of the Modthryth passage give no hint of ocular tyranny or sexual harassment (though I hasten to add that both these are readily identifiable, in curiously modern terms, elsewhere in early English literature). Can the poem have terms other than words? Well, here I am in absolute agreement with Overing that gaps and silences have meaning as well, often highly prominent meaning. I do not think that she and I (or Ted Irving or George Clark10) would be very far apart in our detailed interpretation of what Wealhtheow says, and what she doesn't say. But where again we might part company is in her determination to see women as inevitably powerless in a male-dominated society. "There is no place for women in the masculine economy of Beowulf," says Overing; and even when they have a place and a role, as when Wealhtheow comes forward to pass round the ale-cup, and to speak publicly to her husband, she is still being used; for "language is our inscription into patriarchy." I think this is all voulu. Women have got a place in the economy of Beowulf, though I'm not sure what it is; but in it men do not seem to fight with other men who are related to them through a female bloodline. They fight their in-laws (Hrothgar and Ingeld); they fight their nephews and their paternal cousins (Onela, Eanmund and Eadgils, Hrothulf, Hrethric and Heoroweard). But in the masculine economy, women seem to act as a cut-out: Beowulf is unswervingly loyal to his mother's family, and the son of Hildeburh, perhaps, fights for his uncle not his father. As for language being our inscription into patriarchy, this neglects the traditional belief that words are women's weapons; in a society of masculine violence they have speech privileges denied to men. So Wealhtheow can come forward and rebuke her royal husband publicly without reply. So Hildegyth, in the Waldere fragment, is not repeating herself or talking "out of both sides of her mouth" (as Roberta Frank says): she is exercising the female privilege of commenting on heroic behavior with impunity, while trying to avoid the accusation of nagging, "nalles ic ðe, wine min, wordum cide," "my friend, I'm really not nagging you . . ." But men do this too, I may be told: Unferth, the eald æscwiga of the Heothobards, who also starts off min wine, "my friend." Yes, but isn't their retreat into passivity only accomplished by a denial of full sexuality? The one is old; ergisk hverr sem eldisk (they say in Norse), "every man grows impotent/cowardly as he grows old." The other forfeits dom, becomes a swigra secg, a more silent man; like a woman.

Old English poetry has the reputation of existing in a male, white, violent, Christian world. It's part of its primitivist image. It's a false image, and I've no objection to it being redressed. I think there's a great deal to be learnt by asking questions about masculine and femninine economies, about masculine and feminine speech-patterns, in the poetry, in the prose, and also in history: there is a strange number of "anomalous" women in Anglo-Saxon story, from Alfred's stepmother Judith to Eadburh the wicked queen to Æthelflæd, "Lady of the Mercians" and of course Queen Emma and Queen Ælfthryth (who gave her son candle-phobia by beating him with candles). What I'm afraid of, in the gender issue as well as the Germanic issue, is what I would call "the specular fallacy" and what others have called "presentism": the tendency to look into the past and to see in it only our own faces staring back; to use it as a material resource for just those issues we ourselves are concerned with; to find in it only the up-to-date. I'm not saying anyone can entirely avoid doing this, and that's why I think the exposé of learned tradition by Allen Frantzen is ultimately fruitful. But as a general rule I would say that any modern investigator who looks back at Old English and finds in it confirmation of a cherished modern thesis should check, and wonder whether this isn't too handy to be true.

Also, of course, too familiar to be interesting. A sub-theme of Frantzen's book is the place of philology "in the institutional framework of the Department of English" (p. 64), our collective "Isolation from sections of the Department of English" (p. 101). Foregrounding gender, for instance, in Old English studies may well rescue individual professors from isolation and mar-ginalization, but is it going to add anything new, anything distinctive to the Department of English? We need them. How are we going to make them realize they need us? The traditional standby, of telling them that without us they will never un-derstand true philological rigor, is not going to work. Besides renegotiating Germanicism and gender, what can we do that's positive? I'll mention just a few recent initiatives and then sum up.

One thing we have got to offer is twelve- or thirteen-hundred-year old texts which nevertheless remain in a certain sense accessible. Allen Frantzen, Kevin Kiernan and Katherine O'Keeffe all seem to have realized virtually simultaneously that Cædmon's Hymn is an "eventful text," not well portrayed in the Norton Anthology. Kevin points out, in his piece in Representations 32, that Cædmon's Hymn in Old English began life in the margin or as a gloss to Latin MSS of Bede. It then worked its way into the text of the Alfredian or Old English Bede, displacing some of the original Latin as it did so. In modern editions, its original Latin or Old English prose context has disappeared entirely; while it may also be "normalized" into forms which have never been recorded anywhere. Finally, in the Norton Anthology even the recreated Old English text has come to look very like an interlinear gloss, dominated in layout, and in punctuation, by its Modern English translation: "the most prestigious gloss in all of English Literature," says Kiernan. There are many points one could draw from this presentation: possibly, that Cædmon's Hymn never existed in its alleged context, was always a construction based on/translated from a Latin story; arguably, that Cædmon's Hymn has continually been used as a founding-myth in defence of one ideology or another (Kiernan doesn't say this, but it was always taught to me, following C. L. Wrenn, as a fable on class--because Cædmon was a cowherd, a point which Wrenn made central). But the point remains, very clearly demonstrated, that this observed only exists through the visual strategies of observers.

These visual strategies are available to us to demonstrate, says Frantzen. We have "eventful texts" in college libraries all over the place. We don't have ready access to Old English MSS--Frantzen's image of the "gatekeeper" of a "textual community" has a certain wryness to those who have tried to get into Corpus Christi library. If we had, perhaps we would have realized sooner the point of Katherine O'Keeffe's book Visible Song:11 namely, and very briefly, that Latin and Old English poetry don't look like each other even in MSS of the same date and place; that they don't get treated or punctuated the same way; that the way Old English poems are punctuated gives important clues to their production-context, indicating in particular states (variable states) of residual orality and reader interference. All this tends to suggest, once more, that the tacit philological assumption that what an editor really had to do was get back through the MS, or MSS, to the pure text, the original text, the author's text, is even more of a pipe-dream than it always was. What you end up with is a sanitized text, a guarded text.

Just the same, these are probably what we are going to have to work with. I am going to keep using Klaeber because it has a glossary with all the line-numbers in it. Even the postmodernest of scholars (like Professor Overing) keeps on translating in ways strongly affected by Klaeber's editorial decisions, and his grammatical decisions. To repeat what I said earlier, though, we can now afford to be more honest about this, and to expose our decisions as decisions: not natural states. We have powerful new tools for doing this in books like Kiernan's The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf,12 which not only gives us the readings (in the philological/objective tradition) but also gives us the story which enables us to evaluate them: Thorkelin telling lies, trying to justify his grant, starting to edit before he'd finished transcribing, employing a transcriber who began to destroy the poem, by crumbling the margins, in the very act of the first and most innocent transcription. There's something irretrievably symbolic about that.

I must sum up: I asked at the start how the "upbeat" and the "downbeat" view of Old English studies could be true; and the answer is that we get quite a lot of goodwill as long as we stay out on the margin, doing philological things. We're a kind of Luxemburg within the English Studies Community. I asked what we can do to remedy that situation: and the answer is that we have to rethink the ideology of objectivity. This involves--now I'm working backwards--
1) foregrounding editorial decisions and assumptions instead of hiding them away
2) working where we can from original texts and facsimiles as well as edited ones
3) admitting our own ideological biases instead of trying to impose them
4) facing up squarely to "taboo-areas" instead of trying to pretend that Old English hasn't got them.
If we do all that, then we have got something to offer Departments, and students, of English, which they really can't get anywhere else: and that is a subject with behind it thirteen hundred years of textual history, of contextuality.

Does that sound like the kind of ideological Pelagianism I was being sarcastic about a few pages ago? If it does, it's caused not by fear, threatening though the current situation may be, but by a sort of guilt. I don't think Jakob Grimm would be very pleased with us. We have these mighty projects ongoing: they're the easily sub-divisible ones. But after 175 years of Old English studies, we still have no approach to a literary history; if you want to read Old English prose you're still using the Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, often a hundred years old and even the reprints unobtainable; when a scholar from outside the field wants to pick out "the best account of heroic society," he fixes on H. M. Chadwick's book, dated 1912; in some cases we still don't even have the philological editio princeps, as for instance of Ælfric; the historians, I fear, have given up on us; we have not given them the material for a history of the Anglo-Saxon church, and we have found almost nothing to say about the history of the North of England, where Standard English was created (as I believe), as a kind of Anglo-Norse "cocoliche." And when I think of the literary matters left undone, so that we are still talking gingerly about "tone" in Beowulfian speeches, still trying to squeeze low-information poetry into a high-information poetic, still repeating that Old English poetry has a "dearth of technique for grammatical subordination" (Overing, p. 25, quoting A. L. Binns), when actually it has techniques we habitually don't see--well, I think the real trouble is not that philology let us down, but that we (and our predecessors from the 1880s on) let philology down. Maybe the model for current philology and critical theory is not Radbod and Wulfhramn, heathens and Christians, abandon one way and choose the other, but rather Augustine and Aidan, or Wilfrid and Aidan, or Bede and Cuthbert: a well-organized but unappealing textual body revivified and translated into popular consciousness by a force from outside. A merger like that may end up semi-Pelagian but it doesn't have to, nor does one have to decide from the beginning which partner shall be senior.

I'd close by saying this. We had a philological phase of Old English studies; it started well, it petered out. We had a literary phase; that's had its effect, but has become ritualized. What I look forward to in Old English studies is a historical phase, in which texts cease to be silent words on the page, as in the Latin riddles (O'Keeffe, pp. 50-51), but are set insistently against a context--any context we can give them, philological, codicological, but in the end I hope chronological, societal and historical.

University of Leeds

NOTES

This paper was read at the 107th Convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco on December 28th, 1991.

1 Bruce Mitchell, On Old English: Selected Papers (New York: B. Blackwell, 1988), p. 327 ff.

2 John Hermann, Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989).

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

4 Edward B. Irving Jr., Re-reading Beowulf (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1989).

5 See esp. Kemble's introduction to Francisque Michel, Bibliothèque Anglo-Saxonne (Paris, 1837), pp. 32-34.

6 Daniel G. Calder, "Histories and surveys of Old English literature," Anglo-Saxon England 10 (1982):201-44, p. 244 (cited in Frantzen).

7 Roberta Frank, "Germanic Legend in Old English Literature," in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 88-106.

8 Patrick Wormald, "Anglo-Saxon Society and its Literature," in Cambridge Companion, pp. 1-22.

9 Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).

10 George Clark, Beowulf (Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers, 1990).

11 Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990).

12 Kevin S. Kiernan, The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf (Anglistica XXV; Copenhagen, 1986).