Paul Battles

The past three decades have witnessed a bewildering variety of interpretations of the Old English Wife's Lament. We are no longer even certain that it is, in fact, the lament of a "wife"; critics have suggested that the narrator is a lordless retainer, a heathen deity, the soul yearning for the body (or the body for the soul), or a revenant. Numerous syntactical and lexical ambiguities - as well as the poem's abstract diction in general - have led to interpretations which differ dramatically even in regard to the basic facts of the poem.(2) At the heart of the debate over the general circumstances described by the poem is the narrator's dwelling, an eoroscraef or eorosele underneath an actreo in a wuda bearu (ll. 27-29).(2) The dwelling and its surroundings are described at considerable length (ll. 27-36), and this detailed description contrasts starkly with the rest of the poem, whose abstract language and nonlinear order make it difficult to reconstruct the e...

In Old English poetry, feast scenes tend toward one of two extremes. On the one hand, they serve as the quintessential expression of joy; the image of warriors at their mead cups, served by attendants moving busily among the benches, is invariably accompanied by poetic synonyms for happiness (gleo, dream, wynn, bliss, sæl ). Through accompanying rituals such as gift giving, feasting serves to establish and reaffirm the ties that bind the community together, celebrating social unity and cohesion. On the other hand, feasts can become catalysts for social disruption and disintegration. In Juliana, the devil confesses that he often lures men to their deaths by urging them to drunken flyting (483b–490a). Precisely this happens in Beowulf, where the Danish-Heathobard feud will be renewed at a feast (2041–66). It is easy to see how this would happen; a prickly sense of personal honor combined with alcohol and weapons forms a perfect recipe for bloodshed. In Beowulf, the potential for violence lurks near the surface of almost every feast. When Beowulf and his men are first welcomed to Heorot, Unferth’s flyting—a form of verbal dueling—could easily have provoked a fight. In a mead hall full of proud and bibulous warriors, death is never far away. It is

Abstract: This article argues that medieval retellings of Theban legends, particularly of the war between Polynices and Eteocles, exercised a profound and sustained influence upon Arthurian tradition. The Theban themes of incest, civil war, and kin-slaying furnished a classical precedent for exploring the darker side—and destruction—of Camelot.

... nullus posset nisi per experientiam scire docentem' (s. 246, 'which can only understood by those who are taught by experience'); this closely echoes the noblewoman's language ('nullus possetnisi experimento cognoscere'). ... 1) The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, vol ...

The past decade has finally laid to rest the stereotype of Kipling the jingoistic poet of Empire. With few exceptions, recent critics of Kipling's work have commented on the ambiguity and multi-voicedness of his fictional portraits of Empire, and have rightly insisted on separating Kipling's public persona from his artistic personae. Of course, no one can deny the sympathy for the project of empire-building--and the admiration for those engaged therein--that runs throughout much of Kipling's Indian fiction, but there are also darker, more cynical visions of Empire in his work. Yet, despite the increasing number of publications on Kipling's relationship to Empire--totaling more than 20 articles and at least three books during the past 15 years--and despite the virtually ubiquitous acknowledgment of the ambivalence that characterizes Kipling's work, few analyses have engaged particular stories in depth to demonstrate how this ambivalence is worked out. This essay will examine "The Mark of the Beast," a work that can shed much fight on Kipling's relationship to Empire, for it represents one of his most forceful critiques of Empire: as an allegory of the relationship of British colonizer and Indian colonized, it deserves a place alongside such stories as "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes"(1) and "The Man Who Would Be King." The events related in "The Mark of the Beast" are deceptively simple.(2) Fleete, a landowner newly arrived in India, overindulges in alcohol at a New Year's party, and commits an outrage against the Indian ape-god Hanuman by grinding his cigar into the forehead of a temple-statue in Hanuman's likeness. He then announces drunkenly, "Shee that? `Mark of the B--beasht! I made it. Ishn't it fine?" (218). Abruptly, a naked and leprous "Silver Man" steps out from behind the image and, before the narrator or his friend Strickland can intervene, touches his head to Fleete's chest. Strickland and the narrator carry the still-drunk Fleete home, and now begins the gradual transformation of Fleete into a beast: his sense of smell grows keener, he eats raw meat, his horses shy when around him, he grovels on hands and knees in Strickland's garden, and he finally loses the power of speech and howls like a wolf. At the same time, a mark appears on his chest--presumably where the Silver Man touched him--and it is similar to the spots on a leopard's hide. Strickland at this point informs the narrator to prepare for trouble, and during that night the Silver Man appears at Strickland's house, walking around the outside while Fleete convulses in his room, reacting to the leper's presence. Strickland concludes that Hanuman has bewritched Fleete to punish him for the desecration and decides to intervene. He and the narrator capture the Silver Man, tie him up, and tell him to cure Fleete. When he does not, they torture him with heated gun-barrels. At dawn, they release the Silver Man and tell him "to take away the evil spirit" (230); he touches Fleete's left breast, and Fleete promptly returns to his normal condition and falls asleep. The Silver Man leaves, and Strickland goes to the temple of Hanuman to consult the priests about atoning for Fleete's desecration of the idol, but is told that the incident he describes never occurred. When Strickland returns, Fleete cannot remember anything about the incident either, but jokes about a dog-like odor in his room. Strickland promptly dissolves into hysterical laughter, as does the narrator, realizing that, in torturing the Silver Man to save Fleete's life, he has forfeited all claims to being a civilized Englishman. The narrative closes with the ironic statement that "it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned" (232). The encounter between Fleete and Hanuman's idol is suggestive of the primal encounter of colonizer and colonized, of Englishman and Indian, of East and West. …

Old English poetry features a recurring scene which I call “The Contending Throng.” In it, a crowd, typically of soldiers or servants, competes to serve, defend, or attack the person at the focus of the narrative, often their lord. Contending Throng scenes occur in Descent into Hell, Christ I, Andreas, and The Battle of Maldon. Its presence in The Battle of Maldon helps to resolve a long-standing crux in that poem, stemnetton (line 122a), which is shown to mean “they vied,” “they contended.” The fact that Contending Throng scenes recur as late as the Middle English Cursor Mundi, and that some of its distinctive elements are mentioned already by Tacitus, testifies to the enduring power of the comitatus ideal as a literary trope.

In his study of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe has argued that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the ancestral migration from the Continent as ‘the founding and defining event of their culture’. He suggests that the adventus Saxonum gave the Germanic tribes in England a shared identity, and proved central to their historical, cultural and even theological self-definition. Howe investigates what he calls the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’, which links the Germanic tribal migration to England with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, both being transmarine journeys from a land of spiritual bondage to one of spiritual salvation. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England traces the development of this concept from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica to Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, and discusses its function in the writings of Alcuin and Boniface, as well as in Old English poetry. Howe's elegant analysis succeeds in demonstrating the pervasiveness of migration a...

... most recently proposed - and most widely-accepted - readings of the eoroscraefleorosele.(11) Earl Anderson has equated this structure with a primitive kind of dwelling very common in Anglo-Saxon England, a "sunken-featured building" referred to as Grubenhaus in continental ...

... Gawain's approach to castle Hautdesert in Fitt 2 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is justly regarded as one of the finest descriptive passages ... Waden, like its modern cognate and unlike “stand,” conveys motion, and halen is rendered best not by the pale “rise,” but with a much ...

Old English poems are difficult to date, largely anonymous, and written in a formulaic idiom, which makes it difficult to establish the authorship and intertextual relationships among the various poems. This essay employs computational stylometry—specifically, n-gram analysis—and network analysis to address this problem. It proposes methods for screening out chance n-grams and for employing n-grams of various lengths within a single analysis. This analysis shows that in Old English poetry formulaic diction exists at the level of idiolect, sociolect, and language. The signed poems of Cynewulf evince idiolectal characteristics; along with Andreas, Christ III, The Phoenix, and Guthlac A and B, they also form a poetic sub-tradition (sociolect).