Stressing and Kenning
One student, Maggie Thompson, provides a nice summary of the development of English as a language, taking from Sweet's A Short Historical English Grammar. It's an effective overview, and she names most of the key surviving texts of the Old English period, and their surviving manuscript sources. Although I will talk a bit about Beowulf and probably a few extant texts (The Dream of The Rood, Caedmon's Hymn, The Seafarer), it's rather difficult to consider them closely in any form but translation, and this puts us in a very awkward position because so much of the organizing principle of OE poetry was aural rather than conceptual. A great deal of OE poetry is based on relatively straightforward concepts, on issues and matters that are represented in chairoscuro (light/dark) terms and in relatively "typical" (i.e., of a type) tropes and symbols (the warrior-chief, the darkened hall, crows, ravens, to name a few). This is surely reductive, but will have to do for now to make a larger point: that the emphasis in these poems is on SOUND, on the matters of rhythm and musicality, the key issue to the latter most often that of alliteration. I'll speak a bit more about this in the lecture, or the tutorial I'm conducting (time depending), but to modern ears, my own included, listening to these fascinating constructions of sound and language without a strong sense of their word-per-word meanings can end up being like listening to opera without having a running translation: one can end up, as Mr Eliot has put it elsewhere, having the experience but missing the meaning, or, alternately, getting the meaning but missing the experience. The very principle, in fact, of poetry is being able to do both at the same time, unless, of course, one is reading Lewis Carroll.
Carroll provides a wonderful "making-sense-of-things" tale, and goodness knows that every edition of OE poetry now has to provide its own Humpty Dumpty in the footnotes. Those with a knowledge of Germanic or Scandivanian languages might not be quite as lost as the rest of us, but even for such people the act of translation can be prohibitive rather than progressive: the concord between sound and sense is constantly disrupted. There are, however, a few central dimensions which should be observed. One has to do with rhythm and alliteration, for which this site provides a good elemental summation. This rhythm is strongly accentual rather than syllabic, and the result, generally, is a poetry that is more forceful, and in some ways more guttural: the accents are driven by what would have been the progressions, or the strums, of a harp (and, as some have argued though not altogether successfully, perhaps drums or similar percussive instruments that needn't have been played by the scop himself). Soon (if not already), the prominence of the caesura should become clear: not only does it enforce a rhythmical structure, but it points to one of the central concerns of OE poetry, the putting-together (or collusion, or even marriage) of two different parts, with an underlying unity between them, sonically the repeated alliteration that unites the first, second and third accented syllables.
This putting-together is not just related to sound; it is also related to sense, evidenced most plainly in the OE fondness for kennings. Kennings are metonyms ("name changes"), compound words built to describe everyday (known) objects in alternately appreciable (perceivable) terms; the classic example of this is hronrade, or whale-road, which is used to mean "sea." Kennings have become rare in modern language, and they demand a more distinctly metaphorical imagination, our age more given to calling a sea a sea and leaving it at that. (Not entirely, of course; the first example that leaps to my mind, as CNN blares in the background, is the term "idiot-box.") The linking of two related ideas, though, should emphasize to you how much this sensibility is comparable to the caesura, of marrying two images or ideas together or colliding them to represent another thing. I suspect-- and this is merely a suspicion-- this may have something to do with a culture that was not just more rooted in the metaphorical, but with a culture more rooted in the crossing or traversing of great spaces, not least of which were the spaces of land and water that so dominated the post-Roman mentality. The idea of crossing-over (in many senses) was a pervasive one in the OE cultures, with even more settled tribes carrying with them a relatively recent history of seafaring and resettlement, often in less than receptive environments. So, even in the techniques of poetry one can begin to see the dominant concerns of a people of the time: concerns with journeying and traversing, of which more Monday.
I said earlier that it's difficult struggling with that gap between sound and sense for those of so far removed from the actual words of the original poetry. It may help some of you, as you try to wrap your heads around these particular sounds, if you glanced at some of the poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the very few employers of OE sounds in his poetry. Hopkins uses what he called "sprung rhythm," a strongly accentual verse form that is often very close to OE forms, even when they may seem very far removed, indeed. In a poem like "The Wreck of the Deutschland," the opening lines of each stanza start in an OE form (four stresses, with a caesura) before expanding into structures that eventually progress to more complicated patterns (and, plainly put, more stresses). Also check out the immensely-complicated but rhythmically very forceful "That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire, it's caesurae writ large, but generally with four stresses on each side of the break. For those especially interested in this sort of thing, you can also check out some of the poems of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (alas, not avilable online) or Earle Birney's "The Gray Woods Exploding" (also, alas, not online).
Have I drifted? Yes, probably. But it's often helpful to see how such patterns can be developed for modern usage, even if the currents and trends of English language, especially since 1066, have tended to lead us away from them.
Carroll provides a wonderful "making-sense-of-things" tale, and goodness knows that every edition of OE poetry now has to provide its own Humpty Dumpty in the footnotes. Those with a knowledge of Germanic or Scandivanian languages might not be quite as lost as the rest of us, but even for such people the act of translation can be prohibitive rather than progressive: the concord between sound and sense is constantly disrupted. There are, however, a few central dimensions which should be observed. One has to do with rhythm and alliteration, for which this site provides a good elemental summation. This rhythm is strongly accentual rather than syllabic, and the result, generally, is a poetry that is more forceful, and in some ways more guttural: the accents are driven by what would have been the progressions, or the strums, of a harp (and, as some have argued though not altogether successfully, perhaps drums or similar percussive instruments that needn't have been played by the scop himself). Soon (if not already), the prominence of the caesura should become clear: not only does it enforce a rhythmical structure, but it points to one of the central concerns of OE poetry, the putting-together (or collusion, or even marriage) of two different parts, with an underlying unity between them, sonically the repeated alliteration that unites the first, second and third accented syllables.
This putting-together is not just related to sound; it is also related to sense, evidenced most plainly in the OE fondness for kennings. Kennings are metonyms ("name changes"), compound words built to describe everyday (known) objects in alternately appreciable (perceivable) terms; the classic example of this is hronrade, or whale-road, which is used to mean "sea." Kennings have become rare in modern language, and they demand a more distinctly metaphorical imagination, our age more given to calling a sea a sea and leaving it at that. (Not entirely, of course; the first example that leaps to my mind, as CNN blares in the background, is the term "idiot-box.") The linking of two related ideas, though, should emphasize to you how much this sensibility is comparable to the caesura, of marrying two images or ideas together or colliding them to represent another thing. I suspect-- and this is merely a suspicion-- this may have something to do with a culture that was not just more rooted in the metaphorical, but with a culture more rooted in the crossing or traversing of great spaces, not least of which were the spaces of land and water that so dominated the post-Roman mentality. The idea of crossing-over (in many senses) was a pervasive one in the OE cultures, with even more settled tribes carrying with them a relatively recent history of seafaring and resettlement, often in less than receptive environments. So, even in the techniques of poetry one can begin to see the dominant concerns of a people of the time: concerns with journeying and traversing, of which more Monday.
I said earlier that it's difficult struggling with that gap between sound and sense for those of so far removed from the actual words of the original poetry. It may help some of you, as you try to wrap your heads around these particular sounds, if you glanced at some of the poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the very few employers of OE sounds in his poetry. Hopkins uses what he called "sprung rhythm," a strongly accentual verse form that is often very close to OE forms, even when they may seem very far removed, indeed. In a poem like "The Wreck of the Deutschland," the opening lines of each stanza start in an OE form (four stresses, with a caesura) before expanding into structures that eventually progress to more complicated patterns (and, plainly put, more stresses). Also check out the immensely-complicated but rhythmically very forceful "That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire, it's caesurae writ large, but generally with four stresses on each side of the break. For those especially interested in this sort of thing, you can also check out some of the poems of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (alas, not avilable online) or Earle Birney's "The Gray Woods Exploding" (also, alas, not online).
Have I drifted? Yes, probably. But it's often helpful to see how such patterns can be developed for modern usage, even if the currents and trends of English language, especially since 1066, have tended to lead us away from them.
Formulations Of The Peacock
Unfortunately, time is always crushing, and I find myself not dealing with the Middle English period, but which will receive more attention in the lecture than the OE will (so, yes, this is a study in compensation). ME poetry, which I'm considering here as a giant lump sum rather than in the generally-accepted tripartite divisions named in Maggie's post, is that poetry composed after the Norman invasion when the French invasion almost completely razed and salted the earth for OE verse. ME poetry also tends to be sharply alliterative, though the genres of poetry expand considerably. I don't want to antedate too much of Monday's discussion, but there's an interesting point to be made here, especially in relation to Alexandra MacInnis's invocation of Thomas Love Peacock's theory of poetic history. Peacock's is one version of this (of course), and can be contrasted, say with Giambattista Vico's model of history offered in The New Science, and which is modified again by Harold Bloom in his much-maligned The Western Canon. (Simply put: there are three or four ages-- the Theocratic, the Aristocratic, the Democratic, and the implied Chaotic ages, the last elided over by Vico but used by Bloom to characterize the late 19th and early 20th centuries-- that are passed through before one ventures through the last and re-emerges in the original. In other words, we're in the Chaotic Age, waiting to discover a new Theocratic Age. But enough of that.) But I want to take a spot to reflect on Peacock's model, which is useful to a degree.
Peacock's model, one has to note at the outset, is a bit simplified. (Again, read Alexandra's rather goos summation, or check out her link to the actual text at the University of Toronto Online Library.) It seems to me that Peacock's scope is a little too broad, and it missed what seems to me a crucial step, one between the Iron and the Golden Ages, and which in the scope of English poetic history is represented by the Middle English Period. This period-- the Steel Age, perhaps? so muses the boy from Hamilton.... -- can be characterized by the introduction of a new (smelting? forging?) force that initiates and conducts a series of cultural transformations. In England, this is the Norman conquest, and the institution of feudal and chivalric codes, and as the Old Language finds itself being expanded and reconstituted to reflect a series of cultural shifts from the tribal to the "national" or "the global" (for lack of better terms). There's a pretty crucial fact that Peacock misses, that for a Golden Age of the type he describes, there would have to be a period of consolidation and expansion, and even stabilization. Some might say this is a putative stage, or even a pupative stage, the initial period in which a chrysalis forms, the development before the change proper. One scholar, Alois Brandl, divides the ME period into four sub-periods, all significant in their own rights:
It also bears stating that, historically, many, if not most, cultures go through a similar period, and if we speak in larger historical terms, one might see poets like Virgil and Ovid in the Latin period as Chaucers to the Greeks like Homer. That's broadly simplified, but not, I think, entirely off-base. In English poetic history, though, this period is the progenitive period for what is alternately called the Early Modern period or the English Renaissance when English poetry becomes a house afire with innovation and reinvention: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and so many others. But consider all this discussion of the ME period as a caveat, or a qualifying addition, to Peacock's theory.
Peacock's model, one has to note at the outset, is a bit simplified. (Again, read Alexandra's rather goos summation, or check out her link to the actual text at the University of Toronto Online Library.) It seems to me that Peacock's scope is a little too broad, and it missed what seems to me a crucial step, one between the Iron and the Golden Ages, and which in the scope of English poetic history is represented by the Middle English Period. This period-- the Steel Age, perhaps? so muses the boy from Hamilton.... -- can be characterized by the introduction of a new (smelting? forging?) force that initiates and conducts a series of cultural transformations. In England, this is the Norman conquest, and the institution of feudal and chivalric codes, and as the Old Language finds itself being expanded and reconstituted to reflect a series of cultural shifts from the tribal to the "national" or "the global" (for lack of better terms). There's a pretty crucial fact that Peacock misses, that for a Golden Age of the type he describes, there would have to be a period of consolidation and expansion, and even stabilization. Some might say this is a putative stage, or even a pupative stage, the initial period in which a chrysalis forms, the development before the change proper. One scholar, Alois Brandl, divides the ME period into four sub-periods, all significant in their own rights:
1066-1250: the Anglo-Norman period, or "The Period of Religious Record": minstrels are producing for French-speak patrons; the Church is largely handling its own material and holding onto it. This is the period the Ancrene Riwle and the medieval Bestiary and much hagiographical literature (saints' lives). Also the lays (or lais) of Marie de France.This is rather long and involved (and round-about), but it's perhaps worth explaining that this is the period in which language, like steel, is used more pliably and in more varied ways. Techniques and genres become more refined, more nuanced, and certainly more complicated. As some of you will see, by the time of the Pearl-poet and Chaucer, poetry is increasingly elaborate and ornate, even if, at times, it hold what some might call rougher-hewn sounds. Indeed, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in my estimation one of the most truly marvelling poems in the English language, we meet a poem that is so carefully crafted that even deal with it's central structure one finds no end of patterns and orders.
1250-1350: the Norman-English period, or "The Period of Religious and Secular Literature": the Norman nobility is adapting to English, and so comes with more popular forms of literature. Writings of this period tend to be moralistic and even mystical, as the didactic begins articulate itself in more popular verbal forms (songs, ballads, romances). Typical writings: early lyrics ("Sumer Is Icumen In," "Edi Beo Thu, Heuene Quene," "Alysoun," "Nou Skrinketh Rose"), the Fabliau (e.g., "Dame Sirith"), Havelok the Dane and King Horn among the romances.
1350-1400(+): "The Period of Great Individual Writers": Linguistic climate is stabilizing, and availing itself to "professional" writing. This is the age of Chaucer, Gower, Wycliffe, William Langland, and the so-called Pearl-poet.
1400-early 1500s: "The Period of Imitation or Transition": Sometimes thought of as the revving of the engine before the drive, or the calm before the storm, as writing tends to repeat itself and anticipates a major epistemological shift. This is the age of Malory revamping the tales of Arthur, of the retelling of long-told tales as in Gesta Romanorum, even the burlesque The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
It also bears stating that, historically, many, if not most, cultures go through a similar period, and if we speak in larger historical terms, one might see poets like Virgil and Ovid in the Latin period as Chaucers to the Greeks like Homer. That's broadly simplified, but not, I think, entirely off-base. In English poetic history, though, this period is the progenitive period for what is alternately called the Early Modern period or the English Renaissance when English poetry becomes a house afire with innovation and reinvention: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and so many others. But consider all this discussion of the ME period as a caveat, or a qualifying addition, to Peacock's theory.
Whew. Yes, this has gone on rather long, for which I apologize. Profusely. For those of you reading this that are in RK's class, be aware that this is ONLY SUPPLEMENT, French-- not freedom-- fries for the main dish. Pick away at any of this as much as you like, and discard the rest. I assure you, Monday's lecture won't be anywhere near this elaborate, winding, intimidating, or (blessèd be) specific. I promise. This is for those of you wishing for a bit more to gnaw on. Some of you, like me, may have smaller appetites. But the fries are cheap, so help yourself if you want.... Cheers and best.
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