Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (review)

This book is in some ways a continuation of Bredehoft's 2005 monograph on early English meter (by the same publisher), which took a refreshing look at Old English poetry. It argued for Old Saxon verse as a relaxing influence on Anglo-Saxon metrical constraints but also for a definition of "late Old English verse" and the promotion of Ælfric of Eynsham to the status of a poet. The author uses this basis (which gained some sympathy, but not unanimous support) to discuss the nature of the production and reception of Old English verse, especially those poems composed after 900 AD. His main argument favors the so-called "literate-formulaic composition," a form of poetic production that draws on extensive libraries, over the (in the author's opinion) single dominating scholarly tradition of the oral formula as influence on poetic similarity.

Among the numerous claims that this study makes in six chapters are: the existence of "localized audiences" for which the more famous poems of the "four great manuscripts" were produced (p. 48; confusingly this is called into question again on p. 202); the use of Old Saxon in poetic borrowings at King Alfred's court (chap. 2); Exeter Riddle 40 as a product of the Glastonbury of Dunstan's day (p. 128); the composition of the Menologium and the four Chronicle poems in the orbit of Æthelwold at Winchester (chap. 3); Wulfstan the Homilist's acquaintance with the poem Andreas (p. 29); the existence of two great poetic libraries in Winchester, one at Alfred's court, one created by Æthelwold (p. 128), and Ælfric's intensive use of exclusively the latter library in the development of "his trademark alliterative style" (p. xii); finally, the identification of two prayers (Min drihten luf and the closing devotion in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 180) as late Old English poems (pp. 175-86), to name only a selection.

The book's strength—its challenging ambition and boldness—is connected to its greatest weakness—a methodology that cannot entirely support the number and size of its assertions. To buttress the literate relations between certain Old English poems, and between poems and texts attributed to Ælfric, much of the study relies on concepts such as the "unique parallel" and "rare vocabulary." However, the exact degree of true parallelism between texts turns out to be very limited and highly variant according to the statistical material presented (see, for example, tables 3.6, 3.14, 4.1). Likewise, an objective grasp on uniqueness of lines, lexical rarity (such as attempted in table 3.3), or stylistic idiosyncrasy can hardly be convincingly claimed on the basis of the evidence presented from the generally limited corpus of Old English. Modern linguists usually draw on corpora that feature millions of tokens and would probably employ theories of collocation and syntax before assuming, much more cautiously, linguistic relations between poetic texts. The question of the actual statistical value and relevance of the data given in this study is ever present to the attentive reader, especially when the author goes as far as to suggest that poems are potentially dependent on each other or are products of the same school, in some cases on the basis of less than a handful of more or less corresponding, or even emended, half lines (p. 140-41). Literal-formulaic borrowing is thus declared evident on account of very small linguistic units such as noun phrases, which are often nothing but simple collocations that have their rightful place in any language and certainly also outside the realm of poetry (for example, on hæþenra; wulf in walde, both p. 121; þanc gesægde, p. 140). The same applies to doxologies, which were commonplace in the omnipresent technical language of the homiletic and devotional genres (for example, waldend and wyrhta ealra gesceafta, p. 30) that make up more than half of the surviving corpus of Old English. There are many points where the intensive focus on formal structures...