On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems (review)

"Aesthetics" is a roomy category, to judge from the 2001 Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, with its forty-six chapters on "Empiricism," "Formalism," "Pragmatism," "Definitions of Art," "Taste," "Aesthetic Universals," "Beauty," "Interpretation," and so forth. The twelve contributors to John M. Hill's volume On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems restrict themselves to teasing out certain aspects of Old English literary aesthetics, concentrating on the poetry that is arguably the Anglo-Saxons' finest artistic achievement. The core of the volume consists of chapters reworked from papers presented at several conference sessions organized by Hill, while other chapters were recruited for this purpose. The essays are new with the exception of Howell D. Chickering's initial chapter on the exuberant diction and bold rhetoric of the Old English poem Judith. The chief reason for the inclusion of that essay here (reprinted from Studies in Philology 2009) may be that Chickering makes a fine display of the methods of the New Criticism—without, however, offering a critique of those methods or the assumptions underlying them. Though easily shunted aside in our post-postmodern back-to-the-manuscripts era, scholarship along such lines, with its alert attention to ironic contrasts and "self-delighting wordplay" (p. 36), clearly merits inclusion in a book that places literary aesthetics at center stage.

The twelve authors could be said to represent North American backgrounds and perspectives with the exception of Tom Shippey, who—in an essay that concludes the book on a high note—offers reflections on what student life was like for him in the English Tripos at Cambridge in the early 1960s, when Erich Auerbach's Mimesis offered him an intellectual life-line. "It was like having an oxygen mask clapped on suddenly as one was perishing from emphysema" is his wry way of putting it. Shippey proceeds to analyze a single passage from Beowulf (ll. 2910-81) in a manner that deliberately mimics Auerbach's learned, leisurely, old-fashioned practice of critical reading. But the essay is anything but familiar in its conclusions. By probing what seem to be infelicities of expression when one compares Beowulf with ancient classical norms, Shippey is able to show how uniquely efficacious the style of Old English heroic poetry is, and how specific to the intellectual order of its period it is as well.

Three essays on numerical or geometrical proportions in Old English verse lend the center of the volume a mathematical turn. In a chapter on arithmetical patterning in the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, John Hill points out that certain rhythms in the poem's discursive development coincide with groupings of 13 lines, while other key movements in the narrative, too, succeed one another according to a complex numerical scheme (the "Fibonacci sequence"). Since, as Hill acknowledges, determining what constitutes a "significant movement" in the text involves subjective judgment, the patterns he discovers remain suggestive rather than decisive. Writing with no such reservations, Robert Stevick makes crisp claims about the presence of numerical proportions in Christ II, while Thomas E. Hart discovers complex mathematical patterning in both Beowulf and Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae. Stevick's essay builds on research along similar lines he has published elsewhere. His demonstration of the mathematical "wizardry" of Old English texts (p. 141) is clear and internally consistent. It would be compelling, as well, if it did not depend on one's acceptance of the modern editorial lineation of Old English texts (and hence the exact "countability" of their lines) as an integral part of their design. Hart's mathematics, on the other hand, may strike some readers as byzantine or even solipsistic, seeing that his argument relies on diagrams whose meaningful explication would require many extra pages.

The book presents an attractive diversity of perspectives, though a detractor might say that it suffers from a lack of agreement among its contributors as to what it...