John the Baptist’s Prayer or The Descent into Hell from the Exeter Book: Text, Translation and Critical Study by M. R. Rambaran-Olm (review)

M. R. Rambaran-Olm’s edition and study of the Old English Descent into Hell is the first full edition and discussion of this important poem from the Exeter Book. This is an intelligent and interesting discussion and presentation of this poem. The book is approximately 250 pages long, and the poem as transcribed and edited from the Exeter Book is approximately 122 lines long, a bibliographical fact that gives some sense of the scope of this edition.

This new edition includes an introduction, followed by chapters on “Paleography, Codicology and Language”; “The Descensus Motif”; “Literary Analysis,” and “Selected Comparative Studies and Analogous Literature.” The volume ends with an afterword, as well as a text, translation of, and commentary on The Descent into Hell.

One immediate point about this study concerns the presumed audience. Rambaran-Olm devotes a substantial amount of space to outlining the development and significance of the Descent into Hell/Harrowing of Hell theme in the context of early-medieval Christian thought and provides an appendix in which she lists various authorities who expressed opinions about and definitions of this “event” in the history of salvation. Although a book about an Old English poem can presume that the students and scholars who consult it already know about the Descensus or can consult the usual handbooks or encyclopedias to confirm their knowledge of it, it is convenient to have this information gathered, and relatively few students will pick up this edition with a firm knowledge of the development of the Descensus theme in the early Church. Thus the extended discussion of this theme will be convenient for students, and those scholars who have studied this material in other contexts can pass over those chapters that summarize this material. One must observe, however, that a comment such as “Rabanus Maurus states the Descent in a matter-of-fact way” (p. 196) is hardly very useful even though the exact reference is convenient. The Descent is a clause in the Creed after all.

One major theme of this new study is that Rambaran-Olm feels that the traditional title of this poem The Descent into Hell does not adequately describe it and proposes a new title: John the Baptist’s Prayer. There are, however, two problems with the new title. First, most of the narrative of the poem and the various speeches take place in “hell” or some more vaguely defined realm of the dead. The setting of the poem is important, and the newly proposed title does not indicate anything about the locus of the poem. More important is the problem with bibliographies and similar handbooks. Specialists in Old English can learn new titles easily enough, but a scholar whose primary interest is in Middle High German, Old French, or even Middle English (and such scholars might well be interested in this poem) would find it confusing and frustrating that “John the Baptist’s Prayer” and “The Descent into Hell” are the same poem.

One pleasure of a new fully annotated edition of a poem like this is that it becomes much easier to re-examine and debate the editor’s text and commentary. Thus, for example, she translates lines 99–102 “Oh! Jerusalem in Judaea! / How you remained fixed in that place! Not all living dwellers on the earth / who sing praise to you may traverse you.” With all due respect, this translation does not make immediate sense—cities do not move around and not everyone on Earth can wander about a given city. It is more likely that the poet is alluding to the stasis motif—the idea that the world stood still at the birth of Jesus—and that the translation should reflect these...