Laæamon's 'Brut' between Old English Heroic Poetry and Middle English Romance: A Study of the Lexical Fields 'Hero,' 'Warrior' and 'Knight' (review)

The relationship of Laæamon's Brut to the English literary tradition, in terms of style as well as language, has defined much of the research undertaken on the two versions extant, British Library Cotton MSS Caligula A. ix and Otho C. xiii. Christine Elsweiler's study, undertaken for her doctoral thesis, takes the debate in an important direction as she investigates with methodological rigor the lexical fields of warrior and knight. She scrutinizes claims that Otho is a modernization of an otherwise archaistic text represented by Caligula, approaching the two texts separately before proceeding with a comparison of each set of findings. Her choice of lexical fields is pertinent, linking as they do elements common to Old English heroic poetry and Middle English romance: the deeds of armed men. By limiting investigation to these closely related lexical fields, she is able to explore in depth lexical choices and their interpretative implications in the two extant versions. The data relating to the lexical fields under discussion are detailed in two core sections of her book, the first exploring them in relation to the Old English heroic tradition and the second in relation to Middle English romance. A number of tables, making it possible to view her data at a glance, and the index of lexemes at the end of the book are indispensable and will allow this study to remain an important reference resource.

Elsweiler investigates the relationship of the two texts to Old English in three stages. In the first she categorizes the lexemes of Laæamon's Brut into Old English poetic terms, terms unique to Laæamon in Middle English and terms remaining current in the Middle English period. Her discussions of the semantic force of some words are particularly insightful—lauerd in Caligula, for example, transmits generally the sense of a ruler or a king, at times giving expression to the theme of loyalty between lord and retainer associated with the term hlaford in Old English heroic poetry (ironically in the case of Modred and emphatically in the case of Gawain), a sense not sustained consistently in Otho. The second part of her investigation, on the use of nominal compounds, also demonstrates significant differences between Caligula and Otho. Finally, Elsweiler goes deeper, showing how the poet promotes certain themes and motifs by building alliterative clusters, while the Otho redactor's 'elimination of clusters' results in a 'change of thematic emphasis' (246-47).

In order to define the relationship of the two versions of the Brut to the emerging romance genre, Elsweiler begins by analyzing the lexicon of a group of Middle English romances in the fields of knight, leader, and army. Her sample from the romances, necessarily highly selective, includes the earliest romances in English, King Horn and Havelok the Dane, as well as the first 1200 lines of The Alliterative Morte Arthure. To broaden her findings, Elsweiler also mines data from the Middle English Dictionary, assessing comparable lexemes identified in the wider corpus of Middle English romances. Importantly, Elsweiler finds that Otho and Caligula 'mostly agree in their usage of the lexemes under investigation' (365). Additionally, through sampling a variety of romance texts, Elsweiler provides some insight into the lexicon of Middle English romance, inspiring further questions for future research.

Finally, Elsweiler considers her findings in the light of cultural transfer theory in a short section that at times needs more discussion. It would perhaps have been helpful to introduce some of these concepts earlier so as to integrate the ideas more convincingly into the book's overall argument.

Elsweiler was awarded her doctorate in 2009, and we are fortunate that it is in...