Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (review)

The heroic poems that figure in Niles's book are Beowulf (chap. 1), Widsith (chap. 2), Deor (chap. 4), and The Battle of Maldon (chaps. 5 and 6). There is also a chapter on Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (chap. 9); one on Bede's story of Cædmon's miracle, in which it is argued that it is a reflex of the Irish Tale-Type 2412B (chap. 8); and two rather more wide-ranging chapters, one examining the imaginative geography of Old English heroic poetry (chap. 3), and the other showing how societies "tell truth" through myths or myth-like stories in ways which are socially valuable (chap. 7). There is an underlying argument that all stories are encoded narratives which are socially embedded, and that there is no story for which one cannot legitimately ask, "Who is telling this story, to what moral or intellectual end, and to whose profit or advantage?" (p. 281).

The quotation just given comes from chapter 7. As posed it is not, of course, one that is confined to heroic poetry, and so it justifies the examination in the following chapter of how Bede, in telling the Cædmon story, adapted a folk-tale pattern for Christian purpose. Niles shows how Bede's resulting truth-tale, whatever its relationship to the actual reality of the origins of vernacular Christian poetry, provides a powerful image (myth) of those origins, and at the same time "celebrates the virtues of a life lived in accord with monastic discipline, including the habit of ruminating over scriptural texts" (p. 319). As Niles goes on to note, "Bede's story of Cædmon can thus be read as a showpiece demonstrating that the Latin textual culture of early medieval Christianity was such a powerful institutional entity as to be able to absorb the native English tradition of oral poetry as the source of yet more devotional texts" (p. 319). By shifting the angle from which the story is read, therefore, Niles is able to tease us away from the usual, more limited, reading of the episode-the inception of Christian poetry in Old English-to think about the complexity of meaning that it might have had within the ecclesiastical world from which Bede came and within which his Latin writings circulated.

Within the terms of Niles's general thesis the subject of this chapter makes very good sense, but within the bounds of this book it seems a little awkward, since it is not about heroic poetry and so does not continue the particular thread that so firmly draws together the first six chapters. The final chapter, on Heaney's translation of Beowulf, has a similarly detached quality, although of course it is in some sense "about" Beowulf, and could be argued to function as a concluding chapter by the very fact of exemplifying cultural appropriation, in this case through translation as transmutation. Nonetheless, although Niles argues in the Afterword that the book is unified by being about "myths and mystifications" (which is undeniably true), it reads, to this reviewer at least, as a book that suffers from a degree of dislocation, since it consists of a run of six chapters on the social work of heroic texts and traditions, strongly linked by subject, approach, and specific conclusions, and a further three chapters on a more broadly-scoped analysis of transmutation, in which chapter 7 serves as a kind of second introduction. The shifting focus might be a reflection of the book's origins, for only chapters 3 and 9 are new: chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 have appeared in print as journal articles and book chapters since 1991, and chapter 7, as an independent study, is described as forthcoming. The older previously published chapters (i.e., all those directly on Beowulf, Widsith, Deor, and Maldon) have been revised only in minor ways: new thoughts, in response to challenges to Niles...