Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century

nis þær hearpan sweg, / gomen in geardum, swylce ðær iu wæron (2458b-59)¹

There is no sound of the harp, delight in courts, as there once were

The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it.

(Pound 1951:56)

Even within an advanced print culture, poetry arguably never escapes the oral dimension. For Ezra Pound, whose highly intertextual epic The Cantos, so conscious of its page appearance, could only be the product of such a print culture, poetry was nevertheless "an art of pure sound," the future of which in English was to be the "orchestration" of different European systems of sound-patterning (Pound 1973:33). Verbal orchestration is meaningless without auditors; it goes without saying that the notion of oral literature simultaneously implies the concept of aural literature. This much is also evident from the very beginning of Beowulf: Hwæt, we Gar-Dena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon …. ("Listen, we have heard of the Spear-Danes in times past, of the glory of the people's kings …," lines 1-2). While the conventionality of the opening might suggest the evocation of a formulaic idiom often associated with oral composition,² the emphasis is clearly on aurality, on hearing a voice. Much work has been done in recent decades on the evidence in Old English written texts for a poetics that draws on compositional methods derived from an oral culture, either as it had survived into a period of widespread literacy, or as it was imagined to have once existed.³ This essay will not directly address that valuable rehabilitation of oral-formulaic theory into a more sophisticated understanding of early medieval scribal culture, although it will draw on it at times. Rather, I wish to pay some attention to the contiguous matter of that emphasis on listening for voice, of trying to make a space in the text for audible performance, before moving on to consider an analogous impulse in modern poetry and to argue for a new of type of textual allusion. A number of Old English poems could be used to explore the first idea, but the present essay will limit itself to some observations about Beowulf.

Beowulf is a poem that stages the making and/or performance of poetry on several occasions;⁴ one could say that poetry itself, or its creation, is one of the poem's major themes. Although it is in some ways a self-referential impulse, one hesitates to call this preoccupation metatextual, lest that should suggest that Beowulf is concerned to observe and investigate the production of poems like itself, that is to say, textual in its usual sense, made of words in their written, material form. Our Beowulf, an inscripted text, the product of a late tenth- or early eleventh-century scriptorium,⁵ is intrigued by the sound of oral composition, perhaps as much so as modern scholars of early Germanic verse.⁶ Through this staging of the voice or voices of oral poetry, Beowulf situates itself as listening in to that tradition.⁷ In doing so, the poem implicitly aligns itself with a poetics where transmission and composition are co-dependent, indivisible aspects of the same act, just as its opening rhetorical gambit implicates speaking with hearing and collocates narrator and audience, suggesting through the plural pronoun that a poet is always also a listener, as the second epigraph to this essay makes explicit.

A prime example of this straining to listen for the voice of oral composition occurs in the episode that takes place the morning after Beowulf's victory over Grendel, when one of Hrothgar's thanes word oþer fand / soðe gebunden ("found other words, truly bound," 870b-71a) in order to tell sið Beowulfes ("Beowulf's adventure," 872a). We are informed that the thane knows a great deal of traditional material; he is guma gilphlæden, gidda myndig / se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena / worn gemunde ("a man full of speech, mindful of poems, who remembered a multitude of many old songs," 868-70a). We are also told...