Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone (review)

Carla Cucina, Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Macerata, has in the past published extensively with a special emphasis on the subject of voyaging in the Germanic world. A massive study of runic inscriptions (predominantly Old Norse) dealing with the subject of voyaging, both literal and metaphorical (Il tema del viaggio nelle iscrizioni runiche, 1989) followed by a two-volume edition of inscriptions and saga texts dealing with Viking voyages (Vestr ok austr, 2001) and a valuable study of the structure of the Old English poem The Seafarer (Sulla struttura del Seafarer, 2002) are but some of her publications. In the present volume she brings her mastery of Germanic accounts of voyaging to bear on the most famous Old English poem about seafaring, the124-line poem The Seafarer, and the result is what must be the definitive study of that poem to date.

Her book begins with a detailed paleographical account of the poem in its Exeter Book setting followed by a heavily annotated text of the poem with facing-page (Italian) translation. The edition is conservative, only indispensable emendations being admitted. The notes are thorough and judicious (see, for example, the notes on lines 53–55a on pp. 86–88). The edition is followed by an extensive review of the poem’s critics beginning with Rieger (1869) and extending into the present century. Here central matters such as the poem’s genre and the extent to which it is or is not allegorical are treated. Next she examines the structure of the poem, which she sees as a complex one facilitating the poet’s alignment of the sea journey with the faithful Christian’s journey to the next world and his heavenly reward.

The longest chapter examines the poem’s presiding motifs, viewing them in both their literal and their symbolic functions. The sea, the ship, the meadhall, coldness and the winter landscape, and spring are taken up, after which several homiletic themes are identified and discussed—peregrinatio Christianorum and the vanity of worldly riches, contemptus mundi, the transitoriness of human life and the aging of the world. The author explains how the homiletic themes in the second part of The Seafarer are, in the poem at large, reified in the Anglo-Saxon cultural milieu with freshness and originality.

The remainder of the book is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the style and language of the poem. Poetic diction and the poet’s lexical innovations are first examined. She presents an effective classification of hapax legomena and shows how controlled ambiguities of both syntax and lexicon are marshaled by the poet toward promoting expression of the poem’s major themes. In keeping with her general effort to make a literary evaluation of the poem’s achievement in its broadest literary and cultural context, she discusses in succession the poet’s individual response to the fixed Germanic traditions of kennings, variation, formulas, meter, and the poet’s linguistic features. This is an impressive display of the poem’s qualities, showing, inter alia, how a controlled ambiguity of both syntax and lexicon is marshaled toward an effective expression of the poem’s major themes. In her analysis of kennings, she adopts a broad definition rather than the more narrowly conceived sense adopted by Brodeur, the Art of Beowulf, appendix A, and Caroline Brady in a series of articles in Anglo-Saxon England, vols. 8 (1979) and 11 (1982), who see kennings exclusively as two-part syntactic structures with a pronounced metaphorical content. As a result she deals with a much larger group of constructions than they would have done.

After a careful review of the subjects of variations and of their various syntactic constructions, Professor Cucina concludes that overall these constructions serve to lend clarity not only to the poem’s metaphorical language but also to its complex structure and even to symbolic aspects of the text. Drawing on recent discussions of the formulaic element in Old English—by Teresa...