'Anglo-Saxon attitudes': the visual nature of some poetic narrative structures

'Anglo-Saxon attitudes': the visual nature of some poetic narrative structures* The many talents of Lewis Canoll are not usually thought to include literary criticism, far less helpful insights into Anglo-Saxon poetry,1 yet in the Alice books Carroll anticipates by some considerable time the critical tendency to explore literary structures through visual analogues. In Alice in Wonderland Alice asked: 'What is the use of a story without any pictures?'; in Alice Through the Looking Glass Canoll related the alignment of story and picture specifically to the Anglo-Saxon period through his creation of the Anglo-Saxon Messenger. Nearly a hundred years later John Leyerle's essay on the interlace structure of Beowulf drew together visual and linguistic patterning,2 and since its publication in 1967 there have been sufficient persuasive explorations of the analogies between the patterning and ornamentation of the two forms to establish, first that the stylized and decorative nature of Anglo-Saxon poetry is recognizably a verbal dimension of the visual aesthetic, and, second, that meaning can be generated by form.3 The substance of this essay was first presented as a paper at the Conference of the Medievalists of the University of Wales on 'Medieval Narrative', Gregynog, April 1992. 1 Lewis Carroll was mildly interested in Anglo-Saxon studies. On 13 March 1855 he listed areas in which to improve his reading and placed Anglo-Saxon between Church Architecture and Gothic (The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. R. Lancelyn Green, 1, London, 1953, pp. 43-44). Later in the same year he planned a drama for the Marionette Theatre about jElfred the Great (ibid., p. 55), and issued thefirststanza of the poem Jabberwocky, for which he provided his own pseudo-learned notes, under the heading 'Stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry', in Mischmasch, the last of the series of family magazines (ibid., pp. 68, 70). It is tempting to identify Haigha, the AngloSaxon Messenger, with Daniel C. Haigh, the eminent antiquarian and authority on runic literature, author of The Anglo-Saxon Sagas: an examination of their value as aids to literary history, 1861, and the equally idiosyncratic The Conquest of Britain by the Saxons, 1881. On his death Carroll's library included a copy of Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Lewis Carroll's Library, ed. J. Stern, Virginia, 1981, p. 21). 2 J. Leyerle, 'The Interlace Structure of Beowulf, University of Toronto Quarterly, 37.1 (1967), 1-17. 3 For a general consideration of Anglo-Saxon artistic principle see C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: a new perspective, Manchester, 1982, especially pp. 24-44, and D. M . Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, London, 1984. Bibliographic information is provided by R. Deshman, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian Art: an annotated bibliography, Boston, 1984, and David A. E. Pelteret, in The Anglo-Saxons: Synthesis and Achievement, ed. J. Douglas Woods and David A. E. Pelteret Ontario, 1985, pp. 165-67. Studies specifcally relating art and literature include P. R. Schroeder, 'Stylistic Analogues between Old English Art and Poetry', Viator 5 (1974) 185-97; J. J. Campbell, 'Some Aspects of Meaning in Anglo-Saxon Art and Literature', Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974), 5-45; C. B. Hieatt, 'Envelope Patterns P A R E R G O N ns 10.2, December 1992 72 M. A. L. Locherbie-Cameron Canoll's Anglo-Saxon Messenger who, according to Tenniel's Ulustrations, derived his strange contortions from the Caedmon manuscript of the Junius codex, may have been the author's comment on cunent fashionable interest in Anglo-Saxon studies,4 but the character provides an unexpectedly helpful diagram to an understanding of Anglo-Saxon poetic nanative. First, Canoll's description centres attention on an absence of naturalism: '[the Messenger] kept skipping up and down and wriggling like an eel as he came along with his great hands spread out like fans on either side'. Second, the two similes here stress the appearance of the Messenger. Third, the king's revelation, 'he's an AngloSaxon messenger and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. H e only does them when he's happy',5 aligns the stylized form with special occasion. If w e substitute 'celebration' for 'when he's happy' (if only because, according to...