Laʒamon’s Brut Between Old English Heroic Poetry and Middle English Romance: A Study of the Lexical Fields ‘Hero’, ‘Warrior’ and ‘Knight’ by Christine Elsweiler (review)

Christine Elsweiler has undertaken an important assessment of the language of Lazamon’s Brut, which is all the more essential, and arduous, since the EETS two-volume edition (1963, 1978) still lacks both glossary and linguistic introduction. This analysis of martial terms moves from individual warriors, through leaders, to the army, and, importantly, examines the presence of terms covering this lexicon in both extant manuscripts, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. ix and Cotton Otho C. xiii. The fragile Otho manuscript, before fire damage in 1731 made large areas of text unreadable, was already a shortened version of the original, which is presumably more exactly represented in Caligula. Since the Otho version has only been studied in detail for the past fifteen years, this examination of the ways in which its selection and arrangement of words differs from Caligula advances understanding of the Otho reviser’s aims and attempts to prove that he was neither impatient with the author’s archaistic recall of Anglo-Saxon heroic society nor deliberately responding to the evolving Middle English romance.

The strength of Elsweiler’s detailed examination of her chosen terms warrior/knight, leader, and army in Lazamon’s Brut is her demonstration of the intermediate position of the poem, which harks back to the contrived style and ethos of the Old English heroic world by deploying a poetic form and idiom largely derived from or imitating Anglo-Saxon, yet resembles Middle English romance in its basic war lexicon.

The four parts of the book, each divided into chapters, begin with an introductory summary of research on the Brut. Part II, the longest, examines lexemes in Lazamon’s Brut in the context of the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition, evidencing in turn lexemes of Old English, Old Norse, and Latin/French origin for warrior, leader, and army, first in the Caligula then in the Otho manuscript and distinguishing those that remain in the Middle English lexicon and those that are, or are nearly, exclusive to the Brut. This section concludes (pp. 135–44) by noting that Caligula does not discriminate between Old English poetic terms and those current in Old English prose. Some lexemes are obsolescent in Lazamon’s Brut: æðeling occurs only four times in Caligula and (allowing for damage) twice in Otho, and is used in the more specialized sense of “royal prince.” Other terms, such as cniht, are generalized: in Otho, cniht often replaces poetic terms, rare even in Caligula, such as hæleð, rink, secg, wine, and driht, and Old Norse scalk. Rarer lexemes are used more selectively in Otho and with thematic significance, such as dugeð, which highlights Arthur’s prophetic dream of his downfall. While Caligula resembles the “archaic fictionality” of The Battle of Maldon, it is a “chronicle diction” that Otho levels to a more “matter-of-fact” chronicle style (p. 144). A similar treatment of noun compounds in Chapter Two of Part II identifies as current throughout Middle English only horsmon, present in both manuscripts, and concludes that Otho, with only seventeen compounds, is markedly different from Caligula, with forty-one noun compounds, twenty-nine presumably invented by Lazamon himself (p. 209), but Elsweiler cannot conclude that Otho deliberately identified and removed such Anglo-Saxonisms.

The brief third chapter of Part II identifies helpfully the alliterative clusters in the Brut, and discusses, with supporting illustration, the effects of differences in the two versions. Following discussion of meanings of the lexemes in the two preceding chapters with extended illustrative quotations from Caligula and Otho in turn, this chapter demonstrates how clustering of these lexemes “place[s] special emphasis on certain aspects of the narrative,” an emphasis that Otho’s “reorganisational design” changes by reconstituting the alliterative clusters (p. 253), in some...