Dream, Bliss, and the Shaping of Emotional Meaning in Beowulf

INTRODUCTION

Antonette diPaolo Healey reminds us that “we determine the meaning of a word primarily through analysis of its context.”¹ It follows that the use of a word in different contexts may imply for that single term a range of possible denotations. In the partially complete Dictionary of Old English,² sense subdivisions within word entries reveal the frequency and breadth of this polysemy: a word will often carry a long list of possible denotations, arising from differences in the grammatical or semantic environment in which the word is deployed across the surviving corpus. Thus a term may carry a certain meaning only with the dative, or only in military sense—in the latter case, it falls to the audience to recognize the martial context and so infer the relevant sense of the word. Each different semantic context (which may be as specific as the referent of a word or as diffuse as the genre in which it is deployed) might suggest to the meticulous lexicographer a different subcategory of meaning to add to the dictionary entry. This lexicographic effort presents in the finished word entry a reassuring appearance of comprehensive coverage and semantic stability.

In the real world of language use, of course, this stability is an illusion: cultural and linguistic pressures insist on change—even within the comparatively conservative world of Old English poetic language. And there are other still more subtle and slippery ways for meanings to shift and multiply. Words bring with them senses that live in the shadowy borderlands between denotation and connotation, where cultural and emotional associations make implicit claims on the territory of explicit meaning. These senses often lie outside the sharp lines drawn by the lexicographer, who cannot tell us whether a word might have sounded a bit more risqué or felt a little less heroic than its semantic neighbors—nor to whom, and when, it might have done so—if such shades of meaning are recoverable at all. In literary genres like poetry, moreover, a single word might deliberately and simultaneously present several possible senses to its audience: the full impact of a term so used lies in the poised tensions of its multiple meanings.

Perhaps, then, the most significant feature of meaning to escape the lexicographer’s system is its capacity to change, its potent and layered mutability of semantic function. And Old English poets, on the evidence of the terms under examination in this study, were themselves active agents in the process; they acted both as provocateurs of semantic movement and as directors of the sometimes fraught ideological conflicts that this movement reflected. Words denoting emotions often excite this kind of poetic attention, and can cause in consequence particular difficulties for modern commentators. They commonly appear at points of dramatic intensity, and carry meanings that are more than usually contingent and pointed. In this study of some aspects of dream and bliss (both words broadly meaning “joy”), I argue that poetic deployments of these high-value terms can be seen as events in a broader linguistic struggle over the ownership of their temporal and spiritual significance. The stakes of this struggle are particularly clear in Beowulf, a poem that uses a wider array of joy terms than the remainder of the poetic corpus combined, but from which the term bliss (otherwise a popular and common joy synonym) is conspicuously absent.

JOY WORDS IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY

In the Old English poetic corpus, there are over 1,400 direct references to joy.³ This poetic interest is not only found in religious and elegiac poetry, but is a focus also—perhaps surprisingly—in heroic narratives, and often at the expense of more physical action.⁴ The vocabulary used to denote joy is also a large and varied one, and contains overlaps and associations that are absent from the semantic field in Modern English. Old English bliss, for example, carries the meanings “mercy” and “glory” in addition to its more immediate affective sense; words with a root in ead- or sæl-, as they are used in surviving poetry, combine their emotional...