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I Alliterative Romance: Improvising Tradition AT THE BEGINNING OF St. Erkenwald an Anglo-Saxon construction crew digging the foundations of a new Christian cathedral unearths an ancient tomb graven with mysterious writing. Hit was a throgh of thykke ston thryuandly hewen With gargeles garnysht aboute aile of gray marbre. The sperl of pe spelunke that spradde hit olofte Was metely made of pe marbre and menskefully planed And pe bordure enbelicit with bry3t golde lettres; Bot roynyshe were pe resones pat pere on row stoden. Full verray were pe vigures pere auisyd hom many Bot all muset hit to mouth and quat hit mene shuld, Mony clerke in pat close with crownes ful brode Pere besiet hom aboute no3t to bryng hom in wordes. (Erkenwald, 47-56) [It was entirely made of thick stone gracefully hewn, garnished about with gargoyles all of grey marble. The fastening of the tomb that sealed it on top was fittingly made of marble and becomingly smoothed, and the border embellished with bright gold letters. But mysterious/runic were the words that stood there in a row. Full clear were the letters where many studied them there but all wondered aloud what it meant. Many a wide-tonsured clerk in that close busied himselfto no avail to make words out ofthem.Jl This passage shows the fascination ofancient inscription especially when it can no longer be read. The excellence, smoothness, and exquisite artifice of the tomb are brilliantly apparent, but their import is lost with the writing that adorns but cannot elucidate them-some antique worthiness has been ritually cherished but whose and why? The paradox of familiar letters but mysterious words might well describe a fourteenth-century clerk's attempt to read the ancient writing of Britain and the dialects of Anglo-Saxon, probably indecipherable to fourteenth-century readers.2 However, this passage suggests that ignorance of an ancient writing does not beget indifference. In St. Erkenwald the compulsion exerted by the tomb reflects its prior and consummate artistry in a land barely converted to the new work of Christianity. Viewed across Alliterative Romance 15 the break between a forgotten past and a barely incipient present, both the break and the incipience intensify the need to know. Two lines later all of London converges on the tomb in an inquisitive wave of global proportions : "I>er comen pider ofall kynnes so kenely mony I I>at as all pe worlde were pider walon within a hondequile" (64-65) [There came there eagerly so many people of all stations I that it was as if all the world had swarmed there in an instant]. There follows the energetic but futile attempt of the "broad crowned" Latinate clerks to parse that past writing, to "brynge hom in wordes.'' That they cannot do so perhaps hints that a more vernacular reader is needed. Their interpretive failure leads to their penetration of the wonderful tomb and its eventual transformation into what the poem demands it should become, a ruin holding only dust and fittingly replaced by the cathedral foundations. As D. Vance Smith has pointed out, the inscription never is interpreted -it is pried off and discarded in the opening ofthe tomb and effectively replaced by the drama of the speaking corpse.3 The inscription's glossy and unglossable wholeness at its first moment of unearthing gives way to the gaping tomb from which an ancient corpse will dramatically speak. This loss that becomes a conduit-the disappearance of the beautiful inscription-the opening ofthe mouth ofthe dead-performs the mystery ofthe alliterative romances' formal relationships with their own poetic predecessors. These relationships confound traceable genealogy but nonetheless bear identifying traits-alliteration, a tendency to four (and sometimes five) stress meter-that have, siren-like, cried their heredity to the puzzled ears ofmedieval scholars for a century. In this chapter I will argue that the alliterative poets, unlike the clerks in the passage, knew their insular vernacular traditions sufficiently to read the letters and also to mimic the lineaments, the "verray vigures" [true figures/letters] whose shapes can be discerned and admired despite their mysterious import. That is, while the alliterative poets may not have understood (or wanted to emulate) Anglo-Saxon or its long line-the beautiful inscription remains lost-alliteration itself becomes a marker of antiquity.4 They were canny and curious enough about the deep-structures of ongoing vernacular alliterative traditions in England to be able to put together an alliterative long line that looked...

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