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  • The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse
  • Thomas A. Bredehoft
The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. By Renée R. Trilling. Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series, 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp xiv + 297. $70.

The central conceit of Renée Trilling’s book on Old English verse centers on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “constellation,” in which the modern perspective on the past sees links and juxtapositions amongst past artifacts that may be as much an artifact of perspective as indicative of a “true” relationship. Benjamin’s image carries its own warnings: we generate historical meanings in relationship to our perspectives, as much as in relationship to an authentic past, just as the individual stars in a constellation we see in the night sky may be light years distant from one another. Trilling, quite interestingly, argues that the image of the constellation can both help us to understand the ways we make meaning out of Anglo-Saxon texts and also to articulate something crucial about how Old English poets made use of the past in their own works. Though I sometimes wished that Trilling would have made more of the tension or sympathy between these two modes of constellative [End Page 532] thought, the book as a whole makes a useful and interesting contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies, and I think it will probably be widely read in the field.

Trilling’s use of the notion of the constellation as a heuristic for reading works is an updating of Fred C. Robinson’s arguments about an “appositive style” in Old English verse. Where Robinson argued that the Beowulf poet juxtaposed pagan past and Christian present as a structuring tension in the poem, Trilling suggests that constellations may have more dimensions than just two, although she also argues that the inherited heroic diction and content of the classical poetic form was often deployed by Old English poets as an explicit or implicit contrast to the present. Indeed, the constellative juxtaposition of (heroic) past and present stands as the “aesthetics of nostalgia” of the book’s title. As such, the relationship between Trilling’s “aesthetics of nostalgia” and Robinson’s appositive style made me wish that a full chapter in this book had been devoted to Beowulf, which gets its most extended treatment here in the introduction.

In the first of the chapters proper, “Art and History in Old English Heroic Poetry,” Trilling turns to Deor, The Ruin, and Widsith, and the discussions of Deor and Widsith are especially clear in addressing how these poems function by juxtaposing stories and names from the historical past in constellations that are essentially new with these poems. The discussion of The Ruin, naturally enough, focuses in on that poem’s tension between past and present, concluding that The Ruin “ends not in nostalgia but in redemption” (p. 55). The second chapter, on Anglo-Saxon Biblical verse, considers the poems of the Junius manuscript (although Daniel receives only sporadic commentary). The discussion of the telos of Christian history, as it is juxtaposed to heroic poetry’s very different ethos, is carried out with effective thoroughness, and some suggestions—such as the possibility that the digressions of Exodus work constellatively, like the exempla of Deor—are certainly productive of useful understanding. Yet Trilling’s concluding comment on “the production of the de luxe Junius 11 in the twilight years of Anglo-Saxon England” (p. 123) struck me, at least, as engaged in a quite modern kind of nostalgia, at least insofar as it is shaped by our knowledge of later Anglo-Saxon history.

The third and fourth chapters deal with Maldon (chap. 3) and the canonical verse of the Chronicle (chap. 4). The third chapter implicitly sees Maldon as a “verse memorial,” and concludes that “Maldon does not write the Danish conquest into the larger patterns of salvation history, but opts instead for the larger patterns of heroic history” (p. 169), quite differently from Wulfstan’s perspective on somewhat later events. The fourth chapter makes an unusual argument that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle must be understood as a kind of prosimetrum, which—while it is obviously...

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