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  • Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England by Lori Ann Garner
  • Earl R. Anderson
Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England. By Lori Ann Garner. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 367; 32 illustrations. $45.

Structuring Spaces is a survey of architectural symbolism in Old English poetry and in selected Middle English poetic narratives, in seven chapters grouped into three parts. Part I introduces an “Architectural Oral Poetics” (chap. 1) with special attention to Beowulf (chap. 2). Part II, “The Architectural Landscape of Old English Verse,” studies architectural symbolism in OE texts based on Latin sources (chap. 3), figurative uses of architecture (chap. 4), and symbolic space in the “elegies” (chap. 5). Part III, “Post-Conquest Developments and Continuations,” studies the continuity [End Page 512] of Anglo-Saxon symbolism in the context of Norman influences in Layamon’s Brut (chap. 6), and traces the evolution of a new “poetics of space” in King Horn and later romances (chap. 7). Garner concludes with a charming essay on “Modern Encounters with Anglo-Saxon Spaces.” Thirty-two black-and-white photographs of Anglo-Saxon “vernacular spaces” provide a welcome visual component to the discussion. This is an attractive book, articulate, jargon-free, well researched, argued with generous cross-references among medieval texts, and well edited.

Symbolic settings have long been a topos in the criticism of Old and Middle English poetry. From W. W. Lawrence down to A. G. Brodeur, humanist critics noted symbolic contrasts between Heorot and Grendel’s mere. A generation of formalist critics (Stanley Greenfield, Alain Renoir, and Edward B. Irving, particularly) expanded the scope of this criticism to include biblical epics and elegies, but Garner’s study is the first to include the entire poetic corpus. Situating her work in the domain of the “South Slavic analogy” with its emphasis on verse formulas as the building blocks of poetic composition, Garner credits the influence of oral poetics for denotative limitations and connotative power in Old English poetry. Architectural imagery is a case study.

Heorot, for example, is described scantly: the greatest of hall-dwellings, healærna mæst, is heah ond horngeap, high and wide-gabled, made of wood, adorned with gold, with a massive door hung by iron hinges (pp. 22–23). Oral-poetic tradition delimits description. Audiences must fill in the picture by reference to real and fictional halls, based on their familiarity with Anglo-Saxon “vernacular” buildings and their “fluency” in oral poetics. Heorot signifies comitatus idealism (pp. 48–49), as do sparsely-described halls in Andreas, Exeter Riddle 1, Layamon’s Brut, and (in a continuation of this architectural symbolism) in King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The ideal of the comitatus is extended in malo to Holofernes’s tent in Judith, and in bono to columns of cloud and fire in Exodus. These structures find their chthonic antithesis in earthen and stone counterparts, such as Grendel’s mere, the dragon’s lair, the eorðscræf in The Wife’s Lament, prisons in Juliana and Andreas, the grave in The Wanderer, the pit in Cynewulf’s Elene, and the Green Chapel in Gawain and the Green Knight.

Garner figures this symbolism as a “dialogue” between Anglo-Saxon buildings and oral poetic tradition. The denotative scope of verse formulas is limited, but descriptions of buildings gain depth by allusion to the “built environment” and metonymic allusion to a poetic tradition of halls and other buildings. No one would dispute this part of Garner’s thesis, with its paradox of limited denotation and connotative power in formulaic verse. But there is room for debate about two central points. One is her assertion that halls signify comitatus idealism to the exclusion of other values such as kingship, kinship, largesse, dynastic treachery, potentially dangerous feasts, and feuds. I see no reason to exclude other possibilities in bono and in malo, along lines explored by Hugh Magennis in Images of Community in Old English Poetry (1996). Then, too, although Garner uses comitatus as shorthand for a collectivity of heroic values, in fact the term implies a specialized mode of political...

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