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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2008
In the process of literary interpretation no critic can afford to overlook the rôle of the poetic narrator. While poetic and narrative statements (as it is commonly argued) designate their meaning largely in accordance with the conventions of language and literary discourse, linguistic criteria alone cannot determine the attitude of the speaker towards what he says; and this attitude constitutes a crucial element in the meaning of the statement as a speech act or utterance. Indeed, as users of language, all of us habitually include considerations of speaker intentions in our standard operations of interpreting as well as producing discourse. Can the speaker be trusted? Does he speak ironically or sincerely? Is he trying to achieve some aim in relation to the hearer other than that which his act of communication ostensibly purports? Entailed in any act of communication, this dimension of interplay between speaker and statement is inevitably involved in literary discourse as well, since obviously we do not always take literary statements at face value. One of the primary tasks confronting the literary critic, then, in Old English poetry or any other body of work, lies in determining the character of the narrator and the parameters of his functioning.
1 Studies of narration and the narrator have advanced in sophistication enormously over the past three decades. For several major works that deal extensively with the narrator and related topics, see Booth, W. C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961)Google ScholarGenette, G., Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, trans. Lewin, J. E. (Ithaca, 1980)Google ScholarChatman, S., Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978)Google ScholarLanser, S. S., The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar and Prince, G., Narratology: the Form and Function of Narrative (Berlin, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Despite numerous discussions of ‘speakers’ within poems, and particularly in problematic pieces such as The Wife's Lament or Christ 164–213Google Scholar (Advent lyric 7), where doubt exists concerning speech boundaries or the dramatic situation of the speaker, Old English scholarship on the whole has approached the problem of poetic narrators from a limited range of viewpoints, by the standards of contemporary narratological discourse. For a sample of the type of study just mentioned, see Wentersdorf, K. P., ‘The Situation of the Narrator in the Old English Wife's Lament’, Speculum 56 (1981), 492–516,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Foley, J. M., ‘Christ 164–213: a Structural Approach to the Speech Boundaries in Advent Lyric VII’, Neophilologus 59 (1975), 114–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An important study of poets in the Old English period is Opland, J., Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry: a Study of the Traditions (New Haven, 1980).Google Scholar Opland's enquiry concerns itself more with actual poets, as recoverable through historical evidence and in-text allusions of poetic performance, than with narrators as such; nonetheless, his work has a major though indirect relevance. Some of the best work on narrators has focused on Beowulf; for two particularly important studies, see Niles's, J. D. chapter ‘The Narrator's Voice’, Beowulf: the poem and its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 197–204,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Greenfield, S. B., ‘The Authenticating Voice in Beowulf’, ASE 5 (1976), 51–62.Google Scholar On the distinct yet generally related problem of point of view, see Alain Renoir's excellent treatment of Beowulf 702–27,Google Scholar‘Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf’, NM 63 (1962), 154–67.Google Scholar Though it does not deal directly with the narrator in any way, Peter, Clemoes's unusual article, ‘Action in Beowulf and our Perception of It’, Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. D. G. Calder (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 147–68,Google Scholar offers many interesting perspectives with potential bearing on problems of narration. L. N. de Looze examines a moment of fictionalizing in Beowulf 2444–62a in ‘Frame Narratives and Fictionalization: Beowulf as Narrator’, Texas Stud. in Lit. and Lang. 26 (1984), 145–56.Google Scholar
3 The term ‘primary orality’, coined by Walter J. Ong, refers to the orality of a culture that is fully preliterate. See Ong's, discussion in Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), esp. pp. 31–77,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in earlier writings of his cited there. Seminal studies in orality and oral tradition include the writings of Milman Parry from the 1920s and 1930s, reprinted in The Making of Homeric Verse: the Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971),Google Scholar and Lord, Albert B., particularly The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).Google Scholar Foley reviews the published writings of Parry and Lord up to the end of 1978 in ‘The Oral Tradition in Context’, the introductory essay in Oral Traditional Literature: a Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord (Columbus, Ohio, 1981), ed. Foley, pp. 27–122,Google Scholar esp. 28–51. For a comprehensive bibilography of the oral-formulaic theory up to the end of 1982, see Foley's, Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: an Introduction and Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1985).Google Scholar For more recent research in the field, see the first two issues of Oral Tradition and the essays collected in Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context, ed. Foley (Columbia, Miss., 1986).Google Scholar
4 In addition to the works cited above, n. 1, see Rubin, L. D., The Teller in the Tale (Seattle, 1967).Google Scholar For a full-length treatment of the origin of meaning in a literary work with consideration given to problems of mediation inherent in any study of narrators, see Juhl, P. D., Interpretation: an Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princetion, 1980).Google Scholar On related problems, see Knapp, S. and Michaels, W. B., ‘Against Theory’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 723–42,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the responses to this article in the next volume of that journal.
5 I discuss this idea of the traditional narrator as it appears in Beowulf and the Homeric epos in ‘Ritual and Narrative: the Poetics of Re-enactment in the Old English and Homeric Epic Traditions’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. of Missouri, 1983), pp. 47–82.Google Scholar
6 The general line of argument which I will be tracing in the next two paragraphs concerning the relation between the stability of discourse and modes of thought owes much to Havelock, E., Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963)Google Scholar and Goody, J., The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar Ong expands on many of the same themes in Orality and Literacy. See also Opland's discussion of orality and writing in Old English poetry in ‘From Horseback to Monastic Cell: the Impact on English Literature of the Introduction of Writing’, Old English Literature in Context, ed. Niles (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 30–43 and 161–3.Google Scholar
7 The insistence on originality grew slowly as literacy became more and fully internalized. Thus even Shakespeare felt no compunction about lifting whole plots and paraphrasing passages from other sources. The decisive stage in the history of western culture, when the literate mind began at last to purge itself of residual orality, may have been the Romantic era; on this point, see Ong, , ‘Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology’, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, 1971), pp. 255–83,Google Scholar as well as other essays in this volume. On the unsuitability of the criterion of originality to most Old English poetry, see Renoir, , ‘Originality, Imitation, and Influence: two Mediaeval Phases’, in Proc. of the IV th Congress of the International Comparative Lit. Assoc., ed. Jost, F. (The Hague, 1966) ii, 737–46.Google Scholar
8 To retell does not mean, of course, to repeat verbatim; on this point, see Lord, The Singer of Tales.
9 For some of the earlier efforts in this area, see Magoun, F. P., ‘The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry’, Speculum 28 (1953), 446–67,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Creed, R. P., ‘On the Possibility of Criticizing Old English Poetry’, Texas Stud. in Lit. and Lang. 3 (1961), 97–196,Google Scholar and ‘The Making of an Anglo-Saxon Poem’, in The ‘Beowulf’ Poet: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. D. K. Fry (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), pp. 141–53.Google Scholar For a review of much of the orality-literacy debate over the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, see Watts, A. C., The Lyre and the Harp: a Comparative Reconsideration of Oral Tradition in Homer and Old English Poetry (New Haven, 1969).Google Scholar Watts in turn comes in for criticism from Niles, (Beowulf, pp. 121–37)Google Scholar, who argues for the validity of formulaic analysis based on a modified version of Donald Fry's definition of the formula outlined in ‘Old English Formulas and Systems’, ES 48 (1967), 48–53.Google Scholar
10 ‘Oral Texts, Traditional Texts: Poetics and Critical Methods’, Canadian-Amer. Slavic Stud. 15 (1981), 122–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an excellent discussion of the present state of scholarship relating to many of the issues in the orality-literacy dispute in Old English studies, see Foley's, ‘Literary Art and Oral Tradition in Old English and Serbian Poetry’, ASE 12 (1983), 183–214.Google Scholar
11 ‘The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry’, PMLA 81 (1966), 334–41.Google Scholar D. E. Bynum takes Benson to task for what he sees as misapplications of Parry's principles, in The Daemon in the Wood: a Study of Oral Narrative Patterns (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 8–13.Google Scholar The applicability of Parry's criteria in their totality to Old English poetry needs to be reappraised in any case; for a discussion of problems of formulaic comparability in view of disparities in poetic metres, see Foley's, ‘Tradition-Dependent and -Independent Features in Oral Literature: a Comparative View of the Formula’, Oral Traditional Literature, ed. Foley, pp. 262–81.Google Scholar
12 Berkley Peabody reviews the three Parry-Lord tests for orality (the formulaic, enjambment, and thematic) and adds to them two more of his own (the phonemic and song tests) in what constitutes the most developed version of this method set forth to date; see The Winged Word: a Study in the Technique of Ancient Greek Oral Composition as Seen Principally through Hesiod's ‘Works and Days’ (Albany, 1975), pp. 1–4Google Scholar and throughout.
13 See Wormald, , ‘The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours’, TRHS 5 th ser. 27 (1977), 95–114,Google Scholar and Clanchy, , From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar For a fuller bibilography relating to this later period, see my‘The Oral-Formulaic Theory in Middle English Studies’, Oral Trad. I (1986), 636–94.Google Scholar
14 See Havelock's Preface to Plato as well as the essays collected in his The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, 1982)Google Scholar he summarizes some of these views in ‘The Alphabetic Mind: a Gift of Greece to the Modern World’, Oral Trad. I (1986), 134–50.Google Scholar Goody's iandmark The Domestication of the Savage Mind addresses related themes, as does Ong in Orality and Literacy, in Rhetoric, Romance and Technology, in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, 1977), and elsewhere.
15 See, e.g., his essay ‘Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style’, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, pp. 23–47. Detailed studies demonstrating the complexities of orality-literacy interactions are just beginning to appear; for two examples, see Stock, B., The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princetion, 1983),Google Scholar and Kelber, W. H., The Oral and Written Gospel: the Hermenutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia, 1983).Google Scholar More recently Lord has described the survival of oral tradition even into modern times and its interactions with literary culture in Dalmatia and Montenegro, in ‘The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values’, Oral Tradition in Literature, ed. Foley, pp. 19–64.
16 In ‘Oral-Formulaic Rhetoric and the Interpretation of Written Texts’, ibid. pp. 103–35, A. Renoir has taken a related line on the problem of interpretative context, arguing that a poem should be interpreted in the light of the context which the poem itself seems to assume in its aesthetic structure. Renoir shows how certain written poems, such as Elene, are at certain points best interpreted in the context of an oral rhetoric, whereas other poems remain opaque when viewed from this perspective. Renoir's study typifies a recent redirection of effort away from mere demonstrations that poems were or were not composed orally in favour of a more sophisticated treatment of aesthetic presuppositions within works.
17 The fullest discussion of these formulas is Rumble's, ‘The Hyran-Gefrignan Formula in Beowulf’, Annuale Mediaevale 5 (1964), 13–20.Google Scholar Rumble correctly points out the ‘appeal to the authority of legendary tradition’ (p. 16) which these formulas embody. He also claims that they serve to create suspense in passages of description. The concept of literary ‘suspense’ needs to be reconsidered in view of the fact the Old English audiences probably already knew the outcome of many of the stories they were listening to. Greenfield similarly recongnizes in these formulas the reference to ‘the body of things told’, ‘the storehouse of memory’ (‘The Authenticating Voice’, p. 54). Fr. Klaeber in his edition of Beowulf notes the association with an orality: gefrægn formulas, he says, ‘unmistakably point to the “preliterary” stage of poetry, when the poems lived on the lips of singers, and oral transmission was the only possible source of information. Emphasizing, as they do, the importance of a fact - known by common report - or the truth of a story, they are naturally employed to introduce poems or sections of poems…to point out some sort of progress in the narrative…to call attention to the greatness of a person, object, or action…They add an element of variety to the plain statement of facts, and are so eminently useful and convenient that the poets may draw on this stock for almost any occasion’ (Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1950), pp. lxvi–lxvii)Google Scholar. See also Niles, , Beowulf, pp. 197–204.Google Scholar
18 The line of analysis which follows is developed in far greater detail in my article ‘Orality and Poetics: Synchrony, Diachrony, and the Axes of Narrative Transmission’, Current Issues in Oral Literature Research: a Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. Foley (Columbus, Ohio, 1987),Google Scholar forthcoming.
19 ‘I have also learned through enquiry that the monster…’ Here, and throughout, my citations follow The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (hereafter abbreviated to ASPR), ed. G. P. Krapp and E. van K. Dobbie (New York, 1931–1953); my citations from Instructions for Cbristians, a poem not in ASPR, refer to Rosier's, James L. edition, ‘“Instructions for Christians”: a Poem in Old English’, Anglia 82 (1964), 4–22.Google Scholar I use the abbreviated titles set out in ASE 4, at 213–15,Google Scholar and amended in ASE 8, at 33.Google Scholar For my research I have relied heavily on a A Concordance to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. J. B. Bessinger, Jr (Ithaca, 1978).Google Scholar Unless I have indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.
20 For other instances in which forms of the verb geascian are used, as in this quotation, see Deor 2 and Phoen 393.
21 ‘Lo, a wise man, a learned messenger said to me in days long ago many wondrous things!’ For another interesting example of this kind, see Fates 1–4.
22 ‘The glory-king had set against Grendel, so men heard, a hall-guardian …’. For related cases see Ex 388, El 569–72 and 1012–4, Christ 71–3 and 224–6, Guth 819–23, Phoen 127–9 and Beo 69–70.
23 ‘These sayings the wise Lord put into your mind; I never heard a man so young in life speak more wisely.’
24 ‘I hear that this is a company friendly to the lord of the Scyldings.’
25 ‘Lo, we have often heard that the holy man in his early youth loved many dangerous things!’ In translating frecnes in its connotation of ‘danger’, I follow the advice of the latest editor, Jane, Roberts (The Gutblac Poems of the Old English Exeter Book (Oxford, 1979), p. 131).Google Scholar
26 It must be recollected that I am not discussing the source of Guthlac or any other poem but the context of aesthetic presuppositions which this phrase in Guthlac attests to. Such presuppositions, since they are largely unconscious, could persist even in a poem where the poet is working from a written source.
27 ‘Then I heard that the men, sad in spirit, led the beloved teacher to the prow of the boat along with a crowd of people.’
28 ‘I never heard that he who had not been a servant to God or men in youth became a good lord afterwards in old age…’. The translation is Rosier's (‘“Instructions”’, p. 21).
29 Two of the other three passages in the negative mode, Ex 28 5b-6 and Christ 78–9, also illustrate this principle. Judas's statement, El 656–61, is somewhat more ambiguous. Ostensibly he is rationalizing his inability to answer Elene's question; perhaps thereby he means to criticize in covert fashion Elene's enquiry into that which his tradition does not record. In any case, the passage clearly implies the inferiority of his traditional knowledge to the novel truth of Christian revelation and thus represents an attack on this oral habit of mind.
30 ‘the best between the seas of those that we ever heard of among the English’.
31 ‘I never heard, before or after, of a lady bringing a fairer host on the water-stream, on the seapath.’
32 Of course, editorial opinions do not always coincide on the assignation of speakers for passages of text. For the sake of consistency I have followed the editorial decisions represented in ASPR.
33 h12, h14, f7, f11, f17, f26, f33, f34, f35, and f36, f61 occurs in lines 4–5 of KtPs.
34 Speech-initial formulas occur in h7, h8, h9, h24 and f29;bwæt associations occur in h1, h3, h4, h6, h8, h9, h10, h11, h12, h27, f7, f17, f36 and f58. The poetic narrator uses formulas to help lead into character speeches in f4 and f15 On other occasions the formulas occur at points that acquire their rhetorical prominence in other ways: in f58 e.g., the formula begins a major section of MSol; h1, h3, h4, h6, f48 and f57 occur where the editors of ASPR mark the beginnings of verse paragraphs; and f32 opens a stanza.
35 h2, h5, h15, h18, h25, f9, f21 and f38.
36 h15, h19, h21, h22, h25, f10, f11, f39, f41, f42, f43, f46, f48 and f49. In b25 the actual allusion is to ‘learning’, not treasure, borne across the seas; yet in the context of many passages in Old English that describe ships loaded with treasure of various sorts, this ‘learning’ should be construed as a kind of treasure figuratively transformed in the context of Christian thinking.
37 See, e.g., h4, h6, h8, h9, h26, f24 and f27. These constructions are not, in fact, dissimilar to phrases such as ‘pæs pe us secgað bec’ which, although refering to ‘A tells N1’ rather than ‘B hears N1’ and so lacking an ‘I heard’ expression, nonetheless allude to the same sort of transmission process. For several examples of this sort (which, of course, do not appear in my Appendix), see Gen 227, 969, 1239 and 1723, Christ 785, Guth 878, Brun 68 and LPr II 20. h7 contains a negative allusion to book-lore; on this example, see above n. 29.
38 For a discussion of the reduction of language to visual space, a process initiated by writing (chirography) and catalysed by print, see Ong, , Orality and Literacy, pp. 78–138.Google Scholar
39 For references, see above, n. 2. Though Opland does, in fact, give consideration to descriptions of poetic performances within poems, these descriptions are at best mimetic (and perhaps not even that) of the compositional practices which produced those poems in which the descriptions occur. Thus it is not directly the poet's own narratorial act that these descriptions allude to.
40 Jesse Gellrich has made an important recent contribution to the history of textuality in The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca, 1985),Google Scholar although in this study he is not concerned with the orality-literacy distinctions that are my major concern here.
41 A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Old English Language and Literature divisional meeting at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1984. I should like to express my appreciation to the University of Cincinnati for the Charles Phelps Taft postdoctoral fellowship during the 1983–4 academic year, which supported much of the research and writing represented here.
