![Early Medieval English in the Modern Age:
An Introduction to Old English Medievalism
Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel
O
LD ENGLISH IS alive! While the last native speaker of Old English may have
died over 900 years ago, the language of early medieval England seems more
popular than ever. In recent decades, modern poets, authors of historical
fiction and production teams of TV series, movies and video games have drawn on
the language and literature of early medieval England for inspiration. The presence
of early medieval English in the modern age is hard to miss: Seamus Heaney’s 1999
Beowulf translation was a world-wide best seller and Paul Kingsnorth’s Man Booker
Prize-longlisted novel The Wake (2014) was completely written in ‘pseudo-Old
English’, while immensely popular media set in Viking Age England, such as the
TV series Vikings (2013–20) and the video game Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020),
feature dialogue in Old English.1
These more recent revivals of Old English are part
of a long trend that goes as far back as the Middle Ages;2
Old English language and
literature have long been a source of artistic inspiration and fascination, providing
scholars and artists with the opportunity not only to explore the past but, in doing
so, to find new perspectives on the present.
This volume explores how Old English has been transplanted and recreated in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by translators, novelists, poets and educa-
tors. As the individual chapters demonstrate, these Old English afterlives take on
various forms, ranging from the evocation of elements of Old English language or
1
See, for example, Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Old English in the Modern World: Its Didactic
Value’, OEN 46:3 (2016), <http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/46_1/46-3_traxel.php>
[accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Reviving a Past Language Stage: Modern Takes
on Old English’, in Michiko Ogura and Hans Sauer with Michio Hosaka (eds), Aspects of
Medieval English Language and Literature (Berlin, 2018), pp. 309–28.
2
See, for example, Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Afterlife of Old English: A Brief History of
CompositioninOldEnglishaftertheCloseoftheAnglo-SaxonPeriod’,inTheTombofBeowulf
and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford, 1993), pp. 275–303; Chris Jones, ‘Old English after
1066’, in Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old
English Literature, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 313–30.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-22-320.jpg)
![Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 3
early medieval English history, literature and language by modern ethno-nation-
alist movements, as well as in acknowledging the inherited prejudices that may be
encoded even in superficially apolitical uses of Old English.7
The study of Old Eng-
lish has always been used to support the political and ideological agendas of those
who worked on it,8
from Matthew Parker’s religious polemic in the sixteenth cen-
tury9
to the founders of what has been termed the ‘Englisc nationalist movement’ in
twenty-first century Britain;10
the discipline of Old English studies has never been
ideologically neutral. Bearing this in mind, we must be especially vigilant for the
ways, both overt and covert, in which Old English medievalism might be used to
further contemporary political and ideological ends.
Fortunately, the reuse and adaptation of Old English material is by no means
limited to right-wing extremists. In his Antiracist Medievalisms, Jonathan Hsy has
called attention to reinventions of Old English poetry by contemporary poets of
colour including Carter Revard, Yusef Komunyakaa and Timothy Yu, whose repur-
posing of early medieval English poetic forms challenges those audiences who see
Old English poetry as an exclusively white cultural heritage.11
An awareness of both
the more sinister aspect of Old English medievalism and the various ways that this
7
See, for example, Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’,
JSTOR Daily, 3 May 2017 <https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-problem>
[accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-
Saxon” Studies’, History Workshop, 4 Nov. 2019 <https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/
misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. Because
of its unfortunate associations with racism and white supremacy, some scholars have decided
to avoid the use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon(ist)’; others, particularly in sub-fields such as
archaeology and public outreach, have argued in favour of retaining the use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’
on grounds of technical precision and popular recognition, or to prevent white supremacists
from ‘taking over’ the term for their own ends. These latter views are represented in the essay
by John Hines et al., ‘The responsible use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”’ published on <http://
www.fmass.eu> (last update 3 Jan. 2020) and Howard Williams, ‘The Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’,
Aeon, 29 May 2020 <https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-keep-the-term-anglo-saxon-in-
archaeology> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. On the terminology discussion, see also Elise Louviot,
‘Divided by a Common Language: Controversy over the Use of the Word “Anglo-Saxon”’,
Études Médiévales Anglaises 95 (2019), 107–47, In light of these discussions, we have chosen
in editing this volume to allow individual contributors to use whichever terminology they
feel is most appropriate to their work.
8
See, for example, John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901:
Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering and Renewing the Past (Chichester, 2015); Donna Beth
Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, Postsaxon Futures (New York, 2019); Catherine E. Karkov,
Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (Woodbridge, 2020).
9
R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, 1993); Aaron Kleist, ‘Matthew
Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage’, in Thomas N. Hall and Donald G.
Scragg (eds), Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s
‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ (Kalamazoo, 2008), pp. 106–33.
10
On this movement and its ideological underpinnings, see the trilogy of blog posts
published here: <http://radicalbritain.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-history-of-englisc-nation
alist.html> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. As the archaic orthography of the ‘Englisc’ descriptor
implies, members of this movement often use (aspects of) the Old English language as a
vehicle for their extremist ideas.
11
Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds,
2021), pp. 99–107.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-24-320.jpg)
![Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 5
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Bone Dreams’ (1975) is a clear example of how modern poets
have been inspired by Old English poetry. Heaney describes how the finding of
a piece of bone triggered within him the memory of the Old English kenning for
‘body’ – ‘Bone-house: / a skeleton / in the tongue’s / old dungeons’ – and a desire to
go back to the linguistic roots of English: ‘Come back past / philology and kennings,
/ re-enter memory’.13
Heaney’s use of elements of medieval poetry, including alliter-
ative verse lines, metrical patterns, kennings and imagery, has been well studied.14
More than just a reanimation of a past language state and poetic style, Heaney’s Old
English medievalism, both in his own compositions and his famous Beowulf trans-
lation, has been interpreted as an ‘act of literary and linguistic politics’:15
a form of
‘cultural appropriation’, as he claims part of what is traditionally considered typically
English heritage for the Irish.16
Heaney is by no means unique in drawing on Old English poetry for inspiration:
many other twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and translators evoke or
allude to Old English poetry, and, as with Heaney, their acts of evocation typically
serve as tools for contemporary expression.17
A recent example is the poem ‘Ginnel’
by Kayo Chingonyi, one of three poets to be invited to reflect on the 2018 Anglo-
Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition of the British Library as part of the
Sheffield-based Poet in the City project. Born in Zambia and having migrated to
the United Kingdom at an early age, Chingonyi has noted how an awareness of
the longevity of some of the earliest English expressions allowed him to find ways
to connect to the local Yorkshire dialect of Sheffield.18
In ‘Ginnel’, he alludes to the
possible Old English etymology of the Yorkshire word ginnel ‘narrow passageway’,
as well as to the well-known poetic kenning hronrad:19
From the Old English:
the coast’s open maw
13
Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, pp. 27–9, lines 17–20, 49–51; for a full analysis of this poem
within the context of Heaney’s oeuvre, see Jones, Strange Likeness, 207–13.
14
See, for example, Daniel Donoghue, ‘The Philologer Poet: Seamus Heaney and the
Translation of Beowulf’, The Harvard Review 19 (2000), 12–21; Jones, Strange Likeness, pp.
182–237; Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North’, in
Bernard O’Donoghue (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, 2008),
pp. 192–205; Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008).
15
O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf’, p. 205.
16
Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 182. See also Conor McCarthy, ‘Language and History in
Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf’, English: Journal of the English Association 50:197 (2001), 149–58.
17
For an overview, see Chris Jones, ‘New Old English: The Place of Old English in
Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Poetry’, Literature Compass 7:11 (2010), 1009–19. For
an important analysis of the relatively under-studied role of woman writers who recreate the
past, including through reworkings of Old English poetry, see Clare A. Lees, ‘Women Write
the Past: Medieval Scholarship, Old English and New Literature’, Bulletin of the John Rylands
Library 93:2 (2017), 3–22.
18
‘Digesting History | Poet in the City’, YouTube, 25 Feb. 2021, <https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Cgv3jPp388I> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; the interview with Chingonyi starts at
12:00. We thank Fran Allfrey for alerting us to Chingonyi’s work.
19
The word may derive from Old English gin as found in the phrase ‘garsecges gin’ [the
ocean’s gap] in line 430 of the Old English poem Exodus. But this etymology is uncertain, see,
for example, OED, s.v. ginnel.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-26-320.jpg)
![10 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel
that these portrayals remain firmly rooted in the present day. For better or worse,
we do not see the medieval directly but through the lens of the present; the ‘eald
daegs of the anglisc’ seen in these novels are, like Kingsnorth’s language, a modern
creation, not an unaltered Old English in geardagum. As many of the contributors
to this section argue, however, it is in the instability of this imagined medieval past,
in the ‘eald daegs’ that never really existed, that we can find a space for imaginative
linguistic and literary experimentation that speaks to both past and present.
Translating and Composing in Neo-Old English
Sceaða butan mildse, deorcnes worulde – Beorgaþ
Heorot cwacað – Ac beorheall stenteþ
Timber bifaþ – feohtdæg
Sceaða butan mildse, wamm on þam lande – Beowulf stenteþ!
[Fiend without mercy, darkness to the world – Beware!
Heorot quakes – but the mead hall will stand
Timbers tremble – battle-day
Fiend without mercy, blight on the land – Beowulf will stand!]27
Though this passage looks like Old English, it is not found in any known manuscript
written in early medieval England. So are we dealing with a newly discovered text
that had been lost for centuries? This is clearly not the case. In fact, composing in
Old English despite its being a dead language has a long tradition which can be
traced back as far as the early modern period. The passage above is taken from Song
of the Wildlands, a progressive rock album by Clive Nolan based on the Old English
epic Beowulf, which was released in September 2021 by Crime Records. Though
most of its lyrics are sung in Modern English, the album also features some choral
passages in Old English composed by academic Christopher Monk, well-known
for his blog The Medieval Monk.28
In texts such as this, which might be described as
neo-Old English, the world of academia meets that of popular culture. Unlike the
works of Old English medievalism discussed in the previous section, which seek to
convey a general impression of early medieval England and its language through
creative responses and reimagination, compositions such as Monk’s are acts of lin-
guistic recreation. Composing such neo-Old English texts requires a solid, often
academic, grounding in the linguistic intricacies of early medieval English and, for
a long time, these neo-Old English compositions have been seen as the products of
playful pastime for scholars of Old English.29
27
Clive Nolan, ‘Grendel Attacks’, lyrics booklet for Song of the Wildlands, CD, Crime
Records and We Låve Rock Music (2021), p. 8.
28
<https://www.themedievalmonk.com/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022].
29
Michael Murphy, ‘Scholars at Play: A Short History of Composing in Old English’, OEN
15:2 (1982), 26–36, <http://oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/OEN15_2.pdf> [accessed 1 Apr.
2022]. For an early example of a creation of a neo-Old English poem by a non-anglophone
student who sought to impress his professorial donors, see the edition and analysis of ´Se
Gleomann’ [The Minstrell] by Dutchman G. J. P. J. Bolland in Thijs Porck, ‘An Old English](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-31-320.jpg)
![12 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel
discusses his prospective readers and how different audiences might lead to differ-
ent translation strategies. Kemmler reveals that his works can be read at different
levels since elements of intertextuality, in the form of literary echoes of original Old
English texts, can only be enjoyed by more advanced readers. Particular challenges
that Kemmler discusses include his desire to create a linguistically authentic Old
English text as well his strategies of dealing with modern cultural items and ideas
for which the speakers of Old English lacked a means of expression.
This last challenge is also taken up by Denis Ferhatović, who discusses the way
food and drink items are handled by Peter S. Baker in his Old English translation
of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book. Ferhatović demonstrates how Baker’s han-
dling of Carroll’s Victorian ideas of food and consumption invites an exploration of
cultural and material history, prompting readers to rethink simplistic assumptions
about modern–medieval equivalencies. In the context of abuse and misappropria-
tion of Old English, Ferhatović shows how Baker’s translation can serve as a basis
to begin discussions that dismantle harmful stereotypes of medievalism, such as
the perceived isolationism of the early medieval period. The translation prompts
a greater appreciation of both the international, multicultural awareness of early
medieval writers (as seen from the fact that an apparently ‘modern’ ingredient such
as pepper can be transposed directly into the pseudo-medieval setting of the Old
English Alice) and the fallacy of assuming that modern assumptions can be mapped
onto the early medieval period (as seen in the differences between Carroll’s food-
stuffs and those selected by Baker in his translation).
Rounding off this section on neo-Old English translation and composition is
Rafael J. Pascual. He presents and discusses his own composition of a neo-Old
English verse text The Fall of the King, inspired by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien,
specifically an episode from The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien, Pascual brings his
linguistic expertise to bear on his linguistic re-creation, offering a metrical analysis
as well as a practical guide to composing one’s own Old English verse. Pascual also
adds a pedagogical angle to his chapter, highlighting how students might be taught
Old English metre through verse composition exercises. His chapter thus forms a
natural bridge to the next section, which focuses on pedagogical aspects of Old
English medievalism.
Approaching Old English and Neo-Old English in the Classroom
In the late nineteenth century, Henry Sweet realized the educational potential of
newly composed Old English. Rather than confronting the readers of his First Steps
in Anglo-Saxon (1897) with the original and complex poetic language of Beowulf,
he wrote his own prose paraphrase ‘Beowulfes siþ’ [the journey of Beowulf], which
begins as follows:
Hit gelamp geo þæt an cyning wæs on Denum, se wæs haten Hroþgar. And se
Hroþgar wæs mære heretoga, swa þæt his magas him georne gehierdon, oþ-þæt
his folgoþ weox þearle, and he hæfde sige swa hwider swa he eode, ægþer ge on
sæ ge on lande.32
32
Henry Sweet, First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1897), p. 39.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-33-320.jpg)
![Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 13
[It happened long ago that there was a king among the Danes, who was called
Hrothgar. And this Hrothgar was a famous army-leader, so that his kinsmen
eagerly followed him, until his following grew greatly, and he had the victory
wherever he went, both on sea and on land.]
In his preface, Sweet pointed out that he had found the composition process ‘very
difficult’ but that he was satisfied with the result. He further noted that this text,
along with two other adapted and normalised versions of original Old English texts
(‘Be þissum middangearde’, based on Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, and ‘Be manna
cræftum’, based on Ælfric’s Colloquy), was highly suitable for new learners of Old
English:
These three texts not only form an easy and interesting introduction to the lan-
guage, but have the further advantage of giving a brief but comprehensive view of
the science, daily life, and epic and mythological traditions of our forefathers.33
Sweet’s educational writings on Old English, notably his Primer and Reader, have
remained fundamental for Old English pedagogy from their publication to the pres-
ent day.34
Working in the tradition of Sweet, twenty-first-century educators continue
to use neo-Old English in the classroom, occasionally even turning to performance
and composition rather than translation of Old English to help students get to grips
with grammar and vocabulary.35
One notable example is a group of Old English
translations of modern pop songs, produced by students of Timothy Arner (Grin-
nell College),36
the publication of which on YouTube has sparked off a whole genre
of Old English music videos, of varying quality.37
The two chapters making up this
section explore the place of Old English medievalism in the classroom, considering
its potential pitfalls as well as its pedagogical advantages.
Looking back at the nineteenth-century foundations of Old English pedagogical
practices, Joana Blanquer, Donna Beth Ellard, Emma Hitchcock and Erin E. Sweany
33
Sweet, First Steps, pp. viii–ix.
34
On Henry Sweet, see, for example, Mark Atherton, ‘Priming the Poets: The Making of
Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader’, in Clark and Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the
Modern Imagination, pp. 31–50.
35
Peter S. Baker, ‘On Writing Old English’, in Haruko Momma and Heide Estes (eds),
Old English Across the Curriculum: Contexts and Pedagogies, special issue of Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 22:2 (2015), 31–40; Martin K. Foys, ‘Hwæt sprycst þu?:
Performing Ælfric’s Colloquy’, in Momma and Estes (eds), Old English Across the Curriculum,
pp. 67–71. For a practical example, involving the composition of Old English proverbs, see
Thijs Porck and Jodie Mann, ‘Blanded leornung: Three Digital Approaches to Teaching Old
English’, TOEBI Newsletter 34 (2017), 5–13.
36
Grinnell College students are responsible for Old English renditions of Carly Rae
Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptp_v7chhm4> [accessed 1
Apr. 2022], and Avicii’s ‘Wake Me Up’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOyEQah0s-k>
[accessed 1 Apr. 2022].
37
Examples include the Old English cover of Disney’s ‘Let It Go’ published on the
YouTube account Silly Linguistics, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbbpXLUP_qY>
[accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; a particularly successful Old English cover is the rendition of Paul
McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ by Die Töchter Düsseldorfs, with Old English lyrics by Fritz Stieleke,
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTRl0bMfWUQ> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022].](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-34-320.jpg)
![Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 15
literature of early medieval England,39
even if its members share an adamant rejec-
tion of extremist misappropriation.
As editors, we hope to have brought together a balanced volume that is not blind
to the darker sides of Old English medievalism but also does not let misappropri-
ation obscure the positive, imaginative and inspirational vigour of Old English in
the modern age. The chapters in this volume each demonstrate how Old English in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a site of creative innovation that requires
authors, teachers and readers to actively engage not only with the medieval past
but also – through the processes of recreation and reimagining – with the modern
context into which it is partially or wholly transplanted. In exploring these revivals
of Old English, the contributors consistently question the interplay of such aspects
as inspiration, affect, authenticity and ideology: is early medieval English in the
modern age a raised Lazarus or rather a Frankenstein’s monster? A miracle, to be
admired and made much of, or an abomination, abused and abhorred, or possibly
both at the same time?
The chapters in this volume show that there is no easy answer to this question.
As scholars of Old English, we are inclined to react positively to groups outside
academia engaging with the material we study, whether they are poets, museum
directors, novelists, film makers or teachers, and we welcome their fresh and crea-
tive responses, which demonstrate the continued imaginative value of Old English.
However, as Jane Toswell reminds us in the epilogue to her chapter, there is a danger
that, in our enthusiasm, we might turn a blind eye to some of the more negative
aspects of these engagements, whether it is its potentially elitist nature or the darker
motivations behind engaging with the medieval. We hope that this volume points
the way towards an approach that has space for both of these responses to come
together: an approach that is able to celebrate the continued vitality of Old English
while critiquing its limitations and holding to account those who seek to misuse
it. If one of the central themes of Old English medievalism is the almost limitless
potential to find new meaning in old words, this is surely an approach that offers a
sense of hope for our discipline as a whole, that a reimagined, positive and inclusive
Old English can, while retaining its links with the past, move forward to inspire new
audiences and creators.
39
For example, Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘The Many Myths of the Term
“Anglo-Saxon”’, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Jul. 2021, <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. Cf. Williams,
‘Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’, and Francesca Tinti, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons (Cambridge,
2021), pp. 3–4. See further footnote 7 above.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-36-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 21
end of the 1920s in various nostalgic ways, all focused towards his development as
a poet and the various influences on that development. The quotation is often cited
and analysed in terms of Auden’s real commitment to learning Old English and his
real love of the material:
I remember one [lecture] I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not
remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnifi-
cently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going
to be my dish. I became willing, therefore, to work at Anglo-Saxon because, unless
I did, I should never be able to read this poetry. I learned enough to read it, how-
ever sloppily, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my
strongest, most lasting influences.4
Throughout his long life as a poet, Auden’s love of this material intersects with some
of his other loves as poet and person. As I have considered elsewhere, his sense of
his own personal origins, his family roots, embeds itself in the north and in Old
English and Old Norse, hence his etymologizing of ‘Auden’ as a version of ‘Odin’.5
As Odin/Auden he brings poetry to the world, a vatic being of great certainty and
assuredness, creating works of imagination that encapsulate and respond to the
great philosophical and political questions of the age. However, the point of the quo-
tation that should not be lost is Auden’s clear statement that, ‘I do not remember a
single word he said’; that is, it is the sound of the Old English that captures Auden’s
interest, not the argument or ideas that Tolkien was propounding. Moreover, he finds
Old English to be hard work and he only comes to read it ‘sloppily’. His knowledge
is not deep.
Auden’s perception of his own engagement with Old English should, perhaps, be
foregrounded in this consideration of his accomplishments. Humphrey Carpenter’s
biography of Auden notes that, ‘He took enough trouble with Anglo-Saxon to be
able to appreciate The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, as well
as some of the Exeter Book riddles and at least part of Beowulf’.6
Carpenter is very
restrained, being well aware that around these statements of deep connection lay an
absence of detailed knowledge. Auden found Old English spiritually engaging, not
intellectually or linguistically ineluctable; he played, somewhat superficially, with
medieval Germanic texts and references throughout his literary life. However, he
also seems later in life to have engaged with Old English in a different way, as a
craftsman and poet thinking through the structure of a medieval text. For exam-
ple, an exchange of letters with an Oxford academic, Alan Ward, indicates that he
was attempting in The Age of Anxiety (1947) to replicate Old English alliterative
4
W. H. Auden, ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
(London, 1963), pp. 31–60, at pp. 41–2.
5
M. J. Toswell, ‘Auden and Anglo-Saxon’, Medieval English Studies Newsletter 37 (1997),
21–8. I argued at that time that Old English was a ‘half-learned mode’ (p. 24) for Auden and
investigated the papers he took at Oxford and his early poem based loosely on ‘The Wanderer’
and Sawles Warde, but here I suggest that Auden did not need to know Old English in detail
to use it as a poetic playground and find it inspiring.
6
Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 55.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-42-320.jpg)
![22 M. J. Toswell
structures, and in specific points of that poem to produce particular Old Norse
metres.7
Thus, he responds to a very technical question:
I made some attempts to obey the quantity rules of O.E. but abandoned them; as
in all quantitative experiments in modern English so many vowels become long
by position that, without an obviously artifi[ci]al diction, you cannot get enough
Lifts of the Accented-Short-unaccented-short type.8
He concludes: ‘The alliteration conforms, I hope, to O.E. rules’. Ward had clearly
asked him about the alliteration in the poem, and more specifically about the metre,
having noticed that in places it looks quite close to Old English and Old Norse
models. Auden responds with a solid technical discussion of short and long vowels
in modern English and the effect this has on the replication of Old English metrical
structures, and concludes on the most positive of his points, that the alliteration
does conform.
Ward’s second and far more technical letter (which survives) also gets a reply,
admitting that not always is the second alliteration exact but Auden thinks that
the first and third are always there. This, of course, is not precisely accurate, for
Old English metre depends on the stress at the head-stave after the caesura in each
line alliterating with one or both of the stresses in the first half of the line; Auden
seems to think alliteration is required on the first stress and strongly recommended
on the second – which may be the norm but is not the rule. This exchange with
Ward demonstrates how Auden engaged with these medieval metres. He treated
them from the point of view of a working poet finding ways to capture a metrical
approach and marry it to his chosen content. His conclusion about Old English
metre confirms this: ‘On the whole, I suspect that it is a metre which is only suitable
to rather sombre subjects, but I may be wrong’. Here is Auden the crafter of poetry,
seeing what he can do with this approach. The phrase is also a memorable one with
a solemn cadence, and appropriately alliterative: ‘suitable to rather sombre subjects’.
The next question, of course, is why Auden would choose to write The Age of
Anxiety in his own version of Old English metre. Others have written about Auden’s
use of themes and ideas from medieval England, and in particular of his habit of
using single lines in translation, sometimes appearing rather randomly placed in
his poetry.9
His version of ‘The Wanderer’, as noted earlier, really includes snatches
of ‘Maxims I’ and Sawles Warde, and only tangentially connects to the Old English
elegy. If it were not Auden, one might call his poetic use of medieval materials pas-
tiche. Consider, for example, these lines from an untitled poem written in the 1920s:
7
M. J. Toswell and Alan Ward, ‘Two New Letters by Auden on Anglo-Saxon Metre and
The Age of Anxiety’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism 15 (2000), 57–72. The details of Auden’s
engagement with Old English and Old Norse metres are discussed at length in that article; see
also the references there for research on Auden’s medieval metres published earlier and for
his use of Old Norse metrical forms as well as Old English in the poem.
8
Toswell and Ward, ‘Two New Letters’, p. 57. David Ward now owns the letters.
9
See Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry
(Oxford, 2006), 68–121. The classic study is Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Cambridge,
MA, 1983).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-43-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 23
Nor was that final, for about that time
Gannets, blown over northward, going home,
Surprised the secrecy beneath the skin.
‘Wonderful was that cross, and I full of sin’.
‘Approaching, utterly generous, came on,
For years expected, born only for me’.10
In his notebook, Auden records lines 45–7 of ‘The Wanderer’ beside the first stanza of
this untitled poem. Katherine Bucknell in her edition notes, rightly, that the gannets
probably came from ‘The Seafarer’, not ‘The Wanderer’. She also notes that Auden
sent a poor transcription of Dream of the Rood l. 13 to Christopher Isherwood, but
in this notebook has a better version of the Old English line corresponding to the
first line of the second triplet quoted here. The sense of the poem as a whole (there
are two more stanzas) is pretty uncertain; it really does read like a practice piece,
something Auden was playing with, and enjoying for the fun of putting disparate
ideas and images and words together. It is dated October 1927, the beginning of
Auden’s second year at Oxford. Auden is obviously assembling ways of thinking
about Christianity, and doing so by playing with different elements, calling on the
cross of Christ as against the first-person sinner, picking up T. S. Eliot’s idiom of the
skull beneath the skin to here have secrecy beneath the skin, but also playing with
the Miltonic idea of being surprised by sin.11
Auden likes playing with words and
sounds, and he enjoys mixing his Old English materials with his biblical knowledge
and his literary knowledge from other writers. He uses Old English with exuberance
here, but a serious exuberance that brings it into play with Christian imagery in a
profound way. He brings out the ‘these bones shall live’ reference to Ezekiel 37:3
in the fourth and last stanza of this poem and finishes with ‘Of Adam’s brow and
of the wounded heel’, tying together Christ’s sacrifice with the fall of humanity in
the Garden of Eden – referring to the most salient features of that fall. The poem
may not strike us as entirely coherent, but it is a kind of sacred play using various
elements from Auden’s capacious knowledge, already in 1927.12
The Age of Anxiety, as noted above, was Auden’s last long poem, an extended
apocalyptic meditation on war and life in the twentieth century, and apparently set
in a bar in New York. Heather O’Donoghue argues in an insightful paper that the
10
W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928, ed. Katherine Bucknell (Princeton, 1994),
p. 224. The poem is untitled, though Bucknell uses the first line, ‘Nor was that final, for about
that time’.
11
The reference is to the second line of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’, written
between 1915–1918, and frequently published since appearing in Poems (London, 1919);
see it now at <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52563/whispers-of-immortality>
[accessed 26 Apr. 2022].
12
An article taking a different and very sophisticated approach to another of Auden’s
juvenile poems with respect to its medieval valence is Daniel C. Remein, ‘Auden, Translation,
Betrayal: Radical Poetics and Translation from Old English’, Literature Compass 8:11 (2011),
811–29; disagreeing somewhat with Remein and also looking at the same early poem is
Robert E. Bjork, ‘W. H. Auden’s “The Secret Agent”, the Old English “Wulf and Eadwacer”, and
Ockham’s Razor’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews (November
2020), 1–7. See also, for a fresh approach, Conor Leahy, ‘Middle English in Early Auden’,
Review of English Studies 70 (2019), 527–49.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-44-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 25
placing his nouns and adjectives in alliterative highlights, with the occasional verb
as necessary. The result is a metre, and a poem, not easy to fathom but consistent
and intelligent, sombre and thoughtful.
Auden, then, performs his knowledge of Old English in various ways. He is per-
haps most successful in playing with his medieval knowledge when he does not try
to be obvious about it; that is, the fascinating use of medieval metres in The Age of
Anxiety gives Auden a chance to work with Old English and Old Norse word pat-
terns and syntax, so that the poem feels archaising but not in an obvious or particu-
larly unsettling way. Auden takes his somewhat sketchy knowledge of Old English
poetic texts, as exemplified in his youthful effusions and the somewhat awkward
way he uses puns and word-play, to imply a depth and meaning to his poetry that
is not really there, and advances to the point where his use of Old English is in
the service of his own strengths. The Age of Anxiety ponders the Zeitgeist of the
Second World War and its aftermath and does so in a heavily alliterative and some-
what ponderous metre: he applies his own thoughts about Old English prosody as
best suited to ‘sombre subjects’. To get to this sophisticated play with Old English,
he works his way through various other kinds of play with this material, and also
thinks, as a working poet does, about his craft in terms he is happy to discuss with a
fellow enthusiast of early medieval metres.
Christopher Patton
Having laid this groundwork demonstrating how one modern poet, Auden, plays
with Old English in ways that are superficial and in other ways that are serious and
intriguing, it seems appropriate to turn to two modern Canadian poets to see how
they play with Old English. Both have had similar educations, but seventy or eighty
years later in North America, and appear to have used their own discovery of Old
English as a way into the writing of poetry in the modern, perhaps the postmodern,
era. The first of these, Christopher Patton, is an American who has spent significant
time in Canada, receives Canadian government grants for his creative work, and
publishes only with Canadian presses (notably the well-known art press in the prov-
ince of Nova Scotia called the Gaspereau Press), and is usually claimed as a Canadian
poet (on his website he calls himself ‘American born. Canadian grown’).15
His third
and fourth books of poetry closely concern Old English, prepared while he was a
graduate student of medieval literature at the University of Utah; together they offer
translations of elegies and riddles in highly curated textual productions. Patton now
teaches creative writing at Western Washington University on the American west
coast, and playing with language and its permutations continues to be his métier.
Patton’s debut collection, entitled Ox and published with Véhicule Press in 2007,
had poems that had been published earlier in The Paris Review, and was extremely
well reviewed. His second book was a children’s story in poetry called Jack Pine,
15
Patton has a very carefully curated website, <https://theartofcompost.com/christopher-
patton/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022] where he also provides a blog. His most recent volume, also
with Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, turns to a different world-view; entitled Dumuzi, it retells
the stories of the Sumerian god of spring (2020). For the Gaspereau books see also <http://www.
gaspereau.com/bookInfo.php?AID=126&AISBN=0> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-46-320.jpg)
![26 M. J. Toswell
published by Groundwood Press, also in 2007. These first two books demonstrate
Patton’s concern with nature, his deft eye for the salient detail, and his charm. Patton
then has two beautiful books referring to Old English with Gaspereau Press, the first
entitled Curious Masonry: Three Translations from the Anglo-Saxon in 2011, and
including facing-page translations with extensive commentary of ‘The Earthwalker’
(usually ‘The Wanderer’), ‘The Seafarer’, and ‘The Ruin’, and the second Unlikeness
is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book, from 2018.16
Patton has extensive introductory
notes and commentary justifying his decisions on which poems to translate, the
structures of his volumes, and the purpose of his engagement.
Although he seems to have less formal scholarly engagement with the medieval
than Auden or the next poet, Dodds, Patton offers a very intriguing approach. In
his commentary provided for each translation, he steers quite clear of the scholarly
tradition and produces his own quite original material, some of it quite sly and
subversive. Patton brings the material to the modern day; he wants to keep the Old
English material alive. He presents the original material on the left opening of each
page, and on the right opening of each page gives his careful interpretation of the
text. Curious Masonry is a remarkable book, with a navy blue outer cover embossed
randomly with words and fragments of words from the Old English texts. The words
overlap and, since they are embossed, decoding them requires holding the book at
various angles in order to capture different words or phrases. They run randomly
at angles across the outer cover and give a sense of de luxe engagement with this
material, of partaking of a bygone era of enjoying a literary text as an artefact, lux-
uriating in how the text is prepared and printed as much as in its words and mean-
ing. In addition to the three translations, this chapbook offers a short introductory
statement and an additional poem based on ‘The Ruin’ entitled ‘H Earth’ or ‘Hearth’
(there is a careful discrepancy between the title of the poem as given in the artist’s
biography in a sleeve placed over the back outer cover, which reads ‘Hearth’ and the
appearance of the title in the table of contents and the text, in which there is an ‘H’ in
blue followed by at least two spaces then ‘Earth’ also in blue). Patton is interested in
spatial relationships, and even his titles reflect this concern (he has also done some
visual poetry installations).
Curious Masonry also has an inner cover, this one black and covered on the outer
sides with a pattern of stylized large and small white stars or snowflakes (six-pointed
made of three straight and equidistant lines). Moreover, the chapbook appears to
be handprinted, with delicate initials in blue at the beginning of each poem and
wherever the press designer and printer decided some extra refinement would be
useful. The book is a beautiful product; even the type is ‘a digital revival of Mono-
type Poliphilus by Andrew Steeves’ at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, Nova Scotia.
The book demonstrates just how good the production from a small but serious
press can be: it is a small-press spectacular, and deeply reminiscent of the fonts and
16
Christopher Patton, Ox (Montreal, 2007), Jack Pine (Toronto, 2007), Curious Masonry
(Kentville, 2011), Unlikeness is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book (Kentville, 2018), Dumuzi
(Kentville, 2020). Patton has a significant number of other publications, blogs, single poems
in journals, and visual poetry installations. See his website <https://theartofcompost.com/>
[accessed 1 Feb. 2022], subtitled ‘Christopher Patton’s website’.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-47-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 27
approaches of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and, even farther back in time,
William Pickering and his elegant productions of Old English fonts.17
‘The Wanderer’, entitled ‘The Earthwalker’ by Patton, begins with long and
involved syntactic units, heavy use of enjambement, and a carefully middle-range
vocabulary: ‘One often alone, hedged in, heavy/at heart, wandering waves, one/who
stirs a hoary sea with his hand/and walks a wretched way of exile’.18
Patton does not
strive to surprise the reader or listener, but to convey a sense of the original and its
charms. Parataxis and juxtaposition sweep the poem forward, never slowing, always
leaping ahead to the next moment. Like Auden, Patton plays with modern English
syntax in order to enforce the sense of otherness of his material. He likes gnomic
statements (‘Fate is implacable’) and kennings or near-kennings, inventing ‘war car-
nage’ and ‘earthwalker’ just in the first eight lines. Otherwise, he uses very ordinary
modern English, striving for a conversational style. There is both a wide sweep to
Patton’s work here as he reaches to make ‘The Wanderer’ a demotic poem and also
a meticulous care with the text.
Patton fearlessly retitles not only ‘The Wanderer’ but many other poems, nota-
bly in the next volume Unlikeness is Us, the title obviously taken from the poem
often known as ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ but called by Patton simply ‘The Wolf’. As he
says in the extended scholastic–poetic introduction to the volume, ‘Translation is
a savage triage’.19
The poet decides what to keep and what to reject. The poet who
begins, as Patton does, by transcribing the poem from the manuscript has yet more
to think about and more decisions to make. For example, Riddle 57 concerns a flock
of birds, variously described by scholars as swallows, crows, swifts, jackdaws, house
martens, or perhaps not birds but a cohort of bees, hailstones, raindrops, storm
clouds, musical notes, damned souls, demons. Patton notes that Michael Warren
in The Riddle Ages blog considers that the riddle, like all birds, eludes naming, and
suggests that the riddle may be just ‘unanswerable, or even that its answer may be
unanswerableness’.20
Patton, however, does attempt an answer, arguing that the way
the birds swoop about in a flock is best compared to a group, a clutter, of starlings.
The last line, that ‘they name themselves’, reflects Patton’s sense that the birds them-
selves have agency and make their own choices; they are no longer in the hands of
the humans describing them, or those reading that description and attempting to
decode it as humans into a name like the names given by Adam in Genesis to all
living things. Patton is deeply interested in human and animal ecology, and prefers
the birds to choose their own names, rather than to have humans assign identity.
17
See Sian Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), on Morris passim, and
on Pickering, pp. 56–7, though she does not mention his lovely production of Joseph Gwilt,
Rudiments of a Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue (London, 1829), which seems to have
eluded scholarly attention.
18
Patton, Curious Masonry, p. 13.
19
Patton, Unlikeness is Us, p. 26.
20
The blog is a group effort, this section now to be found at <https://theriddleages.com/
riddles/post/commentary-for-exeter-riddle-57/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022], with this entry by
Michael Warren, but the blog in general is Megan Cavell with Matthias Ammon, Neville
Mogford and Victoria Symons (eds), The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations
and Commentaries (2013; redeveloped 2020) < https://theriddleages.com> [accessed 1 Feb.
2022].](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-48-320.jpg)
![28 M. J. Toswell
Finally, Patton addresses Riddle 9, but does not call it that. ‘The Cuckoo’ is
fascinating:
Mother and father? They left me for
dead in my first days. No soul in me
then. No life. And then love herself
wrapped me in warmth, swaddled
me, held me in a sheltering robe, as
kindly as she would her own child;
and I, under that cover, grew strong
among unkin – as my nature had me.
She fed and fostered me a long time,
until, great in spirit, my journey took
me further. Well, she’d fewer to love,
sons and daughters, for what she did.
Mec on þissum dagum deadne ofgeafun
fæder 7modor; ne wæs me feorh þa gen,
ealdor in innan. Þa mec [an] ongon,
welhold mege, wedum þeccan,
heold 7freoþode, hleosceorpe wrah
swa arlice swa hire agen bearn,
oþþæt ic under sceate – . swa min gesceapu wæron,
ungesibbum wearð eacen gæste.
Mec seo friþemæg fedde siþþan,
oþþæt ic aweox, widdor meahte
siþas asettan. Heo hæfde swæsra þy læs
suna and dohtra þy heo swa dyde. :721
Patton may well have read Jennifer Neville’s argument that perhaps there is some
anthropomorphizing here, and the cuckoo might refer to a foster-child, one per-
haps larger and more demanding and destined for greatness.22
He does not mention
this in his very eclectic references in his annotation of this poem, which range from
Kubrick to Deleuze and Guatteri. His ‘great in spirit’ reference to the first-person
protagonist, the presumed cuckoo about to leave the nest, might well refer to the kind
of behaviour Neville adduces. More striking, perhaps, is Patton’s willingness here to
rearrange lines and half-lines, putting ‘Mother and father?’ at the beginning and with
a question-mark. They are included only to abandon the dead child, which comes
back to life when parented by ‘love herself’, a loose but intriguing translation, given
that the text never identifies the person/bird who stands in loco parentis – because the
important issue is that the cuckoo does find someone, not what that might mean for
21
Unlikeness is Us, p. 82 [Old English], p. 83 [Patton’s version]. Patton’s transcription and
presentation are much more detailed than the version here, with length marks for long vowels
and a mid-point diamond after ‘sceate’, reflecting his deep engagement with the Old English.
22
Neville provides the commentary for this riddle in Cavell, Riddle Ages <https://
theriddleages.com/riddles/post/commentary-for-exeter-riddle-9/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-49-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 29
other offspring. This is thoughtful and interesting translation, carefully reflective of
Old English style and metre, but also carefully modern in lexicon and syntax. Patton
embeds himself here both in the scholarship about Old English texts and in a detailed
and extensive learning of Old English, which gives him a base from which to produce
his demotic but syntactically unusual renderings of these poems.
Patton, then, is not unlike Auden in becoming engaged with Old English as a
result of his university course (he is also now completing a degree at the University
of Toronto), but his approach is on the one hand far more scholarly and detailed
in its linguistic engagement with the text and on the other hand far more visual
than Auden’s. Where Auden is thinking about sounds and sound patterns, Patton is
deeply concerned with the construction of the word on the page and with the page
in the book: his is the mind of a visual poet, and his play with Old English is a play
rather like that of the cuckoo: he has no parents in the language since no native
speakers exist, but he is suffused by the love and passion that learning the language
provides, and – as the cuckoo poem points out – ‘my journey took me further’.
Patton’s play with Old English is filial, serious, but also original and more than a
little playful. He plays the human/avian parallel of Riddle 9 for every valence and
nuance of meaning, and he rather playfully horrifies the reader in the commentary
with a detailed discussion of Freudian psychology as applied to the text, and then an
even more detailed discussion of a Youtube video with a leopard killing a baboon,
discovering its living baby, and making some efforts to keep the infant alive, but in
a desultory and rather uncaring and playful way. Patton concludes that the baby
baboon was always going to die, that these two cultures going face to face with each
other were never going to find a joyous medium; that the cuckoo of the riddle is not
likely to survive in any meaningful way. The image is shocking, painfully unsympa-
thetic and yet in a deep way quite empathetic about the collisions between different
worlds – and playful as the leopard bats at the young baboon. Patton’s is a modern
sensibility, shifting back and forth between anthropomorphizing the animals in the
riddles and acknowledging their otherness. His riddling play is sophisticated and
scholarly but also rebellious and original. It is too early in his career to know if he
will return to Old English materials with the mature mind of the fully developed
poet as Auden did, but should he do so, I suspect he would produce remarkable
work – and his ecological awareness would provide a fascinating new lens on Old
English texts remade into modern English.
Jeramy Dodds
Jeramy Dodds embarked (much as Auden famously did) specifically on a career as
a poet, with very successful works published and grants won in the early years of
the twenty-first century. He for some years did extensive public relations as a rising
young poet, speaking of his training as a medievalist and his use of that work in his
poetic output, including most obviously his translation of The Poetic Edda. 23
Here
23
As many modern writers do, Dodds has an extensive online presence (which will
become clear later): see <http://www.jeramydodds.com/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. A useful
long reading and discussion piece (particularly on the Old Norse translations) is from the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-50-320.jpg)
![30 M. J. Toswell
the focus will be on his links to Old English and its role in his riddling play with
language as a fundamental feature of his poetry. Note that, as will be discussed at
the end of this section, Dodds’ career suffered a recent setback, and a severe one
that offers an emotionally taxing situation for modern audiences of Old English and
for the question being addressed here of why modern poets engage with the early
medieval as a performative and playful medium. It will be interesting to see how
Dodds addresses his changed circumstances and frames them into his poetry.
Dodds’ career started very impressively. Born in 1974, he grew up near Peterbor-
ough in Ontario and attended Trent University as an undergraduate, completing
a joint degree in English literature and anthropology. He followed the path that a
number of Canadian students, usually those planning medieval studies, take, going
to the University of Iceland to complete a master’s degree in Icelandic. According to
his own account, he worked as a research archaeologist for some time, but contin-
ued to produce poems and to send them to small journals, mostly in Canada. His
first book of poetry, Crabwise to the Hounds, was published in 2008 with the highly
reputable press Coach House Books and was hailed as the confident work of an
important poet. The book won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was short-
listed for several major awards, including the Griffin Poetry Prize. He also won, in
short order, the CBC Literary Award and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award.
All these accomplishments and awards earned Dodds an important job as one of
two poetry editors for Coach House Books.24
Dodds’ interest in medieval poetry is somewhat occluded in his first book, Crab-
wise to the Hounds, not announced or signalled too broadly, but ever present. For
example, here are the first eight lines of ‘Planning your Seascape’:
Shipwrights shoulder-pole
bedrolls and Swede-saws
through a cellophane of rain.
Rent boys pony up to door frames
as cliff-dwellers stare down
dead holes in the sun. Cocklers
chase the tide on oxcarts through
a dogbreath of fog, the only surviving25
The title is the first clue to Dodds’ love of riddles and wordplay, since the usual idiom
is to ‘plan your escape’, not your seascape. The poem describes a large town or city at
the seaside, but with images that constantly shift and shock. There are compounds
coined by Dodds which are nonetheless pretty easy to understand: ‘shoulder-pole’
and ‘dogbreath’ here, and shortly thereafter, ‘pit-fire’, ‘gun-felled’, ‘weather-heckled’.
These all reflect the Old English techniques of adding nouns together, or nouns with
WordsFest 2014: WORDS Literary and Creative Arts Festival held in London, Canada:
Jeramy Dodds in Conversation with Andy McGuire, posted 3 Dec. 2014: <https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ukrw5deTPW4> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].
24
Dodds’ published work to date includes Crabwise to the Hounds (Toronto, 2008), The
Poetic Edda, trans. Jeramy Dodds (Toronto, 2014), and Drakkar Noir (Toronto, 2017).
25
Dodds, Crabwise, p. 44.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-51-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 31
adjectives/participles/gerunds. Some stray a bit farther but remain well within the
world of Old English compounding: ‘three-toe’ as a verb describing the way seagulls
with their three-toed feet stand and balance on the stomachs of the dead (possibly
a reference to the dead, possibly simply a reference to meat about to be barbecued),
or the verb ‘unshadow’ negating the idea of shadowing. Dodds plays with language,
with shocking juxtapositions in a free verse that is nonetheless highly rhythmic,
with a driving force of words tumbling over each other blasting images and crashing
against the norms of human expression.
Dodds’ poetry, even the brief sample analysed above, plays with words very clev-
erly and robustly, pushing idioms and reconfiguring them to force confusion and
uncertainty or new perception into the reader or listener. For example, one long
poem, which Dodds often used to read at poetry events, is ‘Canadæ’, a rant about
what Canada is and how Canadians function. Poems of this kind are something
of a high-art Canadian tradition. That Dodds would produce such a high-profile
piece and read it frequently suggests his own high profile in the field, as rising poet
and poetry editor for Coach House Books, a prestigious independent publisher. His
second book translates large sections of The Poetic Edda, introduced with a foreword
by Terry Gunnell of the University of Iceland, and an introduction to the translations
by Dodds that describes them as ‘recreations that possess birthmark similarities,
echoes, absolute similitudes and forgeries’.26
The book translates thirty-one poems
from the Edda, working from Gustav Neckel’s edition with an added four poems
not from the Codex Regius. Dodds revels in the complexities of these poems, in the
complex naming and word-play, in the confusing dialogues and contradictory sto-
ries. The translation is into a contemporary idiom; see, for example, from Grípisspá:
[Gripir said:]
‘All alone you’ll gut the glistening serpent
greedily lounging on Gnitaheid.
You’ll be the slayer of both Regin
and Fafnir. Gripir tells the truth.’27
Unlike Patton, Dodds does not provide the medieval original, and clearly works
from the published text, with help from various modern translations. His version
is colloquial, using alliteration (as here on g for two lines), and he mostly holds to a
trochaic rhythm that gives the verse an archaic sense. Where he cannot hold to that
rhythm, as in the last line here, he provides a summarizing half-line with alliteration
on ‘tells’ and ‘truth’. Here, too, as with his earlier poems, he likes to shock, using
‘gut’ for Sigurd’s actual sword-stroke on Fafnir, and picking up two descriptors to
describe the dragon: ‘glistening’ and ‘greedily’. He sticks to demotic language, using
‘you’ll’ twice and emphasizing Sigurd’s singular accomplishment with ‘All alone’ to
start the stanza. He worked on the translation for five years, by his own account,
26
Dodds, Poetic Edda, p. 12.
27
Dodds, Poetic Edda, p. 155. He translates from Gustav Neckel (ed.), Edda: Die Lieder
des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern (Heidelberg, 1962).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-52-320.jpg)
![32 M. J. Toswell
spending more time in Iceland to work on his lexicon and perfect the register.28
The
result is a translation of this much-translated text that nonetheless merits attention.
Dodds’ third book, Drakkar Noir (the title is quite helpful for our purposes), is
the one that consciously cites Old English, including ‘From The Exeter Book Riddles:
XCIV’, written in the second person except for the last five lines. The title presuma-
bly refers to the Sir Israel Gollancz edition of the Exeter Book Riddles, given the use
of roman numerals. Riddle 94 is very badly damaged, with only a few phrases here
and there surviving, though it is usually taken as a variation on a creation riddle.
Dodds clearly looks at it as a kind of ‘funhouse-mirror form’ (see the poem below,
which has this image in its first line), a poem that can only be glimpsed sideways
as if through a concave or convex mirror. Moreover, his poem is loosely a narra-
tive, though it riddles its way through the opposition between the narrator and a
‘Deputy’, someone who can be a berserker and the Deputy he reflects in the mirror.
The ‘I’ of the poem kills seven constables when his crystal-meth lab blows up, but
the Deputy is guilty of ‘starscreaming’ down the spine of the narrator’s bedridden
niece. ‘Starscreaming’ is unexplained and genuinely inexplicable, but it sounds like
a crime. The violence the poet and narrator allude to is constant and either barely
averted or embraced wholeheartedly. The poem also picks up the imagery of the
sun, moon and stars often found in the Old English riddles, and its structure, with
a clear caesura in the typesetting, not just in the pauses, and frequent use of Old
English alliterative and metrical patterns, also reflects a Germanic approach. Dodds
likes repetition, especially repetition that can shock. Here are the opening five lines:
You, who’s frozen in your funhouse-mirror form,
locked out of your lookout. You,
who eye-spies me glinting in the echo chamber
of an oak-treed glade, veins lassoing muscles
to bloodstone bone, eyes the pits of Hollowsure Moor.29
Dodds is explicitly referencing an Old English riddle in the title here, yet in the
text he is playing with possibilities that are not about creation but destruction, not
about admiring the accomplishments of a divine creator but about an implied dia-
logue between two antagonists, spying on each other and dreadfully anxious and
bothered by their own behaviour. His riddles are filled with violence and danger,
pitfalls and problems.
Dodds trained as a medievalist and uses his training explicitly in his work. He
takes a robust approach, perhaps, tackling the most well-known texts and using his
medieval knowledge entirely as a way to establish cognitive distancing from the
contemporary world and comment on modern behaviour and modern language
in striking and often shocking ways. Dodds is a difficult poet to discuss these days
since he lost his post as poetry editor at Coach House Books in 2018 as a result of a
Canadian #metoo incident; since then he has been in Europe and engaging with the
28
See the discussion at 28:10–28:34 in the WordFest interview with Dodds: <https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukrw5deTPW4> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].
29
Dodds, Drakkar Noir, p. 21. The solution to this riddle, written upside-down at the
bottom of the page, is ‘Cop Killer’.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-53-320.jpg)
![Old English as a Playground for Poets? 33
Canadian literary scene only to sue as many of his attackers (as he sees it) as he can.30
The story is a difficult and convoluted one, but it would appear that a fellow poet
accused him of sexual harassment and aggressive behaviour in complaints sent to
the press, and shortly thereafter to the internet. Dodds was immediately suspended,
and in fact the most venerable publisher of poetry in Canada suspended its entire
poetry list, since the accusations were not just specific but seemed to suggest a more
general atmosphere of sexual aggression (trading a ‘relationship’ for publication was
implied). The story is complicated, and since it is currently in the courts little can
be said. I can make one comment: in Dodds’ own account of the breakup with his
fellow poet, posted to his own website on 6 March 2018, he states:
Six years ago, following a breakup, I mailed several items back to an ex-girlfriend.
The last item was her taxidermy chicken, which I packed in a box and wrapped in
used target silhouettes — an inside joke inspired by our shared macabre sense of
humour about gun culture. In retrospect, this was poor judgement on my part.31
‘Poor judgement’ hardly starts to clarify the matter. As elsewhere explained by
Dodds and by the woman in question, ‘used target silhouettes’ refers to bull’s-eye
paper targets, something no one would want to get in the post, let alone wrapped
around a stuffed chicken. The suitability of this behaviour is not, whatever other
issues have been raised, in question: this is entirely bad behaviour. It would be hard
to receive such a package and not read a threat. The result has been, for me at least, a
rereading of Dodds’ poetry, and especially of his medievalist work, from an altered
perspective. His interest in violence, in voyeuristic stalking behaviour (as in the
riddle quoted here), his shocking and painful images, his obvious desire to unsettle
and destabilize the reader: all these patterns seem to suggest both hypermasculinity
and a focus on violence. Much as connecting biography to poetic production is
unsettling and inappropriate, here one has to wonder if Dodds shifted to medieval
texts precisely for a distancing effect, for an opportunity to play in a world that
others might not fully understand, a world that could be more easily presented as
violent, aggressive, dangerous. After all, the medieval world was, apparently, all of
these things.32
Moreover, by using it as a backdrop for his poetry, Dodds could take
an oracular or superior stance, a mode of behaviour that could serve as a way of
engaging with difficult issues from a safer location than their everyday world.
30
The suit has been called a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation)
suit, designed to muzzle the complainants; see H.G. Watson, ‘End of Story’, Maisonneuve:
A Quarterly of Arts, Opinion, and Ideas, 14 Sep. 2018, <https://maisonneuve.org/
article/2018/09/14/end-story/> [accessed 26 Apr. 2022]. More recently, see Mandi Gray,
‘Cease and Desist/Cease or Resist? Civil Suits and Sexual Violence’ (Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, York University, Canada, 2021). The case is discussed on p. 184; Dodds sued four
women and at least one media outlet.
31
See <https://jeramy-dodds.squarespace.com/statement> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. This
material is near the beginning of the second paragraph.
32
There is no space for it here, but Dodds’ translations of the Poetic Edda could profitably
be compared to Auden’s, done with Paul Beekman Taylor near the end of his life. See W. H.
Auden and Paul Beekman Tayler, Norse Poems (London, 1981).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25432444-250522174533-fb124a38/85/Old-English-Medievalism-Reception-And-Recreation-In-The-20th-And-21st-Centuries-Rachel-A-Fletcher-Editor-Thijs-Porck-Editor-Oliver-M-Traxel-Editor-54-320.jpg)
Old English Medievalism Reception And Recreation In The 20th And 21st Centuries Rachel A Fletcher Editor Thijs Porck Editor Oliver M Traxel Editor
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- 6. Volume XXI Old English Medievalism
- 7. ISSN 2043-8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the bur- geoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of `the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from histo- riographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and pres- ence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252-0001 USA [email protected] Professor Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews Fife KY16 9AL UK [email protected] Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book
- 8. Old English Medievalism Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries Edited by Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel D. S. BREWER
- 9. © Contributors 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 650 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 80010 806 6 (ePDF) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such web- sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: The original Sutton Hoo lyre, visually merged with its replica © Trustees of The British Museum.
- 10. Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiii List of Abbreviations xv Early Medieval English in the Modern Age: An Introduction to Old English Medievalism 1 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel I Reinventing, Reimagining and Recontextualizing Old English Poetry 1 Old English as a Playground for Poets? W. H. Auden, Christopher Patton and Jeramy Dodds 19 M. J. Toswell 2 ‘Abroad in One’s Own Tradition’: Old English Poetry and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) 37 Victoria Condie 3 Wulf and Eadwacer in 1830 New Zealand: Anglo-Saxonism and Postcolonialism in Hamish Clayton’s Wulf (2011) 53 Martina Marzullo 4 Old English Poetry and Sutton Hoo on Display: Creating ‘the Anglo- Saxon’ in Museums 71 Fran Allfrey II Invoking Early Medieval England and Its Language in Historical Fiction 5 Creating a ‘Shadow Tongue’: The Merging of Two Language Stages 95 Oliver M. Traxel
- 11. vi Contents 6 At the Threshold of the Inarticulate: The Reception of ‘Made-up’ English in Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2014) 115 Judy Kendall 7 Reimagining Early Medieval Britain: The Language of Spirituality 135 Karen Louise Jolly 8 Historical Friction: Constructing Pastness in Fiction Set in Eleventh- Century England 155 James Aitcheson III Translating and Composing in Neo-Old English 9 Ge wordful, ge wordig: Translating Modern Texts into Old English 173 Fritz Kemmler 10 Fruit, Fat and Fermentation: Food and Drink in Peter Baker’s (Neo-) Old English Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 191 Denis Ferhatović 11 The Fall of the King and the Composition of Neo-Old English Verse 209 Rafael J. Pascual IV Approaching Old English and Neo-Old English in the Classroom 12 Mitchell & Robinson’s Medievalism: Echoes of Empire in the History of Old English Pedagogy 225 Joana Blanquer, Donna Beth Ellard, Emma Hitchcock and Erin E. Sweany 13 The Magic of Telecinematic Neo-Old English in University Teaching 243 Gabriele Knappe Bibliography 265 Index 289
- 12. Illustrations Fig. 1 Specimen page of Heinrich Hoffmann, Be Siwarde þam sidfeaxan. Myrge mæþelword ge lustbære licnessa, trans. Fritz Kemmler (Neckarsteinach, 2010), p. 10. © Edition Tintenfass, used with permission 184 The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and per- sons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledge- ment in subsequent editions.
- 14. Contributors James Aitcheson is the author of four historical novels set during the Norman Con- quest of England which have been published in the UK, the US, Germany and the Czech Republic. His most recent title is The Harrowing (Heron, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Fran Allfrey is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading and a museum education facilitator. She holds a Ph.D. from King’s College London. She has published on ‘affective Anglo-Saxonism’ and researches how early medieval tex- tual and material remains become enmeshed with contemporary politics in arts and heritage practices. Joana Blanquer is currently a Special Community Member at the University of Denver and holds a Ph.D. in English from Trinity College Dublin. She has published on Beowulf, the science of the calendar and Old English lexicography. Victoria Condie is a Bye-Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. She works on medievalism in the nineteenth century and is currently engaged in a study of the afterlives of medieval manuscripts in New Zealand. Donna Beth Ellard is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She writes about Old English in relation to its disciplinary history, postcolonialism and critical animal studies. Denis Ferhatović is Associate Professor of English at Connecticut College (New London, CT, USA). He has published on Old English poetry, its translations and adaptations, as well as on fabliaux and queer aliens. His book Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry came out in 2019 with Manchester University Press. Rachel A. Fletcher holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Glasgow. She has published on the history of Old English lexicogra- phy, Old English scholarship in the Early Modern period, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s work on the Oxford English Dictionary. Emma Hitchcock is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English and Compar- ative Literature at Columbia University. Her approach to early medieval English literature is grounded in genre studies, religious and intellectual history, and critical Indigenous studies.
- 15. x Contributors Karen Louise Jolly is Professor of Medieval European History at the University of Hawai‘i, where she has taught for more than 30 years since receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1987. Her first book was Popular Religion in Late Saxon England (The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and her most recent book is The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (The Ohio State University Press, 2012). She is currently working on a historical fiction biogra- phy of Aldred the scribe exploring life in tenth-century Northumbria. Fritz Kemmler holds a Dr.phil. from the University of Tübingen. His publications include several editions of a course book on English Medieval Studies, a study of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, and a prose translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into modern German. Judy Kendall is Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. Her publications as an award-winning creative writer, critic and translator include the subjects of visual text, poetic processes and Old English riddle translation. Her third monograph, Where Language Thickens: Meaning and Effects at the Threshold of the Inarticulate in Translated and Original Literary Work, is due out with Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Gabriele Knappe is Extraordinary Professor (außerplanmäßige Professorin) of English Linguistics and Medieval Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany. In her Ph.D. dissertation (published 1996) she explored traditions of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England. She has continued publishing on Anglo-Saxon England but also developed further research interests in the history of linguistic thought and historical phraseology. Martina Marzullo is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Studies at Heidelberg Univer- sity and also a member of the Heidelberg Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS). Her current research explores the correlation between early medieval England and contemporary writers. This is her first publication. Rafael J. Pascual is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at New College, Oxford. Previously, he held a Departmental Lectureship in English Language and Litera- ture at the Oxford Faculty of English as well as postdoctoral research positions at CLASP: A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (an ERC-funded project based at the Oxford Faculty of English) and at Harvard University. He specialises in medieval English language and literature, with a focus on Old English poetry. Thijs Porck is University Lecturer in Medieval English at Leiden University. He has published on Old English textual criticism, Beowulf, old age, medievalism, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Recent books include Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History (Boydell Press, 2019) and Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-His- torical Perspectives (co-edited with Harriet Soper; Brill, 2022). Erin E. Sweany is currently a part-time Instructor in the English Department at Western Michigan University and holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloom- ington. She researches representations of health and medicine in Old and Middle English, as well as modern academic approaches to medieval medical texts.
- 16. Contributors xi M. J. Toswell teaches Old English, medieval studies and medievalism at the Univer- sity of Western Ontario in Canada. Recent publications include the edited collection A Pandemonium of Medieval Borges in Old English Newsletter (2021) and a collec- tion of essays on medieval syntax in honour of Michiko Ogura co-edited with Taro Ishiguro (Peter Lang, 2022). Oliver M. Traxel is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Stavanger. He has a Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge and habilitated in English Philology at the University of Münster. He has published widely on the representation of past language stages in the modern world.
- 18. Acknowledgements This volume has its origins in a series of sessions at the International Medieval Con- gress at the University of Leeds (2019, 2020). We wish to thank our contributors for developing their chapters in the midst of a global pandemic. We would also like to thank the anonymous reader for Boydell & Brewer for their insightful and help- ful comments on the volume. Caroline Palmer and Elizabeth McDonald at Boydell have supported this project and we are very grateful for their patience and advice. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Chris Jones, co-editor of the Medievalism series. We are furthermore grateful for support and assistance from the University of Glasgow, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and the Department of Cultural Studies and Languages at the University of Stavanger. We are greatly indebted to colleagues who have generously given their time to advise us and to read and respond to chapters, and we would especially like to thank Jonathan Lench and Amos van Baalen for their comments, as well as Fran Allfrey for her helpful suggestions for our introductory chapter. We also owe thanks to student-assistant Juliane Witte for her editorial assistance. Of course, any remaining errors are very much our own.
- 20. Abbreviations AND Anglo-Norman Dictionary <https://anglo-norman.net> ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records Bosworth-Toller Crist, Sean and Ondřej Tichy (eds), Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, based on a digital edition of Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (eds), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth (1898) and Supplement (1921) (Prague, 2019) <https://bosworthtoller.com> DOE Cameron, Angus, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (eds), The Dictionary of Old English: A–I (Toronto, 2018) <https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/> DOML Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library DSL Dictionaries of the Scots Language < https://dsl.ac.uk/> EETS Early English Text Society MED Lewis, Robert E., et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, 1952–2001). Online edition in Frances McSparran et al. (eds), Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor, 2000–18) <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/> NS New Series OED Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford, 2000–) <www. oed.com> OEN Old English Newsletter ONP Dictionary of Old Norse Prose <https://onp.ku.dk/onp/ onp.php?> OS Original Series
- 22. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age: An Introduction to Old English Medievalism Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel O LD ENGLISH IS alive! While the last native speaker of Old English may have died over 900 years ago, the language of early medieval England seems more popular than ever. In recent decades, modern poets, authors of historical fiction and production teams of TV series, movies and video games have drawn on the language and literature of early medieval England for inspiration. The presence of early medieval English in the modern age is hard to miss: Seamus Heaney’s 1999 Beowulf translation was a world-wide best seller and Paul Kingsnorth’s Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel The Wake (2014) was completely written in ‘pseudo-Old English’, while immensely popular media set in Viking Age England, such as the TV series Vikings (2013–20) and the video game Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020), feature dialogue in Old English.1 These more recent revivals of Old English are part of a long trend that goes as far back as the Middle Ages;2 Old English language and literature have long been a source of artistic inspiration and fascination, providing scholars and artists with the opportunity not only to explore the past but, in doing so, to find new perspectives on the present. This volume explores how Old English has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by translators, novelists, poets and educa- tors. As the individual chapters demonstrate, these Old English afterlives take on various forms, ranging from the evocation of elements of Old English language or 1 See, for example, Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Old English in the Modern World: Its Didactic Value’, OEN 46:3 (2016), <http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/46_1/46-3_traxel.php> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Reviving a Past Language Stage: Modern Takes on Old English’, in Michiko Ogura and Hans Sauer with Michio Hosaka (eds), Aspects of Medieval English Language and Literature (Berlin, 2018), pp. 309–28. 2 See, for example, Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Afterlife of Old English: A Brief History of CompositioninOldEnglishaftertheCloseoftheAnglo-SaxonPeriod’,inTheTombofBeowulf and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford, 1993), pp. 275–303; Chris Jones, ‘Old English after 1066’, in Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 313–30.
- 23. 2 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel style in the context of a modern literary work to the adaptation and recontextual- isation of works of Old English literature, the depiction of Old English-speaking worlds and world views in historical fiction, and even linguistic recreation through the composition of neo-Old English (whether translating an existing text into Old English or creating an original work). The contributors to this collection investigate a myriad of literary, political and ideological uses of Old English in the modern world, as well as addressing concerns about the linguistic and cultural authenticity of these various modes of recreation. For several of them, these concerns are not only theoretical but personal, as the volume includes contributions from practicing writers and translators. The insights into their creative process are brought into dialogue with readings of established figures of literary medievalism such as W. H. Auden and J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as with the afterlives of Old English in other media and contexts, including television, film and museum communication, as well as the classroom contexts in which Old English and neo-Old English are often first encountered. The modern reception of Old English literature and early medieval England is the subject of a growing body of scholarship, which has thus far focused primarily on literary revivals as well as the ideologies underpinning the reuse of early medie- val English material. Two monographs by Chris Jones, in particular, have advanced our understanding of Old English literary resonances in, respectively, nineteenth- and twentieth-century English poetry, demonstrating how such authors as William Morris and W. H. Auden interacted with Old English poems.3 As Jones shows, alongside the contributors to John D. Niles and Allen J. Frantzen’s Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997) and Donald G. Scragg and Carole Weinberg’s Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (2000), reviving elements of Old English literature was a means of political, cultural and ideological (self-)expression for scholars and poets alike.4 Reviewing more recent primary material and also including film and visual arts, the volume Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (2007) edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins highlights how engagement with the literature and art of early medieval England still remains an important creative impetus for modern-day artists.5 Not every revival of early medieval English is worthy of celebration, however: Old English language and culture have long had an appeal to far-right extrem- ists.6 Scholarly controversy at the end of the 2010s over the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has contributed to a growing interest in this unfortunate misappropriation of 3 Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006); Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth- Century Poetry (Oxford, 2019). 4 John D. Niles and Allen J. Frantzen (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, 1997); Donald G. Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2000). 5 David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Cambridge, 2007). 6 See, for example, the discussion in Jones, Fossil Poetry, pp. 8–12, 273–4.
- 24. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 3 early medieval English history, literature and language by modern ethno-nation- alist movements, as well as in acknowledging the inherited prejudices that may be encoded even in superficially apolitical uses of Old English.7 The study of Old Eng- lish has always been used to support the political and ideological agendas of those who worked on it,8 from Matthew Parker’s religious polemic in the sixteenth cen- tury9 to the founders of what has been termed the ‘Englisc nationalist movement’ in twenty-first century Britain;10 the discipline of Old English studies has never been ideologically neutral. Bearing this in mind, we must be especially vigilant for the ways, both overt and covert, in which Old English medievalism might be used to further contemporary political and ideological ends. Fortunately, the reuse and adaptation of Old English material is by no means limited to right-wing extremists. In his Antiracist Medievalisms, Jonathan Hsy has called attention to reinventions of Old English poetry by contemporary poets of colour including Carter Revard, Yusef Komunyakaa and Timothy Yu, whose repur- posing of early medieval English poetic forms challenges those audiences who see Old English poetry as an exclusively white cultural heritage.11 An awareness of both the more sinister aspect of Old English medievalism and the various ways that this 7 See, for example, Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’, JSTOR Daily, 3 May 2017 <https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-problem> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo- Saxon” Studies’, History Workshop, 4 Nov. 2019 <https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/ misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. Because of its unfortunate associations with racism and white supremacy, some scholars have decided to avoid the use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon(ist)’; others, particularly in sub-fields such as archaeology and public outreach, have argued in favour of retaining the use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on grounds of technical precision and popular recognition, or to prevent white supremacists from ‘taking over’ the term for their own ends. These latter views are represented in the essay by John Hines et al., ‘The responsible use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”’ published on <http:// www.fmass.eu> (last update 3 Jan. 2020) and Howard Williams, ‘The Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’, Aeon, 29 May 2020 <https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-keep-the-term-anglo-saxon-in- archaeology> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. On the terminology discussion, see also Elise Louviot, ‘Divided by a Common Language: Controversy over the Use of the Word “Anglo-Saxon”’, Études Médiévales Anglaises 95 (2019), 107–47, In light of these discussions, we have chosen in editing this volume to allow individual contributors to use whichever terminology they feel is most appropriate to their work. 8 See, for example, John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering and Renewing the Past (Chichester, 2015); Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, Postsaxon Futures (New York, 2019); Catherine E. Karkov, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (Woodbridge, 2020). 9 R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, 1993); Aaron Kleist, ‘Matthew Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage’, in Thomas N. Hall and Donald G. Scragg (eds), Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ (Kalamazoo, 2008), pp. 106–33. 10 On this movement and its ideological underpinnings, see the trilogy of blog posts published here: <http://radicalbritain.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-history-of-englisc-nation alist.html> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. As the archaic orthography of the ‘Englisc’ descriptor implies, members of this movement often use (aspects of) the Old English language as a vehicle for their extremist ideas. 11 Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds, 2021), pp. 99–107.
- 25. 4 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel might be resisted informs the approaches taken by many of the contributors to this volume, though they vary widely in how they choose to engage with it. Some address the legacy of problematic engagements with Old English, while others choose to focus on how modern re-creations and recontextualisations might be used as a tool to challenge fixed and narrow perceptions of Old English and to build a more out- ward-looking and inclusive field. Amid this intense scrutiny of modern reactions to and applications of ‘Anglo- Saxon’ culture in a general sense, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the language that acts as the vehicle of these themes and ideas. The present volume works to redress the balance by focusing on specifically ‘Old English’ medieval- isms – responses not simply to the abstract idea of early medieval England, or to its material culture, but to the distinctive language and literary style of its surviving textual witnesses. As many of these essays demonstrate, such linguistic and stylistic responses cannot be considered in isolation from the concerns of medievalism as a whole; familiar themes and issues, from authenticity to extremist misappropria- tion, recur throughout the volume. However, they also demonstrate the potential of this more focused approach to shed new light on old topics, and perhaps even to identify an Old English medievalism that is distinct from more cultural–historical Anglo-Saxonism. From stylistic echoes to more elaborate linguistic revivals of Old English in the form of pseudo- and neo-Old English, this volume hopes to contrib- ute to a broader and more complete understanding of medievalism, and of modern responses to early medieval England. Reinventing, Reimagining and Recontextualizing Old English Poetry I push back through dictions, … to the scop’s twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line. In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found bān-hūs its fire, benches, wattle and rafters, where the soul fluttered a while in the roofspace.12 12 Seamus Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, North (London, 1975), pp. 27–30, at p. 28, lines 21–2, 29–41.
- 26. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 5 Seamus Heaney’s ‘Bone Dreams’ (1975) is a clear example of how modern poets have been inspired by Old English poetry. Heaney describes how the finding of a piece of bone triggered within him the memory of the Old English kenning for ‘body’ – ‘Bone-house: / a skeleton / in the tongue’s / old dungeons’ – and a desire to go back to the linguistic roots of English: ‘Come back past / philology and kennings, / re-enter memory’.13 Heaney’s use of elements of medieval poetry, including alliter- ative verse lines, metrical patterns, kennings and imagery, has been well studied.14 More than just a reanimation of a past language state and poetic style, Heaney’s Old English medievalism, both in his own compositions and his famous Beowulf trans- lation, has been interpreted as an ‘act of literary and linguistic politics’:15 a form of ‘cultural appropriation’, as he claims part of what is traditionally considered typically English heritage for the Irish.16 Heaney is by no means unique in drawing on Old English poetry for inspiration: many other twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and translators evoke or allude to Old English poetry, and, as with Heaney, their acts of evocation typically serve as tools for contemporary expression.17 A recent example is the poem ‘Ginnel’ by Kayo Chingonyi, one of three poets to be invited to reflect on the 2018 Anglo- Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition of the British Library as part of the Sheffield-based Poet in the City project. Born in Zambia and having migrated to the United Kingdom at an early age, Chingonyi has noted how an awareness of the longevity of some of the earliest English expressions allowed him to find ways to connect to the local Yorkshire dialect of Sheffield.18 In ‘Ginnel’, he alludes to the possible Old English etymology of the Yorkshire word ginnel ‘narrow passageway’, as well as to the well-known poetic kenning hronrad:19 From the Old English: the coast’s open maw 13 Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, pp. 27–9, lines 17–20, 49–51; for a full analysis of this poem within the context of Heaney’s oeuvre, see Jones, Strange Likeness, 207–13. 14 See, for example, Daniel Donoghue, ‘The Philologer Poet: Seamus Heaney and the Translation of Beowulf’, The Harvard Review 19 (2000), 12–21; Jones, Strange Likeness, pp. 182–237; Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North’, in Bernard O’Donoghue (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 192–205; Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008). 15 O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf’, p. 205. 16 Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 182. See also Conor McCarthy, ‘Language and History in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf’, English: Journal of the English Association 50:197 (2001), 149–58. 17 For an overview, see Chris Jones, ‘New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Poetry’, Literature Compass 7:11 (2010), 1009–19. For an important analysis of the relatively under-studied role of woman writers who recreate the past, including through reworkings of Old English poetry, see Clare A. Lees, ‘Women Write the Past: Medieval Scholarship, Old English and New Literature’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 93:2 (2017), 3–22. 18 ‘Digesting History | Poet in the City’, YouTube, 25 Feb. 2021, <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Cgv3jPp388I> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; the interview with Chingonyi starts at 12:00. We thank Fran Allfrey for alerting us to Chingonyi’s work. 19 The word may derive from Old English gin as found in the phrase ‘garsecges gin’ [the ocean’s gap] in line 430 of the Old English poem Exodus. But this etymology is uncertain, see, for example, OED, s.v. ginnel.
- 27. 6 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel pointing the way to the whale road.20 Chingonyi reinvents Old English, re-situating it in a modern urban landscape. In doing so, he, like Heaney, claims a place in a literary and linguistic history from which some might seek to exclude him. ‘Ginnel’ shows how contemporary poets can incorporate echoes of Old English into their poetic voice to create works that are not merely evocative of the past but also make strong statements about pres- ent-day linguistic and cultural identities. The chapters in this first section of the volume showcase the variety of ways in which modern authors and audiences have responded to the rich poetic traditions of Old English. As in the work of Heaney and Chingonyi, these responses often involve implicit claims of identity through participation in a continuing literary tra- dition, and each one of the four chapters invites us to consider how the choice to hearken back to the medieval past through elements of Old English poetry carries weight and meaning in the present.21 Old English medievalism can be used to great effect but, as these chapters remind us, should also be critically evaluated with an awareness of the voices and perspectives that it may be silently excluding. First, M. J. Toswell explores the concept of Old English as a space for stylistic and thematic exploration and play, particularly for poets with a solid academic grounding in medieval literature. She demonstrates how W. H. Auden’s juvenilia combine echoes of various Old English poems in a way that can almost be described as pastiche, while his later work returns to Old English, and particularly its prosody, in more subtle and sophisticated ways. Moving from the well-known example of Auden, Toswell turns to more recent and less-studied poets from twenty-first-cen- tury Canada. The work of the American-born Canadian poet Christopher Patton demonstrates how thoughtful translation of Old English poetry can spill naturally into creative play, combined with a delight in the visual and material. Next, in the troubled career of Canadian poet Jeramy Dodds, Toswell finds not only a bold reim- agining of medieval poetry but also a cause for concern: how does the playground of Old English allow darker, more concerning impulses to be expressed? In her con- clusion, Toswell notes that, while scholars are inclined to be appreciative of modern 20 Kayo Chingonyi, ‘Ginnel’, A Blood Condition (London, 2021), n.p., lines 7–10. 21 It is worth noting here that while most of the chapters in this section of the volume focus on the work of white male authors who are very much part of the literary canon, scholarship is increasingly recognising the important and interesting work done by authors outside the traditional literary canon. Examples include the analyses of such women poets as Caroline Bergvall and Sharon Morris in Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice (London, 2019); the study of the reworking of medieval English poetry by poets of colour in Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms; and the work done on echoes of Old English poetry in the often unpublished work of lesser-known authors in Francesca Brooks, Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones (Oxford, 2021), and Carl Kears, ‘Eric Mottram and Old English: Revival and Re-Use in the 1970s’, The Review of English Studies 69 (2018), 430–54. With thanks to Fran Allfrey for her suggestions of relevant scholarship. Equally relevant is the scholarship on non-anglophone reworkings of Old English poetry, which includes most notably the work of Jorge Luis Borges, for which see M. J. Toswell (ed.), A Pandemonium of Medieval Borges, special issue of OEN 47:1 (2021).
- 28. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 7 poets interacting with early medieval English material, the motivations of these poets to play with the medieval require careful interrogation. Victoria Condie’s chapter on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) offers a counterexample to Toswell’s observation that Old English medievalism in poetry is a game played predominantly by the limited circle of poets who studied the language in an academic setting. Grahame was not a scholar of Old English, yet in his classic work of children’s literature, specifically in the nautically themed prose-poem interlude ‘Wayfarers All’, Condie finds aural and thematic echoes of Old English poetry, albeit of a very different kind to the direct and conscious allu- sions made by more traditionally medievalist writers. She shows how reading this interlude alongside Old English texts such as Beowulf, The Seafarer and The Wan- derer can offer new insights into its distinctive style. In addition, Condie argues that the medieval soundscapes identifiable in this part of Grahame’s work can be used to situate it in a long literary tradition of Old English medievalism, showing the continued aesthetic impact of Old English on the popular imagination. In her analysis of the novel Wulf (2011) by Hamish Clayton, Martina Marzullo turns to the domain of historical fiction to argue that Old English poetry can be a source of literary inspiration that transcends national and historical boundaries. In her post-colonial analysis, Marzullo demonstrates how allusions to the Old Eng- lish poem Wulf and Eadwacer are woven throughout Clayton’s novel, giving the famously ambiguous poem a new life as Clayton uses it to portray the complex ten- sions and loyalties of colonial New Zealand in ways that explore and challenge the cultural gap between the Māori and the British colonizers. As such, Marzullo argues that Clayton’s bold recontextualisation offers a hope for a ‘perpetual and limitless Old English’ that is able to break free from historicised, nationalist narratives and welcomes new ideas and perspectives.22 The final chapter in this section, by Fran Allfrey, continues the theme of the imaginative de- and recontextualisation of Old English poetry. Echoing the con- cerns raised by Toswell, Allfrey focuses on how such decontextualisation can be used to construct a narrative of the medieval past that is limited, misleading, and potentially harmful. Analysing the use of Old English texts, such as Heaney’s Beowulf as well as newly produced ‘fake’ Old English, in the British Museum and at the National Trust Sutton Hoo site, she shows how extracts, presented in translation and stripped of their surrounding narrative, are used to guide visitors’ reactions to the artefacts and landscapes on display. This literary cherry-picking, Allfrey argues, contributes to the construction of a stereotyped ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past that smooths out historical depth and complexity and is open to ethno-nationalist misappropria- tion. Allfrey closes her essay with the exhortation to confront these issues through greater interdisciplinary communication. Taken together, these chapters offer a vision of what a reinvented Old English has to offer as a vibrant literary and poetic heritage that speaks to, and can be used by, authors and audiences outside traditional national and academic boundaries. At the same time, they show some of the imaginative limitations of Old English medievalism as an activity that tends to look inward and to return to well-worn, 22 See below, p. 67.
- 29. 8 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel simplistic narratives about Old English texts and the culture that produced them. Once released from ‘the tongue’s / old dungeons’, to use Heaney’s phrase, Old Eng- lish poetry can become many things: ‘love-den, blood-holt / dream-bower’.23 Invoking Early Medieval England and Its Language in Historical Fiction he wolde spec micel of the eald daegs of the anglisc of our folcs cuman here to these grene lands from across the wid sea. and those daegs he wolde always sae those daegs was best for our folc24 The speaker of this passage in The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth’s novel set in England in the years immediately following the Norman Conquest, is looking back to a romanticised version of the early settlement of England by Germanic peoples. The sentiment expressed here will be recognised by many readers of texts that engage in Old English medievalism, Kingsnorth’s own readers included. The ‘eald daegs of the anglisc’ still hold a particular fascination for many, and, for many audiences today, these old days are situated somewhere in the Old English-speaking world. Kingsnorth’s phrase invites several questions. What is ‘eald’ about this early medi- eval past; how is its oldness and sense of temporal distance conveyed to a modern audience? In what ways can the ‘eald daegs’ be said to belong to ‘the anglisc’ (or, as Kingsnorth writes later in the same passage, to ‘our folc’); who lays claim to the imagined Englishness of the past, and in what ways can that claim be challenged? And were the ‘eald daegs’ ever ‘best’; indeed, did they ever exist at all? The novels discussed in the second section of this volume are all concerned, in various ways, with the evocation of a reconstructed or imagined early medieval past in the medium of historical fiction. Each of the four chapters pay particular atten- tion to how these novels use language and intertextuality, alongside other strategies, to evoke an English past that remains stubbornly ambiguous and out of reach. Oliver M. Traxel’s chapter concentrates on the linguistic strategies of Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2014) and Philip Terry’s tapestry (2013).25 Both novels use distinctive language that is intended to recall some of the features and style of Old English, while remaining intelligible to a present-day, non-specialist audience. Traxel analyses the spelling, pronunciation, morphology, syntax and vocabulary of these pseudo-Old Englishes in order to assess how convincingly and authentically they emulate genuine Old English. He points out problems arising from the tension between authenticity and comprehensibility and offers his own suggestions for lin- guistic strategies that balance these two goals, which will be of considerable interest to writers of future novels set in early medieval England. The linguistic analysis of this chapter paves the way for the three other chapters in this section, which, respectively, focus on the reception of such reconstructed past languages by the audiences of historical fiction, the challenges faced by historical fiction authors that 23 Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, p. 29, lines 47–8. 24 Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (London, 2014), pp. 16–17. 25 Throughout this volume we have retained the author’s preferred non-capitalised version of this title.
- 30. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 9 wish to invoke the multilingual reality of early medieval England, and the non-lin- guistic strategies that historical fiction authors can bring to bear to create a sense of pastness. Judy Kendall’s chapter discusses readers’ reactions to the pseudo-Old English in Kingsnorth’s The Wake in the context of other literary experiments in constructed forms of English, such as those of Caroline Bergvall and Philip Terry. The chap- ter supplements that of Traxel, whose main interest is in the faithfulness shown by authors of historical fiction to Old English as a linguistic model; instead, Kendall turns her attention to the issue of how pseudo-Old English is received by readers. Her investigation into the highly polarised responses to the linguistic challenge presented by The Wake demonstrates how ‘made-up’ English (or Englishes) is a deliberately fluid, ambiguous and anti-prescriptive concept that not only permits but delights in linguistic inconsistency. In doing so, she highlights the potential of pseudo-Old English to be both frustrating and liberating. Next, Karen Louise Jolly shares her experiences not only as a scholar of early medieval England but also as a writer of historical fiction herself. Inspired by both the multilingualism of her chosen setting and her engagement with contemporary post-colonial theory, Jolly seeks to reject modern Western binarisms and to portray an authentically medieval spiritual worldview in her novel-in-progress about the tenth-century Northumbrian glossator Aldred. Her chapter traces precedents of her approach in medieval-inspired fiction from Tolkien to Kingsnorth and Umberto Eco, assessing how their use of language reflects both character and world-view. Like Kendall, she ultimately celebrates the potential of fluidity and ambiguity, in Jolly’s case not only in the experience of reading but also in personal, social and spiritual outlook. The ways in which historical fiction set in the early medieval period lends itself to multiple and ambiguous readings are also a central concern of the last chapter in this section, by James Aitcheson. Like Jolly, Aitcheson offers an academic reflection on his own practice as an author of historical fiction, analysing his own novel The Har- rowing (2016) alongside Terry’s tapestry and Justin Hill’s Shieldwall (2011). Build- ing on Robert Eaglestone’s taxonomy of ‘modes of pastness’ in historical fiction,26 Aitcheson demonstrates how the idea of the past – both the medieval past from the perspective of the present day and the past experiences of the individual characters portrayed in each novel – can serve a variety of overlapping purposes. Surveying three historical novels set in eleventh-century England, Aitcheson emphasises that each novel incorporates multiple narrative strategies to invoke a sense of the past. These multiple modes create a space for multiple readings of the novels and of the medieval past, which are informed by Old English texts without being constrained by them. Taken together, the chapters in this second section show that historical fiction can be fertile ground for the exploration of the language and literature of early medieval England. Writers of historical novels employ great linguistic ingenuity and careful research to portray their medieval settings, yet it is important to remember 26 Robert Eaglestone, ‘The Past’, in Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone (eds), The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (Abingdon, 2019), pp. 311–20.
- 31. 10 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel that these portrayals remain firmly rooted in the present day. For better or worse, we do not see the medieval directly but through the lens of the present; the ‘eald daegs of the anglisc’ seen in these novels are, like Kingsnorth’s language, a modern creation, not an unaltered Old English in geardagum. As many of the contributors to this section argue, however, it is in the instability of this imagined medieval past, in the ‘eald daegs’ that never really existed, that we can find a space for imaginative linguistic and literary experimentation that speaks to both past and present. Translating and Composing in Neo-Old English Sceaða butan mildse, deorcnes worulde – Beorgaþ Heorot cwacað – Ac beorheall stenteþ Timber bifaþ – feohtdæg Sceaða butan mildse, wamm on þam lande – Beowulf stenteþ! [Fiend without mercy, darkness to the world – Beware! Heorot quakes – but the mead hall will stand Timbers tremble – battle-day Fiend without mercy, blight on the land – Beowulf will stand!]27 Though this passage looks like Old English, it is not found in any known manuscript written in early medieval England. So are we dealing with a newly discovered text that had been lost for centuries? This is clearly not the case. In fact, composing in Old English despite its being a dead language has a long tradition which can be traced back as far as the early modern period. The passage above is taken from Song of the Wildlands, a progressive rock album by Clive Nolan based on the Old English epic Beowulf, which was released in September 2021 by Crime Records. Though most of its lyrics are sung in Modern English, the album also features some choral passages in Old English composed by academic Christopher Monk, well-known for his blog The Medieval Monk.28 In texts such as this, which might be described as neo-Old English, the world of academia meets that of popular culture. Unlike the works of Old English medievalism discussed in the previous section, which seek to convey a general impression of early medieval England and its language through creative responses and reimagination, compositions such as Monk’s are acts of lin- guistic recreation. Composing such neo-Old English texts requires a solid, often academic, grounding in the linguistic intricacies of early medieval English and, for a long time, these neo-Old English compositions have been seen as the products of playful pastime for scholars of Old English.29 27 Clive Nolan, ‘Grendel Attacks’, lyrics booklet for Song of the Wildlands, CD, Crime Records and We Låve Rock Music (2021), p. 8. 28 <https://www.themedievalmonk.com/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. 29 Michael Murphy, ‘Scholars at Play: A Short History of Composing in Old English’, OEN 15:2 (1982), 26–36, <http://oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/OEN15_2.pdf> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. For an early example of a creation of a neo-Old English poem by a non-anglophone student who sought to impress his professorial donors, see the edition and analysis of ´Se Gleomann’ [The Minstrell] by Dutchman G. J. P. J. Bolland in Thijs Porck, ‘An Old English
- 32. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 11 It is unsurprising, then, that the best-known author of neo-Old English, J. R. R. Tolkien, was also a noted philologist whose Old English compositions demonstrate linguistic rigour as well as an imaginative response to the medieval texts he studied and taught, as well as, in several instances, a keen sense for the whimsical, anachro- nistic potential to be found in writing Old English in the twentieth century.30 Tolk- ien’s neo-Old English ranges from passages incorporated into his fantasy fiction to an imagined folktale precursor to Beowulf, translations of parts of the Old Norse Atlakviða, riddles, drinking songs, and even an Old English version of ‘I Love Six- pence’, an English nursery rhyme.31 From this varied output we can get an impres- sion of the different possible modes of neo-Old English composition, from free invention to careful translation of an existing text, and from serious to humorous. With the exception of the Old English passages, place names and personal names in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s neo-Old English writings were probably never intended for a wider audience. They were mostly written for his own satisfaction or the entertainment of his learned colleagues. By contrast, more recent years have seen the publication of three neo-Old English translations that were meant for a wider audience, all translations of children’s literature: Fritz Kemmler’s Old English translations of Le Petit Prince (2010) and Der Struwwelpeter (2010), as well as Peter S. Baker’s Æðelgyðe Ellendæda on Wundorlande: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Old English (2015). The first two chapters in this section deal with these three twenty-first-century neo-Old English translations, while the third and final one dis- cusses a newly composed Old English poem inspired by the works and practices of Tolkien. All three contributors offer a careful consideration of the technical chal- lenges of composing accurate, convincing neo-Old English while responding to the unique characteristics and audiences of the particular texts on which they focus. Fritz Kemmler’s chapter is another practice-based contribution in which the author reports on his own Old English translations of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s French classic Le Petit Prince and the German children’s book Der Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman. In addition to some of the linguistic and technical choices he had to make in order to render these works into Old English, Kemmler also Love Poem, a Beowulf Summary and a Recommendation Letter from Eduard Sievers: G. J. P. J. Bolland (1854–1922) as an Aspiring Old Germanicist’, in Thijs Porck, Amos van Baalen and Jodie Mann (eds), Scholarly Correspondence on Medieval Germanic Language and Literature, special issue of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 78:2–3 (2018), 262–91. 30 On Tolkien’s use of Old English in his writings, see Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Exploring the Linguistic Past through the Work(s) of J. R. R. Tolkien: Some Points of Orientation from English Language History’, in Monika Kirner-Ludwig, Stephan Köser and Sebastian Streitberger (eds), Binding Them All: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on J. R. R. Tolkien and His Works (Zurich, 2017), pp. 279–304. 31 See, for instance, Maria Artamonova, ‘Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles’, in Clark and Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, pp. 71–88; Mark Atherton, ‘Old English’, in Stuart D. Lee (ed.), A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (Oxford, 2014), pp. 217–29. Tolkien’s retelling of Beowulf can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Together with Sellic Spell, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2014), pp. 355–414; his translation of Atlakviða is printed in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2009) and the nursery rhyme is in J. R. R. Tolkien, E. V. Gordon et al., Songs for the Philologists (London, 1936).
- 33. 12 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel discusses his prospective readers and how different audiences might lead to differ- ent translation strategies. Kemmler reveals that his works can be read at different levels since elements of intertextuality, in the form of literary echoes of original Old English texts, can only be enjoyed by more advanced readers. Particular challenges that Kemmler discusses include his desire to create a linguistically authentic Old English text as well his strategies of dealing with modern cultural items and ideas for which the speakers of Old English lacked a means of expression. This last challenge is also taken up by Denis Ferhatović, who discusses the way food and drink items are handled by Peter S. Baker in his Old English translation of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book. Ferhatović demonstrates how Baker’s han- dling of Carroll’s Victorian ideas of food and consumption invites an exploration of cultural and material history, prompting readers to rethink simplistic assumptions about modern–medieval equivalencies. In the context of abuse and misappropria- tion of Old English, Ferhatović shows how Baker’s translation can serve as a basis to begin discussions that dismantle harmful stereotypes of medievalism, such as the perceived isolationism of the early medieval period. The translation prompts a greater appreciation of both the international, multicultural awareness of early medieval writers (as seen from the fact that an apparently ‘modern’ ingredient such as pepper can be transposed directly into the pseudo-medieval setting of the Old English Alice) and the fallacy of assuming that modern assumptions can be mapped onto the early medieval period (as seen in the differences between Carroll’s food- stuffs and those selected by Baker in his translation). Rounding off this section on neo-Old English translation and composition is Rafael J. Pascual. He presents and discusses his own composition of a neo-Old English verse text The Fall of the King, inspired by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, specifically an episode from The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien, Pascual brings his linguistic expertise to bear on his linguistic re-creation, offering a metrical analysis as well as a practical guide to composing one’s own Old English verse. Pascual also adds a pedagogical angle to his chapter, highlighting how students might be taught Old English metre through verse composition exercises. His chapter thus forms a natural bridge to the next section, which focuses on pedagogical aspects of Old English medievalism. Approaching Old English and Neo-Old English in the Classroom In the late nineteenth century, Henry Sweet realized the educational potential of newly composed Old English. Rather than confronting the readers of his First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (1897) with the original and complex poetic language of Beowulf, he wrote his own prose paraphrase ‘Beowulfes siþ’ [the journey of Beowulf], which begins as follows: Hit gelamp geo þæt an cyning wæs on Denum, se wæs haten Hroþgar. And se Hroþgar wæs mære heretoga, swa þæt his magas him georne gehierdon, oþ-þæt his folgoþ weox þearle, and he hæfde sige swa hwider swa he eode, ægþer ge on sæ ge on lande.32 32 Henry Sweet, First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1897), p. 39.
- 34. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 13 [It happened long ago that there was a king among the Danes, who was called Hrothgar. And this Hrothgar was a famous army-leader, so that his kinsmen eagerly followed him, until his following grew greatly, and he had the victory wherever he went, both on sea and on land.] In his preface, Sweet pointed out that he had found the composition process ‘very difficult’ but that he was satisfied with the result. He further noted that this text, along with two other adapted and normalised versions of original Old English texts (‘Be þissum middangearde’, based on Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, and ‘Be manna cræftum’, based on Ælfric’s Colloquy), was highly suitable for new learners of Old English: These three texts not only form an easy and interesting introduction to the lan- guage, but have the further advantage of giving a brief but comprehensive view of the science, daily life, and epic and mythological traditions of our forefathers.33 Sweet’s educational writings on Old English, notably his Primer and Reader, have remained fundamental for Old English pedagogy from their publication to the pres- ent day.34 Working in the tradition of Sweet, twenty-first-century educators continue to use neo-Old English in the classroom, occasionally even turning to performance and composition rather than translation of Old English to help students get to grips with grammar and vocabulary.35 One notable example is a group of Old English translations of modern pop songs, produced by students of Timothy Arner (Grin- nell College),36 the publication of which on YouTube has sparked off a whole genre of Old English music videos, of varying quality.37 The two chapters making up this section explore the place of Old English medievalism in the classroom, considering its potential pitfalls as well as its pedagogical advantages. Looking back at the nineteenth-century foundations of Old English pedagogical practices, Joana Blanquer, Donna Beth Ellard, Emma Hitchcock and Erin E. Sweany 33 Sweet, First Steps, pp. viii–ix. 34 On Henry Sweet, see, for example, Mark Atherton, ‘Priming the Poets: The Making of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader’, in Clark and Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, pp. 31–50. 35 Peter S. Baker, ‘On Writing Old English’, in Haruko Momma and Heide Estes (eds), Old English Across the Curriculum: Contexts and Pedagogies, special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 22:2 (2015), 31–40; Martin K. Foys, ‘Hwæt sprycst þu?: Performing Ælfric’s Colloquy’, in Momma and Estes (eds), Old English Across the Curriculum, pp. 67–71. For a practical example, involving the composition of Old English proverbs, see Thijs Porck and Jodie Mann, ‘Blanded leornung: Three Digital Approaches to Teaching Old English’, TOEBI Newsletter 34 (2017), 5–13. 36 Grinnell College students are responsible for Old English renditions of Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptp_v7chhm4> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022], and Avicii’s ‘Wake Me Up’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOyEQah0s-k> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. 37 Examples include the Old English cover of Disney’s ‘Let It Go’ published on the YouTube account Silly Linguistics, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbbpXLUP_qY> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]; a particularly successful Old English cover is the rendition of Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’ by Die Töchter Düsseldorfs, with Old English lyrics by Fritz Stieleke, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTRl0bMfWUQ> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022].
- 35. 14 Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel address some of the negatives of Sweet’s legacy in the classroom. They interpret the linguistic normalisation used by Sweet in his introductory Reader and Primer as an often-unnoticed form of medievalism that reshapes original texts according to modern criteria of correctness. This normalisation, they argue, reflects a tacit colonial ideology that lingers in the background of many subsequent pedagogical endeavours in Old English, including the hugely successful Guide to Old English of Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson.38 The authors challenge us with the question of how the potential pedagogical advantages of reshaped, normalised Old English can be balanced against the ideological baggage that continues to weigh on the field. Finally, Gabriele Knappe shares her experience of teaching Old English through television and film dialogue, such as the Old English used in TV series, such as BBC’s Merlin and the History Channel’s Vikings, or in films, such as Éowyn’s Lament for Théodred in the extended DVD version of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Knappe notes how the Old English dialogue in these series allows teachers to use the popularity of the telecinematic medium to enrich the teaching of what might otherwise be considered a ‘dead’ language. She contextualizes her classroom prac- tice by first sketching how the use of Old English in TV series fulfils the audience’s desire for linguistic realism, while also serving other narrative purposes, such as othering those who speak in different tongues, as in Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf film (where the Grendelkin speak Old English), and alienating the audience, as in Merlin (where Old English is used for magical spells). Next, Knappe provides practical examples of how various scenes that feature telecinematic neo-Old English can be fruitfully combined with other pedagogical tools to highlight crucial aspects of the Old English language. For teachers not to use this material, she concludes, would be a missed opportunity as it opens up the field to students who might otherwise not be interested in Old English. As the first place where most people encounter Old English, the classroom is an important setting for the reception and recreation of Old English. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, teachers of Old English cannot afford to ignore the significance of Old English medievalism. From innovative new media approaches to the legacies of Victorian ideologies, the classroom presence of Old English is strongly shaped by its post-medieval reception, and this fact should inform our pedagogical approaches. We conclude this introduction by briefly returning to a troubling aspect of Old Eng- lish medievalism: the co-option of the language and literature of early medieval England and the use Old English to further the nefarious objectives of right-wing and nationalist movements. In recent years, the scholarly response to this misap- propriation has been manifold, ranging from wrongfully ignoring its existence to radically altering some of the field’s foundations, including most notably elements of its central nomenclature. Far from presenting a unified front, the academic field currently remains divided on how best to challenge misuse of the language and 38 Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English: Revised with Texts and Glossary, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1982).
- 36. Early Medieval English in the Modern Age 15 literature of early medieval England,39 even if its members share an adamant rejec- tion of extremist misappropriation. As editors, we hope to have brought together a balanced volume that is not blind to the darker sides of Old English medievalism but also does not let misappropri- ation obscure the positive, imaginative and inspirational vigour of Old English in the modern age. The chapters in this volume each demonstrate how Old English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a site of creative innovation that requires authors, teachers and readers to actively engage not only with the medieval past but also – through the processes of recreation and reimagining – with the modern context into which it is partially or wholly transplanted. In exploring these revivals of Old English, the contributors consistently question the interplay of such aspects as inspiration, affect, authenticity and ideology: is early medieval English in the modern age a raised Lazarus or rather a Frankenstein’s monster? A miracle, to be admired and made much of, or an abomination, abused and abhorred, or possibly both at the same time? The chapters in this volume show that there is no easy answer to this question. As scholars of Old English, we are inclined to react positively to groups outside academia engaging with the material we study, whether they are poets, museum directors, novelists, film makers or teachers, and we welcome their fresh and crea- tive responses, which demonstrate the continued imaginative value of Old English. However, as Jane Toswell reminds us in the epilogue to her chapter, there is a danger that, in our enthusiasm, we might turn a blind eye to some of the more negative aspects of these engagements, whether it is its potentially elitist nature or the darker motivations behind engaging with the medieval. We hope that this volume points the way towards an approach that has space for both of these responses to come together: an approach that is able to celebrate the continued vitality of Old English while critiquing its limitations and holding to account those who seek to misuse it. If one of the central themes of Old English medievalism is the almost limitless potential to find new meaning in old words, this is surely an approach that offers a sense of hope for our discipline as a whole, that a reimagined, positive and inclusive Old English can, while retaining its links with the past, move forward to inspire new audiences and creators. 39 For example, Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘The Many Myths of the Term “Anglo-Saxon”’, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Jul. 2021, <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/> [accessed 1 Apr. 2022]. Cf. Williams, ‘Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’, and Francesca Tinti, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 3–4. See further footnote 7 above.
- 38. I Reinventing, Reimagining and Recontextualizing Old English Poetry
- 40. 1 Old English as a Playground for Poets? W. H. Auden, Christopher Patton and Jeramy Dodds M. J. Toswell P oets often like arcane knowledge, hidden byways, odd detours, new ways of seeing the world. Their work, after all, is to see things anew themselves and somehow in their poetry to shock or entice us, their interlocutors, to see things anew ourselves. They use language to inspire and enlighten, to intrigue and engage. Sometimes they do so to teach their audience or expound their views on a political, social or cultural issue; sometimes they do so to delight or engage the heart and soul; and sometimes they do so simply to provide a thing of beauty or a surprise.1 To do this work they need inspiration and enlightenment themselves. For some poets, beginning with figures such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman, Old English has formed some part of that inspiration. A poet’s access to Old English is sometimes secondhand, or medi- ated in various ways, and sometimes firsthand, generally through undergraduate study or some other specific learning opportunity. There, however, matters become somewhat complicated: knowledge of Old English is generally reserved not just for university-level students of English literature but for a small subset of that group ‒ those who choose to take courses in the earliest language and literature of the field. Thus, even students of English often turn aside from a course or program in which they essentially learn a new language. This means that references to Old English are arcane even to many students of English today. Demonstrating detailed knowledge of the literature and language of early medieval England is, therefore, a kind of secret understanding, a world of material that is just beyond accessibility even for those who are well acquainted with English literature, a kind of otherworldly reach for the poet to know and the poet’s audience to admire. In the one hundred and fifty years since serious university-level study of English literature as a scholarly field began, various poets have engaged with this material, from Tennyson and Longfel- low to Jorge Luis Borges, from Richard Wilbur to Earle Birney, from Basil Bunting 1 An old study but a good one making these pretty well-known points is Robin Skelton, Poetic Truth (London, 1978).
- 41. 20 M. J. Toswell to Geoffrey Hill to Seamus Heaney, and from my chosen poets here, W. H. Auden to Christopher Patton and Jeramy Dodds.2 For some of these poets, working with Old English is about establishing their roots, becoming aware of the origins of English poetry, and engaging with issues of nationalism and ethnicity. For others, Old English offers a kind of sacred play, a sense of inspiration direct from the earliest speakers of English, making a spiritual link from the past to the present. It provides roots and a strong sense of place and engagement. Poets also delight in the sounds of Old English and in the linguistic complexity of trying to recreate Old English poetic techniques and predilections in a modern idiom, playing with issues of literalism and register as they transfer early medieval material into a contemporary mode, or working to recreate the alliterative line with appropriate modifications.3 Two generations ago, perhaps the most inter- esting efforts in this direction came from Auden and Jorge Luis Borges, though the focus here will be on Auden; in the current era, a significant number of modern poets play with Old English, among whom two young Canadian poets, Christopher Patton and Jeramy Dodds, offer two extreme kinds of treatment. Play itself is a term with a long history, here used to consider the light-hearted side of poetic approaches to Old English but also more serious play, and (at the end) a much darker possible interpretation. W. H. Auden Auden offers the most obvious example for this approach to Old English as a play- ground for the modern poet. In his 1963 series of essays and aphorisms called The Dyer’s Hand, Auden famously notes that, after listening to J. R. R. Tolkien declaim the opening lines of Beowulf, he concluded, ‘This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish’. The specific context of this firm conclusion is interesting, since it is Auden’s Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, an event held on 11 June 1956. During the lecture, he recalls his own undergraduate years at the 2 On the institutional history of the study of English, see Heather Murray, Working in English: History, Institution, Resources (Toronto, 1996), and for the historiography of Old English studies more particularly see John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1991: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Malden, 2021). Niles also addresses the poets mentioned here, though I do not entirely agree with his view of the importance of Longfellow. On the question of how much Old English mattered to these poets, Heaney, for example, describes brocen wurde, the opening half-line of Battle of Maldon, as a phrase whose plainspoken force ‘stamped itself indelibly on my memory’; see his ‘Foreword’ to Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (eds), The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (New York, 2011), pp. xi–xiii, at p. xi. 3 There are many studies of direct translations from Old English, nearly all of them focused on translations of Beowulf. The best, and most sympathetic, of these is Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (Cambridge, 2011). There are far fewer studies of poetry of the kind I am discussing here, but enough to result in one valiant effort to classify modern poetic engagements with Old English by Oliver M. Traxel, ‘Reviving a Past Language Stage: Modern Takes on Old English’, in Michiko Ogura and Hans Sauer with Michio Hosaka (eds), Aspects of Medieval English Language and Literature (Berlin, 2018), pp. 309–28. Note the material discussed here would probably best fall under his final classification of ‘Modern Anglo-Saxonist Poetry’, but that term perhaps needs revision.
- 42. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 21 end of the 1920s in various nostalgic ways, all focused towards his development as a poet and the various influences on that development. The quotation is often cited and analysed in terms of Auden’s real commitment to learning Old English and his real love of the material: I remember one [lecture] I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnifi- cently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish. I became willing, therefore, to work at Anglo-Saxon because, unless I did, I should never be able to read this poetry. I learned enough to read it, how- ever sloppily, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.4 Throughout his long life as a poet, Auden’s love of this material intersects with some of his other loves as poet and person. As I have considered elsewhere, his sense of his own personal origins, his family roots, embeds itself in the north and in Old English and Old Norse, hence his etymologizing of ‘Auden’ as a version of ‘Odin’.5 As Odin/Auden he brings poetry to the world, a vatic being of great certainty and assuredness, creating works of imagination that encapsulate and respond to the great philosophical and political questions of the age. However, the point of the quo- tation that should not be lost is Auden’s clear statement that, ‘I do not remember a single word he said’; that is, it is the sound of the Old English that captures Auden’s interest, not the argument or ideas that Tolkien was propounding. Moreover, he finds Old English to be hard work and he only comes to read it ‘sloppily’. His knowledge is not deep. Auden’s perception of his own engagement with Old English should, perhaps, be foregrounded in this consideration of his accomplishments. Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Auden notes that, ‘He took enough trouble with Anglo-Saxon to be able to appreciate The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, as well as some of the Exeter Book riddles and at least part of Beowulf’.6 Carpenter is very restrained, being well aware that around these statements of deep connection lay an absence of detailed knowledge. Auden found Old English spiritually engaging, not intellectually or linguistically ineluctable; he played, somewhat superficially, with medieval Germanic texts and references throughout his literary life. However, he also seems later in life to have engaged with Old English in a different way, as a craftsman and poet thinking through the structure of a medieval text. For exam- ple, an exchange of letters with an Oxford academic, Alan Ward, indicates that he was attempting in The Age of Anxiety (1947) to replicate Old English alliterative 4 W. H. Auden, ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London, 1963), pp. 31–60, at pp. 41–2. 5 M. J. Toswell, ‘Auden and Anglo-Saxon’, Medieval English Studies Newsletter 37 (1997), 21–8. I argued at that time that Old English was a ‘half-learned mode’ (p. 24) for Auden and investigated the papers he took at Oxford and his early poem based loosely on ‘The Wanderer’ and Sawles Warde, but here I suggest that Auden did not need to know Old English in detail to use it as a poetic playground and find it inspiring. 6 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 55.
- 43. 22 M. J. Toswell structures, and in specific points of that poem to produce particular Old Norse metres.7 Thus, he responds to a very technical question: I made some attempts to obey the quantity rules of O.E. but abandoned them; as in all quantitative experiments in modern English so many vowels become long by position that, without an obviously artifi[ci]al diction, you cannot get enough Lifts of the Accented-Short-unaccented-short type.8 He concludes: ‘The alliteration conforms, I hope, to O.E. rules’. Ward had clearly asked him about the alliteration in the poem, and more specifically about the metre, having noticed that in places it looks quite close to Old English and Old Norse models. Auden responds with a solid technical discussion of short and long vowels in modern English and the effect this has on the replication of Old English metrical structures, and concludes on the most positive of his points, that the alliteration does conform. Ward’s second and far more technical letter (which survives) also gets a reply, admitting that not always is the second alliteration exact but Auden thinks that the first and third are always there. This, of course, is not precisely accurate, for Old English metre depends on the stress at the head-stave after the caesura in each line alliterating with one or both of the stresses in the first half of the line; Auden seems to think alliteration is required on the first stress and strongly recommended on the second – which may be the norm but is not the rule. This exchange with Ward demonstrates how Auden engaged with these medieval metres. He treated them from the point of view of a working poet finding ways to capture a metrical approach and marry it to his chosen content. His conclusion about Old English metre confirms this: ‘On the whole, I suspect that it is a metre which is only suitable to rather sombre subjects, but I may be wrong’. Here is Auden the crafter of poetry, seeing what he can do with this approach. The phrase is also a memorable one with a solemn cadence, and appropriately alliterative: ‘suitable to rather sombre subjects’. The next question, of course, is why Auden would choose to write The Age of Anxiety in his own version of Old English metre. Others have written about Auden’s use of themes and ideas from medieval England, and in particular of his habit of using single lines in translation, sometimes appearing rather randomly placed in his poetry.9 His version of ‘The Wanderer’, as noted earlier, really includes snatches of ‘Maxims I’ and Sawles Warde, and only tangentially connects to the Old English elegy. If it were not Auden, one might call his poetic use of medieval materials pas- tiche. Consider, for example, these lines from an untitled poem written in the 1920s: 7 M. J. Toswell and Alan Ward, ‘Two New Letters by Auden on Anglo-Saxon Metre and The Age of Anxiety’, The Year’s Work in Medievalism 15 (2000), 57–72. The details of Auden’s engagement with Old English and Old Norse metres are discussed at length in that article; see also the references there for research on Auden’s medieval metres published earlier and for his use of Old Norse metrical forms as well as Old English in the poem. 8 Toswell and Ward, ‘Two New Letters’, p. 57. David Ward now owns the letters. 9 See Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), 68–121. The classic study is Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
- 44. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 23 Nor was that final, for about that time Gannets, blown over northward, going home, Surprised the secrecy beneath the skin. ‘Wonderful was that cross, and I full of sin’. ‘Approaching, utterly generous, came on, For years expected, born only for me’.10 In his notebook, Auden records lines 45–7 of ‘The Wanderer’ beside the first stanza of this untitled poem. Katherine Bucknell in her edition notes, rightly, that the gannets probably came from ‘The Seafarer’, not ‘The Wanderer’. She also notes that Auden sent a poor transcription of Dream of the Rood l. 13 to Christopher Isherwood, but in this notebook has a better version of the Old English line corresponding to the first line of the second triplet quoted here. The sense of the poem as a whole (there are two more stanzas) is pretty uncertain; it really does read like a practice piece, something Auden was playing with, and enjoying for the fun of putting disparate ideas and images and words together. It is dated October 1927, the beginning of Auden’s second year at Oxford. Auden is obviously assembling ways of thinking about Christianity, and doing so by playing with different elements, calling on the cross of Christ as against the first-person sinner, picking up T. S. Eliot’s idiom of the skull beneath the skin to here have secrecy beneath the skin, but also playing with the Miltonic idea of being surprised by sin.11 Auden likes playing with words and sounds, and he enjoys mixing his Old English materials with his biblical knowledge and his literary knowledge from other writers. He uses Old English with exuberance here, but a serious exuberance that brings it into play with Christian imagery in a profound way. He brings out the ‘these bones shall live’ reference to Ezekiel 37:3 in the fourth and last stanza of this poem and finishes with ‘Of Adam’s brow and of the wounded heel’, tying together Christ’s sacrifice with the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden – referring to the most salient features of that fall. The poem may not strike us as entirely coherent, but it is a kind of sacred play using various elements from Auden’s capacious knowledge, already in 1927.12 The Age of Anxiety, as noted above, was Auden’s last long poem, an extended apocalyptic meditation on war and life in the twentieth century, and apparently set in a bar in New York. Heather O’Donoghue argues in an insightful paper that the 10 W. H. Auden, Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928, ed. Katherine Bucknell (Princeton, 1994), p. 224. The poem is untitled, though Bucknell uses the first line, ‘Nor was that final, for about that time’. 11 The reference is to the second line of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’, written between 1915–1918, and frequently published since appearing in Poems (London, 1919); see it now at <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52563/whispers-of-immortality> [accessed 26 Apr. 2022]. 12 An article taking a different and very sophisticated approach to another of Auden’s juvenile poems with respect to its medieval valence is Daniel C. Remein, ‘Auden, Translation, Betrayal: Radical Poetics and Translation from Old English’, Literature Compass 8:11 (2011), 811–29; disagreeing somewhat with Remein and also looking at the same early poem is Robert E. Bjork, ‘W. H. Auden’s “The Secret Agent”, the Old English “Wulf and Eadwacer”, and Ockham’s Razor’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews (November 2020), 1–7. See also, for a fresh approach, Conor Leahy, ‘Middle English in Early Auden’, Review of English Studies 70 (2019), 527–49.
- 45. 24 M. J. Toswell poem swirls around the notion of Ragnarök, and she investigates the Old Norse metrical usage that Auden so obviously uses, especially a variant of kviðuháttr and the extremely complex dróttkvætt or court metre in some passages (reflecting quite accurately, though she was not aware of it, Auden’s own account to Alan Ward).13 But it is here, in his self-described use of Old English as the ground bass for the metre in use throughout the poem, that Auden’s sophisticated engagement with Old English as a mode for poetry lies. The usage gives the poem a faint but noticeable archaism, a sound patterning through the length of the poem that is almost that of modern syntax but not quite. See, for example, this short excerpt near the beginning of Part 3 of the poem, where the alliterating syllables are marked with boldface: But Rosetta says impatiently: Questioned by these crossroads our common hope Replies we must part; in pairs proceed By bicycle, barge, or bumbling local, As vagabonds or in wagon-lits, On weedy waters, up winding lanes, Down rational roads the Romans built, Over or into, under or round Mosses dismal or mountains sudden, Farmlands or fenlands or factory towns, Left and right till the loop be complete And we meet once more.14 Metrical analysis of this passage starts with syllable-counting. Of the twelve lines here, nine clearly have nine syllables, two (lines 2 and 4) have ten, and the last line has but five (with a heavy spondaic sense). Here, as Auden notes, he has drawn from the tradition of medieval romance, more a Continental tradition from the Romance languages of syllable-counting than an English tradition. But it gives the lines a basic coherence and unity of length. The basic sound-pattern of the lines feels trochaic, which picks up the second element of the sound-patterning, the alliteration. As Auden noted in his letters to Alan Ward, almost every line alliterates according to Old English customs. Omitting the first line as introductory to the speech, five lines here have single alliteration and five have quite good double alliteration (only one of them with vowel alliteration, and that one plays with alliteration on prepositions in a way that is rather amusing). Note that Auden does not include ‘proceed’ in line 3 (which would correspond to Middle English alliterative practice) because the syl- labic emphasis falls on the second syllable. I suspect he also enjoyed playing with the non-English etymologies and pronunciations of ‘vagabonds’ and ‘wagon-lits’ to get his sound-pattern in that line. Mostly, however, Auden follows Old English practice, 13 Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Owed to Both Sides: W. H. Auden’s double debt to the literature of the North’, in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds), Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 51–69. She also extensively discusses an early work heavily indebted to Beowulf, Paid on Both Sides, making similar points about its debt to Old Norse (as well as Old English) metres and narratives. 14 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 1976), p. 490.
- 46. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 25 placing his nouns and adjectives in alliterative highlights, with the occasional verb as necessary. The result is a metre, and a poem, not easy to fathom but consistent and intelligent, sombre and thoughtful. Auden, then, performs his knowledge of Old English in various ways. He is per- haps most successful in playing with his medieval knowledge when he does not try to be obvious about it; that is, the fascinating use of medieval metres in The Age of Anxiety gives Auden a chance to work with Old English and Old Norse word pat- terns and syntax, so that the poem feels archaising but not in an obvious or particu- larly unsettling way. Auden takes his somewhat sketchy knowledge of Old English poetic texts, as exemplified in his youthful effusions and the somewhat awkward way he uses puns and word-play, to imply a depth and meaning to his poetry that is not really there, and advances to the point where his use of Old English is in the service of his own strengths. The Age of Anxiety ponders the Zeitgeist of the Second World War and its aftermath and does so in a heavily alliterative and some- what ponderous metre: he applies his own thoughts about Old English prosody as best suited to ‘sombre subjects’. To get to this sophisticated play with Old English, he works his way through various other kinds of play with this material, and also thinks, as a working poet does, about his craft in terms he is happy to discuss with a fellow enthusiast of early medieval metres. Christopher Patton Having laid this groundwork demonstrating how one modern poet, Auden, plays with Old English in ways that are superficial and in other ways that are serious and intriguing, it seems appropriate to turn to two modern Canadian poets to see how they play with Old English. Both have had similar educations, but seventy or eighty years later in North America, and appear to have used their own discovery of Old English as a way into the writing of poetry in the modern, perhaps the postmodern, era. The first of these, Christopher Patton, is an American who has spent significant time in Canada, receives Canadian government grants for his creative work, and publishes only with Canadian presses (notably the well-known art press in the prov- ince of Nova Scotia called the Gaspereau Press), and is usually claimed as a Canadian poet (on his website he calls himself ‘American born. Canadian grown’).15 His third and fourth books of poetry closely concern Old English, prepared while he was a graduate student of medieval literature at the University of Utah; together they offer translations of elegies and riddles in highly curated textual productions. Patton now teaches creative writing at Western Washington University on the American west coast, and playing with language and its permutations continues to be his métier. Patton’s debut collection, entitled Ox and published with Véhicule Press in 2007, had poems that had been published earlier in The Paris Review, and was extremely well reviewed. His second book was a children’s story in poetry called Jack Pine, 15 Patton has a very carefully curated website, <https://theartofcompost.com/christopher- patton/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022] where he also provides a blog. His most recent volume, also with Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, turns to a different world-view; entitled Dumuzi, it retells the stories of the Sumerian god of spring (2020). For the Gaspereau books see also <http://www. gaspereau.com/bookInfo.php?AID=126&AISBN=0> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].
- 47. 26 M. J. Toswell published by Groundwood Press, also in 2007. These first two books demonstrate Patton’s concern with nature, his deft eye for the salient detail, and his charm. Patton then has two beautiful books referring to Old English with Gaspereau Press, the first entitled Curious Masonry: Three Translations from the Anglo-Saxon in 2011, and including facing-page translations with extensive commentary of ‘The Earthwalker’ (usually ‘The Wanderer’), ‘The Seafarer’, and ‘The Ruin’, and the second Unlikeness is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book, from 2018.16 Patton has extensive introductory notes and commentary justifying his decisions on which poems to translate, the structures of his volumes, and the purpose of his engagement. Although he seems to have less formal scholarly engagement with the medieval than Auden or the next poet, Dodds, Patton offers a very intriguing approach. In his commentary provided for each translation, he steers quite clear of the scholarly tradition and produces his own quite original material, some of it quite sly and subversive. Patton brings the material to the modern day; he wants to keep the Old English material alive. He presents the original material on the left opening of each page, and on the right opening of each page gives his careful interpretation of the text. Curious Masonry is a remarkable book, with a navy blue outer cover embossed randomly with words and fragments of words from the Old English texts. The words overlap and, since they are embossed, decoding them requires holding the book at various angles in order to capture different words or phrases. They run randomly at angles across the outer cover and give a sense of de luxe engagement with this material, of partaking of a bygone era of enjoying a literary text as an artefact, lux- uriating in how the text is prepared and printed as much as in its words and mean- ing. In addition to the three translations, this chapbook offers a short introductory statement and an additional poem based on ‘The Ruin’ entitled ‘H Earth’ or ‘Hearth’ (there is a careful discrepancy between the title of the poem as given in the artist’s biography in a sleeve placed over the back outer cover, which reads ‘Hearth’ and the appearance of the title in the table of contents and the text, in which there is an ‘H’ in blue followed by at least two spaces then ‘Earth’ also in blue). Patton is interested in spatial relationships, and even his titles reflect this concern (he has also done some visual poetry installations). Curious Masonry also has an inner cover, this one black and covered on the outer sides with a pattern of stylized large and small white stars or snowflakes (six-pointed made of three straight and equidistant lines). Moreover, the chapbook appears to be handprinted, with delicate initials in blue at the beginning of each poem and wherever the press designer and printer decided some extra refinement would be useful. The book is a beautiful product; even the type is ‘a digital revival of Mono- type Poliphilus by Andrew Steeves’ at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The book demonstrates just how good the production from a small but serious press can be: it is a small-press spectacular, and deeply reminiscent of the fonts and 16 Christopher Patton, Ox (Montreal, 2007), Jack Pine (Toronto, 2007), Curious Masonry (Kentville, 2011), Unlikeness is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book (Kentville, 2018), Dumuzi (Kentville, 2020). Patton has a significant number of other publications, blogs, single poems in journals, and visual poetry installations. See his website <https://theartofcompost.com/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022], subtitled ‘Christopher Patton’s website’.
- 48. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 27 approaches of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and, even farther back in time, William Pickering and his elegant productions of Old English fonts.17 ‘The Wanderer’, entitled ‘The Earthwalker’ by Patton, begins with long and involved syntactic units, heavy use of enjambement, and a carefully middle-range vocabulary: ‘One often alone, hedged in, heavy/at heart, wandering waves, one/who stirs a hoary sea with his hand/and walks a wretched way of exile’.18 Patton does not strive to surprise the reader or listener, but to convey a sense of the original and its charms. Parataxis and juxtaposition sweep the poem forward, never slowing, always leaping ahead to the next moment. Like Auden, Patton plays with modern English syntax in order to enforce the sense of otherness of his material. He likes gnomic statements (‘Fate is implacable’) and kennings or near-kennings, inventing ‘war car- nage’ and ‘earthwalker’ just in the first eight lines. Otherwise, he uses very ordinary modern English, striving for a conversational style. There is both a wide sweep to Patton’s work here as he reaches to make ‘The Wanderer’ a demotic poem and also a meticulous care with the text. Patton fearlessly retitles not only ‘The Wanderer’ but many other poems, nota- bly in the next volume Unlikeness is Us, the title obviously taken from the poem often known as ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ but called by Patton simply ‘The Wolf’. As he says in the extended scholastic–poetic introduction to the volume, ‘Translation is a savage triage’.19 The poet decides what to keep and what to reject. The poet who begins, as Patton does, by transcribing the poem from the manuscript has yet more to think about and more decisions to make. For example, Riddle 57 concerns a flock of birds, variously described by scholars as swallows, crows, swifts, jackdaws, house martens, or perhaps not birds but a cohort of bees, hailstones, raindrops, storm clouds, musical notes, damned souls, demons. Patton notes that Michael Warren in The Riddle Ages blog considers that the riddle, like all birds, eludes naming, and suggests that the riddle may be just ‘unanswerable, or even that its answer may be unanswerableness’.20 Patton, however, does attempt an answer, arguing that the way the birds swoop about in a flock is best compared to a group, a clutter, of starlings. The last line, that ‘they name themselves’, reflects Patton’s sense that the birds them- selves have agency and make their own choices; they are no longer in the hands of the humans describing them, or those reading that description and attempting to decode it as humans into a name like the names given by Adam in Genesis to all living things. Patton is deeply interested in human and animal ecology, and prefers the birds to choose their own names, rather than to have humans assign identity. 17 See Sian Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), on Morris passim, and on Pickering, pp. 56–7, though she does not mention his lovely production of Joseph Gwilt, Rudiments of a Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue (London, 1829), which seems to have eluded scholarly attention. 18 Patton, Curious Masonry, p. 13. 19 Patton, Unlikeness is Us, p. 26. 20 The blog is a group effort, this section now to be found at <https://theriddleages.com/ riddles/post/commentary-for-exeter-riddle-57/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022], with this entry by Michael Warren, but the blog in general is Megan Cavell with Matthias Ammon, Neville Mogford and Victoria Symons (eds), The Riddle Ages: Early Medieval Riddles, Translations and Commentaries (2013; redeveloped 2020) < https://theriddleages.com> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].
- 49. 28 M. J. Toswell Finally, Patton addresses Riddle 9, but does not call it that. ‘The Cuckoo’ is fascinating: Mother and father? They left me for dead in my first days. No soul in me then. No life. And then love herself wrapped me in warmth, swaddled me, held me in a sheltering robe, as kindly as she would her own child; and I, under that cover, grew strong among unkin – as my nature had me. She fed and fostered me a long time, until, great in spirit, my journey took me further. Well, she’d fewer to love, sons and daughters, for what she did. Mec on þissum dagum deadne ofgeafun fæder 7modor; ne wæs me feorh þa gen, ealdor in innan. Þa mec [an] ongon, welhold mege, wedum þeccan, heold 7freoþode, hleosceorpe wrah swa arlice swa hire agen bearn, oþþæt ic under sceate – . swa min gesceapu wæron, ungesibbum wearð eacen gæste. Mec seo friþemæg fedde siþþan, oþþæt ic aweox, widdor meahte siþas asettan. Heo hæfde swæsra þy læs suna and dohtra þy heo swa dyde. :721 Patton may well have read Jennifer Neville’s argument that perhaps there is some anthropomorphizing here, and the cuckoo might refer to a foster-child, one per- haps larger and more demanding and destined for greatness.22 He does not mention this in his very eclectic references in his annotation of this poem, which range from Kubrick to Deleuze and Guatteri. His ‘great in spirit’ reference to the first-person protagonist, the presumed cuckoo about to leave the nest, might well refer to the kind of behaviour Neville adduces. More striking, perhaps, is Patton’s willingness here to rearrange lines and half-lines, putting ‘Mother and father?’ at the beginning and with a question-mark. They are included only to abandon the dead child, which comes back to life when parented by ‘love herself’, a loose but intriguing translation, given that the text never identifies the person/bird who stands in loco parentis – because the important issue is that the cuckoo does find someone, not what that might mean for 21 Unlikeness is Us, p. 82 [Old English], p. 83 [Patton’s version]. Patton’s transcription and presentation are much more detailed than the version here, with length marks for long vowels and a mid-point diamond after ‘sceate’, reflecting his deep engagement with the Old English. 22 Neville provides the commentary for this riddle in Cavell, Riddle Ages <https:// theriddleages.com/riddles/post/commentary-for-exeter-riddle-9/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022].
- 50. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 29 other offspring. This is thoughtful and interesting translation, carefully reflective of Old English style and metre, but also carefully modern in lexicon and syntax. Patton embeds himself here both in the scholarship about Old English texts and in a detailed and extensive learning of Old English, which gives him a base from which to produce his demotic but syntactically unusual renderings of these poems. Patton, then, is not unlike Auden in becoming engaged with Old English as a result of his university course (he is also now completing a degree at the University of Toronto), but his approach is on the one hand far more scholarly and detailed in its linguistic engagement with the text and on the other hand far more visual than Auden’s. Where Auden is thinking about sounds and sound patterns, Patton is deeply concerned with the construction of the word on the page and with the page in the book: his is the mind of a visual poet, and his play with Old English is a play rather like that of the cuckoo: he has no parents in the language since no native speakers exist, but he is suffused by the love and passion that learning the language provides, and – as the cuckoo poem points out – ‘my journey took me further’. Patton’s play with Old English is filial, serious, but also original and more than a little playful. He plays the human/avian parallel of Riddle 9 for every valence and nuance of meaning, and he rather playfully horrifies the reader in the commentary with a detailed discussion of Freudian psychology as applied to the text, and then an even more detailed discussion of a Youtube video with a leopard killing a baboon, discovering its living baby, and making some efforts to keep the infant alive, but in a desultory and rather uncaring and playful way. Patton concludes that the baby baboon was always going to die, that these two cultures going face to face with each other were never going to find a joyous medium; that the cuckoo of the riddle is not likely to survive in any meaningful way. The image is shocking, painfully unsympa- thetic and yet in a deep way quite empathetic about the collisions between different worlds – and playful as the leopard bats at the young baboon. Patton’s is a modern sensibility, shifting back and forth between anthropomorphizing the animals in the riddles and acknowledging their otherness. His riddling play is sophisticated and scholarly but also rebellious and original. It is too early in his career to know if he will return to Old English materials with the mature mind of the fully developed poet as Auden did, but should he do so, I suspect he would produce remarkable work – and his ecological awareness would provide a fascinating new lens on Old English texts remade into modern English. Jeramy Dodds Jeramy Dodds embarked (much as Auden famously did) specifically on a career as a poet, with very successful works published and grants won in the early years of the twenty-first century. He for some years did extensive public relations as a rising young poet, speaking of his training as a medievalist and his use of that work in his poetic output, including most obviously his translation of The Poetic Edda. 23 Here 23 As many modern writers do, Dodds has an extensive online presence (which will become clear later): see <http://www.jeramydodds.com/> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. A useful long reading and discussion piece (particularly on the Old Norse translations) is from the
- 51. 30 M. J. Toswell the focus will be on his links to Old English and its role in his riddling play with language as a fundamental feature of his poetry. Note that, as will be discussed at the end of this section, Dodds’ career suffered a recent setback, and a severe one that offers an emotionally taxing situation for modern audiences of Old English and for the question being addressed here of why modern poets engage with the early medieval as a performative and playful medium. It will be interesting to see how Dodds addresses his changed circumstances and frames them into his poetry. Dodds’ career started very impressively. Born in 1974, he grew up near Peterbor- ough in Ontario and attended Trent University as an undergraduate, completing a joint degree in English literature and anthropology. He followed the path that a number of Canadian students, usually those planning medieval studies, take, going to the University of Iceland to complete a master’s degree in Icelandic. According to his own account, he worked as a research archaeologist for some time, but contin- ued to produce poems and to send them to small journals, mostly in Canada. His first book of poetry, Crabwise to the Hounds, was published in 2008 with the highly reputable press Coach House Books and was hailed as the confident work of an important poet. The book won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was short- listed for several major awards, including the Griffin Poetry Prize. He also won, in short order, the CBC Literary Award and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. All these accomplishments and awards earned Dodds an important job as one of two poetry editors for Coach House Books.24 Dodds’ interest in medieval poetry is somewhat occluded in his first book, Crab- wise to the Hounds, not announced or signalled too broadly, but ever present. For example, here are the first eight lines of ‘Planning your Seascape’: Shipwrights shoulder-pole bedrolls and Swede-saws through a cellophane of rain. Rent boys pony up to door frames as cliff-dwellers stare down dead holes in the sun. Cocklers chase the tide on oxcarts through a dogbreath of fog, the only surviving25 The title is the first clue to Dodds’ love of riddles and wordplay, since the usual idiom is to ‘plan your escape’, not your seascape. The poem describes a large town or city at the seaside, but with images that constantly shift and shock. There are compounds coined by Dodds which are nonetheless pretty easy to understand: ‘shoulder-pole’ and ‘dogbreath’ here, and shortly thereafter, ‘pit-fire’, ‘gun-felled’, ‘weather-heckled’. These all reflect the Old English techniques of adding nouns together, or nouns with WordsFest 2014: WORDS Literary and Creative Arts Festival held in London, Canada: Jeramy Dodds in Conversation with Andy McGuire, posted 3 Dec. 2014: <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ukrw5deTPW4> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. 24 Dodds’ published work to date includes Crabwise to the Hounds (Toronto, 2008), The Poetic Edda, trans. Jeramy Dodds (Toronto, 2014), and Drakkar Noir (Toronto, 2017). 25 Dodds, Crabwise, p. 44.
- 52. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 31 adjectives/participles/gerunds. Some stray a bit farther but remain well within the world of Old English compounding: ‘three-toe’ as a verb describing the way seagulls with their three-toed feet stand and balance on the stomachs of the dead (possibly a reference to the dead, possibly simply a reference to meat about to be barbecued), or the verb ‘unshadow’ negating the idea of shadowing. Dodds plays with language, with shocking juxtapositions in a free verse that is nonetheless highly rhythmic, with a driving force of words tumbling over each other blasting images and crashing against the norms of human expression. Dodds’ poetry, even the brief sample analysed above, plays with words very clev- erly and robustly, pushing idioms and reconfiguring them to force confusion and uncertainty or new perception into the reader or listener. For example, one long poem, which Dodds often used to read at poetry events, is ‘Canadæ’, a rant about what Canada is and how Canadians function. Poems of this kind are something of a high-art Canadian tradition. That Dodds would produce such a high-profile piece and read it frequently suggests his own high profile in the field, as rising poet and poetry editor for Coach House Books, a prestigious independent publisher. His second book translates large sections of The Poetic Edda, introduced with a foreword by Terry Gunnell of the University of Iceland, and an introduction to the translations by Dodds that describes them as ‘recreations that possess birthmark similarities, echoes, absolute similitudes and forgeries’.26 The book translates thirty-one poems from the Edda, working from Gustav Neckel’s edition with an added four poems not from the Codex Regius. Dodds revels in the complexities of these poems, in the complex naming and word-play, in the confusing dialogues and contradictory sto- ries. The translation is into a contemporary idiom; see, for example, from Grípisspá: [Gripir said:] ‘All alone you’ll gut the glistening serpent greedily lounging on Gnitaheid. You’ll be the slayer of both Regin and Fafnir. Gripir tells the truth.’27 Unlike Patton, Dodds does not provide the medieval original, and clearly works from the published text, with help from various modern translations. His version is colloquial, using alliteration (as here on g for two lines), and he mostly holds to a trochaic rhythm that gives the verse an archaic sense. Where he cannot hold to that rhythm, as in the last line here, he provides a summarizing half-line with alliteration on ‘tells’ and ‘truth’. Here, too, as with his earlier poems, he likes to shock, using ‘gut’ for Sigurd’s actual sword-stroke on Fafnir, and picking up two descriptors to describe the dragon: ‘glistening’ and ‘greedily’. He sticks to demotic language, using ‘you’ll’ twice and emphasizing Sigurd’s singular accomplishment with ‘All alone’ to start the stanza. He worked on the translation for five years, by his own account, 26 Dodds, Poetic Edda, p. 12. 27 Dodds, Poetic Edda, p. 155. He translates from Gustav Neckel (ed.), Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern (Heidelberg, 1962).
- 53. 32 M. J. Toswell spending more time in Iceland to work on his lexicon and perfect the register.28 The result is a translation of this much-translated text that nonetheless merits attention. Dodds’ third book, Drakkar Noir (the title is quite helpful for our purposes), is the one that consciously cites Old English, including ‘From The Exeter Book Riddles: XCIV’, written in the second person except for the last five lines. The title presuma- bly refers to the Sir Israel Gollancz edition of the Exeter Book Riddles, given the use of roman numerals. Riddle 94 is very badly damaged, with only a few phrases here and there surviving, though it is usually taken as a variation on a creation riddle. Dodds clearly looks at it as a kind of ‘funhouse-mirror form’ (see the poem below, which has this image in its first line), a poem that can only be glimpsed sideways as if through a concave or convex mirror. Moreover, his poem is loosely a narra- tive, though it riddles its way through the opposition between the narrator and a ‘Deputy’, someone who can be a berserker and the Deputy he reflects in the mirror. The ‘I’ of the poem kills seven constables when his crystal-meth lab blows up, but the Deputy is guilty of ‘starscreaming’ down the spine of the narrator’s bedridden niece. ‘Starscreaming’ is unexplained and genuinely inexplicable, but it sounds like a crime. The violence the poet and narrator allude to is constant and either barely averted or embraced wholeheartedly. The poem also picks up the imagery of the sun, moon and stars often found in the Old English riddles, and its structure, with a clear caesura in the typesetting, not just in the pauses, and frequent use of Old English alliterative and metrical patterns, also reflects a Germanic approach. Dodds likes repetition, especially repetition that can shock. Here are the opening five lines: You, who’s frozen in your funhouse-mirror form, locked out of your lookout. You, who eye-spies me glinting in the echo chamber of an oak-treed glade, veins lassoing muscles to bloodstone bone, eyes the pits of Hollowsure Moor.29 Dodds is explicitly referencing an Old English riddle in the title here, yet in the text he is playing with possibilities that are not about creation but destruction, not about admiring the accomplishments of a divine creator but about an implied dia- logue between two antagonists, spying on each other and dreadfully anxious and bothered by their own behaviour. His riddles are filled with violence and danger, pitfalls and problems. Dodds trained as a medievalist and uses his training explicitly in his work. He takes a robust approach, perhaps, tackling the most well-known texts and using his medieval knowledge entirely as a way to establish cognitive distancing from the contemporary world and comment on modern behaviour and modern language in striking and often shocking ways. Dodds is a difficult poet to discuss these days since he lost his post as poetry editor at Coach House Books in 2018 as a result of a Canadian #metoo incident; since then he has been in Europe and engaging with the 28 See the discussion at 28:10–28:34 in the WordFest interview with Dodds: <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukrw5deTPW4> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. 29 Dodds, Drakkar Noir, p. 21. The solution to this riddle, written upside-down at the bottom of the page, is ‘Cop Killer’.
- 54. Old English as a Playground for Poets? 33 Canadian literary scene only to sue as many of his attackers (as he sees it) as he can.30 The story is a difficult and convoluted one, but it would appear that a fellow poet accused him of sexual harassment and aggressive behaviour in complaints sent to the press, and shortly thereafter to the internet. Dodds was immediately suspended, and in fact the most venerable publisher of poetry in Canada suspended its entire poetry list, since the accusations were not just specific but seemed to suggest a more general atmosphere of sexual aggression (trading a ‘relationship’ for publication was implied). The story is complicated, and since it is currently in the courts little can be said. I can make one comment: in Dodds’ own account of the breakup with his fellow poet, posted to his own website on 6 March 2018, he states: Six years ago, following a breakup, I mailed several items back to an ex-girlfriend. The last item was her taxidermy chicken, which I packed in a box and wrapped in used target silhouettes — an inside joke inspired by our shared macabre sense of humour about gun culture. In retrospect, this was poor judgement on my part.31 ‘Poor judgement’ hardly starts to clarify the matter. As elsewhere explained by Dodds and by the woman in question, ‘used target silhouettes’ refers to bull’s-eye paper targets, something no one would want to get in the post, let alone wrapped around a stuffed chicken. The suitability of this behaviour is not, whatever other issues have been raised, in question: this is entirely bad behaviour. It would be hard to receive such a package and not read a threat. The result has been, for me at least, a rereading of Dodds’ poetry, and especially of his medievalist work, from an altered perspective. His interest in violence, in voyeuristic stalking behaviour (as in the riddle quoted here), his shocking and painful images, his obvious desire to unsettle and destabilize the reader: all these patterns seem to suggest both hypermasculinity and a focus on violence. Much as connecting biography to poetic production is unsettling and inappropriate, here one has to wonder if Dodds shifted to medieval texts precisely for a distancing effect, for an opportunity to play in a world that others might not fully understand, a world that could be more easily presented as violent, aggressive, dangerous. After all, the medieval world was, apparently, all of these things.32 Moreover, by using it as a backdrop for his poetry, Dodds could take an oracular or superior stance, a mode of behaviour that could serve as a way of engaging with difficult issues from a safer location than their everyday world. 30 The suit has been called a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation) suit, designed to muzzle the complainants; see H.G. Watson, ‘End of Story’, Maisonneuve: A Quarterly of Arts, Opinion, and Ideas, 14 Sep. 2018, <https://maisonneuve.org/ article/2018/09/14/end-story/> [accessed 26 Apr. 2022]. More recently, see Mandi Gray, ‘Cease and Desist/Cease or Resist? Civil Suits and Sexual Violence’ (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, York University, Canada, 2021). The case is discussed on p. 184; Dodds sued four women and at least one media outlet. 31 See <https://jeramy-dodds.squarespace.com/statement> [accessed 1 Feb. 2022]. This material is near the beginning of the second paragraph. 32 There is no space for it here, but Dodds’ translations of the Poetic Edda could profitably be compared to Auden’s, done with Paul Beekman Taylor near the end of his life. See W. H. Auden and Paul Beekman Tayler, Norse Poems (London, 1981).
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- 56. when combined with musk and civet remain fragrant for a long time. A sufficiently large piece of perfume skin inserted in a desk pad or placed among the paper will make the latter very fragrant. Spanish skin is chiefly used for this purpose, as well as for work, glove, and handkerchief boxes, etc. It is generally inclosed in a heavy silk cover. If leather be thought too expensive, four to six layers of blotting- paper may be perfumed in the same way and properly inclosed. Thin layers of cotton wadding between paper can also be thus perfumed and used for filling pin cushions, etc. Spanish Paste. Mix the following substances intimately in a porcelain mortar, and add water drop by drop until a doughy mass results. Ambergris ¾ oz. Benzoin 1½ oz. Musk ¾ oz. Vanilla ¾ oz. Orris root ¾ oz. Cinnamon ¾ oz. Oil of bergamot1½ oz. Oil of rose ¾ oz. Gum acacia 1½ oz. Glycerin 1½ oz. This paste, divided into pieces about the size of a hazelnut, is used for filling the so-called cassolettes or scent boxes which are carried in the pocket, etc., like smelling bottles. Owing to its pasty consistence this preparation can be used for perfuming jewelry (small quantities are inserted within the diamond settings), fine leather goods, belts, and other articles. It is unnecessary to lengthen the list; every practical perfumer will know what objects need perfuming.
- 58. CHAPTER XIX. HYGIENIC AND COSMETIC PERFUMERY. Perfumery is not merely called upon to act in an æsthetic direction and gladden the senses; it has another and more important aim, that is, to aid in some respects the practice of medicine. It is not necessary to point out that in this sense, too, it acts in an æsthetic way; for health and beauty are one and inseparable. The field relegated to perfumery with reference to hygiene is extensive, comprising the care of the skin, the hair, and the mouth. But we also find in commercial perfumery articles which possess no medicinal effect and serve merely for beautifying some parts of the body, for instance, paints and hair dyes. As it is not possible to separate perfumes with hygienic effects from cosmetics, we shall describe the latter in connection with the former. To repeat, hygienic perfumery has to deal with such substances as have really a favorable effect on health. No one will deny that soap takes the first place among them. Soap promotes cleanliness, and cleanliness in itself is essential to health. But it would exceed the scope of this work were we to treat in detail of the manufacture of soap and its employment in the toilet; we must confine ourselves to some specialties exclusively made by perfumers and into the composition of which soap enters. We do so the more readily since perfumers are but rarely in a position to make soap, and in most cases find it more advantageous to buy the raw material, that is, ordinary good soap, from the manufacturer and to perfume it. Next to soap in hygienic perfumery stand the so-called emulsions and creams (crêmes) which are excellent preparations for the skin and pertain to the domain of the perfumer. The human skin consists of three distinct parts: the deepest layer, the subcutaneous cellular tissue which gradually changes into true
- 59. skin; the corium or true skin (the thickest layer); and the superficial scarf skin or epidermis which is very thin and consists largely of dead and dying cells; these are continually shed and steadily reproduced from the corium. The skin contains various depressions, namely, the sudoriparous glands which excrete sweat; the sebaceous glands which serve the purpose of covering the skin with fat and thereby keep it soft, glossy, and supple; and lastly the hair follicles which contain the hairs, an appendage to the skin. The main object of hygienic perfumery with reference to the skin is to keep these glandular organs in health and activity; it effects this by various remedies which, besides promoting the general health, improve the appearance of the skin. As a special group of preparations is intended exclusively for the care of the skin, so another class is devoted to the preservation of the hair, and still another to the care of the mouth and its greatest ornament, the teeth. Accordingly the preparations belonging under this head will be divided into three groups—those for the skin, the hair, and the mouth.
- 60. CHAPTER XX. PREPARATIONS FOR THE CARE OF THE SKIN. Glycerin. Pure glycerin is a substance that has a powerful beautifying effect on the skin, by rendering it white, supple, soft, and glossy; no other remedy will clear a sun-burnt skin in so short a time as glycerin. An excellent wash may be made by the perfumer by mixing equal parts of thick, colorless glycerin and orange-flower water (or some other aromatic water with fine odor), possibly giving it a rose color by the addition of a very small amount of fuchsine. Concentrated glycerin must not be used as a wash, because it abstracts water from the skin and thereby produces a sensation of heat or burning. Besides common soap, the so-called emulsions, meals, pastes, vegetable milks and creams are the best preparations for the care of the skin; in perfumery they are even preferable to soap in some respects because they contain not only substances which have a cleansing effect like any soap, scented or not, but at the same time render the skin clearer, more transparent, and more supple. Emulsions. Many perfumers make a definite distinction between two groups of emulsions which they call respectively “emulsions” and “true emulsions.” By “emulsions” they mean masses which have the property of changing on contact with water into a milky fluid or becoming emulsified; the term “true emulsions” is applied to such preparations as already contain a sufficient amount of water and therefore have a milky appearance. Hence the difference between the two preparations lies in the lesser or greater quantity of water, and is so variable that we prefer to describe them under one head.
- 61. The cause of the milky appearance of the emulsions on coming in contact with water is that they contain, besides fat, substances which possess the property of keeping the fat suspended in form of exceedingly minute droplets which make the entire fluid look like milk. As a glance through the microscope shows, the milk of animals consists of a clear fluid in which the divided fat droplets (butter) float; these by their refractive power make the milk appear white. While soaps always contain a certain quantity of free alkali, a substance having active caustic properties, emulsions include very little if any alkali, and, since they possess the same cleansing power as soap without its disadvantages with reference to the skin, their steady use produces a warm youthful complexion, as well as smoothness and delicacy of the skin. Glycerin is of special importance in the composition of emulsions. Besides the above-mentioned property of this substance of keeping the skin soft and supple, it acts as a true cosmetic by its solvent power of coloring matters: a skin deeply browned by exposure to the sun is most rapidly whitened by the use of glycerin alone. Moreover, glycerin prevents the decomposition of the preparations and keeps them unchanged for a long time. This quality has a value which should not be underestimated; for all emulsions are very apt to decompose and become rancid owing to the finely divided fat they contain. Under ordinary conditions, only complete protection against light and air can retard rancidity, which is accompanied by a disagreeable odor not to be masked by any perfume; an addition of glycerin, which we incorporate in all emulsions, makes them more permanent owing to the antiseptic property of this substance. Recent years, however, have made us acquainted with a substance which in very minute quantities—one-half of one per cent of the mass to be preserved by it—prevents decomposition and rancidity of fats. This is salicylic acid, a chemical product which, being harmless, tasteless, and odorless, should be employed wherever we wish to guard against destructive influences exerted by air, fermentation, etc. While formerly all emulsions were made only
- 62. in small amounts, just sufficient for several weeks’ use, salicylic acid enables us to manufacture larger quantities at once and to keep them without much fear of their spoiling. However, even the presence of salicylic acid is no guaranty against deterioration, if other precautions are neglected. The products should be kept in well-stoppered bottles or vessels, in a cool and dark place. All substances cannot be preserved by salicylic acid, and there are certain ferments or fungi which resist the action of salicylic acid. If chloroform is not objectionable in any of these preparations—and only so much is necessary as can be held in actual solution by the liquid, on an average three drops to the ounce—this preservative is preferable to salicylic acid. The only fats used in the preparation of emulsions are expressed oil of almonds, olive oil, and lard. Almond oil is best made by immediate pressure of the bruised fruits, since fresh almond meal likewise finds application in perfumery; olive oil and lard must be very carefully purified. This is done by heating them for one hour with about ten times the quantity of water containing soap (one per cent of the quantity of fat to be purified). They are then treated five or six times with pure warm water until the latter escapes quite neutral. If the water turns red litmus paper blue, it would indicate the presence of free alkali (soap); if it turns blue litmus paper red, it would prove the presence of free fatty acids (rancid fat). Either one of these substances, especially the latter, would injure the quality of the product. The fat should be absolutely neutral and have no influence on either kind of litmus paper; then its quality may be pronounced perfect.
- 63. CHAPTER XXI. FORMULAS FOR THE PREPARATION OF EMULSIONS, MEALS, PASTES, VEGETABLE MILK, AND COLD-CREAMS. A. Emulsions. Amandine. Almond Cream.—Melt ten pounds of purified lard in an enamelled iron pot or a porcelain vessel, and while increasing the temperature add little by little five pounds of potash lye of 25% strength, stirring all the time with a broad spatula. When fat and lye have become a uniform mass, 2¾ to 3½ ounces of alcohol is gradually added, whereby the mixture acquires a translucent, crystalline appearance. Before the alcohol is added three-fourths to one ounce of oil of bitter almond is dissolved in it. The soapy mass thus obtained is called “almond cream” (crême d’amandes) and may be used alone for washing. For making Amandine take of— Expressed oil of almonds10 lb. Almond cream 3½ oz. Oil of bergamot 1 oz. Oil of bitter almond 1½ oz. Oil of lemon 150 grains. Oil of clove 150 grains. Oil of mace 150 grains. Water 1¾ oz. Sugar 3½ oz. In the manufacture the following rules should be observed.
- 64. Effect the mixture in a cool room, the cellar in summer, a fireless room in winter. Mix the ingredients in a shallow, smooth vessel, best a large porcelain dish, using a very broad, flat stirrer with several holes. The sugar is first dissolved in the water and intimately mixed with the almond cream. The essential oils are dissolved in the almond oil contained in a vessel provided with a stop-cock. The oil is first allowed to run into the dish in a moderate stream under continual stirring. The mass soon grows more viscid, and toward the end of the operation the flow of oil must be carefully restricted so that the quantity admitted can be at once completely mixed with the contents of the dish. Well-made amandine must be rather consistent and white, and should not be translucent. If translucency or an oily appearance is observed during the mixture, the flow of oil must be at once checked or enough almond cream must be added to restore the white appearance, under active stirring. As amandine is very liable to decompose, it must be immediately filled into the vessels in which it is to be kept, and the latter, closed air-tight, should be preserved in a cool place. By adding ¾ ounce of salicylic acid, amandine may be made quite permanent so that it can be kept unchanged even in a warm place. We have described the preparation of amandine at greater length because its manufacture requires some technical skill and because the preparation of all other cold-creams corresponds in general with that of amandine. Glycerin Emulsions. A. Glycerin Cream. Glycerin ½ lb. Almond oil 14 oz. Rose water12½ oz. Spermaceti3½ oz. Wax 480 grains. Oil of rose 60 grains.
- 65. Melt the wax and spermaceti by gentle heat, then add the almond oil, next the glycerin mixed with the rose water, and lastly the oil of rose which may also be replaced by some other fragrant oil or mixture. If the preparation is to be used in summer, it is advisable to increase the wax by one-half, thus giving the mass greater consistence. B. Glycerin Jelly. Glycerin 2 lb. Almond oil 6 lb. Soap 5½ oz. Oil of orange peel150 grains. Oil of thyme ¾ oz. Mix the soap with the glycerin, gradually add the oil (as for amandine), and finally the aromatics. Jasmine Emulsion. Huile antique de jasmin 2 lb. Almond cream 5½ oz. Expressed oil of almond4 lb. Water 5½ oz. Sugar 2¾ oz. Mix in the same order as given under Amandine. Tuberose Emulsion. Huile antique des tubéroses1¾ to 2 lb. Almond cream 5½ oz. Expressed oil of almond 4 lb. Water 5½ oz. Sugar 2¾ oz.
- 66. Violet Emulsion. Huile antique des violettes2 to 3 lb. Almond cream 5½ oz. Expressed oil of almond 4 lb. Water 5½ oz. Sugar 2¾ oz. In place of the huiles antiques named (i.e., fine oils saturated with the odors of the corresponding flowers) any other huile antique may be used and the cream then called by the name of the flower whose odor it possesses. Such creams with genuine huiles antiques are among the finest preparations known in perfumery and of course are high-priced, owing to the cost of the huiles antiques. Olivine. Gum acacia ½ lb. Yolk of egg 10 yolks. Olive oil 4 lb. Soap 7 oz. Water 8 oz. Sugar 5½ oz. Oil of bergamot 2 oz. Oil of lemon 2 oz. Oil of clove 1 oz. Oil of orange peel¾ oz. Oil of thyme 75 grains. Oil of cinnamon 75 grains. The gum, sugar, water, and yolk of eggs are first intimately mixed and gradually added to the olive oil containing the essential oils. B. Meals and Pastes.
- 67. The so-called meals (farines) and pastes (pâtes) really consist of the flour of fatty vegetable substances which possess the property of forming an emulsion with water and are frequently used in washes. As they are free from alkali, they are the most delicate preparations of the kind and are especially suitable for washing the face or sensitive hands. Simple Almond Paste (Pâte d’Amandes Simple). Bitter almonds 6 lb. Alcohol 2 qts. Rose water 4 qts. Oil of bergamot10½ oz. Oil of lemon 3½ oz. Put the bitter almonds in a sieve, dip them for a few seconds in boiling water, when they can be easily deprived of their brown skin; carefully bruise them in a mortar, and place them in a glazed pot set in another kept full with boiling water; pour over them two quarts of the rose water heated to near the boiling-point. Keep up the heat under continual stirring until the almond meal and rose water form a uniform mass free from granules; in other words, until the meal is changed into paste. The pot is now allowed to cool somewhat, when the rest of the rose water and the oils dissolved in alcohol are added. Almond paste should have a uniform, butter-like consistence if the first part of the operation has been carefully performed. Almond and Honey Paste (Pâte d’Amandes au Miel). Bitter almonds 2 lb. Yolk of egg 30 yolks. Honey 4 lb. Expressed oil of almond4 lb. Oil of bergamot 1 oz. Oil of lemon ¾ oz.
- 68. Oil of clove ¾ oz. Decorticate and bruise the bitter almonds and add them with the essential oils to the mixed yolks, honey, and almond oil. Almond Meal (Farine d’Amandes). Almond meal 4 lb. Orris root, powdered5½ oz. Oil of lemon 1 oz. Oil of bitter almond 150 grains. Oil of lemon grass 75 grains. Almond meal here means the bran left after expressing the oil from sweet almonds. First mix the powdered orris root intimately with the essential oils and triturate the mass with the almond bran. Other essential oils may also be used for perfuming the mass. Pistachio Meal (Farine de Pistaches). Pistachio nuts 4 lb. Orris root, powdered4 lb. Oil of lemon 1¾ oz. Oil of neroli 150 grains. Oil of orange peel 1 oz. The pistachio nuts are blanched in the same manner as almonds (see under Simple Almond Paste), and then reduced to a meal. C. Vegetable Milk. The several varieties of vegetable milk are merely emulsions containing sufficient water to give them a milky appearance. They are used as such for washes and are in great favor. Owing to the larger amount of water they contain, they are more liable to decompose than the preparations described above, since the fats
- 69. present in them easily become rancid on account of their fine division in the milk. In order to render these preparations more stable, they receive an addition of about five to ten per cent of their weight of pure glycerin which enhances their cosmetic effect. The addition of about one-half of one per cent of salicylic acid is likewise to be recommended, as it makes them more stable. In the following pages we shall describe only the most important of these preparations usually made by the perfumer. In this connection we may state that by slightly modifying the substances used to perfume them, new varieties of vegetable milk can be easily prepared. Every vegetable milk consists in the main of a base of soap, wax, and spermaceti, and an aromatic water which gives the name to the preparation. This composition is intended to keep suspended the fatty vegetable substances (almond or pistachio meal, etc.), thus producing a milky appearance. Vegetable milks are made as follows. Melt the soap with the wax and spermaceti at a gentle heat. Prepare a milk from the vegetable substance and the aromatic water (e.g., unexpressed almonds and rose water) by careful trituration, strain it through fine silk gauze into the vessel containing the melted mixture of soap, wax, and spermaceti, stir thoroughly, let it cool, and add the alcohol holding in solution the essential oils, the glycerin (and the salicylic acid), under continual stirring. The alcohol must be added in a very thin stream, otherwise a portion of the mass will curdle. The coarser particles contained in the milk must be allowed to settle by leaving the preparation at rest for twenty-four hours, when the milk can be carefully decanted from the sediment and filled into bottles for sale. Lilac Milk (Lait de Lilas).
- 70. Soap 2¼ oz. Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Sweet almonds 1 lb. Lilac-flower water 4½ pints. Huile antique de lilas 2½ oz. Alcohol (80-85% Tralles)2 lb. In place of lilac-flower water and huile antique de lilas, lilacin (terpineol) may be used, a sufficient quantity (about 1 oz.) being dissolved in the alcohol. But the lilacin must be pure and of clean odor. Virginal Milk (Lait Virginal). This preparation differs from all other milks sold in perfumery in that it consists of some aromatic water with tincture of benzoin and tolu. In making it, pour the aromatic water in a very thin stream into the tincture under vigorous stirring. If the water flows in too rapidly, the resins present in the tincture separate in lumps; but if slowly poured in, the resins form minute spheres which remain suspended. The preparation is named after the aromatic water it contains: Lait virginal de la rose, à fleurs d’oranges, etc. Its formula is: Tincture of benzoin2 oz. Tincture of tolu 2¾ oz. Aromatic water 4 qts. Cucumber Milk (Lait de Concombres). Soap 1 oz. Olive oil 1 oz. Wax 1 oz. Spermaceti 1 oz. Sweet almonds 1 lb.
- 71. Cucumber juice (freshly expressed)4½ pints. Extract of cucumber 1 pint. Alcohol 2 lb. Dandelion Milk. Soap 2¼ oz. Olive oil 2¼ oz. Wax 2¼ oz. Sweet almonds 1 lb. Extract of tuberose1 lb. Rose water 5 pints. Dandelion juice 5 oz. Dandelion juice is the bitter milk sap of the root of the common dandelion (Leontodon taraxacum); it should be expressed immediately before use. The rose water may be replaced by some other aromatic water or even ordinary water; but the latter should be distilled, otherwise the lime it contains would form an insoluble combination with the soap. Bitter-Almond Milk (Lait d’Amandes Amères). Bitter almonds 2¼ oz. Soap 2¼ oz. Expressed oil of almond2¼ oz. Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Rose water 4 qts. Alcohol 3 pints. Oil of bitter almond ½ oz. Oil of bergamot 1 oz. Oil of lemon ½ oz.
- 72. Rose Milk (Lait de Roses). Olive oil 2¼ oz. Soap 2¼ oz. Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Sweet almonds4 lb. Oil of rose 150 grains. Rose water 4 qts. Alcohol 1 pint. Pistachio Milk (Lait de Pistaches). Soap. 2¼ oz. Olive oil 2¼ oz. Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Pistachio nuts 14 oz. Oil of neroli ¾ oz. Orange-flower water6 qts. Alcohol 1 qt. D. Cold-Creams and Lip Salves. In the main they resemble in their composition the emulsions and vegetable milks, but differ by their thick consistence which renders them suitable for being rubbed into the skin. Cold-creams are really salves perfumed with one of the well-known odors which give them their names. Fat forms the basis of these mixtures and gives them their hygienic effect, as it imparts fulness and softness to the skin. Every well-made cold-cream should have the consistence of recently congealed wax and should yield to the pressure of the finger like pomatum. It should be noted that the addition of very thick glycerin will increase the effect of the cold-cream and improve its fine
- 73. transparent appearance; but this substance must be added with great care, otherwise the mass will not possess the required firmness. In making cold-cream, a mixture of wax, spermaceti, and expressed almond oil must be combined with an aromatic water and an essential oil. The first part of the operation is easy; the wax and spermaceti are melted at the lowest possible temperature, and the almond oil is added under continual stirring. It is more difficult to unite the other substances with this base; the aromatic water is admitted in a thin stream under vigorous stirring (or whipping, or churning), and when it forms a uniform mass with the contents of the mortar the remaining substances are stirred in and the still fluid mass is poured into the vessels intended for it, and allowed to congeal. Cold-creams are usually sold in tasteful porcelain jars or vases. To guard against rancidity of the mass, the vessels are closed either with ground stoppers or with corks covered with tin foil. The essential oils should be added last, when the mass has cooled to the congealing-point; if added before, too much of them is lost by evaporation. We give below several approved formulas for the preparation of some favorite cold-creams, and repeat that new varieties can be produced by introducing any desired odor into the composition. Glycerin Cold-Cream A. Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 2½ oz. Spermaceti 2½ oz. Glycerin 7 oz. Oil of bergamot ¾ oz. Oil of lemon ¾ oz. Oil of geranium ¾ oz.
- 74. Oil of neroli 150 grains. Oil of cinnamon 150 grains. Rose water 1 lb. Glycerin Cold-Cream B. Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 4½ oz. Spermaceti 4½ oz. Glycerin ½ lb. Oil of rose 150 grains. Civet 30 grains. Camphor Ice (Camphor Cold-Cream). Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Camphor 4½ oz. Oil of rosemary 90 grains. Oil of peppermint 45 grains. Rose water 2 lb. Camphor Ice (Pâte Camphorique). Lard 2 lb. Wax ½ lb. Camphor ½ lb. Oil of lavender ½ oz. Oil of rosemary½ oz. This mixture, which is rather firm, is frequently poured into shallow porcelain boxes; sometimes it is colored red with alkanet root.
- 75. Camphor Balls (Savonettes Camphoriques). Expressed oil of almond7 oz. Purified tallow 2 lb. Wax 7 oz. Spermaceti 7 oz. Camphor 7 oz. Oil of lavender ¾ oz. Oil of rosemary ¾ oz. Oil of cinnamon 75 grains. Savonette is generally understood to mean a soap cast in spherical moulds; this preparation is, as a rule, likewise sold in this form. Divine Pomade A. Expressed oil of almond3 lb. Spermaceti 1 lb. Lard 2 lb. Benzoin 1 lb. Vanilla 7 oz. Civet ¾ oz. The aromatic substances, having been comminuted, are thoroughly triturated with the other ingredients, and the mass is kept for twenty-four hours at a temperature of 50 to 60° C. (112- 140° F.), when it is carefully decanted from the sediment, which is treated again with another mass of the same substances for thirty- six to forty-eight hours. Divine Pomade B. Beef marrow 2 lb. Benzoin 1½ oz. Nutmegs 1 oz.
- 76. Cloves 1 oz. Storax 1½ oz. Orris root 1½ oz. Civet 75 grains. Cinnamon 1 oz. Orange-flower water2 lb. The solid substances are macerated for forty-eight hours with the warm marrow, the liquid perfumed marrow is then strained off and mixed with the orange-flower water. Cologne Cold-Cream (Crême de Cologne). Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 2½ oz. Spermaceti 2½ oz. Mecca balsam 7 oz. Tolu balsam 3½ oz. Rose water 14 oz. Mecca balsam has been a rare article in commerce for many years. That which is usually sold as such is more or less adulterated or an imitation. The genuine was derived from Balsamodendron Opobalsamum Kunth. Cucumber Cold-Cream A. Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 2¼ oz. Spermaceti 2¼ oz. Extract of cucumber 5½ oz. Cucumber juice, fresh 2 lb. The cucumber juice is carefully heated to 60 or 65° C. (140- 149°F.), rapidly filtered from the curds, and at once added to the
- 77. rest of the mass. Cucumber Cold-Cream B. Lard 6 lb. Spermaceti 2 lb. Benzoin 7 oz. Extract of cucumber2 lb. The benzoin is first macerated with the warmed fat for twenty-four hours, and this aromatic fat is treated in the usual manner. Lip Salve A (Pomade Blanche pour les Lèvres). Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 4½ oz. Spermaceti 4½ oz. Oil of bitter almond ½ oz. Oil of lemon grass 75 grains. Oil of rose 75 grains. Red Lip Salve B (Pomade à la Rose Pour les Lèvres). Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 4½ oz. Spermaceti 4½ oz. Oil of geranium 150 grains. Oil of santal 90 grains. Alkanet root 4½ oz. The beautiful red color which distinguishes this preparation is produced with alkanet root; the mass, before the essential oils are added, being macerated for from six to eight hours, under frequent stirring, with the comminuted root, and then decanted from the sediment.
- 78. Cherry Salve C (Pomade Cerise). Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 4½ oz. Spermaceti 4½ oz. Oil of bitter almond ½ oz. Oil of sweet bay 150 grains. Alkanet root 4½ oz. The procedure is the same as for pomade à la rose. Almond Cold-Cream. Expressed oil of almond2 lb. Wax 4½ oz. Spermaceti 4½ oz. Rose water 2 lb. Oil of bitter almond ¾ oz. Civet 30 grains. Almond Balls (Savonettes d’Amandes). Tallow 2 lb. Wax 10½ oz. Spermaceti 7 oz. Oil of bitter almond150 grains. Oil of clove 75 grains. Oil of cinnamon 75 grains. This is usually formed into balls. Rosebud Cold-Cream. Almond oil 2 lb. Wax 2½ oz.
- 79. Spermaceti 2½ oz. Rose water 2 lb. Oil of rose 75 grains. Oil of geranium75 grains. Violet Cold-Cream (Crême de Violettes). Huile antique de violettes2 lb. Wax 2½ oz. Spermaceti 2½ oz. Violet water 2 lb. Oil of bitter almond 150 grains. Oil of neroli 75 grains. APPENDIX. Nail Powder (Poudre pour les Ongles; Fingernagel-Pulver). The finger nails, being an appendage to the skin, belong under the head of the Care of the Skin; we therefore give a formula for preparing the powder used for imparting smoothness and gloss to the nails. For use, some of the powder is poured on a piece of soft glove leather and the nails are rubbed until they shine. Oxide of tin 4 lb. Carmine ¾ oz. Oil of bergamot150 grains. Oil of lavender 150 grains. The oxide of tin must be an impalpable powder and is mixed with the other substances in a mortar.
- 80. CHAPTER XXII. THE PREPARATIONS USED FOR THE CARE OF THE HAIR (POMADES AND HAIR OILS). The hair, the beautiful ornament of the human body, requires fat for its care and preservation, for there are but few persons whose scalp is so vigorous that the hair can derive sufficient nourishment from it to maintain its gloss and smoothness. Among the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germans various ointments were in use for the care of the hair. In Rome there was even, as we have stated in an earlier part of the book, a special guild of ointment-makers or unguentarii. They employed a process for making their ointments fragrant which resembles that of maceration in present use. The so-called pomades (from pomum, apple) were prepared by sticking a fine apple full of spices and placing it for a long time in liquid fat which absorbed the odor of the spices. In the present state of chemical science, the basis of every pomade or hair oil is formed by some fat perfumed with aromatic substances and at times colored. The fats generally used are lard, beef marrow, tallow, bears’ grease, olive or almond oil; some of the firmer fats receive an addition of a certain amount of paraffin, spermaceti, or wax, in order to give the pomade greater consistence. As in the manufacture of all the finer articles, it is essential that whatever fat is employed should be perfectly pure; only fat which is absolutely neutral, i.e., free from acid, can be used, and any sample with but a trace of rancidity (containing free fatty acids) should be rejected on account of the penetrating odor peculiar to several of these acids.
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