The journey forth: Elegiac consolation in Guthlac B

English Studies

Volumn 79, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 489-500

  Powell, Stephen D ^a  

^a TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 0345912630     PISSN: 0013838X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00138389808599153     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago, 1994), x.
2. Ibid., xi.
3. Rosemary Woolf, 'Saints' Lives', in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. Eric Gerald Stanley (London, 1966), 58.
4. James L. Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration: Guthlac B', in Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. James L. Rosier (The Hague, 1970), 82.
5. Margaret Enid Bridges, Generic Contrast in Old English Hagiographical Poetry, Anglistica 22 (Copenhagen, 1984), 55.
6. See the Introduction to The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York, 1936), esp. xiii-xiv.
7. Charles W. Kennedy even supplies an alternative title for the poem, Guthlac's Death (The Earliest English Poetry [London, 1943], 251).
8. See Bertram Colgrave's introduction to his edition of the Vita, Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956), especially p. 18, as well as his notes to Ch. L, pp. 192-93.
9. Felix's Life, 150.
10. See Paul Gonser's edition, Das Angelsächsische Prosa-Leben des Hl. Guthlac, Anglistische Forschungen 27 (Heidelberg, 1909).
11. This and all further references to the Old English poems of The Exeter Book are to Krapp and Dobbie's edition. Throughout, however, I follow the now nearly universal practice of referring to the two Guthlac poems as Guthlac A and Guthlac B, rather than Guthlac I and Guthlac II, as Krapp and Dobbie titled them. The poems have consecutive line numbers, with Guthlac B beginning at line 819.
12. Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, Guthlac of Croyland: A Study of Heroic Hagiography (Washington, 1981), 38.
13. Thoms D. Hill reminds us of the commonplace that Old English verse hagiography is 'patterned after Old English secular heroic poetry'. I suggest that the generic interpenetration in Guthlac B is more profound than mere patterning. 'Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography', in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints' Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1996), 38.
14. Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 85.
15. Similar tendencies have been noticed in other hagiography. Frederick C. Paxton cites Pierre Boglioni's argument that in the earliest Latin saints' lives foreknowledge of death meant that the saint was already separated from the world. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1990), 38n.
16. See Bridges, Generic Contrast, 172-78 for a complete discussion of the Guthlac B-poet's treatment of the separation of body and soul.
17. It is interesting to note that Guthlac's journey is less invisible than the ordinary mortal's might be. After taking his final communion, he 'biseah pa to heofona rice, / glædmod to geofona leanum, ond pa his gæst onsende / weorcum wlitigne in wuldres dream' (1302-4). The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of saints.
18. See, for example, Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 255, Bridges, Generic Contrast, 169, and Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 86.
19. See, for example, Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 255, Bridges, Generic Contrast, 169, and Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 86.
20. See, for example, Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 255, Bridges, Generic Contrast, 169, and Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 86.
21. Jane Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford, 1979), 37, 39. Kennedy adds to this: 'The poet, in the course of 12 lines [987-99], personifies Death in three quite distinct images: Death, the cupbearer; Death, the keeper of the door which swings suddenly wide; and Death, the lone and relentless warrior who rushes on man with greedy grasp' (The Earliest English Poetry, 255). Although there is a certain amount of personification of death in the poem, I am reluctant to equate, as Kennedy does, Satan, the feond of the poem, who functions as cupbearer (just as the traditional Satan functions as applebearer), with death itself. There must be a distinction between the drink, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and the result of the drinking, death; the feond is the tempter, not death itself. I also find no keeper at the door Kennedy mentions: 'him duru sylfa / on pa slionan tid sona ontyneo' (991-92, my emphasis). Kennedy's argument confuses death with the agents of death - the doors and cupbearers, as well as the feondas and deoflas - which are indeed vital and active parts of Guthlac B. Bridges puts the matter more accurately, when she writes. '[The devils] are aligned with death through their common designation as the enemy', and invites us to compare feond in line 864, which actually means death, with other uses, when the word means an actor in the causing of death. (Generic Contrast, 169. The other examples are in lines 902, 915, 961, and 982). The fiend is, in short, aligned with, but not identical to death.
22. Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 86.
23. Olsen, Guthlac of Croyland, 79.
24. It seems wise to assume that bleatan, whatever its exact meaning for the poet, is somehow negative.
25. Edward M. Palumbo points out that the 'Wyrd theme' expressed in lines 1057-59 is absent in the corresponding section of Felix and demonstrates 'the poet's knowledge of a motif which occurs in the heroic as well as elegiac poetry of Old English'. The Literary Use of Formulas in Guthlac II and the Relation to Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci (The Hague, 1977), 39.
26. It is not my purpose to enter into the longstanding critical debate about the definition of the Old English elegy. I prefer to define the genre empirically, accepting the corpus of poems which have been placed in the genre as elegies (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, The Ruin, and perhaps The Riming Poem) and then attempting to extract from these poems the characteristics which draw them together. The elements some or all of them have in common work together to create what B. J. Timmer described more than a half century ago as an 'elegiac mood'. 'The Elegiac Mood in Old English Poetry', ENGLISH STUDIES, 24 (1942), 41. Timmer claims only Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament are truly elegies, but 'we are certainly justified in speaking of an elegiac mood in Old English poetry', a mood which may be found in Old English epic poetry and Beowulf, as well as in some of the so-called elegies. I am content in this context to let the difference between the elegies and the elegiac mood found in these and other poems remain slightly blurred. Thus, I am willing to accept that few elegies will have all the elegiac qualities Timmer and other critics specify. Herbert Pilch's empirical definition of an elegy, for example, is both convincing and useful, but in its specificity too restrictive to allow examination of generic interpenetrations. Pilch writes: 'The Old English elegy is a monologue spoken before sunrise by an unnamed narrator. It contains no reference to a specific geographical locality or to any definite historical period. ... The setting includes the sea with cliffs, hail, snow, rain, and storms, plus the meadhall of heroic poetry with its lords, warriors, hawks, horses, and precious cups.' 'The Elegiac Genre in Old English and Early Welsh Poetry', Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 29 (1964), 211.
27. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 258.
28. Pilch, 'The Elegiac Genre', 213.
29. Greenfield, 'The Formulaic Expression of "Exile" in Anglo-Saxon Poetry', Speculum, 30 (1955), 203. The others are 'departure (initiative movement)' and 'seeking'.
30. Ibid., 201.
31. Palumbo is something of an exception. He believes that the unavoidably of death - even for such a holy man as Saint Guthlac - and his servant's grief because of his master's impending death are 'two dominant themes of Guthlac II, which relate it to the elegies' (The Literary Use of Formulas, 17). But Palumbo does not relate the disciple's grief to the theme of exile.
32. Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 88. Rosier believes, 'This collocation [of soul and body], or some variant of it, occurs sporadically elsewhere in Old English poetry..., but it never occurs in any one text with such frequency, in so many lexical and phrasal recombinations, and as a principle of organization, as it does in Guthlac B'.
33. I use the Wanderer only because he seems to me like the most paradigmatic exile. Any of the elegiac exiles could probably be used, mutatis mutandis, in my argument.
34. Rosier, 'Death and Transfiguration', 85.
35. Olsen goes so far as to claim that the poem 'makes the disciple a general representative of fallen humanity and explores the effects of Guthlac's illness and death on him just as it earlier explored the effects of the Fall on Adam and Eve and their descendants' (Guthlac of Croyland, 83). Frederick M. Biggs, in turn, argues that the saint's sister 'personifies the hope of the final reunification of the body and soul at the end of time'. 'Unities in the Old English Guthlac B', JEGP, 89 (1990), 161. Although I agree that the disciple and the sister figure as representatives of doubting and undoubting humanity, both Olsen and Biggs ignore Guthlac's role in the poem. Indeed, the poet seems very concerned with showing how Guthlac himself is affected by the confrontation of his death and the grief of his disciple. Thus, Olsen's earlier statement, 'Guthlac B does not, in fact, present even Guthlac as a vividly personified character, but merely as a typical human being whose life demonstrates the effects of the Fall and the Redemption' (Guthlac of Croyland, 82), seems to me to be only partially correct, correct in its notation of the way in which Guthlac's life and death reenact the multifarious effects of the Fall, but wrong to say that a saint has to be more than a 'typical human being' to be 'a vividly personified character'. Indeed, the genius of the Guthlac B-poet, I believe, rests in his ability to turn the rather ordinary saint we know from Felix and Guthlac A into a character whom his audience can understand and perceive as human, in spite of his sainthood. By becoming an ordinary man, this saint becomes extraordinary.
36. Woolf, 'Saints' Lives', 58.
37. See John C. Pope's speculations on how much of Guthlac B is missing in his 'Palaeography and Poetry: Some Solved and Unsolved Problems of the Exeter Book', in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, eds M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London, 1978), 35-41.
38. Roberts, The Guthlac Poems, 37. Roberts approaches this sort of speculation with some care, and so do I.
39. Thomas D. Hill, 'The First Beginning and the Purest Earth: Guthlac B, Lines 1-14', Notes and Queries, 226 (1981), 389.
40. See Greenfield, 'The Old English Elegies', 143, and Pilch, 'The Elegiac Genre', 212.
41. See Greenfield, 'The Old English Elegies', 143, and Pilch, 'The Elegiac Genre', 212.
42. Peter J. Lucas sees redemption as even more central to the poem: 'Guthlac B, utilizing and expanding the hints already present in Felix, and exploiting the timing of Guthlac's death, describes it in terms strongly reminiscent of the imagery and symbolism used to commemorate and celebrate the Risen Christ in the Easter Vigil'. 'Easter, the Death of St Guthlac and the Liturgy for Holy Saturday in Felix's Vita and the Old English Guthlac B', Medium Ævum, 61 (1992), 11.
43. Robert E. Bjork argues that the disciple and thus the poem would have achieved 'an eschatological vision that bespeaks an absolute hope', as does The Wanderer. The Old English Verse Saints' Lives (Toronto, 1985), 109.
44. Indeed, of the twenty-nine words for death I have identified, three (deaogedal, peodengedal, deaowege) appear to be hapax legomena and three others (gæstgedal, ealdorlegu, deaoberende) do not appear elsewhere in the known corpus of Old English verse (nydgedal occurs only in Guthlac A [445]), according to J. B. Bessinger, Jr. and Philip H. Smith, Jr.'s Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Ithaca, 1978).