A war of containment: The heroic image in The Battle of Maldon

Studia Neophilologica

Volumn 74, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 60-75

  Matto, Michael ^a  

^a YESHIVA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149200633     PISSN: 00393274     EISSN: 16512308     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00393270252956197     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. E. V. Gordon, The Battle of Maldon (London: Methuen, 1937) 5
2. Edward B. Irving, Jr., "The Heroic Style in 'The Battle of Maldon,'" Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 457-67, at 458. Irving has perhaps been unfairly criticized for these comments, however, as his treatment of the poem in the article does not rely on thinking of the poem as journalism in the way that Gordon's introduction does
3. See Bessinger, "Maldon and the Óláfsdrápa: An Historical Caveat," in Studies in Old English in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene: U Oregeon P, 1963), 23-35
4. George Clark, "The Battle of Maldon: A Heroic Poem," Speculum 43 (1968): 52-71, at 56
5. Also, N. F. Blake takes an even stronger stand for the imaginative provenance of the poem than the earlier critics in his "The Genesis of The Battle of Maldon," Anglo-Saxon England 7 (1978): 119-29
6. Two recent collections exemplify this see-saw: The Battle of Maldon AD 991, ed. Donald G. Scragg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), published in celebration of the millennial anniversary of the battle, is largely a collection of information about military workings, biography, and other background information with little discussion of the poem (though the Scragg does open the collection with a slightly revised version of his 1981 edition of the text)
7. More varied are the essays in Janet Cooper, ed., The Battle of Maldon: Fiction and Fact (London: Hambledon P, 1993) - see in particular the contributions by Paul Szarmach, Ute Schwab, and Roberta Frank for examples of essays that offer fresh approache s to the text. Cooper's title, a reworking of the title of Scragg's contribution called "Fact or Fiction?" consciously replaces the binary "or" with an inclusionary "and"; still, her effort to collapse the binary underscores the fact that the terms of the issue had not changed much as of 1993
8. Edward I. Condren, "From Politics to Poetry: Ambivalent Ethics in The Battle of Maldon," Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 53-66, at 53
9. His reference to Ryle comes from Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York, Basic Books, 1973) 15-16
10. Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1981) 13
11. Scragg's edition has effectively replaced Gordon's as the standard edition of the poem; therefore, all citations from Maldon are from this edition. Citations from poems other than Maldon are from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, eds. George P. Krapp and Elliot van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1931-53). Line numbers are cited in the text; translations are my own
12. John D. Niles, "Locating Beowulf in Literary History," Exemplaria 5 (1993): 79-109, at 79
13. John D. Niles, "Maldon and Mythopoesis," Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 89-121, at 92
14. According to Niles, the poem asks, "If the legendary Byrhtnoth, backed by his elite troops as well as the fyrd of the men of Essex, all of them armed and in good array, could not defeat an army of Vikings on their home turf, then how could any other leader be expected to do so?" Niles, "Maldon and Mythopoesis," 106
15. Though the bibliography of recent work on the mind's use of "image schemata" in cognition is growing exponentially, some primary works include: Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1987)
16. Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
17. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1987)
18. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)
19. For applications of this workto literary theory inparticular, see (among others): Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, "Literary Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinarity," Mosaic 32 (1999): 123-39
20. F. Elizabeth Hart, "Matter, System and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics," Configurations 6 (1998): 311-43
21. and "Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor," Mosaic 28 (1995): 1-23
22. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996)
23. and Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987)
24. Elaine Scarry, "On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction, " Representations 52 (1995): 1-26
25. Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994)
26. Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: SUNYP, 1993)
27. Mark Johnson takes up an analysis of the mind's use of containment imagery in The Body in the Mind, 21-23 and 39-40
28. Gale R. Owen-Crocker, "Hawks and Horse-Trappings: The Insignia of Rank," in Scragg, Maldon AD 991, 220-37, at 222. The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, shows Harold Godwinson riding with his hawk, a sign of his royal position
29. For an outline of the positions, see Virginia Valentine, "Offa's The Battle of Maldon," Explicator 44:3 (1986): 5-7
30. Heather Stuart, "The Meaning of Maldon," Neophilologus 66 (1982): 126-39, also reads the release of the hawk as marking a division between the battlefield and the woods, but in her effort to devise an anti-heroic reading for the poem, she calls the battlefield a place of "captivity" and the woods as a place of "freedom" (see esp. 131-32). This division, and the others she finds to reinforce this reading, I think are better explained by the motif of containment that I advance below
31. While the military action as described in Maldon is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the true operations of Anglo-Saxon armies, the shieldwall is certainly the favorite maneuver for poetic and artistic representations of battles from this period. It is this poetic function - and the image of containment it suggests - that I am most interested in here. The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the clearest example of an artistic representation of the interlocking shields. Richard Abels cites the Bayeux Tapestry, Judith 301, Brunanburh 5, and Elene 648 as examples of artistic uses of the shieldwall motif, in his "English Tactics, Strategy and Military Operations in the Late Tenth Century," in Scragg, Maldon AD 991, 143-55
32. Joseph Boswell and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, Oxford UP, 1898)
33. Supplement, ed. Toller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1921)
34. Addenda, ed. Alistair Campbell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972)
35. Bessinger argued in "Maldon and the Óláfsdrápa, " 28-29, that the "west" here was aformulaic alliterative device, not an historically accurate depiction of direction
36. Allan A. Metcalf notes in his "'West' in Maldon," Papers in Language and Literature 6 (1970): 314-16, that in a larger geographical context, "west" would nonetheless be towards the center of England while "east" would indicate a retreat. But whether the choice of "west" was motivated by alliteration or by geography, that the poet chooses to indicate a direction at all is my interest here
37. also G. C. Britton, "The Characterization of the Vikings in The Battle of Maldon" Notes and Queries 210 (1965): 85-87
38. The historical Byrhtnoth's best military strategy may well have been to engage the Vikings at Maldon, according to the analysis of Byrhtnoth's military position put forth by Warren Samouce and later by Duncan Macrae-Gibson. Both argue that the historic Byrhtnoth could not allow the Vikings to leave without a fight, since the Vikings would otherwise return to their ships and sail down the coast to attack another town where the folk might be less prepared to intercept them. Byrhtnoth has no choice but to engage the Vikings where they stand or risk a Viking attack at a less well-defended point. His strategy, then, if we accept the situation as it is presented in the poem, is first to allow the Vikings over the causeway during low tide, and then to establish the shieldwall a short distance from the river. As the tide came back in, the Vikings would be trapped between the water and the English shieldwall, cut off from their ships. See Warren Samouce, "General Byrhtnoth," JEGP 62 (1963): 129-35
39. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, "How Historical is The Battle of Maldon" Medium Ævum 39 (1970): 89-107
40. For an elaboration of the argument, see Richard North, "Getting to Know the General in The Battle of Maldon," Medium Ævum 60 (1991): 1-15
41. The best survey of the arguments remains that of Helmut Gneuss, "The Battle of Maldon 89: Byrhtnoô's ofermod Once Again," Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 117-37
42. though Paul Cavill reopens some questions that Gneuss had declared closed in his "Interpretation of The Battle of Maldon, Lines 84-90: A Review and Reassessment," Studia Neophilologica 67 (1995): 149-64
43. The phrase scir water is worth a closer look than I can give it here. J. R. Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed., (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1960) includes an entry for the compound scirwœter with the definition "water forming a boundary, " and cites Chronical 656 E as the only occurance. E. V. Gordon in his edition of the poem notes the strangenes s of calling the Blackwater scir ("clear") but dismisses Clark Hall's definition as "not very likely in this context, " (note to line 98). I do not necessarily think that we should read the phrase scir water as a compound "shirewater" (i.e., "boundary-water"), but a pun on a traditional term used to set land boundarie s would not be out of place here given the topos of boundary-crossin g at work in this poem
44. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, eds., A Guide to Old English, 5th ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 245, note to 11. 89-90
45. J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son," Essays and Studies n.s. 6 (1953): 1-18, at 13. I cite Robinson's note because of its influence on generations of new students of Old English
46. Nor is it my intention to provide a full summary of the scholarship to date; for the purposes of this essay it is simply too large a question. As I noted above, Gneuss and Cavill provide the best overviews of the evidence about meaning of the term ofermod. For the thematic question of heroism in the poem as it is embodied in the figure of Byrhtnoth, one would do well to follow the debate between James E. Cross and George Clark: James E. Cross, "Oswald and Byrhtnoth: A Christian Saint and a Hero Who is Christian," English Studies 46 (1965): 93-109
47. and "Mainly on Philology and Interpretive Criticism of Maldon" Old English Studies in Honor of John C Pope, eds. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto, Toronto UP, 1974), 235-53
48. "The Hero of Maldon: Vir Pius et Strenuus," Speculum 54 (1979): 257-82
49. and "Maldon: History, Poetry, and Truth," De Gustibus: Essays for Alain Renoir, ed. John Miles Foley (New York and London: Garland, 1992), 66-84
50. M. R. Godden, "Anglo-Saxons on the Mind," in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday, eds. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 271-98, at 291
51. Eric Jaeger, "Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality," Speculum 65 (1990): 845-59, at 848
52. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990)
53. Soon Ai Low, "Mental Cultivation in Guthlac B," Neophilologus 81 (1997): 625-36, at 630
54. Eric Jager, "The Word in the 'Breost': Interiority and the Fall in Genesis B," Neophilologus 75 (1991): 279-90, at 279
55. This conception of the mind also suggests a slightly different reading of Byrhtwold's famous maxim than is customary: Hige sceal pe heardra, heorte pe cenre, mod sceal pe mare, pe ure mægen lytlao. (312-13) Thought must be so much the firmer, the heart so much the bolder, the spirit so much the greater, as our might lessens. Rather than reading the first three half-lines as examples of synonymous apposition, we might see them as referencing interrelated but separate aspects of the mind. Clearly a warrior's performance is expected to improve as his mod increases, which would suggest that having a large amount of mod is desirable. But the key is to have great spirit while at the same time keeping it contained by a strong mind, keeping the mind heardra ("harder") and cenre ("keener"). We could say that Byrhtnoth's ofermod was due not his abundance of mod, but rather to the fact that his containing heorte did not keep pace and harden the hige - he lacked the strong containing force needed to keep it under control. The connection between these passages has been noticed before, but only in terms of the increase of mod - as Cavill says, "It started with ofermod and will end demanding more and more mod from those who remain," 156. Similarly see Richard Hillman, "Defeat and Victory in The Battle of Maldon: The Christian Resonances Reconsidered," English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 385-95, at 390. But these readings do not account for the containment schema that places the mod inside the heorte
56. Along with the examples I give here, see Godden, 287-88
57. See "Lexical Structure in The Battle of Maldon," in Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers, eds. Geraldine Barnes, et. al. (Sydney: U of Sydney, 1989), 63-69, at 67
58. Rosemary Woolf, "The Ideal of Men Dying with their Lord in Germania and in The Battle of Maldon" AngloSaxon England 5 (1976): 63-81
59. Earl R. Anderson, "The Roman Idea of a comitatus and its Application to The Battle of Maldon" Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 15-26, at 21
60. Niles, "Maldon and Mythopoesis," 111
61. Roberta Frank, "The Ideal of Men Dying with their Lord in the The Battle of Maldon: Anachronism or Nouvelle Vague" in People and Places in Northern Europe 500-1600: Essays in Honor of Peter Hayes Sawyer, eds. Niels Lund and Ian Wood (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), 95-106, at 97
62. also, John M. Hill remarks, "As either experience or theme, nothing like this (i.e., suicidal heroism) seems to have existed before the Conversion or perhaps even before the tenth century," in his "Transcendental Loyalty in The Battle of Maldon" Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 67-88, at 82