Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf', The Journal of English and Germanic ...... one-third of kennings in Old English refer to the human body or the breast, i.e.,.
Q UESTIONS OF D WELLING IN A NGLO -S AXON P OETRY AND M EDIEVAL M YSTICISM : INHABITING L ANDSCAPE , B ODY, AND M IND Patricia Dailey
But had they no witness? I omit God […] but had they not themselves and the testimony of Conscience? — J. Norris, Hierocles, 37 They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars — on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. —Robert Frost, ‘Desert Places’
I. Dwelling and Poetry
H
ow does medieval poetry provide a space for posing the question of dwelling? How does it relate to the question of how one inhabits a world? Who or what of a subject remains in a poem? While much criticism or commentary on medieval poetry seems to answer these questions, directly or indirectly, through a chosen methodology or interpretation, the question of who or what of a subject remains in a poem continues to haunt our understanding of medieval texts. After the disappearance of an authorial voice, scholars have turned towards questions of self-representation, performativity, gender, or embodiment as a way to indirectly mark the gap between text and the question of subjectivity, yet this very move silently assumes a subject constituted through its representational capacities and identifications. Rather than seek out constellations of identity, I will look at points of resistance to, or the limits of subjectivity in several poems, and demonstrate how these limits become
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articulated in what I would like to call ‘the figural body’ of the poem itself. I will examine the question of dwelling and subjectivity with regard to two AngloSaxon poems, Beowulf and The Ruin, and will compare them with two later medieval texts by Beguines: Hadewijch II’s Mengeldichten and, to a lesser extent, Marguerite Porete’s Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties.1 Although this would appear to be an odd grouping of texts, the consistent use of landscape as a measure of an internal limit invites comparative analysis in a manner that is not merely thematic: for each of these texts the landscape becomes a figure for staging the contingency of time, world, and body in relation to poetic language. Landscape and the body are intimately related and bring to the fore the detachable, contingent, hospitable, or divisible nature of dwelling from earth or world.2 The underlying contexts, thematically, historically, and theologically 1
Hadewijch’s works, written in Middle Dutch in the early thirteenth century (c. 1230), are comprised of fourteen visions (Visionen) written in prose, thirty-one letters (Brieven) written in prose with some passages in rhyming couplets, twenty-nine poems in couplets (Mengeldichten), forty-five poems in stanzas (Strofische Gedichten), and a ‘list of the perfect’ written in prose. The only English editions of her work are The Complete Works, trans. by Columba Hart, OSB (New York, 1980), which omits the list of the perfect and poems 17–29 of the Mengeldichten, and the poems in stanzas in the dual language edition Poetry of Hadewijch, trans. by Marieke van Baest (Leuven, 1998). Letters 1–20 have been translated by E. Colledge in Medieval Netherlands Religious Literature (Leiden, 1965). For translated sections of her work see the bibliography in The Complete Works. The standard Middle Dutch editions of her works were first ‘rediscovered’ and edited by Joseph Van Mierlo but have subsequently been re-edited, with the exception of the Mengeldichten. While Van Mierlo’s editions are still widely used, the following publications may be considered the standard editions: Strofische Gedichten, ed. by E. Rombauts and N. De Paepe (Zwolle, 1961); Visionen, ed. by F. Willaert (Amsterdam, 1996); De Visionen van Hadewijch, 2 vols, ed. by P. Mommaers (Nijmengen, 1979); De brieven van Hadewijch, ed. by P. Mommaers (Averbode and Kampen, 1990); and Hadewijch: Mengeldichten, ed. by J. Van Mierlo (Antwerp, 1952). For an extensive bibliography on Hadewijch up to 1986, see G. J. Lewis, F. Willaert, and M.-J. Govers, Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1989). The most thorough study on Hadewijch’s work is Frank Willaert, De poëtica van Hadewijch in de Strofische gedichten (Utrecht, 1984) and Paul Mommaers with Elizabeth Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer — Beguine — Love Mystic (Leuven, 2004). Although one may assume that Hadewijch addresses her community of women in her letters and elsewhere, all biographical information about her and her community remains speculative. All translations throughout are mine unless noted otherwise. 2
While this approach harbours Heideggerian overtones in coupling the question of dwelling with that of poetry, I do not share Heidegger’s distinction between dwelling and inhabitation, the former a human trait, and the latter reserved for the realm of the animals, whom he deems ‘deprived of world’ (and thus not included in ontology). What is of chief interest to me, as opposed to Heidegger, is thus not primarily the sense of place accompanied by a Weltanschauung,
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speaking, differ with regard to each other. For the Anglo-Saxon texts, separation, transience, and hospitality are central if not defining motifs in how dwelling relates to home and exile, Christian and pre-Christian senses of life and afterlife.3 For the mystical texts, detachment (from the will, body, or proper name) clearly harbours a theological overtone in relation to the desire to become one with Christ and the longed-for afterlife once the flesh is left behind. The role of communal memory and the absorption into it through the medium of language (as lof, poetry, or sacred text) is significant for both. The mystic leaves what is proper to the self in a general movement of expropriation via imitatio and the desire to become the exempla of a text (albeit Scripture, the Word made flesh, that is Christ, or the text which the divine has written through her and must be performed). The relation between works and deeds, and the desire to become text, as in the sense of lof or imitatio is critical for both and merits lengthy analysis, which can only be addressed here in part.4 These texts are separated from each other in historical time, language, and genre. The two Old English poems have no identifiable author, are speculatively dated to the second half of the tenth century, and partake in oral formulaic verse, a linguistic form which often hosted its speakers, transiting from mouth to mouth. The two mystical texts, the first written in Middle Dutch, the second in Old French by an identifiable Beguine, were written in the mid-thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries respectively and also partake in a kind of detachability from their speakers, for they claim to articulate another voice within the mystic, the voice of the divine, which often inhabits and haunts the mystic, divesting her
but the possibility of a space that would prefigure this differentiation and harbour an indifference to a ‘world’. I am not arguing for a unity of Being in poetry, nor for an overcoming of divisions, cuts, or ruptures within the domain of poetry; rather, I am arguing for the way in which poetry attests to or bears witness to a disruption that would prevent this kind of grounding and generates a space and time that resists appropriation by, yet is intrinsic to, its subjects. 3
As Anita Riedinger points out, ‘This omnipresent tension between what is — a separation from home — and what is desired — a return to home — enhances the subliminal drama of much Old English poetry. It is a relatively rare poem, in fact, that does not make some allusion to home’ (‘“Home” in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 96 (1995), 51–59). 4
The complexity involved in the comparison between the two is the subject of my current book, Promised Bodies, and is beyond the scope of this paper. For study on the negative relation between the female body and the Anglo-Saxon book see Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Broken Bodies and Singing Tongues: Gender and Voice in the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 23 Psychomachia’, Anglo-Saxon England, 30 (2001), 137–44.
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of her proper name. Despite the seeming disparity in this grouping of poems and texts, they provide the context for a behind the scenes discourse on the notion of subjectivity and selfhood, of sylf and self, through their respective treatment of landscape and the way landscape is intertwined with the body. By landscape, I intend both what one designates as a ‘natural background’ and the structures or buildings that provide a backdrop or setting for dwelling. Like their pictorial counterparts, landscape in medieval poetry often depicts a kind of threshold or dividing line between two differing spaces. In this essay, I will show how certain poetic devices that are implicated in landscape, namely personification and, to a lesser extent, metaphor, serve to highlight the interrelation between landscape and the body. Personification usually serves to attribute a human personality or quality to an impersonal thing, investing an object with subjective attributes; however, in these poems, I argue that the use of personification serves an opposite end, exposing the inhuman in the human and the nonsubjective in the subjective.5 In other words, these instances of personification highlight what in the subject is not properly of the subject, what impersonal thing or spacing remains in what is thought of as the subject. I will not focus on a self presented as such, a self which is properly manifest in its representation (and constituted as representation), for this self, I argue, better represents our expectations as modern readers of medieval texts. Rather than focusing on constructions of person and voice, I will turn to a landscape that bears witness to the intimacy of solitude in three poetic texts.
5
For studies on the ties between personification and landscape, see Thomas Raff, ‘Die Ikonographie der mittelalterlichen Windpersonifikationen’, Aachener Kunstblätter, 48 (1978–79), 71–218. On landscape as a representation of social structure see Matthias Ebberle, Individuum und Landschaft. Zur Enstehung und Entwicklung der Landschaftsmalerei (Geissen, 1980) and Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999). Unlike Neville, my argument does not intend to identify the social or the cultural in landscape; rather, I seek to highlight a hiatus that emerges in mystical and AngloSaxon texts between self and landscape in order to show how something nonsubjective haunts both as spatialization or as the possibility of space. For Hadewijch, the theme of personification is important not only in the sense of the incarnation of Christ, but it is also important to the sense of becoming a person, that is, imitating the Passion (in an active way) and becoming united with Minne in the unity of the Trinity. This sense of becoming a person is also tied to a separation from God and to the substitute dwelling of this experience in language.
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II. The Subject of Medieval Literature / The Subject of Modernity Redefining the ‘subject’ of a medieval poem resonates in the way the ‘subject’ of the Middle Ages is conceived. That the fine seams that bind a subject together in a medieval context share a thread with our modern ego or cogito, is a commonplace presupposition. While a connection would seem to necessarily bind and hold elements of a voice, body, and mind together with a social or experiential context in order for any coherent contextualization of the history of a self or a subject in or of a text, it is not at all clear that this seeming connection holds in AngloSaxon texts or in medieval women’s mystical poetry. Interpreters and translators of Anglo-Saxon texts often proceed as if the speaker in a given text (as well as the presupposed author behind such a text) shared in our contemporary sense of possessing a self and personhood. The widely used translation of The Seafarer illustrates this common praxis, using the reflexive pronoun sylf as a mold upon which a substantive self is constructed. S. A. J. Bradley’s misleading translation of The Seafarer’s ‘mæg ic be me sylfum’ (Seafarer 1), as ‘I can tell the true riddle of my own self’, heralds the arrival of this unmediated transhistorical consciousness upon the scene of Old English literature.6 As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Michael Matto have noted, the appearance of the sylf or self as a substantive self falsely traces a familiar figure upon a strange body of prose, through the corpus of the Old English language, from The Seafarer to King Alfred, and onwards.7
6
As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, the problem with S.A. J. Bradley’s translation is that the reflexive pronoun ‘sylf’ is turned into a substantive, equipping ‘the Seafarer with a confessional personality and illustrat[ing] how current interpretation in the field assumes an identity between modern and medieval self-consciousness’. This is expanded by Pope and Greenfield’s discussions on the Seafarer, where, as O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, ‘In Greenfield’s second argument, “for myself” skates back and forth over the slippery border of grammar and semantics. That is, while Greenfield acknowledges that sylf is grammatically a reflexive pronoun, he begs the question by claiming that his translation uses the word’s “semantic and not its grammatical property”, that is, that in the name of semantics he can read self/sylf as “by and for the speaker’s self” (emphasis added), producing a substantive self’ (‘Body and Law in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 27 (1998), 209–232 (p. 210)). A literal translation of the first line would read, ‘I myself can sing a true song’. 7 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Body and Law’; Michael Matto, ‘True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 103 (2004), 156–179. In a very compelling argument, Matto examines the tension between inner and outer in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon sylf. He writes that in The Seafarer, ‘the narrator’s concept of sylf is informed by an inner/outer schema that relates the mind, body, and soul in terms of a container and contained’ (pp. 159–160). Matto concludes, ‘The Seafarer
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The strangeness of Anglo-Saxon texts is also subject to the opposite reaction. For many readers, the mark of the medieval as such is grounded in its exclusion from the light of the modern or later medieval periods. As Overing and Lees note, ‘From the more conventional standpoint of a developmental model of history, Anglo-Saxon England is originary — inescapably different from and often irrelevant to subsequent medieval periods’.8 Even in attempts to include Anglo-Saxon texts in the history of a period, such as in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Clare Lees notes ‘medieval English literature begins after the Anglo-Saxon period’ and is ‘framed by a grand récit: medieval English literature begins with 1066 and terminates in 1547’.9 The darkness, or worse, the mysteriousness of the Middle Ages may often be rendered subjectless and inconsequent with the definition of modern self-consciousness, negated in its simplicity by a Hegelian teleology. If medieval narratives do indeed stage the question of subjectivity, the way in which this question is framed poses a problem when it is done in a purely teleological fashion, as though it were the mark of a long product of historical development, only definable from the perspective of modern self-consciousness. Lee Patterson notes of these critics who
cannot be read in ways that prefigure a modern sense of the individual. The problem of the sylf cannot be understood directly in terms of the modern self, but instead must be read in terms of late-ninth-century and early-tenth-century tensions among mechanisms for the production of wisdom, confessional technologies of personal salvation, the heroic and elegiac ethic of constraining the impulses of the inner mind, and public rituals of communal reintegration’ (p. 178). What I am attempting to highlight here is what must precede the self in order to enable even the possibility of its representation, and thus makes an analysis of modern and medieval subjects possible. 8
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, ‘Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 11 (1998), 315–334 (p. 315). Lees and Overing’s study is similar in aim to mine here, in that they want to reconsider the paradigms that structure periodization and, through this, reconsider the construction of the medieval subject in its relation to a presupposed modern self-consciousness, yet their focus is the historical construction of belief, through a reading of Aldhelm’s De Virginitate. They argue, ‘A religious critical paradigm that leaves Christianity unhistoricized, like a modernist secular orientation that ignores belief, elides the importance of the self as a product of both belief and history’, and thus take as their aim the historical-religious character of the self, and what they call ‘the female body’s symbolism and materiality’ in relation to female sanctity (p. 330). Their study aims for a subject that predominately is marked by historical time. 9
Clare Lees, ‘Analytical Survey 7: Actually Existing Anglo-Saxon Studies’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 226–27; The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David W allace (Cambridge, 1999).
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are subject to this desire for a well-defined break between modernity and the Middle Ages: These critics are not interested in historical change at all. What they want to establish is the modernity of their enterprise, the claim that in their chosen texts they descry the present condition in its initial, essential form. And to that end the Middle Ages serves as premodernity, the other that must be rejected for the modern self to be and know itself. [. . .] The Middle Ages is not a subject for discussion but the rejected object, not a prehistory whose shape can be described but the history — historicity itself — that modernity must reject in order to be itself.10
Yet while Patterson argues that ‘to write the history of the medieval subject is in effect to write the history of medieval culture’, in his attempt to efface the fabricated hiatus between the Renaissance man and the history of medieval selfhood, the modernity of his enterprise does not venture earlier than the twelfth century, leaving Anglo-Saxon texts lurking behind the scenes of revision.11 Given this unfortunate gesture, which often reproduces an already well formed resistance within the academy to the crossing between Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods, why this drive for a necessary homogeneity of selfhood and subjectivity, throughout history, and as it is manifest in literature? Why should the appearance of a connection between the subject in and of a literary text and the subject of history hold? And, finally, why should historical time be the privileged background against which traits of subjectivity become legible in a text or the favoured strategy for listening to how these texts speak? What context does medieval literature provide for the staging of subjectivity and selfhood and how
10
Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 65 (1990), 87–108 (p. 99). 11
Recent work in medieval studies attempts to address this. In her survey of recent work, Clare Lees offers a sharp critique of these divisions (in all their forms and institutional incarnations) in the interest of expanding beyond traditional and discipline-oriented modes of analysis. At the heart of this debate, and in order to promote synchronic and diachronic modes of analysis, Lees identifies the constructedness of world-making as a central issue in consideration of ‘the nature of knowledge, the beliefs that knowledge of the world mediates, and the power of language to construct, represent, and enact those beliefs’. She writes, ‘As The Ruin suggests, worlds are reckoned with — measured against — as well as described and reconstructed, and thereby make the object of poetic and clerical knowledge, as the genre of the riddle of the enigma also testifies’ (Lees, ‘Analytical Survey 7’, pp. 250, 245). Rita Copeland’s work in rhetoric from late antiquity to the Middle Ages likewise explicitly works against or across the divide of periodicity. See, for example, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991).
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does it refigure historical time? I would like to attempt to provide one possible answer to this question by taking into account a hiatus between historical time and the time of a poem, the subject in a poem and the subject of history.
III.Temporality and the Subject of ‘The Ruin’ While a poem bears witness to history, inasmuch as it offers itself as a historical document and inasmuch as its language (and its idiom or dialect) literally speaks its place and time (allowing us to attempt to date a text or localize its dialect), and speaks for what we may call its culture, it bears witness to history and to a manner of dwelling in time which does not dwell in the same way as would, for example, a monument. A poem, or a narrative, does not solely dwell as a form of pure exteriority, that is, as an object which is subjected to the unfolding of historical time, for in itself, a poem also bears witness, it generates an other time, even if it is in the form of a fiction or a desired history, like Bede’s, into which a nation will write itself. Narrative bears witness for someone or something that is no longer present. In this sense, something of the subject dwells in the poem, generating another time, something remains of a subject though its form or figure may not resemble us. But how does a poem bear witness? How does a poem dwell in time and space? What happens to the specificity of place in the work of a poetic text? The Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin circles around these questions, in the figure of a wall.12While The Ruin appears to have the innocent appearance of a nostalgic
12
The Ruin is considered by most Anglo-Saxon scholars to be an elegiac poem and survives in a ruined form as a result of damage to the later pages of the Exeter Book. While the first twelve lines are legible, out of forty-nine lines only thirty-seven are legible in entirety, making the end of the poem a guessing game. Most interpretations of the poem read The Ruin as a meditation on ‘the transience of earthly things’ (Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson, A Guide to Old English, 4th edn (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 237) or as a ‘didactic rather than purely descriptive poem’ that reflects Augustinian concerns for the ‘ineffable city of God’ and ‘dwells on the details of the world’s decline in order to move its audience to seek the point-for-point reciprocal majesty, security, and stability of the heavenly Jerusalem where earthly yearnings for noble fellowship and matching dignity of environment are fulfilled, free from the world’s mutability’ (S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Rutland, 1995), p. 201). However, no explicitly Christian references in the poem point to the urgency of this reading. On the other hand, another main branch of scholarship has meticulously tried to pin this poem to a specific place. A widely accepted hypothesis is that of R. F. Leslie, who suggests that the city is most likely tied to the Roman city of Bath, once called Bathum, and is cited in an eleventh-century
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description of a Roman ruin and witness to a manner of dwelling in the past, a great deal of temporal and verbal agitation betrays something more than just the portrait of a once lively skeleton of a town and its inhabitants. Although the descriptive narrative of this poem appears to be a subject’s meditation on a past, no subject appears as an authorial voice. The poem is haunted by the remains of a subject in a way that resembles the riddles before it in the Exeter Book.13 The biography of St Dunstan. R. F. Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, rev. edn (Exeter, 1988). However, topographical poems are not common in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Rodrigues does not disqualify this possibility, but also suggests, according to Wrenn, that ‘The Ruin may have been suggested by Latin topographical verses such as those of the sixth century Christian poet Venantius Fortunatus on the devastation of Thuringia. It is in a sense the first example of topographical verse in English and, in its tradition, probably related to the classical Latin poems in praise of particular places such as Alcuin made for York in the early ninth century (though The Ruin is rather the obverse of the conventional encomium urbis). The only other Anglo-Saxon topographical poem is the very late fragmentary piece on Durham. That The Ruin seems to have been written originally in the Mercian dialect does not necessarily diminish the importance of Leslie’s view, for Bath was in Mercian territory in the eighth century, when the poem is thought to have first taken shape’ (Louis Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English Verse Renderings of The Ruin’, NoSpine.com (2001), pp. 1–16 (p. 4) ; C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London, 1970),153–54. What I find problematic in these readings are the assumption of the value of ‘verisimilitude’ for AngloSaxons, and — given the lack of Anglo-Saxon precedents for topographical poems — the presumption of a Christian relation to mourning and time, and the privilege of a certain form of historical time. My reading seeks to work through these assumptions and provide an alternative reading. In this sense, I would align my reading with Nicholas Howe’s in placing an emphasis on the presence of the past, while noting the constant negotiation of Anglo-Saxons with previously inhabited landscapes. He writes: ‘The Ruin finds its subject in the need to interpret a visible feature of the landscape that does nothing, yet troubles the eye because it cannot be evaded. And from this fact, that the site must be observed, comes an acutely rendered description of the world here and now that should make one all the more hesitant to offer an allegorical reading of the poem’ (‘The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England: Inherited, Invented, Imagined’, in Inventing Medieval Landscapes. Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. by John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Tallahassee, 2002), pp. 91–112 (pp. 96–97). 13
One possible, although questionable, dating of The Ruin is the middle of the eighth century; the more widely accepted hypothesis follows the dating of the Exeter Book to the late tenth century. The Ruin follows The Husband’s Message and is surrounded in the manuscript by Old English riddles. These riddles are short poems, often personifications of objects or animals, often in a first-person voice, and usually end with a question asking the reader to ‘say what (or who) I am’ or to ‘interpret what I mean’, that is, to solve the riddle by naming the object whose use or physical property is described poetically. It has been speculated that The Ruin could also be a riddle; see Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 401, and William Johnson, Jr, ‘The Ruin as Body-City Riddle’, Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 397–411. All references to the
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stone wall or wealstan that figures at the meditative centre of the poem and is later echoed in the wall at the bosom or centre of the hot water of the baths, is continually personified as a witness to the mutability of time through verbs like gebidan (to endure, experience, or live) and wunian (to dwell, subsist, or occupy), yet the way in which this wall dwells is not purely of the past. Verb tenses which within the first sentence alternate between past and present tenses interpolate the pastness of the past into the present of the narrative. In the first line we are introduced into the milieu of a moment that bridges several times: ‘Wrætlic is þes wealstan; wyrde gebræcon’14 (Wondrous is this wallstone, fates captured it). The first line’s use of the demonstrative pronoun þes combined with the present tense is, followed by a preterite gebræcon — which can also mean shattered, injured, subdued, or tamed — evokes a physical and temporal immediacy that belabours the past throughout the text. The past is constantly interpolated into the present as a coupling that ultimately cannot be disengaged. The patterning of present and preterite tenses within phrases (noted by critics such as Rodrigues and Calder), followed in line three and elsewhere, does not merely signal what some critics see as a linearity of temporal events (moving from past to present).15
Exeter Book are to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record: A Collective Edition (New York, 1931–53), III: The Exeter Book (1936), ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie; The Ruin appears on pp. 227–29 in this text. 14
The Hamer translation reads, ‘Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it’ (Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981), pp. 26–29); the Alexander translation reads, ‘Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it’ (Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems (New York, 1997), pp. 2–3); Crossley-Holland’s reads, ‘Wonderful is this wall of stone, wrecked by fate’ (The Battle of Maldon and other Old English Poems, trans. by Kevin Crossley-Holland, ed. by Bruce Mitchell (New York, 1967), pp. 69–70); Bradley’s reads, ‘Wondrously ornate is the stone of this wall, shattered by fate’ (A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 402); Treharne’s reads, ‘Wondrous is this stone wall, smashed by fate’ (Elaine Treharne, Old and Middle English c. 890–1400: An Anthology (Oxford, 2004), pp. 84–88); Neville’s reads, ‘This wall stone is ornamented, broken down by fate’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 48); and Mackie’s reads, ‘Splendid is this masonry, the fates have destroyed it’) W. S. Mackie, The Exeter Book, pt 2, Early English Text Society, o.s. 194 (London, 1934), 199–201. 15 Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English Verse Renderings’, p. 17; D. G. Calder, ‘Perspective and Movement in The Ruin’, Neophilologische Mitteilungen, 72 (1971), 442–45. In her reading of The Ruin, Sarah Lynn Higley also notes that ‘this dramatic shifting between here and there and between now and then illustrates the Anglo-Saxon preoccupation not only with dynamic contrasts but with relationships among those contrasts’ (Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry (University Park, 1993)).
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It mirrors and even performs a work of mourning, marking the present of the past, as presence of past. As Nicholas Howe notes, ‘enough remains for us to know that its use of setting is meant to distance the universal of the elsewhere by depicting the sheer fact of what endures in the here and now […]. The ruined building’s “movement beyond movement” becomes the Old English poem’s “time behind time” in the landscape’.16 The question of remaining is thus posed through the multiple tenses: the question of what remains in time, what remains of life, and of the subjects who once inhabited this space.17 It is important to remember the significance of mourning in Anglo-Saxon England, in texts like Beowulf that stress the necessity of mourning even the most coveted objects and beloved of people. Lack of greed, generosity in giving, courage in facing death, and the desire for praise were qualities to be celebrated in life and death. The works of giants (enta geweorc) — which, in Beowulf, are swords, and in The Ruin (and The Wanderer), are edifices (l. 2) — are signs of a material history that must be absorbed back from the imagined time from which they came, as charmed material for the generations to come. One does not hold fast onto material objects; one lets them escape one’s grasp and allows them to pass on to others, just as this wall may be absorbed and passed down by the narrative. Interpretations of this poem which desire to attribute a uniquely Christian meaning to this theme of transitoriness (and to ignore the Germanic overtones) therefore read the poem’s temporality accordingly — objects and people perish, life is transitory, and all ends badly on earth. Yet this kind of reading (which presupposes a teleology as well as a theology) fails to hear the strangely uplifting tone that persists throughout the poem and dominates the second half. The tone literally revives the past into a celebratory moment of praise. This praise falls in line with the spirit of lof, which
16 17
Howe, ‘The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England’, p. 97.
In her astute study of the natural world as it is represented in Anglo-Saxon poetry, Jennifer Neville highlights the interrelation between the natural world and humans. She argues that the general sense of ‘nature’ is not independent from human constructedness. She notes, ‘Although “the natural world” in Old English poetry does contain elements that are included in a modern definition of the natural world — winds, seas and animals, for example — it is not a category in contrast with the supernatural. It is not really a self-sufficient, externally defined entity at all. It is instead a reflection of human constructions’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 16). Neville highlights the crucial difference in Anglo-Saxon and modern sensibilities towards nature, and emphasizes its nonmimetic and nonmoral characterization in texts.
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as we know, often battles with wyrd (or fate), as does the wall.18 The first line sets the staging for a drama between lof and wyrd: W rætlic is þes wealstan,
wyrde gebræcon
(W ondrous is this wallstone, wasted by fate)
If we read gebræcon with a bit of irony, not only reflecting the way wyrd works on a wall, but reflecting a struggle and meaning injured, captured, subdued, or tamed (as the Old English suggests) — then the personified conflict between lof and wyrd becomes traceable throughout the poem in the upwards inclinations of words that are highlighted in the landscape like the hrofas (roofs), torras (towers), scurbeorge (buildings which protect from storms), heah horngestreon (high gables), hrostbeages (ceiling vaults), and the steap geap [wag] (high, lofty wall). Rodrigues even notes that the upward buildings comprising the landscape are all artefacts that share the height of man’s aspiration as their chief trait19 To counter these upwards inclinations are the downwards motions of destruction highlighted by the repetitive rhyming past participles scorene, gedrorene, forweorone, geleorene, undereotone (respectively meaning cut or gashed; weakened or collapsed; decayed; departed or passed away; and undereaten or undermined).
18
The conflict between lof and wyrd is a common theme in Anglo-Saxon literature and is a site for the intertwining of Christian and non-Christian motifs in the literature of AngloSaxon England. On the one hand, ‘The Germanic warrior was a member of a comitatus, a warrior-band. Life was a struggle against insuperable odds, against the inevitable doom decreed by a meaningless fate — Wyrd, which originally meant “what happens”. There is no evidence in their literature that the pagan Anglo-Saxons believed in a life after death like that of Valhalla.[…] It is, however, a different kind of immortality which is stressed in their literature […] lof, which was won by bravery in battle and consisted of glory among men, the praise of those still living.[…] This is the spirit which inspired the code of the comitatus’ (Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to Old English, pp. 135–136). While the use of wyrd in the poem does not show any overt Christian references, it may also be a comingling or hybridization of both. Leslie notes, in line 24, the expression wyrd seo swiþe occurs in Solomon and Saturn where ‘it is a deliberate pre-Christian use’ (Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, p. 72, n. 24). I would side with Neville, who argues against a formalized incorporation of Christian ideology into pagan attitudes, ‘One could [… ] expect there to be a gradual incorporation of Christian ideology into originally pagan forms of expression (oral-formulaic, heroic poetry, for example).[…] Unfortunately, no trace of any progression can be found. The Anglo-Saxons appear not to have been concerned to develop a consistent cosmological scheme or approach to the “natural world”, and they used isolated elements from all of their sources without any apparent awareness of inconsistency’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 17). 19
Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English Verse Renderings’, p. 6.
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The repetition of time’s destructive actions becomes transformed into the repetitive temporality of sound. While the earth’s grasp may irreparably clutch the city, the poem’s grasp of the matter counters and transforms the repetitiveness of fate’s corrosive actions into the work of poetry. It is the living city that predominates in the second half of the poem, literally giving the work of wyrd little room for celebration and generating an other time that is not successive, but performative, since it manifests the present time of the poem’s praise. While fate is continually operating on the city and the grasp of the earth, refashioning the material of stone and flesh, the poem is continually operating on fate’s grasp and on its consuming of this material, refashioning the material of time and of matter through the bonds of language. A circularity and cyclical temporality — that could even be described as a recycling — is discernable in the poem. This is present in images such as the circularity of walls, the circular pool (the hringmere), the reference to the enta geweorc (the work of giants that is transmitted from one generation to the next), and in the strange tense of ‘oþ hund cnea werþeoda gewitan’ (ll. 8–9). This phrase is not restricted to meaning ‘while a hundred generations of (people or nations) have passed away’, but, because in this instance gewitan taken as a preterite indicative may — given the oþ (þæt) clause — also serve to indicate the implied futurity of a perfect tense, it more correctly means ‘until a hundred generations [shall] have passed away’.20 The narrative’s unearthing of the past and dwelling in history therefore does not only signal a lost past and the parcelling out of the body of the city, it also marks the promise of their present unity in the poem’s ability to provide a new fashioning of the sense of history.
IV. Underlying Space: The Westen The poem The Ruin attributes a sense of purpose to what no longer bears the specificity of place, but hovers on the vacuousness of space embodied by the westen (the wasteland, desert, wilderness). In line 27 we read: ‘wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas’, meaning ‘the martial halls became waste places’. The 20 In tackling the odd tense of gewitan here, Bruce Mitchell supports this view, since ‘the indicative was always good enough to express the idea of futurity present in oþ (þæt) clauses.[…] For what is wrong with the hitherto-accepted view that gewitan is a preterite indicative used as a perfect tense, as often happens in the absence of a regular perfect in Old English, e.g. Deor 39–40?’ (Bruce Mitchell, ‘Some Problems of Mood and Tense in Old English’, Neophilologus, 49 (1965), 44–45).
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westen signals a becoming-uninhabitable of the inhabitable, it introduces an indifference, like that of wyrd, to a space for the living, and marks an encroaching emptiness that seems, however, to have already penetrated the wall.21 Despite its seeming vacuousness, like wyrd, the westen is not excluded from the question of dwelling. To the contrary, the westen borders questions of dwelling and solitude in many Anglo-Saxon texts (for example in Alfred’s Orosius, the Old English Daniel, Genesis, Exodus, Mary of Egypt, and Beowulf, to name a few), and is incorporated into the way an inhabited place is defined. While it may seem to be outside the confines of civilization, like wyrd, the westen is a limit that defines an inside and prefigures the space of what is thought of as being within. It implies a time before time, or behind time, to use Howe’s words, in its implications of a prehistory that conditions the constitution of the living. In later medieval women’s mystical literature, the westen figures precisely at this threshold; it embodies a liminal space that is both outside and inside the mystic. Even in Anglo-Saxon texts in which Christian and pre-Christian overtones are not so easily distinguishable from one another and function in syncretic cohabitation, the penetrating quality of the westen makes for the possibility of religious conversion in the background of a text, providing the means to evoke a Christian hermeneutic by impregnating the background with a biblical heritage. In traditional Christian texts, the desert (wilderness or wasteland) is a strange and destabilizing space, allowing for temptation, crises of faith, and isolation without the bonds of a community. It is a space that is not inhabitable, and does not allow one to dwell, but for the mystics, the desert becomes the most poignant figure for how one dwells in God or in Minne. The figural desert 21
Mitchell and Robinson use the westen as a locus for a uniquely Christian reading of the poem, suggesting that wigsteal mean ‘sanctuaries’ or ‘place of idols’. They trace it to Amos 6. 9 (‘and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste’) (Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to Old English, p. 239, n. 27). R. F. Leslie, however, notes that the compound wig (war) and steal (place) is used twice in other Anglo-Saxon texts and that the use of wig in all the many other compounds in Old English are used in the context of war (Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, p. 73, n. 27). Neville’s reading of the westen in Genesis would, however, nuance this considerably. She argues, ‘An originally idel ond unnyt [empty and useless] natural world can become valuable only by divine or human effort; it is meaningless, even horrible, without reference to or contact with humanity. Thus the land or a horse is valuable because it can be cultivated or adorned, and receives full attention from a poet only once it has been so transformed once the empty weste “wasteland” (Genesis 110a) has been transformed into Paradise (Genesis 206–34), and once the horse has been decorated with gold and exalted with an ornamented saddle (Beowulf 1035–41a)’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 30). In this sense, the empty space of the westen prefigures divine or human intervention.
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borders the relation of thought to the space of otherness in the poems of Hadewijch II, and of the body to God in the work of Marguerite Porete, as I shall show in a moment. In the mystical texts, The Ruin, and Anglo-Saxon texts that explicitly take Christian themes or images as their subject, the westen marks a space of solitude, marking an exterior that becomes one of the most intimate of interior spaces of subjectivity. In examining translations of the Latin solus into Old English, it is usually translated by ana. The Latin noun solitudo, or solitudinis, is once translated as anisse in the Canticles of the Arundel and Stowe Psalters (7. 10), yet the translation immediately slips beyond the sylf to a landscape.22 One only needs to look at a word wheel search of the Old English Corpus to see that the Old English Psalters translate solitudinis into westen (meaning wilderness or desert) in the majority of Old English texts.23 In a similar vein, if we turn to the word anad, which stems from an, ‘a single one’, we see the slippage of aloneness into the hues of a landscape, for anad signifies waste, desert, and solitude, like the German einöde. It is perhaps less surprising that Old English translations of deserto are also westen. John the Baptist’s ‘Vox clamantis in deserto’ (Mark 1. 3–6) is understandably translated most often as ‘Clypiende stemn on westene’; however, the landscape of the desert changes in a way that is quite unpredictable in one particular translation of the Vulgate. In Ælfric’s ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’ we note a change: Ælfric’s text transforms the deserto into wudu (woods): ‘he on
22
In Ælfric’s Grammar, we find: ‘solus, sola, solum ana and heora ealra solius anes; soli anum’ or ‘Her synd ða naman: quis hwa, unus an, ullus ænig, nullus nan, solus ana, totus eall’ (p. 112, l. 5). In the Lindisfarne Gospels, me solum is translated as me ane (16. 32), and in the Rushworth Gospels Mark 8. 15 translates ipusum solum as him anum, and so on. Generally, when solum refers to the adverb or adjective ‘alone’ (as opposed to non solum, i.e., not only), the Old English ana is used, even tu es deus solus is translated as þu eart god ana in the Bosworth Psalter (85. 10). 23
The majority of Old English Psalters translate Psalm 101, line 7, Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis, ‘I am become like to a pelican in the desert’, as ‘Gelic geworden ic eom þam fugele westene’ or ‘Gelic geworden ic eom stangillan westenne’. Aldhelm’s De laude virginitatis translates solitudinis in a more literal manner, that is as ænettes, and secretae solitudinis as digles ænetes, secret solitude. But Psalm 54. 8, mansi in solitudine is translated as ic wunode on westene in Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter, the Arundel and Tiberius Psalters. Likewise, Psalm 106. 4, Erraverunt in solitudine is often translated as Hi dweledon on westenne, and Mark 8. 4’s in solitudine is often translated as on westene. Ælfric’s glossary notes that either desertum or heremus can be glossed as westen, which also conforms with the usage of westen to signify desert (cf. Mary of Egypt, Exodus).
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wuda findan mihte’.24 The desert need not be a sandy dry space, but simply a wild, uncivilized place, apart from civilization. (The words desert and wilderness are inseparable in their Hebrew counterparts, but the Hebrew was certainly not familiar to Ælfric.) Rather than search for pragmatic reasons for this translation, looking into Ælfric’s travels as does Saunders, we may understand this slippage though the way in which even the most outcast of landscapes hosts a degree of familiarity in Anglo-Saxon texts (however hostile, fearful, or threatening that landscape may be).25 The landscape in the ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’ is rendered familiar by the use of the word wudu, for woods were part of a topography that Ælfric undoubtedly knew and was familiar to his readers. The wudu of Anglo-Saxon England is a landscape that may host solitude as does the biblical desert, but can also be used to mark the inscription into biblical history (as the history of Anglo-Saxon England).26 Wudu is used in Beowulf to describe the transitional territory associated with solitude and death (and thus bears a relation to wyrd). It is the space between Grendel’s mere and the mead-house, a space that bears witness to the death of the Danes, making it a joyless wood, a wynleasne wudu (l. 1416), and to the death of the body, as the funeral pyre is a baelwudu. The woods are also referred to as holtwudu, meaning thickets or groves of woods (ll. 1366, 2337), and a ship (a solitary vessel made of wood) is referred to as a sæwudu. But the word westen is also used in Beowulf twice; while only found twice here, the westen figures as a privileged background against which the whole story of Beowulf takes place. It is the space and time of Grendel’s origination and of the monsters that descended from Cain. Once again, biblical history filters into the history of the Danes, through the mythic space of the landscape. We read, ides, aglæcwif se þe wæteregesan cealde streamas, to ecgbanan
Grendles modor, yrmþe gemunde, wunian scolde, siþðan Cain wearð angan breþer,
24
Ælfric, ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’, in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series Text, ed. by Malcolm Godden, EETS, s.s. 5 (London, 1979), p. 18. 25 26
Corinne J. Saunders, Notes and Queries, 39 (1992), 19.
Even if a historical continuity is desired, and a historicity evoked, it does not always dominate, nor does it bear the same sense of chronological time. See, for example Erich Auerbach’s well-known essay ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1959), pp. 11–76.
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he þa fag gewat, mandream fleon, Þanon woc fela was þæra Grendel sum. (ll. 1258–66) 27
(Grendel’s mother, a [super human] woman, monster-wife, kept war grief in mind, she who in terrible waters had to dwell, cold streams, since Cain became sword-slayer, against his brother, his father’s son; he departed, stained in outlawry, gore marked by murder, he fled man’s joys, lived in wastelands. Out of that woke many spirits from old. Grendel was one.)
The westen is a space cast out of civilization and its laws, it is a space that guards the memory of a time that makes monsters (‘Out of that woke many spirits from old’), in turn providing the material for the story of Beowulf itself. The second passage in which westen is used reflects the dragon’s solitude. The draca looks outside the mound to find ‘ne ðær ænig mon | on þære westenne’ (ll. 2298–99; not a single man in that wilderness). Because the westen is associated with a blank, empty, vacuous space, its vacuousness allows for it to host the historicity of the landscape, the making of a desired historicity itself. The westen hosts the originary time through which the story finds its measure, yet it does not necessarily give it its futural force. The past represented by this space is not entirely lost or insignificant; rather, it allows for a backdrop against which a present may define itself. In this sense, the westen is a living past, it is what remains of the past in the present, like a living referent. Once again, the marginal outside hosts an intimate originary space at the heart of the question of dwelling. The westen is therefore not only the watery mere, or the cealde streamas into which Beowulf descends, it is a liminal space marked by solitude, lawlessness, and separation that borders on the monstrous. It is constitutive of the sense of what we could call an individual, or a solitary being, most notably Beowulf himself.28 The westen is both inside and outside. As an exterior that returns as the most interior of spaces, it marks limits in space and limits within a subject. The westen marks the space of a hiatus at the heart of the subject, and like the space 27 28
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. by Friedrich Klaeber, 3rd edn (Boston, 1950).
The parallels between Beowulf, the character, and the monsters or dragons have been noted by many scholars. In addition to the parallels generated by the language of the text, their shared solitary status as last survivors, their marginal relation to the Danes, their heroic courage, and their unfailing adherence to a Germanic code of kinship begs for an identification of similarity over difference. In this uncanny rapprochement of seeming opposites, the inhuman or monstrous aspect of the human, and the human aspect of the monstrous, come to the fore.
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of the poem, it interrupts what one may think of as everyday time and space, for it suspends the time of realities and the space associated with it, allowing for a transitional space, through which Beowulf may pass. To return to The Ruin, the blank space of the ruin, its loss of specificity of place (loss of purposiveness and utility), and its becoming-space like that of the westen, allow for it to become a reflective surface which is not anchored, properly speaking, in the immediacy of a living town nor in the immediacy of selfreflection. Whether or not mirrors ever existed in Anglo-Saxon England, this does not mean that there are no surfaces that offer other forms of reflection in which something other than the self may be reflected. In The Ruin, it is precisely this mirroring that is at work. It generates another time into which the strangeness of Roman ruins is incorporated.29 The specificity of place (and whether this particular ruin be Bath or not, as many scholars would insist) is precisely what this poem mourns (and what we as contemporary readers fail to mourn in the passion for historical time). In other words, the distance and estrangement which this embodiment of the past offers, its illegibility as ruin or riddle to the immediacy of perception, and its exposure as a surface for inscription, allow for the promise of unity in the time of the text. By thinking of the ruin no longer as a stable reality — like Bath — but as the figure of temporal loss and erosion, the reality lost in the everyday world of unreflective surfaces is recovered. The city manifests itself as bound together by ties that are as stable (or unstable) as those of poetry. The Ruin offers itself as an allegory for the relatedness of poem to its own present and to its own interpretive act, drawing upon fragmented pasts reassembled for other ends. As Paul Strohm argues, ‘literary works’ purchase on their moment must also be read as inherently unstable.’30 And if ‘Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things’, as Walter Benjamin writes, then this poem could be read as an allegory about reading, about the mind that witnesses and bears witness, and about what, as I shall show, dwells as ghedachte (as thought) in Hadewijch’s text. To purely allegorize The Ruin and to wrestle it from its historical time and place, or to read it apart from
29
While Roman ruins were undoubtedly familiar to Anglo-Saxons and often reused for Anglo-Saxon purposes, what interests me is that they preserve a trace of an unknown origin, a strangeness that is not completely effaced (like the strangeness of giants) and is used for other ends. 30
Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive’, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), 95.
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the materiality which it points to (as critics do) would also be misleading. Even though a poem may arrest historical time in order to refigure and suspend it, this does not allow a reading to sever the poem from its historical context, from its literary and cultural traditions, or from the context of its language. One must understand the particularity of a context in order to understand how the poem makes use of it. While the poem speaks of its time, that is, while it is a product of its historical conditioning and speaks of its history, it is able to free itself from this temporal anchoring only because of an economy that works both ways. Whether or not a poem is dated, a poem is anchored in its time, but outside of it, part of a temporality that conditions its production, and host to another time that it generates.
V. The Ruins of Embodiment In my reading of The Ruin, I have stressed the personification of the wall, the desert, and the city in relation to these historical forces at work in the poem and to the question of dwelling in time, yet the force of personification could be even taken further. As William Johnson, Jr, cleverly notes in his article ‘The Ruin as Body-City Riddle’, like the Riddles of the Exeter Book (in which The Ruin is found), the poem’s language permits wordplay between body parts and buildings, coming together in the final lines in the description of the hot bath.31 In the final part, the wall, which encloses the wellspring, is spoken of as a bosme (bosom) that encloses the hot-water source as would a living body its lifeblood. While I do not mean to simply fuse the body-city analogy together in a cemented fashion, I would note that this wall borders the question of the subject and of dwelling precisely at the point where inside-outside distinctions, and contact between an interior and exterior seem to break down. As a boundary between inside and outside, the wall forces the question to be posed of what remains and what perishes, what of the body (like the lichama) continues to dwell once the flesh has gone, and what of the ruin remains in the poem, once the ruin and its inhabitants are gone. The Ruin alludes to this question as its predicament, leading the reader to participate in the ruin’s survival in meditating
31
William C. Johnson, Jr, ‘The Ruin as Body-City Riddle’, Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 397–411. While most readings of this poem do not stress the elements of personification at work, the ones that do quickly subsume any particular instance to the theme of abstract destruction and transitoriness on earth in the hope of religious redemption.
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its praise (lof ) in the language of the poem. The language in lines 19 and 20 describes the binding of rings around the structure of the wall and those who forged the wallstones together by encircling them with wire: ‘hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond | weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre’ (firm in links, masons marvellously bound | the edges of the wall together with wire). While difficult to conceptualize , the image of wrapping wire is nevertheless suggestive on many levels. In Riddle 26 of the Exeter Book, the wrapping of wires connotes a transformative force that turns an untamed element of nature (a hide) into a Gospel book (endowing it with various afterlives). The speaker of the riddle explains that someone ‘gierede mec mid golde; forþon me gliwedon | wrætlic weorc smiþa, wire bifongen’32 (covered me with gold; thus the wondrous work of the smith adorned me, wound with wire). Again, in Riddle 26, Neville notes, ‘The reed pen […] though not a treasure like the Gospel book, is transformed from a lonely inhabitant of a wasteland (anæd) by the sea into something marvellous though human ingenuity and force.’33 The act of wrapping or binding between bespeak human energies that engage in countering a destructive force. In Old English the body is often referred to as a composite of lichama (like lichame in Middle Dutch) and as flæsc, the latter referring to the outer materiality that erodes in time. For example, in Beowulf the word flæsc is used in way which connotes a kind of objective outer material (the materiality of bodily matter), wrapped around life, in the phrase that uses the same verb bindan (to wrap, bind) in ‘no þon lange wæs | feorh æþelinges flæsce bewunden’ (l. 2423–24; Not much longer would [Beowulf’s] life be wrapped in his flesh). The flæsce is wrapped around the body of Beowulf, like the wires around the wall.34 In AngloSaxon poetry, it is also common for poetic language to be referred to as a binding of words together, with the thought the poetry will survive death there where the flesh will not. The boundedness of the walls, that is, the forged ties between spaces and people may survive in the space of the poem. The masons who are imagined to have forged the chain wire around the stone walls are also forging ties against a meaningless fate. Given the widespread use of the word bindan
32
Riddle 26, Exeter Book, ll. 13–14.
33
Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 114.
34
For an analysis of the significance of binding, linking, and interlacing, especially with regard to the word bindan, see Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale, IL, 1990). While it is not entirely clear to me how the walls themselves are reinforced through the linkage of wire or chain, the connotation is that of human artifice or craft working defensively or creatively against destructive forces.
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to refer to the way poets join words together in Anglo-Saxon texts, in this transference of the space of the city to the spacing of words in the poem, the poem becomes the resting place or destination of the ruin. Like the wires that remain, the forged links of the poem bear witness to the space that remains and to the life that remains of the past. The life that remains becomes hosted in the figural body of the poem.
VI. The Remains of the Body in Hadewijch II’s Poetry One of the most intimate of landscapes at the heart of the question of the self in mystical and spiritual texts is that of the wilderness or desert, in the Bible and early Church Fathers (Augustine’s interior eremus, for example) to Eckhart and Tauler (‘So inward it is, so infinitely remote, and so untouched by time and space’) and onwards. While Anglo-Saxon uses of the figure of desert are usually ignored in accounts of the ‘growth’ of Western mysticism, the westen figures in the Anglo-Saxon topographies of spiritual battles (a kind of psychomachia in Guthlac), that can harbour negative connotations (the dwelling place of enemies, the devil, and evil spirits), as well as positive ones (detachment and solitude).35 Similar themes of spiritual endurance and the testing of faith in the domain of strange, foreign, or hostile territory are also present in Anglo-Saxon visionary texts, for example in the Dream of the Rood or in the Visio Pauli. The test of spiritual marriage or union may also be staged in the foreignness of the gendered body (as in Ælfric’s lives of Agatha, Agnes, and Lucy).36 Each one of these texts clearly shares in what one could call a mystical element or theme without being a mystical text per se. The exposure to negative external forces and the cultivating
35
Bernard McGinn’s noteworthy work The Growth of Mysticism, Gregory the Great through the 12th Century (New York, 1999), sadly does not even nod to themes of mysticism (in monastic contexts or other) in Anglo-Saxon England despite his acknowledgement that mysticism is ‘best seen not as a discrete entity, a special kind of religion, but as a part or element within broader concrete religious traditions’ (p. 119). Aelred of Rievaulx and Gregory the Great do receive significant attention. McGinn’s astute article “Ocean and Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition” makes the connection between desert and ocean explicit, moving from the desert fathers, to Eurigena, then jumping to the Cistercians and the later mystical tradition. Again, Anglo-Saxons are not present in terms of their use of related images and themes (Journal of Religion, 74 (1994), 155–81). 36
See, for example Clare Lees, ‘Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Ideology in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 17–45.
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and eventual embodying of internal virtues is closely intertwined. For many of these Anglo-Saxon texts, the desert (or domain of the foreign) is the site of an external force against which man must struggle, yet for mystical texts the desert is a positive locus of mystery and divinity. The desert figures discretely in the works of Hadewijch II in a way that does not harbour negative overtones.37 While the word desert (in Middle Dutch woest, wuestine, wild, wide wild) appears infrequently, it occupies a privileged place that may be described as being both inside and outside the subject. It is a place that is not a place; it is a figure that cannot be reduced to its figural (that is, purely rhetorical) dimension. For Hadewijch, rather than denoting a place, the desert denotes a space, or a becoming spatial of ghedachte (thought) in the experience of Minne.38 The term
37
The relation between Hadewijch and Hadewijch II is subject of a longstanding debate and revolves around the poems in couplets, that is, the Mengeldichten. The dividing line between Hadewijch I and II is made between poems 1–16 and poems 17–29. The first are ascribed to Hadewijch I, and the second are ascribed to a poet who is similar to Hadewijch, but who, according to some, uses a far more ‘abstract’ and ‘Platonic’ language as well as ‘perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of mystical union’, according to Paul Dietrich; see Dietrich’s ‘The Wilderness of God in Hadewijch II and Meister Eckhart’, in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. by Bernard McGinn (New York, 1994), pp. 32–36. Mary Suydam has argued for a common identity for the authors of these poems, based on recurring language and motifs. Mary Suydam, ‘Hadewijch of Antwerp and the Mengeldichten’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1993). However, Saskia Murk Jansen has argued for yet another divide between poems 17–24 and 25–29. Jansen, The Measure of Mystic Thought: A Study of Hadewijch’s Mengeldichten (Göppingen, 1991). While the Mengeldichten of Hadewijch II are clearly different from the earlier ones, emphasizing ghedachte (thought) in a way that Hadewijch’s poetic work only suggests, and are more economic in expression and in length, the similarities in language, theme, and expression are such that it is impossible to make a definitive distinction. The complexity of mystical union is by no means a reason for separating the two Hadewijchs. Because each of Hadewijch’s forms of writing corresponds to a response to different custom, translating Minne according to each genre — visions to dream-visions, emphasizing experience; letters to epistolary practices, emphasizing didactic modes of acting; and the poems in stanzas to courtly love poetry, emphasizing the play and modes of Minne — one could argue that the second half of the Mengeldicten responds to different formal constraints. Since so little is known about Hadewijch’s life, these could be poems that were written at a different moment from her first poems; or they could indeed be written by another hand, that is, by another author, whose works were simply copied with those of Hadewijch I. 38
In Hadewijch’s Mengeldichten, we find the expressions ‘Jn dat eweghe wide’ in line 13, and ‘Jn stille wijt’ in line 106 of poem 17; ‘Daer te sine wustinen Jnden aert’ in lines 92–93 of poem 19. Poem 21 is a meditation on this spatialization in the experience of Minne, using expressions such as ‘Widere dan wijt’ (l. 21), ‘Jn dat wide wij’ (l. 36), ‘want in dat wide’ (l. 37),
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wijt (wide, expansive, capacious, and by extension all-encompassing) is also used in her texts to signal this becoming spatial of ghedachte. In the twenty-first Mengeldichten, is even taken to the hyperbolic extreme of consuming its subject in the formulation ‘Jc ben so wijt’ (I am so wide).39 Hadewijch I, the first Hadewijch, Brabant mystic of the thirteenth century, uses this expression in her Strofische Gedichten, showing how Minne, when infused with her, acts on her nature: ‘Om grote minne in hoghe ghedachte | Willic wesen al minen tijt | Want si mi met harer groter crachte | Mine natuere is so wijt’ (‘I want to spend all my time | In high thought on great Minne, | For she, with her great power | Makes my nature so wide’).40 Ghedachte has a wide range of meanings: it is thought, mind, intelligence, reflection, psyche, perhaps, or soul. The word ghedachte, like the modern Dutch ghedachte and the German denken, as well as the Old English geþoht, is linked to thinking, or what we would identify as being an act of a cogito.41 Given the etymological link between Minne and the Latin mens (what and the unusual ‘Jc ben so wijt’ (l. 15). Poem 26 uses the expression ‘Jn dese weelde wide’ (l. 25). See Hadewijch, Mengeldichten, ed. by Joseph Van Mierlo, Jr (Brussels, 1912). 39
Given the influence of St. Benedict on women’s spirituality of the low countries, this could be a further extension of his expansion of the heart: ‘Processu vero conversationis et fidei, dilatato corde inerrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei’ (But making progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run along the path of God’s commandments, our hearts expanded [dilatato] by an indescribable sweetness of love); St Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English, ed. Timothy Fry and others (Collegeville, MN, 1980), 164–66. In Old English, the heart, not the head, was most often the locus of thought and wisdom. St Benedict occupied an important role in Anglo-Saxon England. The life of St Benedict was quoted and imitated in the lives of Guthlac and Cuthbert. One of the earliest manuscripts of the Dialogues, copied in the seventh century, is of Anglo-Saxon provenance. The ninth-century Old English Martyrology pays tribute to Benedict via Gregory’s Dialogues, and his rule was often copied and translated in the tenth century. 40 41
Stanzaic poem 31. Hadewijch, Complete Works, p. 216, ll. 1–4.
In Old English, ‘thought’ as ge-þoht is linked to a coming into appearance, a coming into being as appearing, not phenomenally, but to one’s ‘self’, that is, to what one would call ‘the mind’s eye’. Barney’s Word Hoard notes, ‘The notion “to think” develops from a notion of “to cause to appear (to oneself )”, presumably implying an idea of imagining or fancy, that is, making images or phantasms appear before the mind’s eye. The verb þyncan was lost when the similarly pronounced Middle English reflex. of þencan approached too close in meaning, as “it seems to me” = “I think”’ (Stephen Barney, Word Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary (New Haven, 1985), p. 23). For a discussion on the notion of mind and its relation to faculties and the body, see the classic essay by Malcolm. R. Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Present to Peter Clemoes, ed. by Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 271–98.
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Augustine in De trinitate translates as mind or soul), this effect of Minne on ghedachte does not seem out of place. In what could be called a meditatio on Minne, Hadewijch’s ‘high thought’ (hoghe ghedachte) on Minne causes her thought (or mind) to be expanded. Despite this inner effect, ghedachte is not immediately linked to an ic in Hadewijch’s text, as was the case with her lichame. This becoming-spatial of ghedachte in Hadewijch’s text is linked to a di, a ‘you’ — a ‘you’ who is not named. It is not a particular ‘you’, but a ‘you’ who precedes the ‘I’ and whom the ‘I’ experiences as an event. Similar to the way the desert prefigures space, ghedachte prefigures the ‘I’, for it prefigures the space in which the ‘I’ will sense and represent itself, as though it were closer to its unknown origin.42 In Hadewijch’s poetry this event is an event of Minne. In an apostrophe in the twenty-fourth Mengeldichten, we read: Ic hebbe di gheproeuet Dat mi gheuoeghet Jn die heymelicjchheit Diere ghedachten. (Mengeldichten 24, ll. 1–4) (I have endured [experienced, tasted, or proven] you | There where it is my custom [or dwelling] | In the heavenliness | Of thought.)
The unnamed di is clearly not the same addressee as that of Hadewijch I’s letters, but rather is closer to being an apostrophe to Minne herself, despite the fact that Minne has no clearly distinguishable face nor does she meld into a personified addressee. Ghedachte is exposed as a kind of experience of inhabitation, dwelling, or hospitality of this di. It expresses the way in which thought is inhabited by the alterity of Minne, how it hosts or is hostage to otherness (as divine otherness), how it seeks or is possessed by something other to itself. The desert becomes the most poignant figure for this manner of dwelling, for one does not dwell, properly speaking, in alterity, just as one does not dwell in a desert. The desert is, above all, inhospitable; one only traverses it, one passes through it, or works through it (in the Freudian sense of Durcharbeitung). One is in transit in the desert, and as a result of this transitional quality, one is also traversed, tested, altered, and sometimes purified
42
Ghedachte prefigures the ‘I’, for like Augustine’s mens (soul, mind), it prefigures the historical time in which it finds itself and seems to find its source in the atemporal time (the eternal heavenliness) of God.
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by it. But this contingency on the inhospitable in hospitality is precisely what is put to the test. It is what makes an event. Ghi sijt salc ende goedertieren; Saecht alse een lam, ende onghehiere Alse onghetemde welde diere Jn die woustine, sonder maniere. (Mengeldichten 28, ll. 21–24) (You are malicious and full of clemency, | Sweet as a lamb, and without pity | Like a wild and untamed animal | In the desert, without a way.)
The untamed, inhospitable, wild, and duplicitous quality of Minne is coupled with a paradoxical ‘softness’ and ‘grace’. These contradictions are constitutive of the desert’s double nature. One must learn how to read or discern the signs of Minne in order to persevere. The duplicity of appearances is to be taken as just that: semblance and appearances are all that the desert offers. There is no external referent or reality on which one may rely. Discerning is essential in the desert, even for the most discriminate of readers (including Christ), hence the danger of temptation. The desert is, in this way, a stage for thought’s coming-tobe, the provocation that Minne elicits as the movement of thinking. Thinking finds its trait in a secret which inhabits representation and which it is called upon to discern. As we noted in The Ruin, the desert is a liminal space that is both inside and outside and secretly haunts the space of representation. If Minne’s inhabitation of ghedachte also signals its becoming spatial, and if the desert is a space for a discerning reading, then the space of the poem could also be said to be like that of the desert. Thought (or mind) dwells in the space of desert, as it would in the space of a poem, meaning, in an elusive, transitory, and liminal way. Hadewijch’s poem thus highlights a form of how something not properly subjective transitionally dwells, there where it is inhabited by something other to itself. Since Ghedachte precedes the ‘I’, the space or spacing that is effectuated by it precedes the ‘I’ and allows it to come to be.
VII. Porete’s Desert In Marguerite Porete’s Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties, the desert is also the space of the body.43 It is the ‘wretched body in which I dwell’, the body belaboured 43
When Meister Eckhart, Dominican preacher, was a lecturer at the Université de Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century, he was called upon to pronounce judgement on the work
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by desire and exposed to alterity. In the soul’s discourse with Amour, the soul pleads, ‘Souffrir, sire? mais encore souffrir voulez vous plus voulentiers que nul ne peut dire que je demoure en mon desert, c’est assavoir en ce meschant corps sans nombre de temps’44 (‘To suffer, Lord? Indeed you will to suffer [me], more willingly than anyone could say, while I remain in my desert, that is, in this wretched body, without limiting the time’).45 The desert is not to be understood as a place, nor as a site, but as a space that, in Porete’s work, also hosts the exemplary work of Mary Magdalene’s desire. In desiring God and giving her self over to God, that is, in becoming selfless when God makes a work of Perfection in Mary — this is where Mary is host to God’s work in her, without ‘her’:
of Marguerite Porete. The book in question, entitled Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties, was condemned in 1305 by the Bishop of Cambrai and Parisian clergy, and its pages burnt on the place de Valenciennes, for the reason that it celebrated the ‘freedom’ of the soul in a way which was much too close to the sects of the libres esprits. Porete, from Hainaut (now Belgium), did not belong to a religious order, for she was a Beguine. In 1310, she was condemned as having relapsed into heresy by the new tribunal of the Inquisition and was executed by fire, the first of June on the Place de Grève in Paris. Porete’s book was translated and circulated widely throughout Europe up into the Renaissance but copies were afterwards lost from sight until 1946, when a French manuscript was found and recognized by Romana Guarnieri to be the work of Porete (and not the work of Marguerite of Hungary). The definitive edition of Porete’s work is the bilingual edition: Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples âmes, ed. by Romana Guarnieri / Margarete Porete, Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. by Paul Verdeyen, Corpus Christianorum: Contiuo Mediaevalis, 69 (Turnhout, 1986). For the modern English, unless I provide the translation, I refer to Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls: Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. by Ellen Babinsky (New York, 1993). Porete’s book is a discourse between personified qualities, such as love, reason, the soul, the Church, and truth, on the seven stages of love, and the ascent of the soul to its noble and simple state in God. While Porete is almost divesting the body of any qualities proper to the soul (in opposition to the Council of Vienna’s decree for a theologically embodied form of the soul), the body is nevertheless invested with a trace of its annihilation in the figure of the desert. 44 The Middle English translation reads ‘O Lord ye wole suffre more gladli and mekeli þan eny creature may seie it, notwiþstandinge my desertis þat ben wiþoute nombre and wiþoute recoueringe of þis losse, for mercy þat is in you, for it bihoeþ you to kepe youre riytwisnesse’; referred to in Le mirouer des simples âmes, p. 120, n. 38, ll. 5–8. 45 I have slightly modified the translation of Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 118. I do not read this as ‘I remain in what I deserve’ as does Babinsky, but as ‘while I remain in my desert’. My reading is supported by Colledge, Marler, and Grant’s translation, who use ‘desert’, while noting that ‘The readings in all three Latin manuscripts seem to be corrupt, deriving from an ancestor which took desert to mean ‘recompense’, not ‘wilderness’ (The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. and ed. by Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant (Notre Dame, 1999), p. 57, n. 1.
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Or a Marie sa terre ahannee et semee; ly ahan est les fortes oeuvres de parfection et la semence est la pure entencion. Ces deux oeuvres devons nous par nostre coulpe, mais plus avant ne se peut nostre ahan embatre, et pource convient il que Dieu face le seurplus […]. Et pource convint il que Dieu fit le surplus d’elle, sans elle, pour elle, en elle […]. Tel ouvrage fist il a Marie ou desert de Marie, quant Marie se repousa de luy, non mie quant Marie courut aprés luy d’elle, mais quant la divine bonté se repousa en Marie; et celle bonté repousa de luy Marie, sans Marie, pour Marie. (Porete, Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties, p. 358, ll. 107–11; p. 360, ll. 113–14, ll. 120–04) (Mary has tilled and sown her earth: the labour is the difficult works of perfection and the sowing is the pure intention. These two works we must do because of our sin of deficiency, but our labour may not extend beyond this, for the rest is God’s work.[…] And thus it is necessary that God do the rest without her, for her, in her.[…] Such working he accomplished in Mary, in Mary’s desert, when Mary took her rest in him-not when she went searching for him, but when the divine goodness reposed in Mary; and this goodness reposes Mary from herself, without Mary, for Mary.)46
This act of rest, of being without the self and without the proper name does not mean that there is nothing left ‘of’ Mary. Something remains without the self, something signs for the ‘I’ without the ‘I’, whether it be ghedachte, the preontological echo of an ‘I’ (a spacing, like ghedachte, that renders the ‘I’ possible) or something else.47 In Porete’s text, the aporetic nature of the desert parallels an 46 47
I have slightly modified the translation of Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 205.
The labour or work of the book is intertwined with the question of its addressee. The book is addressed to an ‘auditeur’, not to the personified reader, but to what in the reader is other to the proper name: ‘Entendez las glose, auditeurs de ce livre, car le grain y est, qui l’espouse nourrist. C’est tant comme elle est en l’estre, dont Dieu la fait estre; la, ou elle a donné sa voulonté, et pource ne peut vouloi fors la voulenté de celluy qui l’a de luy pour elle en sa bonté muee. Et se elle est ainsi franche des tous costez, elle pert son nom, car elle monte en souveraineté. Et pource pert elle son nom en celluy, en quoy elle est de luy en luy fondue et remise de luy en luy pour elle mesmes. Ainsi comme feroit un eaue qui vient de la mer, qui a aucun nom, comme l’en pourroit dire Aise, ou Sene, ou une aultre riviere’ (Le mirouer des simples âmes, p. 234, ll. 32–42); ‘Grasp the gloss, hearers of this book, for the kernel is there which nourishes the bride. This is so long as she is in the Being by which God makes her to be, there where she has given her will, and thus cannot will except the will of the One who has transformed her of Himself for her sake into His goodness. And if she is thus unencumbered in all aspects, she loses her name, for she rises in sovereignty. And therefore she loses her name in the One in whom she is melted and dissolved through Himself and in Himself. Thus she would be like a body which flows from the sea, which has no name, as one would be able to say Aisne or lose their names and their courses when they join the sea’ (Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 158). The book asks the reader to lose his or her name in the seven stages of love, becoming like a river that joins the ocean, so that the soul will become sovereign and find its source in God. The book, which figures as a house, is open to all readers, but only those who possess the
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aporetic nature of hospitality, in hosting that which cannot be hosted (as alterity within that excludes the self ), and in traversing that which resists passage. While it may show itself in the body, the body is not a place, properly speaking; it is the space in which this cupola of hospitality articulates itself, for ‘the earth which Mary cultivated was her body, which she tormented with unrestrained and amazing works of ardent longing, which made it range up and down her land, which was herself’.48 The landscape of the desert becomes the space in which divine fruition may be received; this space is that of the work of the body that will eventually be transformed into a work of love signed by God. Even though medieval visions are not explicitly linked to the space of the desert, the same issues surrounding hospitality and embodiment surface.49 The vision is the space in which the body hosts a vision of something otherworldly or divine. Appearance and semblance are the only signs of the real of God’s visitation. Distinctions between inside and outside become problematized, for the vision is an inner vision that is the most external. The mystic hosts a word that claims to be a divine word, and despite the physically tortuous nature of this hospitality, bears witness to a message which traverses her body and seeks to render it legible. The mystic does not interpret (nor does her understanding of the content of the message become articulate), she witnesses and transmits. She does not reflect on an appearance; she allows a sight unseen to pass into language. This space of the vision, which is a space inhabited by language, also marks the distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. It is what traverses ipseity, for it marks the distance between there where one can say ‘I’ and there where one can articulate what has happened to or transpired in ‘me’, without ‘me’. Porete’s book is an exemplary figure of this space, and again, like the desert, it asks the reader to traverse it and be transformed. For Porete, as for Hadewijch, Hildegard, and Julian, the body of the mystic is suspended in this space that promises to become a work signed by God.
key of understanding will gain access. The house is not where the reader dwells, rather, it is the figure of an atemporal threshold. Dwelling is not a form of staying put but, as I suggested earlier, of a kind of transitory and indeterminate manner of ‘taking place’. 48 49
Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 156.
Porete did not have visions. Her book makes the claim for a return to a divine simplicity of the soul in life. One may therefore understand that visions were not necessary for union, since union for Porete could already happen in the time of perfectability.
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VIII. Dwelling in ‘Beowulf’: Remains and Remaining in Beowulf’s Body The question of dwelling in Beowulf the poem, and, as I will show, also for Beowulf the character, may also be approached through the relationship between dwelling and landscape, especially in terms of landscape understood as building and as setting. In his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Heidegger makes a claim as to how to understand the question of dwelling. He asks that rather than deduce something from the shell of architectural form (or from a hollow transcendental structure) that we listen to what language has to say about the question of dwelling. For Heidegger, it is not from architecture that one may form an answer to the question of dwelling; rather, it is from understanding the essence of dwelling that we will comprehend any interrelation between building, dwelling, and thought. Heidegger’s means to answering the question of the nature of dwelling and, consequently, the nature of thought or mind is, like any Anglo-Saxonist looking at Beowulf, to turn to listen to what language has to say. He writes: We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers. But in what does the essence of dwelling consist? Let us listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. But the Gothic wunian, says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, das Frye, and fry means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded.50
The association between building, dwelling, remaining, and preserving, or guarding would seem to fall in easily with Anglo-Saxon renderings of how dwelling (Old English wunian) is experienced in Beowulf. Guarding home, property, and propriety is a recurring figure associated with dwelling and with a peaceful ideal of kingship: Beowulf battles Grendel to establish peace in the mead hall. Hrothgar’s exceptional act, that is, to allow Beowulf to guard (healdan) and control (gewealdan) Heorot, enables Beowulf to perform as if he were king, that is, to act as an eald eþelweard (ll. 1702, 2210) an old guard of the homeland, who will establish peace. (The H in ‘Heorot’ links it by alliteration to Hrothgar’s proper name thus marking it as the home proper to Hrothgar’s kin, their patrimonial dwelling par excellence.) Beowulf in turn assumes the role of eald eþelweard for fifty winters (a sign of peaceful and successful leadership) when he
50
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (San Francisco, 1993), p. 327.
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is made King of the Geats. As a way of preserving kinship and belonging, of being with others and being with the past, with treasures from the past (and therefore also with a future, with an afterlife) dwelling performs what Heidegger calls the gathering of the fourfold; it is linked to a way in which the earth, heaven, divinities, and mortals are gathered and connected together. The term weard (protector guardian, ruler) is used over fifty times in Beowulf, in compounds that further the connection between earth, heritage, origin, or patrimony and dwelling. Aside from eþelweard, we find the compounds seleweard (hallguard), eorðweard (earth-protector or fortress), landweard (land guardian), hyðweard (harbour-guard), and the very specific Heorowearde, on the one hand, but also hordweard (hoard-guardian), yrfeweard (inheritance-guardian), and beorgesweard (barrow-keeper). The bond between treasure and genealogical strain is highlighted here. The figure of continuity, the preserver, assumes the role of the inheritance guardian (yrfeweard), giving out treasures or heirlooms of the past to bind and guard kinship and kingship. Beowulf’s barrow is built with the funerary remains of his body (brondes laf) and is lined with powerful treasures that live there, dormant, until summoned for future use, in an afterlife, or by those who, like Wiglaf, will be associated with its latent powers. The link between dwelling, remaining, and guarding is commonplace in Anglo-Saxon texts, in Beowulf especially. I need not overemphasize this, except to add three points. One, that to ground the nature of dwelling in ‘the land’ or the earth, and to consequently associate it with the identity of a nation, is as complex and often as problematic as was German interest in Anglo-Saxon studies in the thirties, or as was the past French presidential candidate Le Pen’s grounding the nature of being French in patrilinear descent from those born on French soil. Even though Beowulf the text is clearly concerned with dwelling and the maintaining of kingship and lands, it does not allow itself to be articulated in a Christian paradigm as it is in Bede or in Ælfric; rather, the very precarious nature of ownership, the anxiety over boundaries, loss, and transferable inheritance, and the constant focus on spaces between dwellings, or the borderline of dwelling, seem to suggest that the land does not ground dwelling, but that dwelling is constantly reappropriating its tie to land. If less of an emphasis is placed on ownership and propriety, and dwelling in Beowulf is reconsidered in terms of hosting power and shifting relationships of guardianship, this would make for an interchangeability and power of substitution in Beowulf that would be, like the figure of the earth itself, a figure for an ever-changing grasp on things. Figures remain constant, but their material or appropriation of material changes. This
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shifting would also allow us to look at the powers associated with earth, land, treasure, and genealogy, in a way that would be filiated to natural or supernatural, human or inhuman processes, to powers of generation, birth, and to sacral power, as well as to the power of language — especially figural language, which I will develop in a moment. This displacement — which has only been sketched out here — from land and kingdom to the generative power latent or nascent within would fall in line with Paul Taylor’s persuasive analysis that ‘the king’s body is not only a body politic but a treasure and a fertile force’ and that ‘kingship is more important to a people’s welfare than kingdom’.51 My second point concerns another problem that arises when Heorot, the mead hall, is reified as being an exclusive centre around which the question of dwelling circles. The reflection on the nature of dwelling and propriety may be complicated when one takes into account that guardianship and dwelling are not exclusive to man in Beowulf: Grendel and his mother dwell, preserve, and guard their treasures as well. Grendel is described as ‘hall thane’ (which may or may not be ironic), and the dragon (or wyrm) is a hordweard (a treasure guardian) who dwells in a beorg (a barrow) that is also described as a dryhtsele (a noble hall). This treasure guardian is referred to as a gæst (a guest, or visitor as well as the inhospitable guest, that is, fiend) when he justifiably seeks retribution at Beowulf’s hall, after having experienced three hundred years of relatively undisturbed longevity until his dwelling was transgressed by theft. Treasure is guarded both by men and by monsters, raising the question, for whom is it proper to guard, to live in peace, to defend and protect kin and belongings? Is it truly a mark of what is proper to man? The language of Beowulf suggests that proper figure of dwelling — its relation to land and property and propriety in general — be kept in suspense, in a way that renders its transitory and figurative essence similar to that of the westen. My third point concerns the relation of dwelling to the body. While it seems to be clear that dwelling concerns the body, and that bodies are bound, so to speak, to the articulation of how one dwells with others or with what one wants to call a self or a subject in Beowulf, the plurality of figures of embodiment and the multiplicity of terms to speak of the body present a double-edged sword in terms of presenting any unified way of conceiving it. The conflation between the language of building and embodiment begs for thinking through the questions
51
Paul Taylor, Sharing Story: Medieval Norse-English Literary Relationships (New York, 1998), p. 56.
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in a parallel fashion, as many scholars have noted. In Beowulf the word flæsc is used in way which connotes a kind of objective outer material, that is wrapped around life, as noted earlier in the phrase ‘no þon lange wæs | feorh æþelinges flæsce bewunden’ (l. 2423–24; Not much longer would [Beowulf’s] life be wrapped in his flesh). The flæsc is wrapped around the body of Beowulf, like wires around a wall, or like gold around an heirloom sword (which often carries an inscription). The word banhus, ‘bone house’ (ll. 2508, 3147), is also used to speak of the body, and bancofa of the bodily enclosure, but the most commonly used word to refer to the body is the lichama, which is composed of lic (body) and ham (home), making its pertinence to the question of dwelling all the more apparent. The word lic refers to both body and a corpse; in suffix form, it refers similitude. It forms the basis of our word like — the underlying support of metaphor.52 This strange filiation of the lichama to a body that may be dead or alive, to a figure of language (that is, metaphor or kenning) that may survive beyond it, while being like it, suggests that the body may be thought of as hosting life — as being just as separable and divisible from life as perhaps is language. The association and disassociation of the body with life is common: the phrases lif wið lice (life with/from the body), lif of lice (life within/against the body), or lif ond lice (life and the body) are used over five times in the text, making the body like Benjamin’s Leib in its being more like a form that is not identical to its material. The permeability of the flesh, and its separation from the subject of an utterance, makes one think that while the flesh may perish or be consumed and reduced to ashes, a trace of the body or of the subject may continue to dwell once the flesh has gone. If the body is thought of as a compound — as a linguistic, material compound, or even of a generational compound with sexual and procreative powers — then it may also be thought of in relation to couplings and likenesses in language, that is to kennings and to the generative power of metaphor.53 It is of interest to note that approximately
52
For the etymological link between lic (the noun) and -lic (the suffix) see F. Holthausen’s Altenglisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelburg, 1934). 53 A kenning is a poetic compound (a word or phrase) that becomes a metaphorical substitute for another word. For example, the banhus, or bone house, is a kenning for the body in Old English. As Gardner notes, ‘The distinctive aspect of a kenning is its context. It is a two-part figure, consisting in a metaphorical base and an ablenkenden [associative] determinant. The base expresses the thing with which the referent is being compared, and the determinant (the first element, in the case of compounds) serves to bridge the disparity of meaning between
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one-third of kennings in Old English refer to the human body or the breast, i.e., the interior part of man. Metaphor is commonly referred to in the Middle Ages as the birthing of language, and in Old English cenning is semantically associated with birth, procreation, and verbal declaration. As a noun, cenning literally means procreation, parturition, and birth, and in its verbal form (gecennan) it spans the semantic range of to conceive, bring forth, produce, beget, create, produce, nominate, declare, assign, show oneself, and make a declaration in court.54 Language, as we know from Germanic attitudes towards charms and ritual formulation, hosts an inaugural power for Anglo-Saxons that can do things to bodies. What relationship is there between the body and metaphor? What of the body’s likeness in poetic language? Or, put otherwise, although differently, how does the subject dwell in poetic language — and in this Old English poem, to be specific? Poetic language and rhetoric are not foreign to this question in the study of Old English. Poetic form is even traditionally positioned as a means of addressing the question of the remaining and that of an afterlife. In Fred Robinson’s analysis of appositional style, he makes a connection between the appositional structure of poetic language in Old English and its ability to host a kind of remaining of pagan ancestors. He writes, ‘from the smallest element of microstructure — the compounds, the grammatical appositions, the metrical line with its apposed hemistiches — to the comprehensive arc of macrostructure, the poem seems built on apposed segments’. While this allows for an ambiguity and ambivalence to be articulated in terms of pagan and Christian subject matter, the juxtapositional form offers a kind of purgatorial ‘dwelling’ for heathen subjects that would otherwise have no place. He notes, ‘the temporary irresolution of
the base and the referent. The associative determinant is always taken from the universe of discourse (Bedeutungssphäre) of the referent, or from one having some close discernable relationship to that of the referent’ (Thomas Gardner, ‘The Old English Kenning: A Characteristic Form of Germanic Poetical Diction?’, Modern Philology, 67 (1969), 109–117 (p. 113). For a recent and fuller evaluation of what constitutes a kenning, see Susanne Kries ‘Fela I rúnum eða í skáldskap: Anglo-Saxon and Scandianvian Approaches to Riddles and Poetic Disguises’, in Riddles, Knights, and Cross-dressing Saints, ed. by Thomas Honeger (Bern, 2004), pp. 139–64. 54
The Old English cennes can mean what is produced, but can also mean birthday and childbirth. A cennestre is a mother, a cennend a parent, and a cenningstow is a birthplace. Cennendlic is defined as genital, and gecennes is a summons.
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apposition is one means by which the poet creates a niche, “a place in his people’s mind and language where their ancestors can remain, not without theological security, but with dignity”’.55 Robinson’s privileging of the Christian viewpoint is well preserved in this too; however, the urgency of ‘choosing’ a meaning, of posing a teleology for poetic language (whether it be semiotic or Christian) may, I think, remain in suspense. I would emphasize this with regard to Beowulf, for the reasons previously discussed, mainly that the past is not determinately past, nor is the poem a stable place in which one dwells. The past is passed down as a living past, as I have argued; it is transmitted as a living inheritance. In The Textuality of Old English Poetry, Pasternack relates poetic language to inheritance; however, she formulates the relation between poetic language and subjectivity by opposing formulaic language to what she calls the ‘development of a subject’. In her analysis, Pasternack links formulaic language to tradition and the subject to the presence of a first-person narrator. In trying to locate the subject in a poem she seeks the subject in an ‘I’. She writes: A few texts propose a first person speaker and a couple of them even sustain the ‘I’ — The Wife’s Lament, The Dream of the Rood — but they follow convention in that they do not develop and sustain a subjectivity through their language. First of all, the language is formulaic and therefore by its nature open to any voice; but more important, the convention of structuring verse sequences in discrete movements inhibits any such development.56
Pasternack claims that the presence of formulaic language and the absence of an ‘I’ make for the lack of a developed and sustained subjectivity. While this firstperson subjectivity (as character) may indeed be absent, contrary to Pasternack’s view, I have argued that the subject in and of a poem is not represented by the ‘I’ but by a nonsubjective element, like landscape, both within and without the subject. This opposition between formulaic language and subjectivity may be valid, to the extent of a developed character, but does not exclude something else that is, as I have argued, of the subject, although not precisely subjective. Pasternack continues by opposing author to tradition in a way that would seem to imply nothing of the subject in formulaic verse: Instead of implying an author, Old English verse implies tradition. Formulaic echoes and patterns that are frequently used to express an idea function as a code that readers
55
Fred Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, 1985), p. 7.
56
Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), p. 18.
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can interpret as ‘tradition.’[…] Tradition is coded through intertextual relationships that are characterized by the formulaic nature of the poetry’s language.57
Pasternack makes an important claim for the formulaic patterning of verse. She links formulaic patterning to a textual tradition, to an intertextual form of reference, but why must the question of the subject be opposed to code or to formulation? Might not the question of the subject in Old English verse, as I have argued, be articulated precisely in this detachable, substitutable, memorable, and deserted poetic form? Couldn’t the remains of a subject, after life has left the body, be as indifferent, formulaic, and as referential as Biowulfes biorh (Beowulf’s barrow)?58 Even though formulaic language refers to a past tradition, why should this exclude the possibility of it being generative of new meanings or power with each repetition? Poetic language is also subject to the opposite kind of use, mainly, to show proof of something innately structured and formulaic within a subject. In phenomenology and cognitive theory, metaphor is used as a way to demonstrate how language hosts certain structures that are innate to cognition and thus, to dwelling.59 In his essay ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, Paul Ricoeur proposes that a dual structure of reference is discernable in metaphor. Rather than summarize his argument in depth, what I would highlight in his formulation is how again, the question of poetic language is formulated with regard to dwelling, structure, and remains. Metaphor and ‘poetic language’, Ricoeur argues, are no less about reality than any other use [of language] implies but it refers to it by the means of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.
57
Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, p. 19.
58
Biowulfes biorh, Beowulf’s barrow, that is, the mound that marks his tomb, is how Beowulf wishes to be remembered by those that see the mound in the landscape of the sea cliffs. Before he dies, Beowulf requests ‘Order a bright mound made by the brave, | after the pyre, at the sea’s edge; | let it rise high in Whale’s Cliff, | a memorial to my people, that ever after | sailors will call it ‘Beowulf’s barrow | when the steep ships drive out on the sea | on the darkness of waters, from lands far away’ (ll. 2802–808). 59
The relationship between metaphor and its referent is part of a longstanding debate. For one of the most powerful statements on metaphor see Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythologies’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1981), pp. 207–71. Another strong reading of metaphor that merits reconsideration is Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 13–30.
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This suspension is built on the ruins of the direct reference.[…] It is called second order reference only with respect to the primacy of the reference of ordinary language. For, in another respect, it constitutes the primordial reference to the extent that it suggests, reveals, unconceals […] the deep structures of reality to which we are related as mortals who are born into this world and who dwell in it for a while.60
For Ricoeur, metaphor reveals the ‘primordial reference’ of deep structures of reality, structures that establish relation to dwelling. Although I find this claim to a reality outside of language that is ‘built on the ruins’ of a first order reference problematic, to say the least, the idea that poetic language, specifically metaphor, reflects a figure of dwelling and the mind is not entirely incompatible with my own view. A certain nonsubjective element of the mind (or of ghedachte) may promise to reveal itself in the desert of poetic language, in its space. Recent studies of metaphor in Old English are concerned with metaphor in order to establish an immediacy with the structures of reality that are innate to experience; however, they fail to take into account the unstable nature of language and the problem of a pure or self-evident external referent that could ever claim to be proper to reality. My argument has furthered the claim that poetic language has, in the instances presented here, an intimate tie to what Hadewijch calls thought (ghedachte), or to a nonsubjective element in and of the subject; however, given the transitory nature of dwelling, if one is to tie the question of dwelling in Beowulf to structures that establish and confirm social order and community, to patterning and interconnective interlace (to echo Overing), to containment and containing (of the organic body and of the social body), and to structures of the mind and to what is proper to man, then it is only to the extent that the inverse of this synthesizing also holds true.61 There is no container and no structure
60
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, in On Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1978), pp. 141–58 (p. 151). 61
I am referring to the work on metaphor and the ‘structure’ of the mind in Old English, by scholars such as Michael Matto, ‘Containing Minds: Mind, Metaphor, and Cognition in Old English Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1998); Ruth Wehlau, The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry (New York, 1997), Soon Ai Low, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common Sense Psychology in Old English Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2000); and, to a lesser extent Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (see n. 34, above). With the exception of Overing, none of these authors takes into account the referential nature of language and the impossibility of discerning a ‘reality’ without linguistic means. To explore the question of metaphor in depth, in relation to what is thought as ‘the mind’ in Old English is
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without an accompanying dissolution and rupture. Dehiscence, splitting, tearing, the liquidation of social ties, the ruptures of history, and the abolition of structure go hand in hand with dwelling. Containment is, one could say, a fiction or a story one tells oneself, or, better yet, a story one tells others. The mind is only as fictively contained, determined, stable, and structured, as is a poem. Beowulf’s final living moments provide a commentary on this fiction of containment. In Beowulf’s death scene, after his being wounded by the dragon, and his fissured and vulnerable body lies open on the border between water and land, his words are described in a poignant way. We read, ‘[Wiglaf] came out to find his lord, the great king, bleeding still, at the end of his life. Again he began to sprinkle him with water, until the point of a word broke through his breasthoard’ (l. 2788–92). The final segment reads: ‘oð þæt wordes ord | breosthord þurhbræc’. The word bursts through Beowulf’s breast-hoard, it follows the same movement of rupture as does the body’s splitting away from life. If a word’s point can þurhbræc, that is, if it can cut through the flesh with its point, it is similar to the edge of sword. The edge of a sword, an image which recalls the name of Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow (servant of the edge), is, like language, something that one must know how to manipulate, use, and handle. If words have points and edges, that may be sharp or dull, then a care in bonding words together is asked for, just as it would be if one were to handle a sword, especially since it concerns more than just cutting oneself, but also how one faces wyrd and determines one’s afterlife in lof, in the praise of others, or in a poem. Parcelling out, insignificance, discontinuity, the fracturing of community and of the body, are all a stroke too close for comfort. At the end of Beowulf, this filiation between the body, language, transmission, and heritage is made all the more evident. The word lic is used in a specific way which distinguishes lic from the other terms that refer to the body such as banhus (bone house), bancofa (bone enclosure) or flæsc, marking its filiation not to a finite temporality, but to a temporality which is transmitted as history and generation. Towards the end of Beowulf, we read: Biowulf maþelodewunde wælbleate; þæt he dæghwila eorðan wynn(e);
he ofer benne spræc, wisse he gearwe, gedrogen hæfde, ða wæs eall sceacen
part of a project that is beyond the scope of this article. A study with a different aim in the examination of metaphor is, as I noted earlier, Lees and Overing, ‘Before History, Before Difference’, pp. 315–34.
212
Patricia Dailey dogorgerimes, ‘Nu ic suna minum guðgewædu, ænig yrfeweard lice gelenge’.
deað ungemete neah — : syllan wolde þær me gifeðe swa æfter wurde (ll. 2724–32)
(Beowulf spoke, despite the gash, the gaping wound — he knew for certain that he had finished his days, his joys in the world, that his time was over, death very near: ‘Now I would wish to give to my son war garments, where there was so granted to me an inheritance-guardian afterwards related to the body’.) 62
The space of the body is also related to the historicity of inheritance and belonging. It transmits belonging in a fashion similar to the narrative itself, as it passes down as sense of kinship and history. This filiation between the body as guardian and host to history reappears in the final lines of Beowulf, when the twelve nobles mourn Beowulf’s leaving his lichama (his body-home). The final passage sets up a parallel between the mourning of the body, and the mourning in words. We read: Þa ymbe hlæw riodan æþelinga bearn, woldon (care) cwiðan wordgyd wrecan eahtodan eorlscipe duguðum demdon, — þæt mon his winedryhten ferhðum freoge, of lichaman Swa begnornodon hlafordes (hry)re, cwædon þæt he wære manna mildust leodum liðost
hildedeore, ealra twelfe, [ond] kyning mænan, ond ymb w(er) sprecan; ond his ellenweorc swa hit gede(fe) bið, wordum herge, þonne he forð scile (læded) weorðan. Geata leode heorðgeneatas; wyruldcyning(a) ond mon(ðw)ærust, ond lofgeornost. (ll. 3169–82)
62 The Donaldson translation reads: ‘Beowulf spoke — despite his wounds spoke, his mortal hurts. He knew well he had lived out his days’ time, joy on earth; all passed was the number of his days, death very near. “Now I would wish to give my son my war-clothing, if any heir after me, part of my flesh, were granted”’ (Beowulf: A Prose Translation, trans. by E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. by Nicholas Howe (New York, 2002), p. 46). The phrase æfter wurde has also been glossed as ‘after words’ or ‘after fate’.
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(Then around the barrow rode the war-brave, born of princes, twelve nobles. They wanted to mourn their king in their grief, to weave a lay and speak about the man: they praised his noble deeds and acts of courage, his mind’s great prowess. So it is fitting that a man praise his beloved lord with words, love him in heart, when he must be led forth from his life, the body’s home. Thus did the Weders, his hearthcompanions, mourn in words the fall of their lord. They said that he had been of the world-kings, the mildest to his men, the most courteous man, the kindest to his people, and most eager for praise.)
In this passage, the narrative becomes a host body (a lichama) that also preserves guardianship and belonging, yet does so in a way that is neither completely of the subject nor of the time of its life. Both the body, the westen, and the narrative become transitory hosts of material inscription which elude clear demarcations, and are for that reason filiated to a monstrous, untame, or wild kind of subjectivity, if one may even call it that. Narrative figures an inheritance to be passed down, transmitted (through the body, if it is done orally), in turn shaping how we belong to a landscape and how landscape belongs to and disfigures the reflection of an ‘us’ in medieval narratives.
IX. Conclusion In the four different texts analysed here, I have outlined a figure of dwelling that is both of a poem and of subject (while nonsubjective) and is manifest in landscape. It is what I would call in-subjective, an insignificance within the subject that partakes in its life and in its death. As the personification at work in the landscape of the poem The Ruin, as the force of Minne, and as the desert that belabours Mary Magdalene and Porete’s body, these false incarnations can never fully show their face. As an in-subjective space, it exposes; it is the exposure of the inhuman in the human; it is what in the wall, is relentlessly exposed to wyrd, or what in a word, exposes a relation to death. The manner of dwelling cut by each figure is not represented by an ‘I’ who speaks, but by a transitory space that precedes the ‘I’ — whether it is that of ghedachte, the desert, or the body (as lichama) — that transmits a history without being identical to it. This figure of the desert, which is both in and outside of discourse, inside and outside the subject, hosts discourse as though it were the very echo of its own dehiscence. This figure of dwelling, like that of the poem, is not determined by historical time, rather, it traverses historical time, refiguring it, generating new histories, allowing the past to be used for purposes that may even run counter to historical time. Like the spacing of metaphor, it allows for passage and transmission from
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one time to another, from one space to another, from one likeness to a promised one. Who inhabits the poem is not answered by an ‘I’, but by ghedachte, by the desert, by the lichama, or by the event of di, you. If, in this turn to language, ‘we are being changed from form to form and are passing from a blurred form to a clear one’, as Augustine hoped in De trinitate, then this new form is as discernable as a mirage.63 Columbia University
63
In finishing this article, I read a recently published text by Derrida of direct relevance. Jacques Derrida, ‘Rams. Uninterrupted Dialogue — Between Two Infinities, the Poem’, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York, 2005), pp. 135–63. In this short but dense text, Derrida comments on Gadamer’s situating of poetry in relation to subjectivity. Derrida finds a strain throughout Gadamer’s work, especially in the reading of Paul Celan’s poetry, that attests to something in a poem that eludes all intentionality (conscious or unconscious) on the part of an author, yet calls for itself to find a destination in a reader, an encrypted addressee, or a ‘you’, in the form of what he calls an uninterrupted dialogue, that is, a dialogue that keeps active an internal limit of legibility of the poem, and resists appropriation by the subject. This reader must carry, or bear within himself, the mourning of the world attested to in the poem, hence the filiation of the poem to processes of mourning and especially to failed mourning, what Freud designates as melancholia. Melancholia keeps alive the other ‘in me’ but while preserving the difference from the subject, that is, it keeps the other alive in me, but without ‘me’, meaning without appropriation. For Gadamer, as for Derrida, the poem keeps a trace of something encrypted within the subject, something with a transformative power, alive. Derrida writes, ‘Concerning this horizon of subjectivity, the work of art never stands there like an object facing a subject. What constitutes its being a work is that it affects and transforms the subject, beginning with its signatory. In a paradoxical formula, Gadamer proposes reversing the presumed order [of a work of art and its subject]: “The subject [subjectum] of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who made it, but the work of art itself”’ (Derrida, p. 138 (slightly modified)).
