Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature

HUMOUR IN ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE

Humour is rarely considered in connection with the surviving corpus of Old English literature, yet the potential for interesting analysis in terms of humour is considerable. Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature is the first book-length treatment of the subject. Scholars employ different approaches to explore humour in such works as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, the riddles of the Exeter Book, and Old English saints’ lives. An introductory essay provides a survey of the field, while individual essays push towards a distinctive theory of Anglo-Saxon humour. Through its unusual focus, the collection provides a fresh perspective on both famous and lesser-known works of Old English literature. JONATHAN WILCOX is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and editor of the Old English Newsletter.

HUMOUR IN ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE

EDITED BY

Jonathan Wilcox

D. S. BREWER

© Editor and Contributors 2000 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2000 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk ISBN 0 85991 576 X

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Humour in Anglo-Saxon literature / edited by Jonathan Wilcox. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–85991–576–X 1. English wit and humor – History and criticism. 2. English literature – Old English, ca. 450–1100 – History and criticism. 3. Comic, The, in literature. I. Wilcox, Jonathan, 1960– PR933 .H86 2000 829.0917 – dc21 99–058754

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

CONTENTS Contributors

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

JONATHAN WILCOX

Byrhtnoth’s Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture

11

JOHN D. NILES

‘Grim Wordplay’: Folly and Wisdom in Anglo-Saxon Humor

33

T.A. SHIPPEY

Humor, Wordplay, and Semantic Resonance in Beowulf

49

RAYMOND P. TRIPP, JR.

Heroic Humor in Beowulf

71

E.L. RISDEN

Humor in Hiding: Laughter Between the Sheets in the Exeter Book Riddles

79

D.K. SMITH

Sexual Humor and Fettered Desire in Exeter Book Riddle 12

99

NINA RULON-MILLER

‘Why do you speak so much foolishness?’ Gender, Humor, and Discourse in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints

127

SHARI HORNER

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints’ Lives

137

HUGH MAGENNIS

Index

159

CONTRIBUTORS JONATHAN WILCOX JOHN D. NILES T.A. SHIPPEY RAYMOND P. TRIPP, JR. E.L. RISDEN D.K. SMITH NINA RULON-MILLER SHARI HORNER HUGH MAGENNIS

University of Iowa University of California at Berkeley Saint Louis University University of Denver St Norbert College University of Iowa Drew University Shippensburg University The Queen’s University of Belfast

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Initial versions of many of these essays were tried out on conference audiences in sessions I organized in 1997 at the International Congress of Medieval Studies (a.k.a. Kalamazoo) and at the Medieval Association of the Midwest’s annual conference, and I wish to thank all involved with those events. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the efficient assistance of a series of research students for help with editorial tasks, namely Mariah Hope, Ginger Makela, and Melissa Milenkovic, and I thank the Department of English and the Honors Program at the University of Iowa for providing me with such effective helpers. I also thank the University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative for funding to support my writing of the introduction. Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer has provided an enjoyable and effective link with the press, while the press’s anonymous reader read the manuscript with an eagle eye and saved the collection from many infelicities. My greatest debt is to the contributors, who have been a delight to work with throughout. Jonathan Wilcox Summer 1999

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Introduction JONATHAN WILCOX

The first question of course was how to get dry again . . . At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of some authority among them, called out ‘Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I’ll soon make you dry enough!’ They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon. ‘Ahem!’ said the Mouse with an important air. ‘Are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! “William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria –” ’ ‘Ugh!’ said the Lory, with a shiver. [from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865; repr. New York, 1960), pp. 33–34.]

Many consider Anglo-Saxon literature to be as moisture-sappingly dry as the mouse in Lewis Carroll’s story thought Anglo-Saxon history. As the ever-popular Norton Anthology puts it, ‘The world of Old English poetry is predominantly harsh.’1 The reasons for such an assessment are obvious. Modern desire privileges the tiny corpus of Old English heroic literature, characterized by its obsession with loyalty in a world of violence, where there seems to be little scope for humor. (Real men don’t laugh!) The far larger corpus of monastic material receives less attention but this, too, seems unpromising as a vein for much humor. (Real monks shouldn’t laugh!) Frivolous literature or the literature of everyday people is unlikely to survive from an environment where putting quill to parchment required that exceptional resources be deployed by the tiny monastic elite trained in the technology of writing. No wonder that Old English literature, when it is admired at all, is admired for its earnest qualities rather than its laughter. And yet the situation may not be quite so desperate. The heroic world 1

M.H. Abrams, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edn, 2 vols. (New York, 2000), I, 5; see further Horner’s essay below.

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does allow for humor: Old Norse literature is full of it, and a number of the essays in this collection draw comparison with those northern analogues. In the violent world of saga literature, humor can establish the appropriate insouciance of a hero in the face of death, as when the character Atli in Grettir’s Saga coolly observes ‘Broad spears are becoming fashionable nowadays’ as he is stabbed to death by one.2 A minor character intrudes in the death scene of the hero Gunnar in Njal’s Saga for the sake of comic effect. Gizur, the leader of the attackers, asks Thorgrim to establish whether Gunnar is at home. Thorgrim climbs onto the roof of the house and is stabbed through the thatch. He makes it back to the attackers: Gizur looked up at him and asked, ‘Is Gunnar at home?’ ‘That’s for you to find out,’ replied Thorgrim. ‘But I know that his halberd certainly is.’ And with that he fell dead.3

Thorgrim’s logical punctiliousness in a moment of extreme peril makes for a joke. Such joking is clearly compatible with violent action and the heroic ethos. Shippey’s essay in the present volume suggests how such joking is undertaken by Hengest in the Finnsburh Fragment and at the expense of Weland in Deor; Niles focuses on the famously contentious case of Byrhtnoth’s laughter in The Battle of Maldon; while Risden looks at how heroes joke in Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon monasticism proves less inimical to humor than might be expected, too. It is true that the Benedictine Rule is hostile to joking and immoderate laughter, enjoining: ‘Not to love much speaking. Not to speak vain words or such as move to laughter. Not to love much or violent laughter.’4 This prohibition on immoderate laughter is made more absolute in the Old English version, where the constraint sounds the more pressing on account of the punning similarity between (h)leahtor, ‘laughter’, and (h)leahter, ‘sin’:

2

Grettir’s Saga, trans. Denton Fox and Hermann Pálsson (Toronto, 1974), ch. 45, p. 95. ‘Þau tíðkast nú in breiðu spjótin’, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 7 (Reykjavik, 1936), p. 146. 3 Njal’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth, 1960), ch. 77, p. 169. ‘Gizurr leit við honum ok mælti: “Hvárt er Gunnarr heima?” Þorgrímr svarar: “Vitið þér þat, en hitt vissa ek, at atgeirr hans var heima”. Síðan fell hann niðr dauðr’, Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavik, 1954), p. 187. 4 The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Justin McCann (London, 1952), ch. 4, pp. 29–31; ‘multum loqui non amare, uerba uana aut risui apta non loqui, risum multum aut excussum non amare.’

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ne sceal he fela sprecan, ne idele word ne leahtorbere; ne hleahter ne sceal he lufian.5 (he must not speak much, neither idle words nor those causing laughter; he must not love laughter/sin.)

Despite such warnings, there is clear evidence that humor raised its mischievous head in the monasteries, as an Anglo-Saxon copy of the Rule of St Benedict graphically illustrates. MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 57, a manuscript written perhaps at Canterbury at the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century, probably for the use of Abingdon Abbey, where it subsequently resided, gathers together a collection of monastic texts, opening with the Rule of St Benedict. Yet this high-minded and sober text comes with boisterous illustrations: faces drawn into the bow of capital letters, sometimes smiling, often tonsured to show that they are monks.6 Such monks peering back from the page suggest a levity at odds with the proscriptions which the book contains and hint that life in the cloister was not as monolithically somber as the Rule might lead one to expect. Monastic jocularity is in evidence elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. The Latin colloquies of Ælfric Bata envisage a Cokaygne-like world of boys in the monastery required to eat and drink to excess and learning to insult at length.7 Here the humor presumably has a pedagogic point as a technique for keeping the attention of young monks, but its presence makes the monastery sound significantly less cloistered from a comic spirit than the rules prescribe. This may be reflected, too, in the copying of the famous Exeter Book riddles. Smith’s and Rulon-Miller’s essays in this volume both explore the operation of sexual humor in the riddles, pondering its presence in a monastic manuscript, while Horner and Magennis investigate the occasional use of humor within the literature of Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition. 5

Arnold Schröer, ed., Die angelsächsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benedictinerregel, Bibliothek der angelsächischen Prosa 2 (Kassel, 1888), ch. 4, 18/7–9. 6 On the manuscript, see Mildred Budny, Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue, 2 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), # 25 (I, 439–73), with this feature illustrated in vol. II, plates 297–320. Timothy Graham establishes that these faces are an early part of the manuscript’s decorative pattern, pre-dating a yellow infilling of some initials, ‘Cambridge Corpus Christi College 57 and its Anglo-Saxon Users’, in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M. Treharne (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 21–69, at 29. 7 See Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, ed. Scott Gwara, transl. with an introduction by David W. Porter (Woodbridge, 1997), esp. ‘Colloquies’ 8, 9, and 25.

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Surviving Old English literature all comes from the world of the hall and battlefield or of the monastery and pulpit, whereas that from the field or the hostelry, assuming that it once existed, has been lost forever since it never was recorded. A further strand of humor was likely lost with it. Once again, the Old Norse analogues hint at what might once have been present in England. Excavations of the medieval town of Bergen in Norway yielded a wealth of runic messages written on wood, many of them ephemeral acts of communication such as are rarely preserved from the Middle Ages. One rune stave displayed in the Bryggens Museum at Bergen, measuring 25 cm long, and dated to 1248–1332, bears the runic inscription: ‘Sett deg ned og tolk runene; reis deg opp og fis’ (‘Sit down and interpret the runes, then rise up and fart’), probably an early example of lavatory humor. While the Exeter Book riddles preserve numerous sexual riddles and perhaps a scatological one, all are far removed from this popular and ephemeral level.8 All these examples raise the question, of course, of what constitutes humor in literature, who viewed it as funny, and how we can tell they were amused. Such problems are particularly acute in contemplating humor from a long-past society. Here, humor theory is of some value. Incongruity is central as a necessary if not sufficient cause of humor in almost all humor theory. Psychological studies demonstrate how a sudden or simultaneous comprehension of appropriately divergent realities is necessary for a perception of humor.9 Yet for the incongruity to seem funny there must also be a further level of humorous appropriateness. Freud proves useful for establishing why the perception of incongruity is funny.10 He posits that a consistent deployment of psychic expenditure is required in polite society in order to maintain a single inhibited vision of the world and that a release in that application of psychic expenditure is made possible by the puncturing double vision offered by a joke. The value of Freud’s model for investigating a culture from long before his time is ably demonstrated by the essays of Rulon-Miller and, particularly, Smith in this volume. Smith’s deploy-

8

For the possibly scatological riddle, see Williamson’s brilliant but contentious reading of the riddles conventionally numbered 75 and 76 (his Riddle 73): The Old English Riddles of the ‘Exeter Book’, ed. Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill, 1977), pp. 110 and 352–55. 9 Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee, eds., The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues (New York, 1972); Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Humor: An Introduction’, Humor, the Psyche, and Society, ed. Berger, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 6–15; Arthur Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor (New Brunswick, NJ, 1993). 10 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1960); and ‘Humour’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1928), 1–6.

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INTRODUCTION

ment of Freud’s theories suggests much about the inhibitions and taboos present in Anglo-Saxon England, available to be punctured through humor. Some problems of humor analysis are peculiar to reading humor in historical literature. Detecting incongruity presupposes an understanding of congruity, which is itself a challenge in view of the small and fragmentary survival of Old English literature. The scholar who has done most to develop a sense of humor studies in relation to older literature is Bakhtin, whose alertness to the bodily, to Billingsgate language, and to carnival has been a useful stimulus for further study, even as his emphasis on the subversive potential of humor and his historical groundedness have been challenged.11 Bakhtin, though, never turned his attention to Old English. Instead, a groundbreaking attempt to infer the peculiar nature of Old English humor is undertaken by Shippey in this volume. An alternative way of establishing the horizon of expectations from which the humorous launches is to take an anthropological perspective, as Niles’s essay exemplifies. Niles demonstrates the careful attention necessary to acquire the cultural competence for reading even a single gesture related to humor. Yet another approach is to start from a sense of how language creates humor, with particular attention to puns, an approach pursued in Tripp’s contribution. Humor is a recurring preoccupation for scholars of later medieval English literature, where the canonical and most-studied text is a recognized comic masterpiece.12 Indeed, humor abounds throughout Middle English literature and has been much discussed.13 All such fun, though, apparently starts with the Norman Conquest: humor has been conspicuously absent as a focus for the study of Old English literature. The present volume is the first book-length treatment of Anglo-Saxon humor. Not many scholars have touched on the topic in any way: general surveys are rare and slight,14 while specialist studies of humor in individual works are 11

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984); for a critique, see Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1996). 12 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston, 1987); for studies, see, inter alia, Chaucer’s Humor: Critical Essays, ed. Jean E. Jost (New York, 1994). 13 Valuable studies include Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1950); Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1982); and Derek Brewer, Medieval Comic Tales, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996). 14 Jean I. Young, ‘Glæd Wæs Ic Gliwum – Ungloomy Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, ed. Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 275–87; Beatrice White, ‘Medieval Mirth’, Anglia 78 (1960), 284–301; Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor: Towards a Taxonomy’, Thalia 14.1–2 (1994), 9–20.

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surprisingly scarce.15 Laughter in Old English has been the subject of some of the most successful studies, although, unfortunately for those interested in humor, they generally conclude there is little or no correlation between laughter and humor.16 The present collection, then, breaks new ground through its very focus on Anglo-Saxon humor. This book comprises all new essays in which the authors present original arguments about a range of Old English literature. Strong attention is paid to the traditional heroic corpus, demonstrating that fresh insights can be gained by looking at this literature with new questions in mind. Two essays present new readings of material long suspected of being funny, the sexual riddles in the Exeter Book. The two remaining essays take up the challenge of humor in Old English religious prose, and demonstrate that, if not packed full of laughs, the pursuit of humor at least opens important interpretive points. Perhaps the most famous laugh in all Old English literature is uttered by Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon after he despatches one of his Viking attackers and before he, too, is struck down. But what does that act of laughter mean? John D. Niles’s essay, ‘Byrhtnoth’s Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture’, offers a sophisticated extended response to that question. As with all gestures, Niles demonstrates, the act of laughter is culturally conditioned. Understanding that laughter requires understanding a total set of poetic gestures. Niles circles round Byrhtnoth’s laughter, returning frequently to the doomed leader, as he builds an ever-richer interpretation of the poem and of the culture, centering on this one event. Humor plays a part in Byrhtnoth’s laughter – as humor had been present in the earlier exchanges with the Viking spokesman – but it is only a relatively small part. Instead, understanding this gesture opens up the whole question of understanding Anglo-Saxon culture. The conclusion may be predictable – in some ways the Anglo-Saxons are strikingly like us and in some ways they are totally unlike us – but the repeated probing at this point of tension

15

Notable successes are Heinemann’s structural readings of Judith and Beowulf: Fredrik J. Heinemann, ‘Judith 236–291a: A Mock Heroic Approach-to-Battle Type Scene’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 83–96; and ‘Beowulf 665b–738: A Mock Approach-to-Battle Type Scene’, in Perspectives on Language in Performance . . . to Honour Werner Hüllen, ed. Wolfgang Lörscher and Rainer Schulze (Tübingen, 1987), pp. 677–94. 16 Susie I. Tucker, ‘Laughter in Old English Literature’, Neophilologus 43 (1959), 222–26, makes a start; Laura Ruth McCord, ‘A Study of the Meanings of Hliehhan and Hleahtor in Old English Literature’ (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, 1979), provides an exhaustive study of words for laughter and their usage; Hugh Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, with Particular Reference to the “Hleahtor Wera” of The Seafarer’, English Studies 73 (1992), 193–204, provides an outstanding survey of laughter in the poetry.

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leads Niles into a nuanced understanding of laughter in its relation to hubris and scorn. The values of Anglo-Saxon culture might be different from those of modern culture. Baldly put, such an assertion seems laughably obvious, but it has major critical implications addressed in many of the essays in this collection. Niles’s anthropological richness provides one critical response to such a state of affairs. T.A. Shippey is prepared to look those differences in the eye and make the resulting discomfort visible, as he does below in ‘ “Grim Wordplay”: Folly and Wisdom in Anglo-Saxon Humor’. Anglo-Saxon humor, he shows, inclines to grim wordplay of a particularly subtle sort, ‘rising out of pain and grief, using riddling and oblique statement, but most of all depending on the contrast between an obvious meaning and a deeper one, and demanding awareness of that contrast for full effect’. Shippey teases out this kind of humor in the heroic verse – most obviously in Judith, but also and more subtly in the laconic opening of the Finnsburh Fragment and in the painful first stanza of Deor. Loosening the supple sinew-bonds of these comic moments involves understanding proverbial humor, brilliantly explicated here in relation to the Durham Proverbs. Instances of laughter establish a sardonic quality, where the laugh is generally on the laughers since their unreflecting assurance meets its comeuppance as they become the butt of a joke. This proves as true of a Christian scene (the dwellers in Hell laughing, for example, at the moment of the Resurrection in The Descent into Hell) as of the heroic scenes that parallel the heroic Old Norse examples. Such an observation permits Shippey to test his theory with a stunning reading of a rarely considered brief Christian poem, Bede’s Death-Song. Here, the expectations of proverbial wisdom, along with a tight reading of the poem, allow Shippey to see Bede as something he has rarely been seen as before: a joker, even at the very end, bowing out on a sardonic observation which he might have seen as funny even if we don’t. One reason Beowulf seems so unfunny is that such a critical stranglehold has evolved as to what the poem means and how it works. The fossilization of that view is evident in the hold that Klaeber’s edition still retains some 75 years after it was first published.17 One scholar who chooses to throw stones in this glass house is Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., who has been pursuing the idea of a comic Beowulf for some years.18 Tripp’s essay in this volume, ‘Humor, Wordplay, and Semantic Resonance in Beowulf’, takes punning in the poem seriously in order to build up an iconoclastic reading. He starts 17

Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Boston, 1922). The influential third edition with supplement was first published in 1950. 18 See especially Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., Literary Essays on Language and Meaning in the Poem Called Beowulf: Beowulfiana Literaria (Lewiston, NY, 1992).

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from easily accepted assumptions: that Beowulf is double-visioned in its sense of a pagan past and a Christian present and that punning is particularly possible where there are two frames of reference for words to resonate in. Tripp uses this critical leverage to explore a new vision of Beowulf. Surely, most readers will accept Tripp’s initial premises and his initial examples, but beware! Once Tripp has completed his argument, the dignified towering epic edifice proves to have no windows left unsmashed and a red nose on to boot: the epic becomes a mocking account of heavy drinking sessions. This is the kind of iconoclastic criticism Beowulf needs if the poem is to retain its interest for another century of critical scrutiny. One aspect of Beowulf’s humor has long been accepted and yet little explained: the presence of understatement. E.L. Risden works over the poem, exploring both the element of understatement and the flyting elements in his essay, ‘Heroic Humor in Beowulf’. Risden demonstrates that both can be explained as violations of the economy of words, incongruities that can be understood through reference to the pragmatics of language as described by Grice. The riddles are perhaps the only surviving Old English works readily accepted as funny, and yet, alas, nothing is known for certain about their performance context beyond their getting recorded in that vernacular miscellany, the Exeter Book. Particularly striking are the sexual riddles, since the very recording of their bawdy attention to the bodily on pages penned by celibate monks and usually reserved for refined contemplation of spiritual questions poses a massive incongruity that opens the door wide for humor. Yet the lack of a performance context makes a full understanding of that humor difficult. The difficulty is overcome by two essays in this collection which pay close attention to how particular riddles work. D.K. Smith tackles the double-entendre riddles head on in ‘Humor in Hiding: Laughter Between the Sheets in the Exeter Book Riddles’, using the tools of the modern critic and humor analyst. In particular, he brings Freud’s theory of sexual jokes to bear on the sexual riddles. This approach, surprisingly underutilized in the past, proves immensely fruitful, and that very fruitfulness demonstrates something about Anglo-Saxon society. The double-entendre riddles only work because there is a taboo on explicit thought about sex, an inhibition that is codified and constantly reinforced in the cloister, but also present in the rest of society. As Smith remarks, ‘Freud’s theory posits a society in which undisguised sexual images are unacceptable and sexuality is repressed: a society not unlike Anglo-Saxon England.’ Smith works over Riddle 44 in detail, demonstrating the value of Derrida’s structural insights and Bakhtin’s social insights for explaining the mechanics of how an Old English riddler creates humor through repression. He generalizes his insight with briefer readings of Riddles 54 and 45. Nina Rulon-Miller, on the other hand, gives serious attention in ‘Sexual 8

INTRODUCTION

Humor and Fettered Desire in Exeter Book Riddle 12’ to a sexual riddle that has not generally been seen as a continuous double entendre. This essay, too, demonstrates the fruitfulness of a psychoanalytic approach. Rulon-Miller shows that the riddle operates through a mechanism similar to Freud’s sense of a sexual joke centering on the sublimation of sexual desire. In the process of uncovering the ambiguous activity within the riddle, Rulon-Miller unpacks the status of the wonfeax wale – a dark-haired Welsh slave-woman – and reveals for the first time her probable innocent activity – the making of leather. Rulon-Miller’s careful attention to the overtones of the riddle fully opens up the disparity that allows for humorous incongruity, namely that between an ox going about its business dead and alive and the expression of fettered desire. As well as offering notes toward a cultural history of leather-making, of English attitudes to the Welsh, and of masturbation, Rulon-Miller’s essay exemplifies the wealth of understanding possible from a close reading of a single riddle. The Benedictine Rule prohibits immoderate laughter to monks, and John Chrysostom famously pointed out that Christ is seen to weep on a number of occasions, ‘but nowhere laugh, nay nor smile but a little; no one at least of the evangelists hath mentioned this’.19 Nevertheless, in Anglo-Saxon literature, the laughter of saints is one of the few uncomplicatedly happy sounds of mirth, as even the painful death of a martyr is a happy transformation to eternal life when seen through the paradigm shift that accompanies the movement from this world to the next.20 Two essays in this collection contemplate the world of Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives, one centering on the works of Ælfric, the other on an anonymous life. Martyrdom is a paradoxical event in that it involves the presentation of bodily torture as spiritual empowerment. The incongruity of the contrast between worldly and eternal strength is all the more apparent when the victim is a woman who nevertheless outsmarts her male and powerfulin-this-world torturer. Shari Horner investigates this incongruity in Ælfric’s three female saints’ lives in ‘ “Why do you speak so much foolishness?” Gender, Humor, and Discourse in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’. Her reading of the incongruity both reveals the humor of these lives and their epistemological underpinnings. She shows that the powerful worldly

19

Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, homily 6; trans. Philip Schaff, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 10 (New York, 1888), p. 41. For a good survey of early Christian attitudes to laughter, see Joachim Suchomski, ‘Delectatio’ und ‘utilitas’: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur (Bern, 1975), pp. 9–23. 20 On the humor of saints’ death scenes, see Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Famous Last Words: Ælfric’s Saints Facing Death’, Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1994), 1–13.

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figure provides an exemplum of surface literalism but spiritual blindness, whereas the tortured saint demonstrates how to read the martyrdom spiritually. Horner’s reading gets at the pleasure of the defiance in these texts and thereby models an act of feminist recovery through humor. Hugh Magennis explores more widely the typical operation of Old English saints’ lives in ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints’ Lives’. Magennis shows that, in general, Old English writers emphasized the exemplary nature of their subject, downplaying any human failings or even doubts in the stories they inherited. Ælfric, in particular, was too preoccupied with unambiguously conveying his spiritual point to risk including jokes. Magennis shows how Ælfric’s handling of the ‘Legend of the Seven Sleepers’ contrasts with the handling of an anonymous writer who, unlike the earnest abbot, played up the comic potential of the story. The anonymous life revels in the discomfiture of its inept primary protagonist and allows significant laughter. In demonstrating how this is exceptional, Magennis both recovers an endearing but under-appreciated life and casts light on the norms of the Old English hagiographic tradition. Humor is often hard to spot and difficult to interpret. Even within the contemporary world, where humorist and audience share cultural assumptions, humor is often missed or misunderstood or otherwise problematic. Detecting the humor in literature written a thousand years ago is a far greater challenge, but rising to that challenge has significant appeal. Understanding how a paradigm has been broken requires an understanding of the paradigm in the first place; appreciating incongruity first necessitates an appreciation of congruity; spotting the markers of humor calls for an exceptional sensitivity to tone. In fact, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, understanding and explicating the act of humor requires all the skills of good literary and cultural criticism. In addition to recovering moments of humor and laughter from the literature of a millennium ago, these essays demonstrate that understanding humor may provide a key that unlocks the door of interpretation.

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JOHN D. NILES BYRHTNOTH’S LAUGHTER AND THE POETICS OF GESTURE

Byrhtnoth’s Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture JOHN D. NILES

If the past is a foreign country, then those who seek it out take on the role of explorers in a half-known realm. We may approach that realm with the maps and compasses that previous explorers have devised and have bequeathed us, but we will do well to keep in mind that Greenwich meridian longitude may have no meaning to the people dwelling there. Those people may reckon the months by the position of the stars; they may count distances in terms of days on the road and may draw their own maps in the dust; they may measure land in terms of human need, not geometric acreage. Regardless of its familiarity, which paradoxically may diminish as our knowledge of it grows, any era of the past is best approached as an anthropologist might approach unfamiliar shores.1 There is nothing new about the problem of how to shed, as far as can be done, the conceptual biases of our own time and place so as to be able to penetrate the mental world of those people from other times and places whose culture we hope to understand. Consciousness of that problem does little to diminish it, however.2 Any small question in literary interpretation – how to interpret the scene in which Byrhtnoth laughs out loud in The 1

This is an argument pursued by Aaron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. Jana Howlett (Chicago, 1992). I take it up it in a different way in an article forthcoming in Philological Quarterly titled ‘Widsith and the Anthropology of the Past’. The first sentence of my present essay alludes to David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). 2 Contributing to this tendency has been scholarship that seeks to uncover the ideological bases of popular and scholarly constructions of the Middle Ages during the past centuries. Recent studies along these lines include Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1991); John Simons, ed., From Medieval to Medievalism (New York, 1992); R. Howard Bloch and Stephen J. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, 1996); and Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, 1997).

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Battle of Maldon, for example – can soon take on the knottiness of a problem in cognitive anthropology or ethnopsychology. Moreover, attempts to solve such questions may well involve the study of a work’s reception history, which itself is embroiled in larger trends affecting humanistic research in general, for answers to literary problems tend to differ over the years in keeping with those habits of thought that characterize the intellectual history of an era.3 It is amazing how much trouble a laugh can be. Studies of ‘the medieval mind’, if initiated now at all, are naturally undertaken more tentatively than in prior years.4 As soon as one analyzes that huge dark cloudbank that has sometimes been called ‘mind’, it begins to dissolve into the myriad darting, glimmering, contradictory movements that together constitute ‘the way people think’. As for that vast expanse of time and human experience that in our customary shorthand we refer to as ‘the Middle Ages’, it can take on a very different aspect depending on whether one is gazing on the mosaics of Ravenna, interpreting a literary representation of a battle in tenth-century Essex, or contemplating the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. Images and gestures that bear a particular sense in one context may be meaningless in another context or may signify 3

To cite only basic studies in the areas touched on in this paragraph: Roy d’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge, 1995), offers an introduction to cognitive anthropology with many bibliographical references but with almost no attention to the possible relevance of that field of research to medieval studies or literary studies. This is a topic that remains largely unexplored. Ethnopsychology is the concern of Catherine A. Lutz in her well-theorized book Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). Drawing on fieldwork in the South Pacific, Lutz discusses emotions as culturally conditioned acts of communication that differ from group to group. A foundational study of reception theory is Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982); a more recent study relating reception theory to literary criticism is Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1989). 4 One important earlier work in this vein is Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages, 2 vols., 4th edn (London, 1927). Taylor’s assumptions concerning mind are largely unexamined. His concept of the Middle Ages, furthermore, has scant room for either Anglo-Saxon England or non-elite modes of thought. For a stimulating set of essays on the anthropology of mind, see Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan, eds., Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies (London, 1973). Archaeologically oriented perspectives are offered by Colin Renfrew, Towards an Archaeology of Mind (Cambridge, 1982), and are developed in supple detail by Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1991). M.R. Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), 271–98, links the specific Old English vocabulary for the mind and for mental operations to psychological theories in the patristic tradition.

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something surprisingly different, as can happen today, for example, when an English-speaking person on holiday in Greece shakes his head ‘no’ to a question and then realizes, with some consternation, that he has signified an affirmative response. How can we tell, today, how the Anglo-Saxons experienced laughter? Did they experience laughter, grief, impatience, anger, jealousy, lust, regret, and any of a number of other emotions as we do, or as we imagine that people of several generations ago did? Perhaps more importantly, did they display laughter or these other emotions in a similar way, using the same symbolic codes to achieve the same social effects? Did laughter have a place in the early English cultural system similar to what it enjoys among most people in the technologically advanced countries of the Western world today, having now come to seem so much a part of nature as to resist inspection? These questions are not easily answered. The history and ethnography of emotions is a very large book that remains unwritten. No matter how alert we may be to the social construction of reality, including such apparently biological factors as human emotions,5 we like to think of any other group of Homo sapiens as at least grossly analogous to us. They, too, ought to laugh when you tickle them. They ought to grieve when they suffer loss. They must fall in love, make love, have fun, feel shame, rage, boredom, and so on, all for close to the same reasons that people do today, we are likely to assume. But can we be sure? Commonsensical ideas of a single unchanging human nature were swept aside some years ago by D.W. Robertson, Jr., who galvanized medieval studies with his denial that the people of the Middle Ages either thought or felt at all like people today.6 Robertson’s point was a polemical one. He wished to stir medieval scholarship out of its then-current modes of criticism into a direction that was in alignment with patristic thinking, which he declared with some bravado to be virtually the sole basis of medieval literature and life. His claim about patristic thinking can easily be resisted. While his claim about 5

Peter L. Burger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York, 1966). Mary Douglas, ‘Do Dogs Laugh?’, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London, 1975), offers a brief but stimulating discussion of, first, laughter as an eruption of the body, and, second, the body itself as a channel of communication between the individual and society. The cultural construction of emotion is addressed from an anthropological perspective by Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, and by Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge, 1990). I am grateful to John M. Hill for several of these references. 6 Note, particularly, Robertson, Chaucer’s London (New York, 1968), pp. 1–11. In his magisterial study Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1962), Robertson introduces this point briefly and builds on it at length, noting his indebtedness to J.H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York, 1961).

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human nature can be neither proved nor disproved, the denial of human nature is a useful ploy to the extent that it promotes skepticism about attitudes that may seem intuitive but that cannot be assumed to have universal validity. Humor, in particular, is a notoriously difficult thing to translate across linguistic barriers. Not just differences in language, but also incommensurate conceptual systems or psychological assumptions can cause a joke to fall flat. Who has not had the experience of trying to explain an in-joke to someone who comes from outside the group and so lacks the cultural competence that makes effortless communication possible? Whether or not there exists such a thing as a single unchanging human nature, the ability to laugh seems to be a common feature of human experience, if not a universal one.7 Certainly the Anglo-Saxons had a keen sense of play despite the efforts of the clergy to keep that impulse under control. We should not assume that the people of the Middle Ages, unlike their modern counterparts, went about their business with dour faces all the time, whatever we may read in Ecclesiasticus 21:23 about the loud laughter of the fool and in the Rule of St Benedict about monks’ need to avoid excessive laughter.8 After all, there are many types of laughter. A guffaw in the hall or a chuckle in the tavern may be construed differently from a hoot of laughter in the cloister. In Old English poetry, when images of ceremonious public interaction are called to mind, the life led by people of the ruling class is frequently animated by music and the sound of laughter. Well known are the scenes in Beowulf when the lyre is struck up in Heorot and the sounds of conviviality are heard:9 oær wæs hæleþa hleahtor, hlyn swynsode, word wæron wynsume. (611–12a)

7

Whether it is universal is a moot point. When the coastal regions of central California were first explored and settled by people of European descent, for example, travel writers were struck by how sober the Ohlones of that region seemed, as if their ancient way of life or their severely circumscribed life in the missions had accustomed them to a resigned manner that found no place for humor or laughter. ‘I have never seen one laugh’, wrote one early visitor to Mission Dolores, for example; ‘A deep melancholy always clouds their faces’, wrote another observer (quoted from Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco – Monterey Bay Area [Berkeley, 1978], pp. 163–64). Douglas, ‘Do Dogs Laugh?’, p. 84, reviews several odd displays of laughter that have been observed by anthropologists in the field and notes that some tribes are said to be dour and unlaughing while others laugh easily. 8 On ecclesiastical opposition to disordered, riotous laughter, see Hugh Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, with Particular Reference to the “Hleahtor Wera” of The Seafarer’, English Studies 73 (1992), 193–204, at 198–200. 9 Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd edn (Boston, 1950). Citations of Beowulf refer to this edition.

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(There the laughter of men arose; the noise of merriment resounded, words were joyful to hear.)

With their triple internal rhyme (on hlyn, swyn-, and wyn-), these lines enact the very cheerfulness that they describe. For the Beowulf poet, convivial joys are the essence of the life that is prized by the aristocracy, that charmed circle of men and women who seem never to have heard of dirt, sex, or the plow and who have their thoughts set on things other than the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus most of the time. Laughter in the hall is an index of contentment, peace, and plenty. Towards the end of Beowulf, when an unnamed Geatish messenger speaks of the death of his beloved king, he expresses the significance of that loss in terms of the absence of music and laughter: . . . Nu se herewisa hleahtor alegde, gamen ond gleodream. (3020–21a) (. . . Now our lord has laid aside laughter, mirth, and the delight of instrumental music.)

The sound of laughter echoes throughout Old English poetry, as Hugh Magennis has pointed out in a brilliant essay on the subject, as Jonathan Wilcox has reiterated in a typology of humor in Old English literature, and as Jean Young remarked some while ago in her brief study ‘Ungloomy Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’.10 Young’s article is a good one but it is oddly titled. In it the adjective ungloomy is linguistically marked as one half of an implied pair. The corresponding unmarked adjective gloomy thus takes on normative status for Old English verse. Readers of Young’s article might conclude that there are only enough ungloomy things to be said about Anglo-Saxon poetry to fit into one short essay, whereas doom and gloom would require weighty tomes. Were the Anglo-Saxons fun-deprived, then? Perhaps no more so than we moderns. In his book Laughter and the Sense of Humor (New York, 1956), the psychologist Edmund Bergler, M.D., speaks of ‘fun-deficiency’ as a characteristically modern ailment – a product of either drudgery or a sense of ennui. To judge from those examples of Old English literature that are read with some frequency today, including The Wanderer with its joyless exile waiting for release from his earthly woes, The Wife’s Lament with its cast-off woman forced to bide time in a dreary landscape, Beowulf 10

Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’; Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor: Towards a Taxonomy’, Thalia 14. 1–2 (1994), 9–20; Jean I. Young, ‘Glæd Wæs Ic Gliwum – Ungloomy Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, The Early Cultures of NorthWest Europe, ed. Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 275–87.

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with its succession of deaths and ceremonious funerals, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos with its diatribe against moral corruption, and – my own starting point in this essay – The Battle of Maldon with its evocation of savage warfare and heroic defeat, latter-day fun-deficiency would seem to have had its prototype in the unrelieved austerity of the Anglo-Saxon world. And yet when one scans the corpus of Old English literature, images of laughter, pleasure, and amusement abound. One may well ask to what extent the doom and gloom that are often assumed to have been the usual tenor of life in those times are products of the modern construction of Anglo-Saxon studies rather than something embedded in the Anglo-Saxon psyche itself. After all, it is we and not the early English who have canonized such works as I have named while neglecting any number of other works that are emotionally less austere, such as the riddles with their earthy play, the poem of the phoenix in its happy land, or the Advent hymns with their mystical bliss. Let me return to my starting point, then, so as to establish the ground on which the following discussion is based. No, I do not assume that there is such a thing as human nature, but yes, I do think the Anglo-Saxons laughed as much as anyone else. Their palette of emotional responses to the stimuli of life was probably analogous to ours without being identical to it. To the extent that laughter is a social construction and a construable gesture rather than an upwelling of biology, their laughter, considered as a sign, is bound to have had different meanings from ours, for their society itself was different in countless ways. These are the chief assumptions that govern my thinking, at any rate. They are no more than that. I suspect that Anatoly Liberman is probably not far from the truth when he concludes on linguistic grounds that the early Teutons ‘were not stern, grim people fixed on heroic death and posthumous glory but normal men and women for whom life was primarily associated with joy and peace’.11 Of course, Liberman is talking chiefly about prehistory, a period about which die Gedanken sind frei. We can make more confident assertions about the period after the conversion of the pagan English, when theologically grounded pessimism about the things of this world, combined with mind–body dualism that stressed the salvation of one’s soul as the one goal worth pursuing, began to have a profound influence on whatever age-old structures of feeling had preceded the advent of Christianity. Aspects of this change must have been gradual, however. By definition, mentality is what remains chiefly unchanged while days and years swirl around it.12 Structures of feeling do 11

Anatoly Liberman, Word Heath = Wortheide = Orðheiði: Essays on Germanic Literature and Usage (Rome, 1994), p. 18. 12 For example, Jacques Le Goff, in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), refers to mentality as ‘ “that which changes least”

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not dissolve and reform overnight, especially in settings like Anglo-Saxon England where the mass of people had only a cursory acquaintance with the dominant language of literacy, Latin, and where only a small clerical elite read and wrote religious books. Still, if only by virtue of being written down, all Old English texts that have come down to us show the filtering effects of Christianity. Virtually every document from the early Middle Ages that we can read today is conditioned, to a greater or lesser degree, by the belief that lasting joy and peace are to be found in a realm other than daily life. I have referred to Byrhtnoth and his laughter, however, and it is time to look at The Battle of Maldon more closely, reading it within the context of archaic narratives of a comparable type.

The Language of Things and Gestures Readers of The Battle of Maldon may recall the dramatic moment when Ealdorman Byrhtnoth laughs aloud. At that moment in the action, as the unknown poet tells his tale with a vigor and an attention to physical detail that is unusual for the narrative poetry of this time, battle has been joined beside the River Pante between the Essex fyrd (‘militia’), headed by Byrhtnoth and his household retainers, and a powerful band of Viking raiders.13 At first things have gone well for the English, who have the advantage of home ground and, very likely, superior numbers,14 and who

in historical evolution’ (p. 229). I use the term ‘structures of feeling’, which derives ultimately from the writings of Raymond Williams, to denote those habits of sensibility, encompassing emotion as well as thought, that tend to remain stable over long periods of time despite changes in intellectual fashion. 13 The poet calls the river the ‘Pante’ (68a, 97b). Modern scholars take it to be the Blackwater, a river that flows close by the town of Maldon in Essex and at high tide encircles Northey Island, which is thought to have served as the Vikings’ base-camp during their campaign. For this and other details concerning the poem and its historical context I draw chiefly on the essays included in Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon, AD 991 (Oxford, 1991); see Wendy E.J. Collier at pp. 294–301 for exhaustive bibliography. Additional essays chiefly of a historical orientation are included in Janet Cooper, ed., The Battle of Maldon: Fiction and Fact (London, 1993). Five essays approaching Maldon from different critical perspectives are included in Mediaevalia 17 (1994, for 1991), as part of a cluster on the topic ‘History into Literature: Ideology, Values, and the Shaping of History in Narratives Relating to Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, ed. John D. Niles (pp. 1–176). 14 Despite statements that are sometimes made to the effect that the English were outnumbered, since they were on their own turf they were very likely to have had more troops at hand in their folc (‘general army’, 22a) in the actual battle on which the poem is based. Whether they had as many skilled warriors in their heorðwerod (‘household band’, 24a)

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have kept the Vikings at bay over a causeway that separates the two forces. Then, in a tactical decision whose wisdom the narrator questions (lines 89–90), Byrhtnoth agrees to make room for the raiders on his own side of the river Pante so as to draw them into an open fight. While the ensuing battle rages around him, Byrhtnoth is wounded by a Viking spear. Aroused by this blow rather than intimidated by it, he manages to dislodge the spear from his body with a wrench of his shield. With casts or thrusts of his own two spears, he first kills the man who had wounded him and then strikes down a second Viking. He then pauses for a moment to laugh: Se eorl wæs þe bliþra, hloh þa, modi man, sæde metode þanc ðæs dægweorces þe him drihten forgeaf. (146b–48) 15 (That made the warrior happier! He laughed out loud, that brave man; he gave thanks to God for the day’s work that the Lord had given him.)

By laughing out loud in the midst of the fight, Byrhtnoth exemplifies a spirit of defiance like that shown by members of his household troops later on in the battle, as the Vikings push forward and, one by one, twelve named warriors pledge their intent to fight to the death despite their increasingly desperate situation (lines 205–324). Those later lines of the poem have often been admired as among the finest expressions of courage to be found in all of literature. There is a crucial difference between that passage and the earlier one, however. The defiance shown by the twelve warriors is grounded in their knowledge of how desperate their situation is. No one among them is laughing. Byrhtnoth’s laughter, which comes at an earlier stage of the action, is based on no such understanding. The ealdorman has no way of foreseeing that the English will lose the battle, that their casualties will be grievous, and that he himself will be the foremost among the slain.16 In the very next lines of the poem (149–51) – he scarcely has time to as the Vikings had in their powerful raiding party is another question and one that is more to the point. The outcome of battle during this era, we may assume, depended very much on professional skills and armaments. 15 Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 6 (New York, 1942), p. 11. Citations of Maldon refer to this edition (pp. 7–16). Citations of other Old English poems with the exception of Beowulf are from the appropriate volume of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 1931–53). Translations are my own except as noted. 16 Since the end of the poem is lacking, there is no way to tell how the poet conceived of its exact outcome. Though not all sources are in agreement as to whether the battle was a victory or a defeat, the relevant entry in the A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

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blink – he receives a second, more terrible spear wound, and within another forty lines he is dead. Byrhtnoth’s laughter raises a troubling issue of interpretation. How are we to respond to this voiced gesture, this wordless vocal act? Is his laughter an index of happiness and well-being? One would not think so, seeing that he has just been wounded. Has one of his men cracked a joke? Not in our hearing. Anyway, humor and laughter are two different things and need not have any relation to one another. Is his laughter an ironic way of deflecting his pain, as when Adam of Bremen writes of the Danes of his own day, ‘When a man has been condemned [to death or slavery] it is his glory to put on a cheerful face’?17 Perhaps so, but Byrhtnoth has not been condemned by any court or judge, and despite having been wounded he is still on his feet, fighting boldly. Does his laughter then express sardonic scorn for his enemies, whom elsewhere the narrator calls ‘heathens’ (hæðene, 181b) and ‘wolves of slaughter’ (wælwulfas, 96a), terms that imply their savagery compared with the English? Very likely yes, but again, we are left guessing. We are not told explicitly how Byrhtnoth views his enemies at this point, though somewhat earlier (lines 42–61) he has addressed them in a boldly dismissive speech.18 Is his laughter akin to a martyr’s laughter under torture, as when St Lawrence speaks ‘with laughing mouth’ (mid hlihendum muðe) when he is stoned to death, in Ælfric’s homily on that saint?19 Certainly Byrhtnoth gives thanks to God in almost the same breath as when he laughs (147b–48), thus showing his piety, and yet there is a crucial difference that sets him apart from the martyrs. Rather than suffering torture or death, he has been doing his best to deal death out. Given these uncertainties, it is difficult to interpret Byrhtnoth’s laughter presents it as a defeat, while the C, D, E, and F versions specify that it led to a decision to pay the Vikings massive tribute in an attempt to forestall further raiding. See Janet M. Bately, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Scragg, Battle of Maldon, AD 991, pp. 37–50. 17 ‘Tunc, cum dampnatus fuerit, aetum esse gloria est’, Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum 4:6, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, vol. 29, part 2 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1917), p. 234; translation by R.I. Page, Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths (Toronto, 1995), p. 42. 18 Both Edward B. Irving, Jr., ‘The Heroic Style in The Battle of Maldon’, Studies in Philology 58 (1961), 457–67, at 460–61, and Earl R. Anderson, ‘Flyting in the Battle of Maldon’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970), 197–202, have stressed the masterful irony that is achieved through verbal echoes in Byrhtnoth’s speech to the Viking messenger. Note also Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor’, p. 11. 19 Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Text, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford, 1997), XXIX, lines 203–204 (p. 425). See Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, p. 196, note 9, for reference to this and a number of other instances when saints ‘laugh heroically in their defiance of torture and suffering and in their scorn for their obdurate oppressors’.

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or gauge it on a moral scale. Some readers might regard it as no more than an expression of the ellen, the fighting spirit, that is required of a hero in a tight situation or a saint whose zeal is being tried.20 Other readers, particularly those of a Robertsonian persuasion, might take the laughter of Byrhtnoth, that modi[g] man (147a), as a sign of the ofermod for which he is famous: high pride, pride that is based on ignorance and that has no sense of consequences, what the Greeks called hubris or, still more negatively, what patristic writers identified as the superbia (‘arrogance’) that was the sin of Lucifer and the chief of the seven deadly sins. As one can see, study of the scene that features Byrhtnoth’s laughter modulates inescapably toward study of that famous earlier scene where Byrhtnoth, for his ofermode (‘in his arrogance’, or perhaps ‘in his excessive confidence’, 89b), yields landes to fela (‘too much land’, 90a) to the Vikings and allows them unhindered passage over the river Pante so that they may engage in a full fight.21 For every reader of either scene who admires Byrhtnoth’s irrepressible spirit, a second one might be found who would question his wisdom. For most of us, I imagine, admiration for Byrhtnoth as a leader, sympathy for his cause, and doubts about his tactical wisdom coexist in an equipoise of tension. The image of laughter here is thus a semiotically rich one. Its meaning, like the meaning of the hleahtor wera ‘laughter of men’ of The Seafarer that Magennis has analyzed, is not easily translatable into words or reduced to a single formula, for it too represents ‘a dynamic interaction of contrasting significances’.22 By drawing on Magennis’s authority to support this claim I do not mean to evade the issue of literary interpretation; rather, I mean to put it on solid ground. Like any symbol – like fire, or water, or money, or the Cross, each of which either kills or yields blessings depending on how it is used – laughter is a double-edged sword. Its nature, like that of the gods, is inherently ambiguous. Moreover, no one scene in which laughter occurs can be interpreted in isolation. Like any sign, laughter

20

Peter Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), offers a brilliant discussion of ellen as ‘the ingredient fundamental to the fighting capability of any being’, a ‘vital force . . . in itself devoid of moral implications’ that was ‘a sort of kinetic energy, functioning, as we would put it, through the nervous system, and, in humans, cooperating with, but not originating in, willpower and mental functions generally’ (pp. 68–69). 21 See Helmut Gneuss, ‘The Battle of Maldon 89: Byrhtnoð’s Ofermod Once Again’, Studies in Philology 73 (1976), 117–37, taking issue with George Clark, ‘The Battle of Maldon: A Heroic Poem’, Speculum 43 (1968), 52–71. Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, p. 295, has pointed out that the semantic field of the word mod in Old English literature frequently encompasses the idea of a ‘dangerous, rebellious inner force’; the intensifying prefix ofer- clearly magnifies this sense here. 22 Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, p. 194.

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cannot function in the absence of a system of reference by which it can be construed. That system of reference (or those several systems, if more than one comes into play) has to be chosen by a reader or listener who thereby becomes complicit with the project of the poem. Byrhtnoth’s laughter serves as one of many instances in Old English poetry of the language of things and gestures. By this phrase I mean to refer to the tendency for abstract ideas to be expressed in terms of concrete images, material objects, and bodily displays, in a system of signs that is supple enough to encompass a wide range of human experience.23 A good starting point for consideration of the language of things and gestures in archaic literature is chapter one of Jasper Griffin’s book Homer on Life and Death. Griffin develops many insights into the narrative value of material things such as food, clothing, arms, and sceptres, as well as ‘stylized and universally intelligible gestures’ such as libations and gestures of supplication.24 Laughter in most of its forms, though Griffin does not discuss it, falls into this latter category of stylized gestures, for despite its enigmatic potential it is often an intelligible index of either well-being or scorn. One instructive example of Homeric stylization is the motif of attendance. When a man of stature in the Homeric poems appears in public, as Michael Nagler has shown,25 he is regularly accompanied by a pair of male attendants (or, if the leading figure is female, a pair of serving maids). The presence of a pair of attendants serves the function of auxesis: it marks out the attended person as important. Surely this is a motif drawn from life. In addition, however, the regular occurrence of Homeric attendants in pairs, governing a grammatically dual verb form, rather than as individuals or in groups of three or four or some unspecified number, is a literary topos. Since an important person almost never appears in public without an attendant pair, those scenes in Homer when a leading figure does appear alone are rhetorically ‘marked’ ones that are crucial to the development of the plot. An example of this tendency occurs at the beginning of Book 6 of the Odyssey, after Odysseus is washed up naked and alone on the shore of Phaiakia. There he meets the princess Nausikaa, whose attendants flee (6.137–40). Since Nausikaa is not only rich but also charmingly nubile, the ensuing scene hums with sexual tension. One does not forget that only 23

The subject of gesture is a large one that shades on one hand into drama and art history and on another hand into kinesics as a branch of linguistics. The essays included in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture from Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1991), offer many insights into the semiotics of gesture, with a bibliography of that subject on pp. 253–60. 24 Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), ch. 1: ‘Symbolic Scenes and Significant Objects’, pp. 1–49; the citation is from p. 27. 25 Michael N. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley, 1974), in particular chapter 3, ‘The Motif’ (pp. 64–111).

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shortly before this encounter by the shore, Odysseus has left the embraces of Calypso, the nymphomaniac goddess who has long blocked him from his return home to Ithaca and the faithful Penelope. To an uninitiated reader, the absence of attendants for either Odysseus or Nausikaa at this moment might seem to be an index of her danger in the presence of a potential sexual predator. In fact, it is more precisely an index of his renewed danger, from a narratological standpoint, for that absence accents his need to act with the utmost delicacy if he is to fulfil the trajectory of his nostos, his return to his proper place in his native society. The stylized motifs that are woven into the literary fabric of the Iliad and the Odyssey can often be traced in other bodies of literature as well.26 The motif of attendance, for example, figures in The Battle of Maldon in residual form at a crucial moment. When Byrhtnoth is struck down in the passage that follows hard upon his laughter, he is killed ‘not alone’ – o[k ° o4ov, as Homer would have said – but in the company of two named retainers: oa hine heowon hæðene scealcas ond begen þa beornas þe him big stodon, Ælfnoð ond Wulmær begen lagon, ða onemn hyra frean feorh gesealdon. (181–84) (Then the heathen warriors cut him down, together with both those warriors who stood beside him, Ælfnoth and Wulmær – both those men lay dead, having given up their lives alongside their lord.)

The device of auxesis can be recognized here. Byrhtnoth’s stature in death, as well as the stature of those of his troops who remain loyal to him, is emphasized through the poet’s deployment of the attendance motif, as readers of this passage are likely to recognize intuitively whether or not they are devotees of Homer. Readers of the Old Icelandic sagas, similarly, soon develop competence in the semiotic system that is embodied in the imagery of that genre. Mention of a prominent article of clothing – the blue jacket that Skarpheðinn wears in chapter 92 of Njál’s Saga, for example, or the blue tunic that he wears in chapter 120 – can prefigure a dramatic turn in the action. In the first instance, Skarpheðinn is about to kill his arch-enemy Þráinn Sigfússon; in the second, he is about to address a spectacular bit of verbal abuse to a windbag named Þorkell Braggart.27 To be ‘dressed to kill’ 26

I have traced certain of the workings of the motif of attendance in ‘The Ideal Depiction of Charlemagne in La Chanson de Roland’, Viator 7 (1976), 123–39, for example. 27 The ‘blue tunic’ motif in the Icelandic sagas is mentioned also by Page, Chronicles of the

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is a modern English idiom that relates to that same semiotic code. In a similar fashion, for an adult male in the sagas to say nothing but to sharpen an axe makes for an eloquent silence. Such ominous motifs must be ‘read’ in a manner that most readers will find transparent. Skarpheðinn’s sardonic grin, displayed in successive scenes towards the middle of Njál’s Saga (in chapter 119, twice in chapter 120, and again in chapter 123), is a well-known example of the language of things and gestures. It always has a sinister effect, especially seeing how unattractive Skarpheðinn is said to be when he is first described: ‘Hann var . . . liðr á nefi ok lá hátt tanngarðrinn, munnljótr nokkut’ (‘He was . . . [a man] with a crooked nose and prominent teeth, which made him ugly around the mouth’).28 Some readers might be inclined to compare Skarpheðinn’s unpretty smile with Byrhtnoth’s burst of laughter in The Battle of Maldon. Perhaps more aptly, looking to those earlier chapters in Njál’s Saga that feature the first two of the three marriages of the femme fatale Hallgerðr, they may wish to compare Hallgerðr’s odd hilarity at the time of her forced initial wedding to a nondescript man named Þorvaldr (ch. 10), or her equally curious laughter when she hears the news of the killing of her beloved second husband, Glúmr (ch.17). If we compare these scenes from Njál’s Saga with the scene from The Battle of Maldon, we should keep in mind the differences between them. Skarpheðinn is a heathen, as his very name implies without denoting (cf. Old Norse heiðinn, ‘heathen’). His grin, particularly when he displays it at the Althing in the context of his father’s overtures for peace,29 both masks and renders visible the implacable spirit

Vikings, p. 73. The motif of attendance that I have discussed with relation to the Odyssey and The Battle of Maldon can be traced in these scenes from Njál’s Saga, as well. Njáll has three sons, not counting the illegitimate H›skuldr. They are (1) Skarpheðinn, the ‘alpha’ personality who dominates those scenes in which he appears, and (2 and 3) Grímr and Helgi, two subordinate figures who are scarcely differentiated from one another. Grímr and Helgi regularly accompany Skarpheðinn or another character as an attendant pair. In chapter 92, however, when the Njálssons set out from home to attack their arch-rival Þráinn Sigfússon, Skarpheðinn is accompanied by Helgi and by his brother-in-law Kári, both of them dressed splendidly for the occasion, as one might predict. Grímr is not mentioned here though he too is present on the expedition, for mention of him would destroy the motif of dual attendance. Such stylization is typical of the sagas. Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavik, 1954), p. 231; translation by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Njal’s Saga (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 201. 28 Brennu-Njáls Saga, p. 70; Magnusson and Pálsson, p. 83. 29 ‘Njáll gekk þá heim til búðar ok mælti til sona sinna: “Nú er máli váru komit í gott efni. Vér erum menn sáttir ok fé allt komit í einn stað; skulu nú hvárirtveggju ganga til ok veita ›ðrum grið ok tryggðir. Vil ek nú biðja yðr, at þér spillið í engu um.” Skarpheðinn strauk um ennit ok glotti í móti. Ganga þeir þá allir til l›gréttu.’ Brennu-Njáls Saga, p. 313. (‘Njal walked back to his booth and said to his sons, “Now our case has been found

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of blood vengeance that wells up within him. As for Hallgerðr, she is a proud and self-willed woman. Her resentment knows no bounds when her fate is bandied about by men who ignore her desires. Her sardonic laughter on such occasions deflects her pain and encodes her determination to wreak vengeance upon those who have wronged her. Though her laughter is enigmatic to the men in the saga who hear it, to readers of the saga it speaks as eloquently as an axe being ground. Like Skarpheðinn’s grin, it is the index of a desire for blood. As for Byrhtnoth, he is one of the highest-ranking noblemen in the service of King Æthelred. A fearless leader and a pious Christian, he dies defending his land against a band of extortionist Vikings. His laughter, like Skarpheðinn’s grin or Hallgerðr’s laughter, marks him out at once from people of ordinary stature or of a more bland or passive disposition, but there the resemblance between these figures ends. To judge from these examples, laughter can signify a person’s ‘self-marking’ as someone to be reckoned with. A gesture of this kind asserts a person’s claims to dominance, just as a spear that is raised above one’s head signals the delivery of a formal speech. Although this latter image too is likely to be drawn from life, it has a literary integrity. Early in the action of Beowulf, the watchman who greets the Geats upon their arrival at the coast of Denmark raises his spear above his head to command attention, calling upon the visitors to declare the purpose of their visit (lines 235b–36). He thereby makes a claim to supremacy in whatever social interactions follow. When Beowulf then replies with decorous words, the conspicuous absence of any similar gesture on his part indicates his acceptance of a subordinate role in this exchange. Paradoxically, Beowulf’s modest but firm manner of speech convinces both us and the watchman of his readiness to undertake an extremely challenging mission. In The Battle of Maldon, Byrhtnoth raises his shield and waves his spear in the air while uttering a defiant reply to the Vikings’ request for tribute: bord hafenode,/ wand wacne æsc (‘he raised his shield, shook his pliant spear’, 42b–43a). His gesture identifies him as a leader to be reckoned with. Narratologically, it also marks him as the one figure in the poem on whom our attention as readers should be fixed. We can well expect him to be the Vikings’ chief target in the fight that is to come. Enough has been said to confirm that Old English poetry routinely draws on a pool of semantically rich images, based on shared cultural a happy solution. We have been reconciled, and all the money is gathered together. Each side is now to go and pledge peace and good faith to the other. I want to ask of you now not to spoil all this in any way.” Skarp-Hedin stroked his brow and grinned in reply. Then they all walked to the Court of Legislature.’ Magnusson and Pálsson, p. 255 [paragraph divisions deleted].)

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values, that give depth to what might otherwise seem to be neutral situations.30 In this regard it resembles the Homeric epics, the medieval Icelandic sagas, and – though I shall not take the time to discuss it – the traditional or ‘folk’ poetry of modern times,31 to mention only three literary cultures out of many that could be cited. Reading those semantically rich images well, however, requires cultural competence. It is my assumption that members of the upper classes of Anglo-Saxon society routinely had such competence. These were the people, I assume, who constituted the main textual communities of England before the Conquest, who patronized poets from time to time, and who would have been the Maldon poet’s primary audience.32 Members of the upper classes would have gained competence in poetry from an early age, whether from the process of reading it themselves or, more likely, from hearing others read or perform it aloud. If they ever talked with one another about such verse, as we can assume they sometimes did, then those occasions would have sharpened their discernment as members of a critical audience. Modern readers who are cut off from such processes of learning by the passage of centuries and by their own much more academic education are in a poorer position to gain such competence. However impressive the scholarship of our own time may be – and opinions about such matters vary curiously from age to age – knowledge gained through scholarly research inevitably represents a different competence from what is almost the birth30

I offer further discussion of this point in ‘Sign and Psyche in Old English Poetry’, American Journal of Semiotics 9 (1992), 11–25. 31 In his recent book Morning Dew and Roses: Nuance, Metaphor, and Meaning in Folksongs (Urbana, 1995), the noted ballad scholar Barre Toelken has analyzed the semantically rich images and metaphors that are often deployed in narrative songs of the British Isles and North America. References to the color green, to milk-white hands, to the combing out of hair, and to the intertwined growth of roses and briars, for example, do not occur at random in the ballads; rather, they appear at strategic points in the narrative in accord with systems of signification that those who are competent in the conventions of this genre will recognize and comprehend. Toelken draws on the semiotically oriented work of Roger deV. Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (Philadelphia, 1980), as well as on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s influential study of metaphor, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980). Cf. my own study ‘Symbolic Language in the Ballads’, Semiotica 1986, ed. John Deely and Jonathan Evans (Lanham, MD, 1987), pp. 33–42. 32 I borrow the term ‘textual community’ from Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983). Stock uses the term to designate a group of people who not only read texts but also talk about them. He concentrates on twelfth-century Europe and on textual communities centered on the church or monastery. When we turn to poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, however, we should keep in mind that during the period before the Conquest in England, textual communities may also have existed in nonclerical settings where the reading of literature was less important than the hearing of it.

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right of those people who are born into a culture and know it like the air they breathe. How can we redress this situation? Is it possible to learn to read the language of things and gestures in early English poetry with the confidence of native speakers? Perhaps not, and yet the attempt can be instructive. To conclude this essay let me turn once again to a consideration of Byrhtnoth’s laughter, taking a sharper glance now at critics’ understanding of this scene.

Reading Maldon 146b–48 Modern commentators on the scene that I have chosen to foreground seem to fall into two camps. In the first group are those readers who take Byrhtnoth’s laughter as a straightforward expression of joy, a response to what, in his book Taking Laughter Seriously, the philosopher John Morreall has called a ‘pleasant psychological shift’.33 Certainly Byrhtnoth has just experienced such a shift. He has done well after an anxious moment, and the momentum of battle is apparently still on his side. Why should a Christian nobleman defending his home ground against a gang of pagan extortionists not laugh aloud after striking down several of them with what Stopford Brooke, writing with an enthusiasm that was still possible during the era of British and American imperial expansion, once called ‘a good death-stroke’?34 Susie Tucker, writing near the beginning of the Cold War, agrees with Brooke in essence, though her phrasing is more clinical. In her view, ‘There is no hint of blame for Byrhtnoth when he has killed his enemy.’35 Other readers of Maldon have taken Byrhtnoth’s laughter as a sign that all is not well in Essex. As we have seen, Byrhtnoth has just decided to grant the Vikings landes to fela (‘too much land’, 90a). He has made this choice out of ofermod, the poet specifies (89b), a word that notoriously denotes too much of a good thing. Courage and resolve have turned into recklessness, it seems. Byrhtnoth’s laughter at this critical moment just after he has been wounded, long before the battle is resolved, seems of a piece with his earlier actions: his proud gesture when he brandishes his shield and shouts words of defiance, and his foolhardy decision to allow the Vikings to advance past the causeway. 33 34

John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany, 1983), p. 15. Brooke, English Literature (New York, 1877), quoted by Charles Langley Crow, ed., Maldon and Brunnanburh: Two Old English Songs of Battle (Boston, 1897), p. xxiii. 35 Susie I. Tucker, ‘Laughter in Old English Literature’, Neophilologus 43 (1959), 222–26, at 224.

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In Western moral philosophy, laughter is often identified as a sudden eruption that is inconsistent with an enlightened spirituality.36 Lord Chesterfield, placing as much emphasis on good manners as on enlightenment, wrote to his son in 1748, for example, ‘Having mentioned laughter, I must particularly warn you against it. . . . Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners. . . . In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred as audible laughter.’37 To accuse Byrhtnoth of ill breeding at the moment of his good death stroke would seem an unfair application of the standards of a more cultured age. Still, moral philosophy does not seem to be Byrhtnoth’s strong suit, and that weakness should be explored. If his sudden burst of laughter expresses derision, then does it serve as a sign of his lack of enlightenment, even when measured according to tenth-century standards? In a footnote to an important article on The Battle of Maldon, Fred C. Robinson has suggested that like his rash decision to grant the Vikings unhindered passage across the Pante, Byrhtnoth’s laughter is darkened by bitter irony, for it serves as ‘a conventional dramatic signal that a mortal blow is imminent at the moment when the threatened person least expects it’.38 Magennis, similarly, viewing this scene as an expression of ‘exultant laughter at someone else’s expense’, cites it as a prime example of ‘Laughter of Triumph, Hostility and Scorn’39 and notes that often, though not always, laughter of this kind is based on ignorance of the true situation facing the laugher. If this line of thought is followed, then Byrhtnoth’s laughter exemplifies his fatal flaw, his imperturbable arrogance, and could even be said to portend his death, which arrives almost as a form of retribution. I have no wish to quarrel with this approach. Narratologically, a burst of laughter here is like a red flag signalling danger and inviting nemesis. ‘Praise the fair day at even’, runs the English proverb.40 The author of the Eddic poem Hávamál expresses the same sentiment more sardonically in his own Norse tongue: ‘At kveldi skal dag leyfa,/ konu er brennd er’

36

37 38

39 40

Plato for example writes that people ‘must not be overfond of laughter’, for ‘whenever anyone indulges in violent laughter, a violent change of mood is likely to follow’. The Republic 3:338d, trans. G.M.A. Grube (London, 1981 [first pub. 1974]), p. 67. Letter of 9 March 1748, quoted by Norman N. Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, 1982), p. 15. Fred C. Robinson, ‘God, Death, and Loyalty in The Battle of Maldon’, J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 76–98, note 33 (pp. 86–87). Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, p. 195. Archer Taylor, The Proverb and An Index to ‘The Proverb’, with an introduction by Wolfgang Mieder (Bern, 1985), pp. 26, 178–79; cf. ‘An Index’, p. 25; for fuller discussion see Taylor, ‘ “In the Evening Praise the Day” ’, Modern Language Notes 36 (1921), 115–18.

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(‘Don’t say, ‘‘It’s been a good day” till sundown. Don’t say, ‘‘She’s a good wife’’ till she’s buried’).41 Byrhtnoth is foolish to exult. His day’s work is not yet done. In the next moment another Viking spear strikes him right through the body. This wound is no joke. Although a young English warrior pulls the spear from Byrhtnoth’s side and hurls it back, striking that enemy down on the spot, two more Vikings advance and one of them wounds the ealdorman in the arm, causing his sword to fall to the ground. Aware at last of the terrible truth of his position, he gazes toward heaven and utters his last words in the form of a prayer for salvation, giving thanks to God for all the favors he has received over the course of his long life. Then he is struck down dead. If one surveys Old English literature as a whole, most images of laughter are of this sardonic type.42 Presiding over a feast in the poem Judith, the drunken Holofernes indulges in an orgy of mirth and laughter: hloh ond hlydde, hlynede ond dynede, ‘he laughed and whooped, he shouted and stormed’ (line 23). His partying is ill-timed, given what we know about his impending fate. The Anglo-Saxons were well acquainted with cold-blooded laughter as well as such maniacal displays. In The Battle of Brunanburh, much as in the skaldic poetry that Aaron Gurevich has analyzed at some length,43 laughter expresses exultant scorn. The northerners who flee the battlefield with Constantine, king of the Scots, and Anlaf, leader of the Dublin-based Vikings, are said to have had ‘no reason to laugh’ that they came off better than the English in the fight (hlehhan ne þorftun, 47b). In an agonistic context of this kind, depriving one’s enemies of the opportunity to laugh is as good as laughing at them oneself. In the Northern world in general, laughter is usually directed against one’s enemy or rival and is construed as an act of aggression. According to J.C. Gregory, author of The Nature of Laughter, ‘As laughter emerges with man from the mists of antiquity it seems to hold a dagger in its hand.’44 Gregory may be thinking of the ancient biblical or Mediterranean world rather than the mists and moors outside Heorot, but his point holds true for the Germanic North as well. When we contemplate 41

David A.H. Evans, ed., Hávamál, Viking Society for Northern Research, Text Series 7 (London, 1986), verse 81 (p. 55). Translation by Page, Chronicles of the Vikings, p. 144. 42 Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, notes that besides being found frequently in Old English poetry, scornful laughter is also ‘the most characteristic kind of laughter found in Old Norse and other heroic poetry and indeed in hagiography’, as well as being ‘the most common kind of laughter which occurs in the bible’ and ‘the only kind of laughter found in the [Old Saxon] Heliand’; see pp. 196–97, with abundant references in notes 8–12. 43 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, ch. 8 (‘On Heroes, Things, Gods and Laughter in Germanic Poetry’), pp. 122–76. 44 J.C. Gregory, The Nature of Laughter (New York, 1924), p. 13.

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Grendel’s inward laughter when he enters the doors of Heorot, we know ourselves to be in the presence of what Gregory calls ‘the laughter of triumph – laughter in its most crude and brutal form’ (p. 3). Grendel’s mirth is given an ironic twist, however. As with Holofernes’ mirth in Judith, the audience knows more about what is happening than Grendel does. When he pauses just inside the doors of Heorot shortly before his ill-fated encounter with Beowulf, Grendel casts his eyes over a roomful of sleeping men. His heart lights up: þa his mod ahlog (‘then his spirit laughed within him’, 730b). He would be less exultant if he had read the script of the play in which he is a leading actor. Here as elsewhere in Beowulf, an ironic dimension is opened up through the poet’s exploitation of two different points of view: that of the actors in the narrative, who know no more than they see, and that of an enlightened person of later times, who can assess the responses of those actors by the light of a superior wisdom.45 When we read the scene of Byrhtnoth’s laughter in The Battle of Maldon with an eye to the structural ironies of these passages from Judith and Beowulf and with attention also to the different, more favorable trajectory of battle in The Battle of Brunanburh, we can see that there is more to Byrhtnoth’s laughter than defiance, scorn, and the hero’s self-marking as a hero. Also built into the scene by the river Pante is a structural irony that derives from the coexistence of opposed perspectives. Byrhtnoth has tunnel vision. His quickness to exult in his temporary advantage uncomfortably reminds one of Holofernes prematurely celebrating his nuptials or Grendel licking his lips at the prospect of a meal that he is not to enjoy. Byrhtnoth sees only one thing: another Viking down. As readers of the passage, we see the action from two different perspectives. First, we are invited to identify with the actors in the poem, both Byrhtnoth and his followers, who suffer their small agonies with nearly superhuman grace. Second, we are required to keep some distance from those actors and judge them with wisdom that derives from hindsight, for we know more than they do about the course of events in which they are embroiled. Any reader of the poem, or any listener to it in former days, must be aware that it was in this battle that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth met his death. The losses suffered by the English forces at Maldon seem to have led directly to King Æthelred’s decision to offer huge tribute to the Vikings to forestall further attacks.46 It 45

On dual perspectives in Beowulf, see particularly Marijane Osborn, ‘The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf’, PMLA 93 (1978), 973–81. 46 Note the remarks of D.G. Scragg, ed., The Battle of Maldon (Manchester, 1981): ‘Partly through long life and partly through force of personality, Byrhtnoth had established military sway in England second to none. The loss of so experienced a commander must have had a significant effect on the aristocracy, both spiritual and lay, and the decision to buy off the invaders may have been taken on the assumption that if Byrhtnoth could not contain them, no one could’ (p. 19).

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is hard to see how the audience of the poem, either now or in former times, could divest itself of this knowledge so as to view Byrhthnoth’s laughter without misgivings about its appropriateness and timing. If this reading is accepted, then our understanding of Byrhtnoth’s laughter is necessarily somewhat detached. Although he is a figure of magnificence, he is in a fight whose wisdom can be debated, and he is unaware that he is about to pay the price for his courage. But what of the imagined audience of his laughter in the poem? Do Byrhtnoth’s men, fighting and dying beside him, share our superior wisdom and perceive their leader’s mistake? Twelve named companions, among any number of other men, choose to stay at the front to avenge their leader even at the cost of their own lives. If they are imagined to share our wisdom, then their heroic choice is made problematic. It is one thing to lose your life for your leader; it is another to throw it away for a fool. But of course, the men do not share our perspective. They cannot have heard the narrator’s criticism of Byrhtnoth’s ofermod, nor can they be expected to be analyzing the poetics of a literary gesture that is slipping rapidly into the narrative past. They are too close to the action – they are the action itself – and each of them has his own job to do. This conclusion leads to another question, however. If the warriors who die at the front are acting out their parts in ignorance and, like Byrhtnoth, are complicit in their own destruction, then must we not also view their heroics, like those of Byrhtnoth, from a detached and even ironic perspective? This thought is a disturbing one. Almost all modern criticism of Maldon has taken a reverential view of the sacrifices made by the warriors who urge one another on, uttering mutual pledges to fight to the death. Irony, if admitted here, would force a radically anti-heroic reading of this part of the poem and would make a mockery of a long tradition of Maldon scholarship. Although at least one modern reader of Maldon, writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, has adopted such an anti-heroic perspective,47 I do not urge readers down that rocky path. On the contrary, I assume that while Byrhtnoth’s laughter is ambiguous, for it flamboyantly expresses the inseparable qualities of courage and arrogance that characterize his portrayal in this poem, the heroics of his men are to be viewed with unqualified respect. There is a balance of forces here, a push for every pull 47

Heather Stuart, ‘The Meaning of Maldon’, Neophilologus 66 (1982), 126–39. According to Stuart, not only does Byrhtnoth experience a ‘desire for self-destruction’ that arises from preoccupation with ‘his own personal glory’, his loyal thanes, too, ‘behave like puppets’ and remain ‘trapped . . . in their heroic fantasy’ on a battlefield that is ‘fast becoming a slaughter-ground’ (pp. 130–35). What the poem thus depicts, in the end, claims Stuart, is ‘man’s ability to deceive himself’ (p. 137).

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when it comes to audience sympathies. By the time that the fragment breaks off, in my view as in that of the vast majority of readers of this poem, any questions that have arisen earlier concerning Byrhtnoth’s wisdom are subsumed in admiration for the loyal warriors and, indeed, for Byrhtnoth himself as the inspiration for their commitment to the highest standard of conduct.

Thomas’s Saw As the historian Keith Thomas has written, ‘Those who study the past usually find themselves arriving at two contradictory conclusions. The first is that the past was very different from the present. The second is that it was very much the same.’48 No historian or ethnographer is likely to be able to improve upon Thomas’s commonsensical formulation of the dialectics of past and present, of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The issues relating to human nature and the comparative study of mentality that were raised at the beginning of this essay cannot well be resolved, for they are perennial ones. Anyway, why should interpretive issues be resolved in the direction of an imagined order that organizes our conceptions of the past or of a foreign culture so efficiently as to empty it of contradictions? Internal coherence we can perhaps discern in the mental world of other people, if we study them patiently enough. Why, though, should we look for greater consistency in a foreign culture than we generally experience in our own? In The Battle of Maldon as in life as it is often experienced, there is a coherence to the scene-by-scene progression of sympathies that overrides the demands of strict consistency. In the early parts of the poem, the narrator establishes Byrhtnoth as a leader to be reckoned with, confident in his authority and respected by his men. He then ascribes to Byrhtnoth words of defiance that sting the Vikings into action and articulate the pride of the English as a group. Then, after some inconclusive skirmishing and waiting, the unexpected happens. In a moment of bravado, Byrhtnoth clears room for the Vikings on his own side of the Pante so as to meet them in a general fight. As the narrator makes clear, his decision is a foolhardy one. Once that fatal step is taken, however, Byrhtnoth’s unflinching conduct in the battle, the pathos of his wounds, and the heroic efforts of his retainers to avenge him49 all serve to identify him as a true hero, the finest that we know of from his era. The dying Byrhtnoth’s prayer to God for the safe conduct of 48

Keith Thomas, ‘Introduction’ to Bremmer and Roodenburg, Cultural History of Gesture, pp. 1–14; the citation is from p. 10. 49 It is this desire for vengeance, rather than any putative death-wish, that the poet repeatedly stresses, unlike modern critics who speak again and again of the warriors’ ‘suicidal’

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his soul, finally, invites our admiration and encourages our own prayers for his salvation as nothing else in the poem can do. Byrhtnoth’s laughter, then – that sudden outburst of ofermod, the excess of uncrushable spirit for which that leader is famed – sums up the spirit of Maldon in a single image. His laughter is a gesture that expresses what the nature of heroism is, in the eyes of ordinary humanity: it is what both attracts and repels us when a person is resolute in pursuit of a cause that is noble, even if hopeless or misguided. Byrhtnoth’s gesture emblematizes the nature of laughter itself as a form of resistance to the tyranny of reason, compassion, moderation, and good sense. As readers of the poem, having absorbed its contradictory messages, we may come away satisfied that the triumphs and agonies of heroic action have been figured in literature with a precision that merits respect. If we look for other answers to the question of the meaning of Byrhtnoth’s laughter, we are likely to be led astray by cultural assumptions that cling like burrs to our present-day vocabulary and mode of thought, however much we would like to shed them. At best, by offering a literary interpretation of such a poem as The Battle of Maldon – that is, by retelling its story in terms that make sense in our own time and place, as I have done in parts of this essay – we will be doing little more than translating the efficient medieval poetics of things and gestures into the different and less potent language of contemporary prose. We will have gained a substitute for the poem, and in a few years the laugh will be on us.

spirit. I have discussed this point in ‘Maldon and Mythopoesis’, Mediaevalia 17 (1994, for 1991), 89–121, at 106–11, with note 51 (pp. 119–21).

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FOLLY AND WISDOM IN ANGLO-SAXON HUMOR T.A. SHIPPEY

‘Grim Wordplay’: Folly and Wisdom in Anglo-Saxon Humor T.A. SHIPPEY

‘We are not amused’, said Queen Victoria, and the remark has become canonical (however apocryphal its origins) as an example of stuffiness, pomposity, failure to see a joke – all serious offences against the conventions of modern culture. As Derek Brewer has pointed out, GSOH (Good Sense Of Humor) is a sine qua non in the coded language of contemporary ‘Personal Columns’, and few will admit to lacking it.1 Yet at the same time, as has been pointed out recently from another quarter, no disapproving remark makes a modern American intellectual more neurotic than ‘I don’t think that’s very funny’ – the standard way to indicate that once innocent words have become offensive.2 On the one hand, by asserting one’s own ‘GSOH’, one can lay claim to openness, wit, good nature; on the other hand, by denying that humor exists/ought to exist at all, one demonstrates superior sensitivity and moral authority, while denying these desirable qualities implicitly or openly to the other party. All this reminds us, first, that humor can be used tactically within a culture, and second, that humor is to some considerable extent culturally determined and subject to change. The effects of cultural redefinitions of humor, as regards Anglo-Saxon studies, appear to work in two ways. One way is by finding humor (usually categorized as ‘ironic’ humor) in what appears on the face of it to be said straightforwardly. This has become common in the case of heroic literature, especially Beowulf. In several essays one finds it argued that, for instance, the lines on the failure of Unferth’s sword Hrunting ‘fairly drip with irony’; that the awakening scene of lines 484–88 should be seen as a drunken and hungover parody of sober monastic routine; that the vexed word ealuscerwen of line 769 is a sardonic threat, ‘charged with irony’; and

1 2

Derek S. Brewer, ed., Medieval Comic Tales (Cambridge, 1973; 2nd edn 1996), p. xii. Anthony Grafton, ‘Beyond the Joke’, Review of M.A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Harmondsworth, 1997), in Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 1998, pp. 4–5.

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so on.3 It is, of course, impossible to prove or disprove such assertions (the detection of irony being so much a matter of opinion), but one can at any rate recognize their nature. What they characteristically do is expose a heroic and aristocratic context to the conventions of bourgeois realism. If ‘humor is always subversive’, as is often said,4 it is deployed here to subvert an alien culture and reassert liberal and democratic orthodoxy, in a manner always likely to be welcome in a modern classroom. It is their welcomeness, indeed, that renders such assertions suspicious. The humor they find is one which depends on the puncturing of (other people’s) illusions; the Anglo-Saxon audience they imply is one which shares the assumptions of modern culture. Meanwhile, the counterpart to seeing humor which was perhaps not originally intended (the kind of humor mentioned above, humor which fits our own cultural and social patterns), must surely and more seriously be failing to see humor which may indeed have been intended, but which fails to fit or indeed openly rejects our own cultural patterns. Here the chance of coming to some definite conclusions seems to be rather stronger – if, that is, one can overcome the much-feared ‘that’s-not-funny’ reaction. It may be salutary, before proceeding, to remember the summary definition of humor given by the lion in Robert Henryson’s Middle Scots fable of ‘the Parliament of Fourfuttit Beistis’. The lion-king, looking at the bleeding wolf whose broken head has just been likened to the red cap of a Doctor of Divinity, remarks, with his court laughing merrily behind him: The greitest clerkis ar not the wysest men; The hurt of ane happie the uther makis. (lines 1064–65)5

Whatever one thinks of the first line, the second at least represents a well-established if not currently well-regarded view of humor: ‘Hurting people is funny, and people hurting are funny too.’ In this essay I hope to persuade at least some readers that there is a vein of Anglo-Saxon humor which arises out of this theory and which is capable of being demonstrated, whether one chooses to accept it as funny or not. 3

References here are, respectively, to Lewis E. Nicholson, ‘Hunlafing and the Point of the Sword’, in Nicholson and Dolores W. Frese, eds., Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, for John C. MacGalliard (Notre Dame, 1975), pp. 50–61, at 57; Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., ‘Canonical Parody in Beowulf’, in Tripp, ed., Literary Essays on Language and Meaning in the Poem called ‘Beowulf’: Beowulfiana Literaria (Lewiston, NY, 1992), pp. 267–78; and Stephen O. Glosecki, ‘Beowulf 769: Grendel’s Ale-Share’, ELN 25.1 (1987), 1–9, at 9. Such views are summed up in an essay by E.L. Risden, ‘Irony in Beowulf’, in a forthcoming volume in honor of Raymond Tripp. 4 Brewer, Medieval Comic Tales, p. xiv. 5 Charles Elliott, ed., Robert Henryson: Poems (Oxford, 1963; 2nd edn 1974), p. 33.

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* I begin with the observation (its limitations are exposed elsewhere in this volume) that while it is no longer possible to say for sure what Anglo-Saxons found funny, it is possible to count and categorize the contexts in which they felt it appropriate to record laughter. The exercise has been carried out recently by Hugh Magennis,6 and duplicated by myself with only slightly different results. Magennis notes some twenty-two cases of laughter, or laughing, within the corpus of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. He classifies four of them as ‘Laughter as a Symbol of Joy or Relief’, to which I would add a fifth, from Metrical Psalms 85:11. The most striking of these comes from The Descent into Hell, when at the moment of the Maries’ discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, the patriarchs and prophets in hell break into laughter: Open wæs þæt eorðærn, æþelinges lic onfeng feores gæst, folde beofode, hlogan helwaran. (lines 19–21) (The sepulchre was open, the prince’s body received the breath of life. The earth quaked, hell’s inhabitants laughed.)7

Four more examples are classified by Magennis as instances of ‘Laughter as a Symbol of Happiness and Prosperity’ (as for instance in the cheerful settings of Beowulf 611 or Rune Poem 38), while one – the spiritual laughter (næfre ær his ferhð ahlog) of Saturn after being defeated in argument by Solomon in Solomon and Saturn II 178 – is classified as ‘Sublime Laughter’. Magennis does not use the term, but these ten cases could be taken together as examples of ‘positive laughter’. They are outnumbered, however, by various negative forms. Magennis cites a dozen cases of ‘Laughter of Triumph, Hostility and Scorn’, including those inverted cases where the absence of laughter indicates ‘ignominious defeat’, as in Brunanburh 47–49, Andreas 1702–04, or Elene 918–20, in the last of which the devil says ruefully: Ic þa rode ne þearf hleahtre herigean. Hwæt, se hælend me in þam engan ham oft getynde.

6

In ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, with Particular Reference to the “Hleahtor Wera” of The Seafarer’, English Studies 73 (1992), 193–204. 7 Quotations of Old English poems are from George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (6 vols., New York, 1931–53). Translations are my own.

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(I have no need to extol the cross with laughter. Indeed, the Savior has often shut me up in my narrow home.)

His situation is the exact obverse of that of the patriarchs about to be released from Hell in the citation from The Descent into Hell above. In the poem Judgment Day II, line 235, we find another neatly inverted form, this time of the ‘Happiness and Prosperity’ scene of Beowulf 611 viewed with disapproval, for at Doomsday hleahter and plega, ‘laughter and play’, will vanish altogether. Magennis cites one further special case (Holofernes in Judith 23) of ‘Disordered, Riotous Laughter’. However the most striking example of these negative forms must be Grendel’s inner laughter as he sees the sleeping men in Heorot, Beowulf 730: Þa his mod ahlog. What makes Grendel laugh? Obviously, it is the thought of the slaughter he is about to deal out, for (as Henryson’s lion observed) hurting people makes (some) people happy. Grendel’s reaction may, of course, be thought to be merely monstrous, but it is paralleled not only by the pagan tormentor Eleusius in Juliana 189, not only by the subordinate devil who has brought about the Fall of Humanity in Genesis B 724, but also by the Christian hero Byrhtnoth in Maldon 147.8 In the last two cases the ‘laugh of triumph’ is admittedly retrospective, over souls betrayed or Vikings killed, rather than prospective, as in Grendel’s case, but that apart the reactions seem similar. The laughter of ‘happiness and prosperity’ can then be seen positively, as in The Rune Poem, or negatively, as in Judgment Day II. The laughter of ‘triumph, hostility and scorn’ can also be positive or negative, Christian or pagan, heroic or monstrous. Furthermore, as Magennis remarks, even the positive laughter of ‘joy or relief’ is ‘in many ways similar’ to the negative laughter of ‘triumph, hostility and scorn’, the difference lying only in the fact that in the latter type the laughter ‘has an opponent who is its object, who is derided or defeated: it is an exultant laughter at someone else’s expense’, or to use a German term Gegeneinanderlachen, laughter directed at someone else.9 That apart, though, the situations, and the ways in which they are phrased, are often closely similar. When the patriarchs in Hell laugh at the moment of Resurrection in The Descent into Hell, they might be taken as laughing at the thought of relief from their own pains; but at the same time the Resurrection represents a moment of triumph over death and Hell and Satan, a sentiment strongly expressed elsewhere in the poem. 8

On Byrhtnoth’s laughter, see further John D. Niles’s essay, ‘Byrhtnoth’s Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture’, in this volume. 9 ‘Images of Laughter’, p. 195. Magennis borrows the term from an earlier article, Gerhard Wahrig, ‘Das Lachen im Ae und Mittelenglischen’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 3 (1955), 274–304 and 389–418.

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Their laughter could then express triumph as much as relief, and would in that way be similar at bottom to Grendel’s exultation at the sight of the sleeping victims, to Byrhtnoth’s glee at killing his enemy, or to the laughter of the devil in Genesis B 724–25 once he knows that Adam and Eve have been betrayed. It is context alone which marks some instances of laughter as right and proper (the patriarchs), some as wrong and diabolical (Grendel and the devil), while perhaps leaving some (like Byrhtnoth’s) ambiguous. Nevertheless the humor in the situation is arguably always the same: a sudden awareness or expectation of victory, a contrast between tension, failure, or uncertainty in the past and success in the present. Such awarenesses (as Grendel and Byrhtnoth were to realize) are, however, intrinsically vulnerable. And this exposes another very common feature of laughter in Old English poetry: that often, indeed usually, the laugh is on those who laugh. The laughter of Holofernes in Judith, of Grendel in Beowulf, of Byrhtnoth in Maldon, are all followed immediately by death. Their sense of triumph was mistaken, or at best temporary. The same is true of the more striking cases of laughter in Genesis A: Ham laughing at his father Noah’s nakedness in lines 1582–84; the kings of the north carrying home their booty in line 2066; Sarah laughing in disbelief at God’s announcement that she will bear a child in her old age at line 2382. Ham laughs because of a kind of triumph over his father, the kings of the north because they expect soon to be home with the booty they have taken from Abraham, Sarah because she is sure she knows better than God, but all three are wrong, for Ham will be reduced to servitude because of his unfilial disrespect, the kings will be killed in battle, and Sarah will be proven wrong in her own body. It should be noted furthermore that in two cases out of three the scornful or triumphant, but mistaken, laughter has been added by the Old English poet. Sarah’s laughter is there in Genesis 18:10 and 18:12, but the kings’ exultation is part of a major expansion by the poet, while in the case of Ham the Old English poet appears to be adding scornful laughter as a justification for the curse laid upon Ham when his father wakes up. The Vulgate version says only, and with no suggestion of disrespect, ‘quod cum vidisset Ham pater Chanaan verenda scilicet patris sui esse nuda nuntiavit duobus fratribus suis foras’ (And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without) [Genesis 9:22]). This the Old English poet expands with strong condemnation as: þær he freondlice on his agenum fæder are ne wolde gesceawian, ne þa sceonde huru hleomagum helan, ac he hlihende broðrum sægde, hu se beorn hine reste on recede. (1579–84) 37

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(Then he would not show his own father filial respect, nor indeed conceal his shame from his kin, but told his brothers laughingly how the man was lying on his bed.)

It is natural for people to laugh – or so the Genesis poet seems to think – when they believe they have gained superiority over someone else. But often (and this turns the laugh the other way) they are mistaken. The same idea surely lies behind the ‘inverted’ cases mentioned above, of Brunanburh 47, Andreas 1702, Elene 918. That the enemies of the good ‘had no need to laugh’ in defeat implies that they would have laughed in victory; but once again the laugh is on the laughers, and the real humor lies in the sense of expectation thwarted, of laughter choked off. Laughing in Old English poetry is in fact a dangerous business, and the only characters who seem to get away with it are those who have some form of divine sanction (all of Magennis’s ‘joy or relief’ cases, namely the one example from the Psalms, Saturn, and Abraham in Genesis A 2065–67). I would suggest, indeed, that just as important as the distinction between ‘joy’ and ‘triumph’, laughing for one’s own sake or laughing at someone else, is the distinction between justified laughter and (more common and more prominent) foolish laughter. But this distinction can only be made retrospectively. The triumph of the fool (Grendel) and the joy of the wise (the patriarchs and prophets in Hell) look and sound exactly the same. Nor are they as easy to distinguish in terms of virtuous as opposed to vicious motivation as one might like. Byrhtnoth, fighting for England and Christianity against the pagans, laughs exultantly, is wounded two lines later, crippled, and killed in immediately successive scenes. By contrast the devil who seduces Adam and Eve laughs exultantly, makes a long speech of triumph, and retires undefeated and still exultant to take the news to his master. There is (and this seems to be a hard saying for modern academic culture to digest) no correlation between virtue and wisdom. In some cases, all that can be said is that one side is right/realistic, the other is wrong/mistaken. Laughing at people who are not able to tell the difference between the two situations – and this means most people, or most people outside the privileged audience who know the answer – appears to be a staple of Anglo-Saxon humor. This kind of humor depends on an opposition of wisdom and folly, in the full awareness that there is a very fine line between the two; and, further, on the ability to see through what appears on the surface to the truth of the matter underneath. The master maxim of Anglo-Saxon humor might be, ‘He who laughs last laughs longest.’ But of course one never knows, till the very end (and who can be sure when that very end will be?), who will be the last to laugh.

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* I am arguing for a sardonic quality in Anglo-Saxon humor, triggered above all by any too easy optimism, and leading on the one hand to contempt, which may be cruel and derisive, for the laughter of fools, and on the other to a more concealed admiration for those who can view uncomfortable realities with amusement at the gap between them and the wishes of those who experience them, even when the latter group includes themselves. The former attitude remains familiar enough, if very strongly disapproved of within modern liberal culture. The latter, meanwhile, is part of the heroic temper, and related to the ridens moriar theme which was one of the first qualities to strike European scholars in early Germanic literature (especially Old Norse) once they encountered it;10 and one can indeed find examples of both the contempt and the admiration mentioned above within the ‘heroic’ corpus of Old English poetry. The poet of Judith, to take another example from Biblical adaptation, has gone out of his way to create a comic scene out of the gathering of the Assyrians outside Holofernes’ tent after – but unknown to them – their leader has been beheaded by Judith. The apocryphal ‘Book of Judith’ here says only that the Assyrian officers went to the tent of Holofernes to ask for him to be woken, when the eunuch Bagoas ‘entered and knocked upon the curtain of the tent, for he supposed that he [Holofernes] was sleeping with Judith’ (Judith 14:13–14). The Old English poem however stresses what the Assyrian officers thought, their embarrassment at the growing need to disturb Holofernes’ privacy, their comic attempts to reconcile necessity with tact: Hi ða somod ealle ongunnon cohhetan, cirman hlude ond gristbitian, gode orfeorme. . . . Hogedon þa eorlas aweccan hyra winedryhten; him wiht ne speow. (269–74) (Then all together they began to cough and make loud noises, and gnash their teeth, having no luck. . . . The warriors meant to wake their lord; they had no success.)

10

One finds it especially in Thomas Bartholinus, Antiquitatum Danicarum de Causis Contemptæ Mortis a Danis adhuc gentilibus libri tres ex vetustis codicis & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti (Copenhagen, 1689), a book which remained influential for over a century. Bartholin’s loci classici, besides the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar Loðbrók’ mentioned below, include the execution scene in Jómsvíkinga saga and the death of H›gni in Atlakviða and Atlamál.

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The laugh is on them for not guessing that the situation is much worse than they thought. They share Holofernes’ over-confidence from the night before (hloh ond hlydde, ‘he laughed and shouted’), they will be disabused in much the same way, and the poet is surely inviting his readers to relish and find amusement in their shock and despair. They deserve it not for being evil, nor for being the enemies of God, though they are, but for their unreflecting assurance. By contrast one may feel that there is an implicit and much more admirable humor in Hnæf’s speech at the start of the Finnsburg Fragment. Here lack of awareness is present not in Hnæf but in the watchman, who offers three possible explanations for the glints of light that he has seen – dawn, a dragon, the hall ablaze – two of them potentially threatening, but none as threatening as the truth.11 Hnæf replies by repeating and dismissing the watchman’s explanations, before stating the real one: moonlight on weapons. He shows heroic awareness furthermore by seeing beyond the threat of attack to the treachery that has motivated it, the compelling reasons for the treachery, the remorseless and inescapable quality of what must ensue. Is there humor in this situation? I would suggest there is, as there is in other poems and scenes of startled awakening within Germanic literature,12 stemming in this case first from Hnæf’s strictly unnecessary repetition of the watchman’s false explanations, and second from his oblique statement of the real one. Hnæf is amused by the watchman’s over-optimism (or insufficient pessimism, or lack of realism – all much the same thing in the heroic world), which parallels, if more forgivably, the misunderstanding of the Assyrians, and at a further remove the misplaced confidence of Grendel, or Holofernes, or Sarah, or Ham. But Hnæf does not share it, and finds further amusement in letting the situation dawn on his hearers, the watchman and his comrades in the hall.

11

I follow here the argument of Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘ “Is it Fog or Smoke or Warriors Fighting?”: Irish and Welsh Parallels to the Finnsburg Fragment’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 27 (1978), 145–58, who sees in the Fragment a narrative pattern familiar in Celtic heroic literature, in which one character gives false explanations for an event, before being corrected by another. The humorous note I detect in Hnæf is not present in the Celtic examples. 12 The obvious example is the Old Norse Bjarkamál. This is furthermore embedded in a second, and still partly comic context of dawn awakening in the Flateyjarbók version of Fóstbræðra saga, ch. 24; while the same situation is turned into cruel and grotesque comedy in the story of Hjalti’s awakening in the Hrolfs saga kraka. It would be a separate exercise to show how each of these three variations on the same scene is turned into comedy, but all of them, while fatal and disastrous, do contain deliberately comic elements.

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* Sardonic amusement can, however, be found in Anglo-Saxon outside heroic contexts, though still with some relation to them. There is a vein of it in Anglo-Saxon proverbialism, as again in Old Norse. We have as yet no comprehensive study of the Anglo-Saxon proverbial corpus, which would need to take in much of the wisdom poetry, the gnomic statements in narrative poems, scattered citations from Alfred, Ælfric, and homiletic literature, but above all the two major non-poetic collections, the Distichs of Cato and the Durham Proverbs.13 Though the former of these is predominantly translated and the latter predominantly original, the two collections in some ways overlap. But the latter is especially strongly marked by humor of a sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected kind. The Durham Proverbs include, for instance, five ‘Wellerisms’, the device popularized by Dickens by which an innocuous or uninteresting statement is transformed by inventing a fantastic, ridiculous, or obscene context in which it is said to be said.14 Dickens’s examples include, ‘There! now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.’15 The Durham Proverbs are not much less macabre with their nos. 44 and 45, respectively ‘Wide ne biþ wel cwæþ se þe gehyrde on helle hriman’ (Things are bad all over, said the man who heard screaming in hell), and ‘Age þe se þe æfter cige cwæþ se þe geseah hungor of tune faran’ (Let him have you who may call for you, said the man who saw hunger leaving town). They are even harder to visualize with their still-unexplained no. 10, ‘Nu hit ys on swines dome cwæþ se ceorl sæt on eoferes hricge’ (Now it is in the pig’s jurisdiction, said the churl sat on a boar’s back). But there is no doubt about their humor. If the ‘Wellerism’ form did not prove it, the intrinsic unlikelihood or ridiculousness of the imagined situations would. And this is found even outside the ‘Wellerism’ group, as for instance in no. 43, ‘Ne mæg man muþ fulne melewes habban & eac fyr blawan’ (You can’t have a mouthful of meal and blow the fire as well). The disaster that would happen if you tried the exercise must be comic at some very basic level, and imagining it reinforces the point of the maxim’s metaphor: don’t try to do two things at once. Many of the Durham Proverbs work however in a way more closely related to the wisdom/folly opposition indicated above. A consistent theme in the entire collection is the contrast between appearance and reality, seen 13

Edited respectively by R.S. Cox, ‘The Old English Dicts of Cato’, Anglia 90 (1972), 1–42, and by Olof Arngart, ‘The Durham Proverbs’, Speculum 56 (1981), 288–300. 14 The familiar example in (old-fashioned) modern culture is, ‘As the bishop said to the actress’, a tag which is used to give any ambiguous statement obscene meaning. 15 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Oxford, 1986), ch. 28 (p. 419).

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at its most obvious in the sententious no. 17, ‘Blind byþ bam eagum se þe breostum ne starat’ (He is blind in both eyes that does not perceive in the heart); slightly harder to appreciate in the metaphorical no. 7, ‘Oft on sotigum bylige searowa licgað’ (treasures often lie in a sooty bag), so, do not judge by externals; cleverly mordant in no. 14, ‘Man deþ swa he byþ þonne he mot swa he wile’ (A man does as he is when he can do what he wants), so (by reversal), when a man is not free to choose you cannot tell his true nature, so (by extension), a man’s character only emerges once he gets power. The vein of Hávamál-style cynicism comes out in what seems an Anglo-Saxon addition to no. 2, which reads in its Latin form ‘Amicus tam prope quam longe bonus est’, translated adequately into Old English as ‘Freond deah feor ge neah’ (A friend is good, far or near), but then continued in the Old English alone with the words ‘byð near nyttra’ (the nearer will be more useful).16 The opposition of folly and wisdom appears at its strongest in a further group of especially paradoxical or thought-provoking type. These are statements which appear foolish (to the fool), but make sense to the wise; but even to the wise, a part of their effect comes from noting their surface folly, and observing the comic contrast between surface and depth. Statements like this are not completely unknown in modern culture, but they are rare and the effect of them tends to have been worn off by repetition. Once upon a time, ‘Don’t cross your bridges till you come to them’ was a maxim of this type, superficially foolish – you can’t cross a bridge till you come to it, so the advice is pointless – actually sensible: because people often act with analogous folly in wasting time imagining solutions to problems that may never arise, the mistake the maxim is aimed at. Examples from the Durham Proverbs include no. 8, ‘Hwilum æfter medo . menn mæst geþyrsteð’ (‘Sometimes men are thirstiest after mead’, or in more proverbial style, ‘The more mead you drink, the thirstier you get’); no. 39, ‘Ciggendra gehwilc wile þæt hine man gehere’ (Everyone who calls out wants to be heard); and no. 18, ‘oa ne sacað þe ætsamne ne beoð’ (Those who aren’t together don’t fight). The first of these just seems unlikely to be true, the second and third so obvious as not to need saying. Behind these objections, though, lie the thoughts that, respectively, appetite in some respects grows with what it feeds on, or conversely, and still proverbially, you don’t miss what you’ve never had; that it is dangerous to ignore any kind of appeal, however unimportant it may seem; and that while nothing will stop some people hating each other, mere separation will prevent the results, if not the cause. 16

The question of whether the Old English translates the Latin in this collection or vice versa has not been argued convincingly. Possibly some items were originally from one language, some from the other.

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Speech on this double level, plain on the surface, subtle underneath, seems to have been admired by Anglo-Saxons, and worked into their poetry. The last two lines of the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer fit the Durham Proverbs pattern exactly. They go (at the end of the complaint by the female speaker): Þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs, uncer giedd geador. (One easily separates what was never joined, our song together.)

No, one might reply, logically if imperceptively, what was never joined cannot be separated,17 any more than a bridge can be crossed before you come to it, or people who aren’t there can fight.18 That is the superficial response, and one needs to recognize it before reaching for the deeper and more uncertain one: ‘our song’ was never joined in reality, but it was/is in the speaker’s imagination, an imagination which finds the contrast between its own subjective power (‘our song together’) and its objective weakness (‘easily separated’) an especially painful one. Is the end of Wulf and Eadwacer, then, funny? Not as Gegeneinanderlachen directed at the female speaker, no: but perhaps through the sardonic and bitter amusement with which that speaker (in this respect just like Hnæf) observes her own situation, her own powerlessness, the contrast between her own superior, if unhelpful, awareness and the superficial understanding of others. Moments like that one are to be found elsewhere in the Old English ‘elegies’ (which furthermore contain several more overlaps with proverbial statement), but the others do not seem even to this author to be funny.19 There is, however, a ‘joke’ in Deor which is very likely to trigger the modern that’s-not-funny reaction, but which seems nevertheless to use a similar technique of two-level response. It occurs in stanza 1, lines 4–6, when the speaker remarks of Weland the smith that he:

17

The point was first made in Alain Renoir, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer: A Non-Interpretation’, in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of F.P. Magoun, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., and Robert P. Creed (New York, 1965), pp. 147–63. 18 The poetic lines are obviously quite closely similar to Durham Proverb, no. 18, quoted above. 19 A further evident example of the speaker observing his own powerlessness, and contrasting subjective/objective reality, is The Wanderer 39–48, the scene of wakening from a dream. See also The Wife’s Lament 24–25. For overlaps between elegiac poetry and the proverbial corpus, see T.A. Shippey, ‘The Wanderer and The Seafarer as Wisdom Poetry’, in Companion to Old English Poetry, ed. Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 145–58.

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. . . wean oft onfond siþþan hine Niðhad on nyde legde, swoncre seonubende on syllan monn. (4–6) (. . . often found pain, ever since Nithhad laid fetters on him, supple sinew-bonds on the better man.)

The translation just given offers the superficial (and natural) way of understanding the lines: Weland felt pain after Nithhad physically restrained him, put (iron) fetters on him, (tied him up with) bonds made of sinew. Nyde could however be an abstract as well as a concrete noun, meaning ‘necessities’ rather than ‘fetters’. Could the ‘sinew-bonds’ be abstract as well? They are, after all, ‘supple’. Behind this lies the story of Weland the smith, which at least in its Old Norse form says that Nithhad restrained Weland not with iron fetters or ropes of sinew, but by hamstringing him, cutting his sinews so he cannot walk.20 So the ‘sinew-bonds’ were ‘supple’, they were so supple that they (Weland’s sinews) weren’t there at all! But there is no doubt (back to line 4) that they caused him pain. This again is Anglo-Saxon humor, rising out of pain and grief, using riddling and oblique statement, but most of all depending on the contrast between an obvious meaning and a deeper one, and demanding awareness of that contrast for full effect. Part of the joke is always on the fool who sees only the obvious meaning, and may, like Grendel or Sarah, laugh in the confidence of his or her own insight. For the speakers of Deor or Wulf and Eadwacer, though, and for Hnæf, an element of the humor is laughing, or perhaps rather being grimly amused at, one’s own predicament. It is one mark of the hero(ine) to laugh at one’s own pain – though this too has ceased to be culturally accepted. A further point one should stress in considering Anglo-Saxon humor is its liking for barely perceptible statement, to be caught only by the wise or the alert. ‘Sinew-bonds’ is a good example, in that its two different meanings – ‘physical bonds made of sinew’ and ‘just-as-physical bondage created by the absence of sinew’ – could be expressed by exactly the same word, while ‘supple’ points the unwary listener in just the wrong direction. Slightly less perfect examples, but accordingly slightly more apparent 20

For the Old Norse poem, see Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, ed. Gustav Neckel, rev. edn. by Hans Kuhn, 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1962), I: 116–23. The parallel between the two is interestingly discussed in Bruce Dickins, ed. and trans., Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge, 1915), p. 72. Dickins notes that earlier German scholars had tried to read the hamstringing of the Old Norse text into the Old English poem, significantly by emending to seonubenne, ‘a sinew-wound’, thus producing a single meaning and incidentally destroying the joke. But Dickins regards this as ‘quite unnecessary’, rejecting both the emendation and the parallel, and also missing the joke.

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ones, are provided by Byrhtnoth’s first speech to the Viking spokesman in The Battle of Maldon. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere,21 and therefore will make only three points here. First, there is no doubt that Byrhtnoth is trying to be funny: his use of the word heregeatu in line 47 to mean (a) heriot, financial tribute, the meaning the Danes would like, but (b) war-gear, armed resistance, the meaning they are going to get, is a genuine pun. Second, his speech clearly makes use of the device of repeating what the Viking has just said, and what he has just said himself: line 56 echoes line 40, line 59 echoes line 33, line 61 echoes 46 which echoes 32. The third point, though, is that Byrhtnoth’s humor depends very largely on the opposition to each other of verbal endings, in particular the infinitive -an and the present subjunctive -en (in standard Old English spelling, in the Maldon transcript -on). There is not much difference at all between these in sound; but there is an all but total difference in sense. The infinitive -an means something is going to happen, the subjunctive -en/-on means it isn’t. So the Viking says ‘we will go to the ships with the money (gangan)’, line 40, and Byrhtnoth replies that he thinks it wrong that ‘you go to the ships with our money (gangon)’, line 56. Conversely the Viking says it would be a bad idea that ‘we should deal out battle so hard’ (swa hearde . . . dælon), line 33, and Byrhtnoth replies that ‘you will not gain treasure so soft’ (swa softe . . . gegangan), line 59. The Viking’s subjunctive mid gafole forgyldon (should buy off with tribute), line 32, is answered by Byrhtnoth’s infinitive to gafole garas syllan ([will] give spears as tribute), line 46, which he varies himself in his last line to subjunctive again as grim guðplega, ær we gofol syllon (grim war-play, before [ever] we give tribute), line 61. The joking is hard to convey in a language which has lost significant subjunctives, but joking it is: to adapt Byrhtnoth’s own phrase, ‘grim word-play’ indeed. Just as in Deor, the joke turns on recognizing the enormous differences of meaning between barely perceptible or imperceptible differences of sound. If anything it adds to the joke that modern readers tend not to notice, or react with ‘that’s-not-funny’ when they do. There is surely deliberate provocation in the Viking messenger’s use of the modal verb motan, ‘to be allowed to’, in line 30: Me sendon to þe sæmen snelle, heton ðe secgan þæt þu most sendan raðe beagas wið gebeorge . . . (The bold seamen sent me to you, told me to tell you that you have our permission to send quickly rings for your defence . . .) 21

See T.A. Shippey, ‘Boar and Badger: An Old English Heroic Antithesis?’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985), 220–39.

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‘Have our permission’ has a drawled insolence implying that surrender is a favor that may be withdrawn. Most modern translations simply assume that the messenger is saying ‘you must send . . .’ (which would be þu scealt sendan), as so often accepting the direct modern facilior lectio.22 And yet this too may only be fitting. For percipient amusement thrives above all on the contrasting presence of the imperceptive, laughing confidently, failing to grasp the sense of proverbs, sure that surface meaning is all there is, ignoring the force of subjunctives, and assuming that one modal verb is after all about as good as another. * Can this essentially elitist attitude be reconciled with Christian charity? Hugh Magennis makes the point that there is a powerful tradition of rejecting laughter, and humor, in Christian thought, which tends, especially for the monastic audience he posits for The Seafarer, to work against the powerful Anglo-Saxon images of merriment in hall, hleahtor wera, ‘the laughter of men’.23 The same tradition need not however be incompatible with the native, secular, proverbially oriented tradition of wisdom finding grim amusement in folly. Is there any possible connection, one might finally ask, between, say, the death-scenes in which we find embedded respectively ‘Bede’s Death-Song’ and ‘The Death-Song of Ragnar Loðbrók’, now more generally called the Krákumál? The latter has for centuries been seen (with increasing modern disapproval)24 as the classic expression of a kind of Viking spirit, with the hero Ragnar singing his ‘death-song’ of boastful heathen ferocity while being bitten to death by adders in the snake-pit to which his enemy has condemned him. The last words of the twenty-ninth and last stanza are, famously: Glaðr skal-ek ›l með Ásom í ›ndugi drekka. Lífs ero liðnar stundir. Læjandi skal-ek deyja. (Gladly shall I drink ale in the high-seat with the gods. The hours of my life are past. I shall die laughing.)25

22

The crux is discussed by Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985), I: 424–25. 23 See Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, pp. 201–03. 24 See T.A. Shippey, ‘The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrog: A Study in Sensibilities’, in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman (Turnhout, 1998), 155–72. 25 Cited here from Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, eds., Corpus poeticum boreale, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1883), II: 339–45. A more modern edition is E.A. Kock, ed., Den norsk–isländska skjaldedigtningen, 2 vols. (Gleerup, 1946–49), I: 316–21.

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Ragnar’s laughter here is a virtual paradigm of the ‘laughter of triumph, hostility or scorn’, indeed all of them together: hostility to his enemy King Ella, scorn for Ella’s inability to break his will by torture, triumph in that fact and in the anticipated vengeance of his sons. It seems strange and indeed improper to even think of a connection between this image of heathen rage and the death-bed of the saintly Bede, a model of Christian humility and resignation. But Bede’s last words, as credibly reported,26 do have a potential for humor. They run as follows, in their Northumbrian form: Fore thaem neidfaerae naenig uuiurthit thoncsnotturra, than him tharf sie to ymbhycggannae aer his hiniongae huaet his gastae godaes aeththa yflaes aefter deothdaege doemid uueorthae. (Before that compelled journey no one is wiser than he needs to be, in considering, before he goes hence, what of good or evil will be judged to his spirit after his death-day.)

Just as with the Maldon translations above, modern English fails to capture vital distinctions: for instance, between the indicative uuiurthit ending line 1 and the subjunctive uueorthae ending line 5. But just as with Byrhtnoth’s speech in Maldon, the distinction is vital (or rather, if one may venture on a joke of Anglo-Saxon type, mortal). No one is wiser – that is a fact. What will be, or may be judged – that is a fact too, but not a known fact. The wise person is aware of his own ignorance about what will happen after death (in subjunctive time) while it is still possible to do something about it, in life (in indicative time). The two times are furthermore sharply contrasted by the poem’s ‘zig-zag’ pattern in lines 1a, 3b, and 5a: before that compelled journey, before he goes hence, after his death-day.27 The time to be wise is ‘before’, because ‘after’ will be too late. But what Bede is saying, what the whole poem is saying, is that no one is fully wise, no one is or can possibly be wiser than necessary. Allowing for the well-known Old English device of statement by negatives (seen for instance in Durham Proverb no. 14 above), what ‘no one is wiser than necessary’ means is, ‘many people are not wise enough’. What will happen to them, of course, is doom and damnation. I am sure 26

In the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Manuscripts of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ and ‘Bede’s Death Song’ (New York, 1937). W.F. Bolton casts doubt on the letter’s authenticity in ‘ “Epistola Cuthberti de Obitu Bedae” ’: A Caveat’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 1 (1970), 127–39. 27 There is a very similar pattern in the Viking’s speech in Maldon, see lines 31, 35, 39, all of which vary the formula ‘x for y’.

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one can (in modern liberal style) exculpate Bede from the charge of wishing this on anyone, and one would not like to think of him finding their fate funny.28 Nevertheless his oblique, sardonic, highly wrought, quasi-proverbial style seems to me to be exactly in line with the examples given above. Furthermore, part – the main part – of what he is saying is that while some people will be wise enough to understand him and take the appropriate action, many, for all that he can do, will not. Another Old English proverb runs, in effect, ‘woe to him who does not take warning while he has the chance’ (Genesis B 634–35), and that has application here as well. Should Bede have tried to make his meaning clearer? Did he find amusement in the fate of the foolish who could not understand him? One would like to acquit him of these charges, but the fact remains: a characteristic part of Anglo-Saxon humor is grim amusement from the wise at the expense of those who cannot understand words and do not share their vision of reality. A heathen like Ragnar could be sure, perhaps, that the moment of death is the moment when one can be confident of having the last laugh, and so escaping the derision visited on Grendel or Holofernes. As Bede says, this is not an option for a Christian, even the best of Christians dying blamelessly. It is unlikely that Bede meant to ‘die laughing’, like Ragnar. But he might, even within the rules of his order,29 and in complete conformity to the mores of his culture, have died with a mordant saying and a barely perceptible smile. This too would be a kind of heroism, and a kind of humor: death-bed, yes, but also ‘dead-pan’.

28

Though God does of course notoriously have sinners ‘in derision’, see Psalms 2:4, and Paradise Lost 2:731. 29 The Rule of St Benedict discourages excessive laughter, see Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, p. 199.

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RAYMOND P. TRIPP, JR. HUMOR, WORDPLAY, AND SEMANTIC RESONANCE IN BEOWULF

Humor, Wordplay, and Semantic Resonance in Beowulf RAYMOND P. TRIPP, JR.

It is unlikely that even the most diplomatically trenchant preamble can avoid repetition or, for that matter, elevate the pros and cons surrounding the subject of humor much above the Rubáiyát level. Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great Argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same Door as in I went.1

Arguments ‘about it and about’, when it is humor, are ineluctably ad hominem and are, therefore, as likely to offend as to persuade. The inherent polysemy of natural language is the starting point of the following essay, which approaches humor, not as something that can be reduced to another mechanism, but as a ‘felt change of consciousness’2 experienced through language as the boundary between material and non-material worlds. Polysemy and thus wordplay depend upon the capacity of words to cross what the poet Emily Dickinson calls the ‘magical frontier’,3 between the particular and the universal. The battle lines between strictly literal and imaginative minds remain pretty much where Joseph Addison drew them in his prescient 1710 attack upon carnivalesque language.4 Language, he complains, all too easily degenerates into a wild ‘party of puns’ and becomes a false ‘world of 1

Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York, 1947), stanza 27, 1st edn, p. 20. 2 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, A Study of Meaning, 3rd edn (Middletown, CT, 1973), pp. 48, 52. 3 Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1960), 1764: 6. 4 The Spectator, 61–63 (10–12 May 1710). Jonathan Swift, lacking a philosophical context in which to answer the kind of objections raised by Addison, resorted to satire in his A Modest Defense of Punning.

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magic’. Addison’s instinctive preference for the security and propriety of syfernys, ‘sobriety’, is, of course, hardly new in the English tradition. The formidable Wulfstan centuries before him lectures us not to be ealles to hlagole, ‘given always to laughter’.5 But the good bishop himself enjoys a clever quibble, when he can think of one,6 and late Old English comes rather close to joining Addison’s wild ‘party of puns’. The historical study of wordplay, paradoxically, finds solid ground in the flux of natural language, which philology acknowledges, but often only to arrest. While the wide variation of Middle English spelling is universally acknowledged, the welter of forms in late tenth- and early eleventh-century Old English is less frequently acknowledged and rarely put to critical use. Homiletic prose, in which the Beowulf poet is well versed, reflects this development. The copying and re-copying involved in long-term use led to collections which required an alert and flexible response to wide variations in spelling and pronunciation. In the same collection, often in a single homily, the same word appears in several markedly different spellings. An effective preacher could not stumble over the alternatives. A word, like ‘crown’, could be recognized as such although it might be spelled beag, bæg, beah, bæh, and beh. Rapid morpho-graphemic change not only allows but encourages Wulfstan to indulge his taste for annominatio, especially in pairs like sorgung and sargung and lufian and gelyfan, metatheses like myrhþe and on ymrðe (echoing þa mærþa and þa myrhþe), and resonant phrases like weorðmynde on munde, and so on.7 E.R. Kintgen has pointed out the ubiquitous play upon l + vowel + f combinations.8 Such ‘falling together’ of numerous, once presumably distinct, forms invites wordplay, dependent as it is upon perceived phonological likenesses, because under such circumstances words ‘may participate in a kind of mutual semantic assimilation’, so that the author is provided with ‘a set of words, phonetically similar and semantically congruous’.9 These few among myriad other examples indicate the lines along which this essay investigates the relationship between 5

6

7 8

9

Dorothy Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957), VIIIc, 170, cf. Xc, 97. According to an anonymous homilist, laughter in church is of the devil: Arthur Napier, ed., Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über hire Echtheit (Berlin, 1883), XLVI, p. 233. See William W. Ryan, ‘Word-Play in Some Old English Homilies and a Late Middle English Poem’, in Studies in Language, Literature, and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Archibald A. Hill (Austin, 1969), pp. 265–78. See the lists in Ryan, ‘Word-Play’. ‘Lif, Lof, Leof, Lufu, and Geleafa in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 78 (1977), 309–16. The literature on paronomastic usages is substantial and cannot be cited here. Respectively, Ryan, ‘Word-Play’, p. 267, and Kintgen, ‘Lif’, p. 316.

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the combined forces of cultural and linguistic change and the Beowulf poet’s humorous exploitation of them through the literary language he inherited. Apart from the often elusive suppositions of historical linguistics, however, humor as such remains a vast and difficult subject; and there is no more agreement about how best to explain it, or even whether one should try, than there is about its narrower paronomastic expression. The still narrower question of the role that verbal humor plays in Beowulf but compounds the difficulty. There is a general agreement, however, that, whatever humor may be, it is a ‘double’ phenomenon, in that it involves contradiction, necessary suddenness, and an ambivalent relation to laughter.10 Studies which aim at theory, however, often slip into listing, as if a catalogue of things which burn could explain combustion. The wide variety of thematic wordplay in Beowulf has not gone unnoticed,11 but the sustained presence of categorically paronomastic language in the poem has been dismissed out of court because it conflicts with established views. In spite of early warnings that no poem is a museum catalogue nor, it should be noted, a genealogical table, Beowulf is still, for many reasons, read more as history than literature.12 Although the poet’s love–hate relationship with the past is widely acknowledged,13 the fact that this is the very thing which supplies the doubleness for his linguistic humor, specifically his resonant wordplay, has not been admitted into the received view of the poem. To reveal the sinews of the poet’s humor, new emphasis needs to be placed upon the ways in which wordplay is inherent in the poet’s frame of mind, and his frame of mind inherent in the linguistics of cultural conflict. Studies of the poet’s humor have for the most part addressed specific features, such as ‘echo words’, individual puns, special verbal techniques, and thematic metaphors.14 As diverse and in a sense unfocused as these studies have been, however, they do provide a starting point, in that all 10

11

12

13 14

Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Humor: An Introduction’, Humor, the Psyche, and Society, ed. Berger, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 6–15, lists four theories of humor based respectively upon superiority, incongruity, psychoanalysis, and cognition. Most recently in Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., Literary Essays on Language and Meaning in the Poem Called ‘Beowulf’: Beowulfiana Literaria (Lewiston, NY, 1992). For examples of religious parody, mock-epic, primitive scatology, mercenary satire, sexual innuendo, and other linguistic jokes, see 126–29a; 301–307a; 1024–29, 1154–59a, 2144–47, 2312–21; 920b–24; and 2864–91, et passim. W.W. Lawrence, ‘The Dragon and his Lair’, PMLA 33 (1918), 579, note. See also Nicholas Howe, ‘Historicist Approaches’, in Reading Old English Texts, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 79–100. Most recently and subtly by Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, 1985). George Clark, ‘The Hero and the Theme’, in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln, NE,1997), pp. 271–90, recognizes Beowulf’s sense of often

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agree in presupposing a self-conscious use of language;15 their very diversity, indeed, leads one to wonder how many ‘funny places’ there can be in an ‘epic’ before it becomes something else. Nevertheless, the promise of a more sophisticated view of the poet’s linguistic humor has not yet been realized, because, although the presence of ambiguity has been conceded, it has been downplayed on the circular grounds that it is anachronistic.16 Where wordplay cannot be swept under the carpet, it has been accommodated in the less threatening form of the onomastic indulgence of clerics black humor, pp. 276, 278, and 279. But in this same volume Ursula Schaefer, ‘Rhetoric and Style’, pp. 105–24, at 113–14, cites F. Bracher, ‘Understatement in Old English Poetry’, PMLA 52 (1937), 915–34, to the effect that humorous effects are uncertain, because we lack ‘knowledge of the full connotations of words’, from Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry, ed. Jess B. Bessinger and Stanley J. Kahrl (Hamden, CT, 1968), p. 237. Recently, two general studies have been written by Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor: Towards a Taxonomy’, Thalia 14.1–2 (1994), 9–20; and Hugh Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, With Particular Reference to the “Hleahtor Wera” of The Seafarer’, English Studies 73 (1992), 193–204. Although devoted to prose, see also Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Famous Last Words: Ælfric’s Saints Facing Death’, Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1994), 1–13. 15 For a bibliography of this literature, see my ‘ “Like It or Lump It”: Thematic Remarks Toward an Accurate Translation of Beowulf’, In Geardagum 5 (1983), 13–28. The ‘echo-word’ studies grow out of J.O. Beaty, ‘The Echo-Word in Beowulf with a Note on the Finnsburg Fragment’, PMLA 49 (1934), 365–73. The recent annotated bibliographies of Douglas Short (New York, 1980) and Robert J. Hasenfratz (New York, 1993) confirm this picture. While in Short the heading ‘puns’ lists four items (three of which are the present author’s) and ‘humor’, one; and in Hasenfratz the heading ‘wordplay’ lists eleven and ‘humor’ six items; other ‘humorous’ headings such as ‘comedy’, ‘comic’, ‘jokes’, ‘parody’, ‘mock epic’, ‘laughter’, and ‘satire’, etc., do not occur. ‘Irony’ receives no entries in Short and sixteen in Hasenfratz. The heading ‘ambiguity’ does not occur in Short (Marijane Osborn, ‘Some Uses of Ambiguity in Beowulf’, Thoth 10 [1969], 18–35, is listed under ‘puns’, as is J. Edwin Whitesell, ‘Intentional Ambiguities in Beowulf’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 [1966], 145–49), but lists eight items in Hasenfratz. Acknowledgements of the ‘parody of the heroic ideal’, such as Fredrik Heinemann, ‘Beowulf 665b–738: A Mock Approach-to-Battle Type Scene’, Perspectives on Language in Performance . . . to Honour Werner Hüllen, ed. Wolfgang Lörscher and Rainer Schulze (Tübingen, 1987), pp. 677–94, are still cast wholly within the literal context of Germanic ideals. 16 Middle English literature has, perhaps by reason of more abundant and obvious allomorphic spelling, fared better: E.L. Risden, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale: Postmodernist Play and Medieval Stand-Up Comedy’, Humor 3 (1990), 403–13; R.A. Shoaf, ‘The Play of Puns in Late Middle English Poetry: Concerning Juxtology’, in On Puns, The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford, 1988), pp. 44–61; K.K. Ruthven, ‘The Poet as Etymologist’, Critical Quarterly 11 (1969), 9–38, admits that ‘word-play is common enough in medieval literature’, but cautions ‘the idea that words are in some way autonomous and constitute a “word-world” is a Renaissance discovery’, 11. Ryan, ‘Word-Play’, pp. 262–73, concludes ‘that “play” now applies more accurately to William Langland than to any other medieval rhetorician–poet who wrote in English’, p. 274. See also note 14.

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with an Isidorean turn of mind.17 In general, a peculiarly literal and unimaginative ‘heroic’, if not ‘high seriousness’, has obscured the connection among the poet’s wordplay, his acknowledged themes, and his cultural context. The poet’s ‘appositive style’ is also widely acknowledged,18 but the ambivalent revaluation of the past it entails has not been connected to his sense of humor. An ‘appositive style’, however, is essentially a double style: the Christian is superadded to the pagan. Consequently, an ‘appositive style’ is at one and the same time also an ‘oppositive’ style19 and, as such, another expression of the opposition between competing religions. Apposition entails juxtaposition20 and therefore comparison; this in turn invites qualification, and qualification reaches into denigration, rejection, and finally into appropriation through redefinition. Through the complementary doubleness of humor, therefore, figures of speech become figures of thought, so that wordplay becomes the verbal complement of cultural conflict. Essays on the subject consistently assert that humor requires two points of view however these are come by, and usually two parties.21 The joke is always on someone, usually someone else, and most often to laugh is to laugh at.22 Hazlitt’s early formulation of this idea, for example, is represen17

18 19 20 21 22

Wordplay is acknowledged, but not allowed as a mode of writing, as in the onomastic studies of Roberta Frank, ‘Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse’, Speculum 47 (1972), 107–26; and Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Significance of Names in Old English Poetry’, Anglia 86 (1968), 14–58, ‘Some Uses of Name-Meanings in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 69 (1968), 161–71, ‘Lexicography and Literary Criticism: A Caveat’, in Philological Essays in Honor of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. James L. Rosier (The Hague, 1970), pp. 99–109, and also ‘Personal Names in Medieval Narrative and the Name of Unferth in Beowulf’, in Essays in Honor of Richebourge Galliard McWilliams, ed. Howard Creed (Birmingham, AL, 1970), pp. 43–48; Robert E. Kaske, ‘ “Hygelac” and “Hygd” ’, in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, 1963), pp. 200–206; and Anne Leslie Harris, ‘Hands, Helms, and Heroes: The Role of Proper Names in Beowulf’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83 (1982), 414–21. For ‘poetymology’, which falls between etymology and punning, see Ruthven, ‘The Poet as Etymologist’. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style, has coined this useful phrase. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘2. Characterized by opposing or contrasting; expressive of contrariety or antithesis; adversative’. Shoaf, ‘The Play of Puns’. Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter’, sees laughter as double, but in a moral rather than the epistemological sense here argued. Gerhard Wahrig, ‘Das Lachen im Ae und Mittelenglischen’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 3 (1955), 274–304 and 389–418, as Hugh Magennis reports, ‘makes the significant distinction [made by Hazlitt] between laughter against someone – Gegeneinanderlachen – and laughter with someone – Miteinanderlachen’, ‘Images of Laughter’, note 1. But two or more people may laugh together at someone else.

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tative and apposite: ‘Someone is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.’ As in the Coliseum, ‘What is sport to one is death to another.’23 In Beowulf Christians laugh at pagans. The poet’s ‘combined admiration and regret’24 admits a derisiveness which crosses over into cruel humor at pagan expense.25 Man or monster, the pagan had it all wrong. He stupidly trusted the wrong things, like strength, wealth, war, and walls; and the predictable results were always the same: him seo wen geleah, ‘the expectation deceived him’ (2323b), and he deservedly perished.26 The theology of being certain seems invariably to involve self-righteousness. The Beowulf poet may not be the equal of Michael Wigglesworth,27 whose self-righteous mothers laugh at their damned sons, but he comes close, as we shall see, in making sport of Wiglaf’s pagan failure to revive his dying chieftain. Cultural conflict is in many ways central to the historical context and linguistic structure of the poet’s humor. His poem records an historical moment when one view of the world was rapidly overtaking, displacing, yet incorporating its predecessor, so that for a while, as Ortega y Gasset puts it, ‘. . . all thought represents thought against, whether so indicated verbally or not’. ‘The history of philosophy prima facie reveals the past to us as a defunct world of errors.’28 In Beowulf ‘thought against’ becomes ‘humor against’, against the undefunct, malignant world of pagan error, which if not in all ways wrong was intrinsically less.29 The longest laugh, however, may not be last, because ‘last’ is a precarious status. Grendel is hr«mig, ‘elated’ (124a); but after he fñg wið God, ‘re-

23 24 25

26

27 28 29

Respectively, Essays of William Hazlitt, ed. E. Rhys (London, 1889), ‘On Wit and Humour’, p. 274. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style, p. 11. Harvey Mindess, ‘The Panorama of Humor and the Meaning of Life’, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 82–95, reports that today at least the ‘category of hostile or degrading wit enjoys a vast appeal’ and ‘may be the most popular of all’, p. 88. Translations are mine, sometimes adapted from Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., Beowulf: An Edition and Literary Translation In Progress (Denver, 1990). Richard N. Ringler, ‘Him S«o W«n Gel«ah: The Design for Irony in Grendel’s Last Visit to Heorot’, Speculum 41 (1966), 49–67, argues for straightforward Christian irony; but see Tripp, ‘ “Like It or Lump It” ’, for the poet’s wordplay upon w«n/wen(n) as ‘hope’, ‘struggle’, and ‘swelling’. An English-born American Calvinist poet (1631–1705) famous for his poem ‘The Day of Doom’. José Ortega y Gasset, The Origin Of Philosophy, trans. Toby Talbot (New York, 1967), pp. 74, 19. As a linguistic instrument of rejection, the Beowulf poet uses more than twice the number of complex adjectives ending in -l«as as any other Old English poet: aldorl«as (3), dãml«as (1), dr«aml«as (1), feohl«as (1), feormendl«as (1), hlñfordl«as (1), sñwol«as (1), sorhl«as (1), sigel«as (1), t†rl«as (1), ð«odenl«as (1), winel«as (1), wynl«as (2).

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joiced against God’ (811b),30 it is soon Beowulf’s turn to relish gÃðhr«ð, ‘battle-pleasure’ (819a), having nihtweorce gefeh (827b) ‘rejoiced in his night’s work’. Although there is much in Beowulf to suggest that the poet took Christianity as the last laugh of history, his reluctance to throw the rest of history away hints at þ«ostrum geþoncum, ‘(second) dark thoughts’ (2332a), of disturbing consanguinity. A suspicion that history may never stop repeating itself puts a derisive edge upon his ‘admiration and regret’. If in previous times death, the ondl«an31 or ‘retribution’ of men, carried everyone away (2236b–37a), it still does, and now with God’s blessing. There may be neither winners nor losers in the ‘great feud’;32 but someone will surely be the butt of the ‘great joke’ when the ‘punch line’ is pronounced on Judgment Day. The sãðfæstra dãm, ‘the judgment of the righteous’ (2820b), is not clear, not yet; and mãdes myrðe, ‘mirth’ (810), may prove ‘murderous’.33 The poet’s thematic edwenden, ‘turn about’ (280a, 1774b, 2188b), confirms his concern with the revolutions of human experience, individual and collective. The moment Heorot is finished, he reminds us, ne wæs hit lenge þñ g«n, ‘it was neither right nor very long’ (83b) before it would be ‘burned’ by Grendel’s hatred.34 When Grendel’s mãd ñhlãg, ‘ “stomach” laughed’ (730b), his end was, like the man-dragon’s, ungemete n«ah, ‘closer than thought’ (2420b).35 Although for a while the hæleþa hleahtor, ‘loudness of laughing men’ (611a), continues to rumble in Grendel’s stomach,36 the first ‘great laugh’ is going to be on him as ‘sufferer’ and

30 31 32 33

34 35 36

I restore the text on the basis of the sustained wordplay upon mãdes myrðe . . . fñg wið God . . . nightweorce gefeh (810–27). Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., More About the Fight with the Dragon: Beowulf 2208b–3182. Commentary, Edition, and Translation (Lanham, MD, 1983), pp. 56, 423–24. Marijane Osborn, ‘The Great Feud: Scriptural History as Strife in Beowulf’, PMLA 93 (1978), 973–81. See Klaeber’s note to 810. The poet plays upon Grendel’s evil joy and murderous intent via the resonance among my(i)rgð, my(i)rhð, myrð, myrðra, myrð(u), morð(-), and morðor. Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., ‘A New Look at Grendel’s Attack: Beowulf 804a–815a’, In Geardagum 1 (1974), 8–11. Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., ‘Hate and Heat in the Restoration of Beowulf 84: Þæt se Secg Ñþum Swerian’, English Language Notes 18.2 (1980), 81–86. For this attribution see Tripp, Literary Essays, pp. 179–80. In Beowulf laughter is uneasy and anxious. The tragic song of the geãmuru ides, ‘sad woman’ (1075b) Hildeburh is met with the disturbing incongruity of happy games and laughter. But these gamen, ‘games’ (1160b), and bencsw«g, ‘bright riot on the benches’ (1161a), are only fleeting, since þñ gyt wæs hiera sib ætgædere, ‘still holding was their kinship’ (1164b). Good times never last, because men sorge ne cÃðon, ‘are asleep to care’ (119b). Lines like sorh is gen†wod, ‘sorrow is come back’ (1322b) and wrãht wæs gen†wad, ‘strife was renewed’ (2287b) remind us that hæleþa hleahtor, ‘the loudness of laughing men’ (611a) is short, if not a little nasty and brutish.

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fool, since God «aþe mæg/ þone dolsceaðan d™da getw™fan, ‘A Godly death can easily [and will] part this cruel madman from his deeds’ (478b–79). And since the wisdom of the world is foolishness before God,37 the Christian poet could make fun of paganism as a centuries-long bad joke, and the devil as the greatest buffoon of all,38 but he does so with an uneasy hostility. Although similar observations about the fundamentally Boolean39 mind of the Beowulf poet have been made before, the common etiology of the poet’s humor, theology, and the general dialectics of cultural predicament has not been applied to his poem. When the displacement of the past becomes the raison d’être of a poet’s writing, he becomes preoccupied with negative redefinition,40 so that every important word, having for him two frames of reference, comes thus to have two or more meanings. As a result an epochal wordplay comes naturally to him, to the degree that his frame of mind and his frame of reference coincide. His wordplay becomes a kind of worldplay, and equals the achievements but does not require the precocious reflexivity of a later James Joyce. History and semantics are both a succession of hostile takeovers, because that is the way he sees them. The emotional and linguistic complexities of this fundamental antagonism spill over into and color his style. Through a linguistic form of theological typology, his Christian perspective enables him to see the ‘true’ meaning foreshadowed in pagan words. His humor, as well as his moralizing, pivots on this major shift in thought and feeling. If ‘thought is thought against’, then in Beowulf humor is laughter against. Theological revisionism and wordplay unite to create a style which amounts to an epochal Gegeneinanderlachen. In the linguistics of counter-laughter, however, moral and theological doctrines are less important than the dialectics of cultural displacement, which proceeds according to a succession of seriousnesses.41 A new view of the world emerges and displaces its predecessor by virtue of having a more powerful, certain, and unquestionably self-evident ‘Will and Idea’. 37 38

1 Corinthians 3:2, et passim. Thomas McAlindon, ‘The Emergence of a Comic Type in Middle English Narrative: The Devil and Giant as Buffoon’, Anglia 81 (1963), 365–71, does not consider Old English precedents for this development. Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Devil in Old English Poetry’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 4 (1953), 1–12, presents the devil seriously. 39 That is essentially binary; cf. George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (New York, 1958; first ed. 1854). 40 Cf. Sanskrit apoha, ‘definition by difference’. 41 For a discussion of the varieties and succession of seriousness, see Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., Beyond Canterbury: Chaucer, Humanism, and Literature (Church Stretton, 1987), pp. 105–13.

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What is serious can hardly be made fun of, because the slightest hint of second thoughts concedes an alternative seriousness. ‘Res sacras non modo manibus attingi, sed ne cogitatione quidem violari fas fuit.’42 Wordplay and cultural displacement go hand-in-hand, therefore, because ‘We laugh at what we do not believe’,43 and, conversely, do not believe what we laugh at, and laugh at what we dismiss, and we do both with words. Søren Kierkegaard reminds us, ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’,44 but in Beowulf there are always two things: the poet’s truth and the pagan’s error, which in the end comes to be defined by occupying the status of what is being laughed at, the butt of the ‘great joke’. The poet is alert to the ways opposition shapes perception, affects language, and drives the doubleness of humor. He laughs at the past according to the logic of competing seriousnesses. This stance provides him with the contradiction, suddenness, and ambivalent laughter that humor requires. Competing seriousnesses establish the conditions of semantic resonance. The new seriousness first cancels the desynonymizing force of cultural imperatives upon which linguistic distinctions ultimately depend. Words and parts of words are decontextualized by the movement from one seriousness to another; and the old connections between form and meaning are weakened and succumb to new associations. A period of rapid phonological, morphological, and semantic assimilation then sets in, until a new equilibrium is achieved, suggesting in the case of Beowulf a late date of composition.45 But in the process of realignment to new configurations of thought and feeling, many look-and-sound-alike words fall together, as in the classic case of sc†tan and scyttan.46 The semantic resonance between gesc«at/dryhtsele (2319b–20a) and scñt/druh enables the poet to suggest that the man-dragon’s den is also a spiritual privy. The ground of linguistic humor, according to Hazlitt, then:

42 43 44 45

46

Cicero, In Verrem, ii, 4. ‘Sacred things are not be touched with the hands, nor even violated in the mind’. Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour’, p. 274. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas Van Steere (New York, 1948). Kierkegaard draws from James 4:8. The phonology which supports the poet’s resonant wordplay suggests the eleventh-century date argued on different grounds by Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, NJ, 1981), and elsewhere. Hans Platzer, ‘The Temporary Merger of OE sc†tan and scyttan, or: A Case of Harmless Homophony’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 30 (1996), 69–82. The poet also exploits the related homophony of sc«otan, ‘shoot’, ‘rush’, and ‘pay’, sceatt, ‘money’, and sc«ot, scot, ‘shooting’, ‘paying’, etc.; see Tripp, ‘Revaluing the Currency: Money in Beowulf’, Literary Essays, pp. 71–84.

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lies in the sort of mock-identity, or nominal resemblance, established by the intervention of the same words expressing different ideas, and countenancing as it were, by a fatality of language, the mischievous insinuation which the person who has wit to take advantage of it wishes to convey.47

A more contemporary analysis makes the same point; the same ‘wit’ supports etymology and paronomasia: In both devices the same process occurs: two similar-sounding but distinct signifiers are brought together, and the surface relationship between them is invested with meaning through the inventiveness and rhetorical skill of the writer. If that meaning is in the form of a postulated connection between present and past, what we have is etymology; if it is in the form of a postulated connection within the present, the result is word-play.48

The Beowulf poet, of course, is just such a person, with enough ‘wit to take advantage of’ the ‘mock-identity, or nominal resemblance’, of lookand-sound-alike words which have fallen together, that is (to combine Attridge and Hazlitt), of ‘two [or more] similar sounding but distinct signifiers’, ‘through . . . inventiveness and rhetorical skill’. Linguistic perception is guided by expectation, and expectation, by the seriousness within which it occurs. The meaning of the ‘same words’ will vary, therefore, according to whether Christian or pagan seriousness has guided linguistic perception. Within an established way of looking at the world, the look-and-sound-alike accidents of language are not noticed, because by cultural fiat and, therefore, linguistic experience, they are perceived as different. When the old seriousness is displaced, so that the seriousness guiding perception shifts from one seriousness to another, the desynonymizing forces of habit are withdrawn, and look-and-sound-alikes are seen as such, because there is nothing to keep them out of each other’s way, as they slip below the threshold of useful distinction. At this point, the conditions for semantic resonance are in place; and there is nothing to do with dead and dying words but to forget them, change them, or to play with them. Only, for example, after the sense of the world expressed by the Old English modal sculan has become irrelevant, can the form be ‘cannibalized’ into a ‘sign of the future’, and so on. In the linguistic wake of cultural conflict many words and parts of words become loosely homophonic, terminally polysemous, and available for new poetic uses according to the ‘skill’ or ‘mischievous insinuation’ of the poet. 47 48

‘On Wit and Humour’, p. 288. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language, Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY, 1988), p. 108.

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New perceptions resulting in semantic doubleness and morphological likeness resonate throughout Beowulf. The much discussed ‘coast guard’ scene (229ff.) is a prime case in point, because the man’s curiosity and response raise questions about perception and knowledge which go far beyond his nominal duties and the intentions and national identity of his visitors. His odd use of the neuter hwæt, ‘what’ (233b, 237a), where masculine hwñ, ‘who’, might better do, suggests that hine fyrwit bræc (232b), ‘it suddenly occurred to him that he wanted to know’, is aimed at both language and the theological status of the Geats through language. His closing admonition that a scearp or ‘intelligent’ (288a), fellow, s« þe w«l þenceð, ‘who can think well’ (289b), can distinguish not only between worda ond worca, ‘words and deeds’ (289a), but also between ‘words and meanings’, challenges the audience entering his poem as it speaks to the role of getting language right in order to survive poets as well as one’s friends and enemies. All told, the coast guard’s certainties present him as something of a nominalist, if not an empiricist, convinced as he is (in spite of editors) that næfre him his wlite l«oge, ‘never would his [Beowulf’s] appearance belie him’ (250b).49 The coast guard is a practical man who does not put all his eggs into one figurative basket, although, like a marine bird, he announces that he is an endes™ta, ‘cliff/duck/butt-sitter’, holding ™gwearde, ‘sea/ egg-watch’ (241b). After a long tongue-in-cheek greeting rife with double entendre, however, the coast guard, to make sure that these young men have understood him, raises the distinction between serious and non-serious, that is humorous, language. He ‘gets serious’ with ‘NÃ . . . gehyrað ñnfealdne geþãht’, ‘Now . . . hear onefold thought’ (254b–256a).50 In distinguishing literal and figurative, the poet hints at the binary contrast between ‘single and serious’ and ‘double and non-serious’ upon which humor turns. Beowulf gets the hint and wordhord onl«ac, ‘unlocked his wordhoard’ (259b). This response is more than a tired formula for ‘he spoke’, but itself a hint that Beowulf, like the coast guard, not only reveals the wealth of his verbal talent, but has also ‘unlocked’ the coast guard’s wit and thus ‘set his [own] words free’ from literal meaning. So doing, Beowulf can reply in kind to the coast guard’s clearly twifeald, ‘twofold’, welcome and in a way which anticipates his subsequent ‘unlocking’ of Grendel and his world.51 49 50

Here Klaeber and most other editors emend to næfne. The form m†ne (255b) should stand as a possessive adjective modifying merel†ðende (255a), to preserve the coast guard’s condescending ‘Now, my sea-travellers . . .’. 51 Lines 815b–17a, 834–36, and 958–79. Stanley B. Greenfield, ‘The Extremities of the Beowulfian Body Politic’, in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens, 2 vols. (Collegeville, MN, 1979), I, 1–14.

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Humor is twifeald, ‘double, ambiguous’; seriousness, ñnfeald, ‘single, sincere’, and precludes punning use. A Christian poet cannot joke about the Resurrection; that would be going ‘too far’. Pagans, their customs, and their language are another matter. On the mantelpiece, religious icons become objets d’art, and serious words put to use in wordplay suffer a similar linguistic sacrilege. The vocabulary of the old seriousness becomes the raw material of worldplay of the new seriousness. ‘Pope Goes The Weasel!’ is more likely to be sung by Protestant than by Catholic children, and an early Christian is more likely than a pagan to see the humor in s†e s†o b™r gearo, ‘let the bier/beer be ready’ (3105b), for the celebration of the hero’s funeral. From the very beginning of the poem everything depends upon the linguistic effects of reading from the point of view of an old heroic or a new Christian seriousness. Semantic resonance does not require exact etymological equivalences.52 In an heroic mode, the first word Hwæt, ‘Listen’ (1a), is perceived and likely to get our attention as an exclamation; in a Christian mode, this same form is ‘unlocked’ from this single meaning and may be perceived and thus compete for our attention as hwæt, the preterite of hwettan, ‘to whet’, as in one’s ‘whistle’,53 or (given the instability of initial h- in the poem)54 as w™t, ‘drink’, as in the phrase ™t and w™t, ‘food and drink’. The poet like Chaucer’s Pardoner may begin by asking for a drink. Indeed, in anticipation of the poet’s play upon ™rest (6b), these implications are supported by the collocation of «st and the prefixed form of the verb ahwettan in the phrase «st ahwette, ‘provide a liberal supply’ (Andreas 339b), as well as by the Beowulf poet’s own later phrase «st get«ah, ‘granted bounty’ (2165b), which reverses Scyld’s – oft«ah – fate. In any case, a Christian reading disrupts the sober Germanic mindset and allows the opening of the poem to resonate as an extended alcoholic joke.55 52

Robert Lew, ‘Towards A Taxonomy of Linguistic Jokes’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 31 (1997), 124–52. See also Wlodimierz Sobkowiak, Metaphonology of English Paronomastic Puns (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); and Ruthven, ‘The Poet as Etymologist’, 34–36. 53 John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1883), p. 151, cites the Tattler, 138, on ‘Whetters who go half drunk to do business’. 54 L.E. Nicholson, ‘The Literary Implications of Initial Unstable h in Beowulf’, Classica et Medievalia 35 (1984), 265–83; also Tripp, ‘Hate and Heat’, and More About The Fight, p. 274. 55 First suggested by Paul Edwards, ‘Alcohol into Art: Drink and Poetry in Old Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon’, in Sagnaskemmtun: Studies in Honour of Hermann Pálsson, ed. Rudolf Simek, et al. (Vienna, 1986), pp. 83–97; and Tripp, ‘Alcohol into Art: Drunkenness and the Death of the Dromenon’, Literary Essays, pp. 185–93; but see also Hugh Magennis, ‘The Exegesis of Inebriation: Treading Carefully in Old English’, English Language Notes 23.3 (1986), 3–6; and his ‘Water–Wine Miracles in Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives’, English Language Notes 23.3 (1986), 7–9.

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The poet continues with innocent references to the þrym, ‘strength’ (2b), or the ‘capacity’, of his ancestors, and to their activity: hà ðñ æþelingas ellen fremedon, ‘how those princes did brave deeds’ (3). But a Christian reading would not miss the resonance (metaplasm) of ealað (gen. pl. ealeða), ‘ale’, in æþeling, nor the echoic proximity of ellen to eln, ‘fore-arm’, and to elnboga, ‘elbow’.56 He would relish the fact that the poet is praising the Danes of old as heroic drinkers as well as fighters, men who to be sure ‘did bold deeds’, but who also ‘lifted bold “arms” ’ or, in more modern parlance, ‘bent powerful elbows’. Once the desynonymizing weight of cultural imperatives is lifted, new contexts emerge, in which look-and-sound-enough-alike pairs like hwæt/w™t, æþeling/ealaþ(ing), and ellen/eln(boga) approach the ‘magical frontier’, cross over morphemic medians, and meet the oncoming semantic traffic, creating numerous homophonic coincidences which invite poetic exploitation of the resulting semantic resonance. The same process affects inflectional and derivational morphemes as well as morpheme words. An heroic frame of mind, not the form in itself, it should be noted, requires meodosetla (5b), to be only the genitive plural ‘of mead-seats’, rather than also the weak masculine nominative singular ‘mead/bench-sitter’, on the model of cotsetla, ‘cottager’. A Christian frame of mind, disapproving the b«orsetl, ‘beer-bench’, world would have an eye for a pejorative reference through an alternate syntax, in which oft«ah, ‘denied’ (5b), would parallel egsode, ‘terrified’ (5b), and take Scyld as a common object – and a longstanding ‘non-crux’ would disappear in linguistic if not liquid mirth.57 An heroic reading, further, takes ™rest (6b) only in the single sense of a superlative adverb ‘first, from the beginning’. An ‘unlocked’ Christian reading, free from this semantic restriction, may construe ™rest in several other ways – as a complex or compound word, or as two words. Competing components, ™r, «st, ™, and rest (rist) resonate with ‘earlier’, ‘outstanding’, ‘excessive’, ‘food’, ‘feast’, ‘hospitality’, ‘favor, grace’, ‘true’

56

The dative and genitive singulars of ellen are usually syncopated to elne and elnes. The verb elnian, ‘to comfort oneself’, should not be overlooked in a context of drinking. See also the collocation of ellenweorc/«stum (958). A vocalic n and an epenthetic e bring these forms into critical proximity. 57 For this phrase, see Fred C. Robinson, ‘Two Non-Cruces in Beowulf’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966), 151–60. It makes eminently better sense to have the son of ‘shoving’, Scyld Scefing, consoled for being shoved rather than for shoving others. It is interesting to note that in Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1997), especially pp. 198–201, imaginative alternative readings of key words in the opening of the poem have entered conventional historical study, which is ordinarily weakened by naive literalism.

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(emphatic), and ‘rising’. On the model of ™r™t, ‘overeating’,58 ™r«st may suggest ‘excessive eating or feasting’ or ‘outstanding hospitality’. Differently divided as ™-rest, ‘resurrection’, it also allows syððan ™rest to resonate with æfter ™riste, ‘after resurrection’, in anticipation of Scyld’s comeback. Later and obviously paronomastic lines like þæt ic his ™rest ð« «st gesægde, ‘that I of his grand hospitality/right off should say something hospitable/good’ (2157), confirm the poet’s earlier manipulation of ‘«st’.59 As far as «st goes, to a fortunate man it is get«ah, ‘granted’ (2165b), to an unfortunate it is oft«ah, ‘denied’ (5b).60 Conversely, a good man imitates God the primary ‘giver’ and is happy to ged™lan, ‘share’ (72a), while a bad man nallas. . . geaf, ‘never gave’ (1719b).61 Throughout the poem the sustained collocation of ™r and «st is thematic, culminating in the poet’s moral peroration: næs h« goldhwæte gearwor hæfde / agendes «st ™r gesc«awod (3074–5), ‘not at all had he rich in gold more readily shown the hospitality befitting a king’.62 Other semantic resonances inform the phrase weorðmyndum þñh (8b), where second element -myndum suggests mund, ‘hand’, since conversely through a free variation of y and u + nasal mund becomes an alternative spelling for mynd, ‘mind, memory’.63 In conjunction with þñh, the preterite singular of both þ«on, ‘to prosper’, and of þicgan, ‘to take (grasp) or to drink’, the heroic reading ‘prospered with honor’ resonates with the humorous Christian reading ‘took (grabbed) treasure in hand’. The poet seldom uses a good joke only once; and as in this case often exploits inflectional coincidences like þñh. The preterite singular of the verb (ge)mynan, ‘to remember’, and the dative singular of the noun mund, ‘hand’, both generate the homophonic munde, so that in the later related occurrence of hond gemunde (2488b), where the first word triggers the connection, a straightforward pagan reading, ‘the hand remembered’ again resonates with a mis-

58

59

60 61 62

63

The compound ™r™t is paired with oferdrinc, ‘excessive drinking’ and parallels words beginning with ofer-, such as the adjective ofer™te, ‘given to excessive eating’, ofersl™p, ‘excessive sleep’. Cf. Adam ™rest þurh «st Godes (Guthlac, 826), where the second est invites a reinterpretation of the first, and æppel unrædum ofer est godes (The Phoenix, 403), with its double play ‘unwise/unripe (red)’ and ‘mercy/delicacy (food)’. Matthew 25:29. Beowulf is of course a wilgeofa, ‘willing giver’ (2900a). The reference is to whoever (probably Heremod) did not succeed in hiding (gehydde, 3059b) and exiling (wræce, 3060a, restored) himself in the barrow after he could no longer live as a man among men (3062b–65), etc. Lines like Andreas 339, on eowerne agenne dom est ahwette, suggest that here the poet intends ordinary rather than divine possession. The poet’s slip of writing handgripe (965a), where alliteration calls for mundgripe, reflects the semantic nexus of ‘hand’/‘mind’/‘hand’ in his mind.

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chievous Christian reading, ‘the hand “handed” ’, ‘the hand “took in hand” ’. Kennings are also affected according to the old or new seriousness in which they are solved. The form hronrñde (10a) presents a characteristic example of the poet’s humor. This compound is conventionally read as ‘whale-road’, as a kenning for the ‘sea’. But with possible metathesis,64 the first element hron- can also be read as ‘horn’, to give ‘horn-road’, as an alternative kenning for ‘beer-bench’, or b«orsetl, ‘over’, that is, up-and-down which a drenchorn, ‘drinking horn’, would travel.65 The full phrase ™ghwylc ymbsittendra (9b) has been solved as the bemusingly oxymoronic, ‘each one of those dwelling nearby over the sea’, presumably ‘marine neighbors’. But in the beer-bench world of drinking and shoving, it may also be solved as ‘each one of those sitting next on the beer-bench’. These and many more examples show that when the cultural forces which prevent look-and-sound-alike forms from ‘falling together’ weaken, semantic resonance takes over as a natural technique of association and therefore composition.66 The related form gomban (11a), for another example, may then be solved in two ways: as an heroic accusative singular of the weak noun gombe, ‘tribute’, or as a Christian strong accusative compound gomban, resonating with goma, ‘mouth’, and (ge)bñn, ‘command’, to give ‘gum-command’, which like cinbñn, ‘chin-bone’, yields a second kenning ‘mouth-bone’67 as a variation of ‘drinking-horn’. A serious heroic context, of course, calls for ‘(monetary) tribute’; a humorous yet judgmental Christian context treats such a tribute figuratively68 and allows for ‘gum-command’ or ‘gum-bone (horn)’, that is, allows for the ‘liquid tribute’ which a mandatory toast or ealugafol, ‘tribute paid in ale’, would be. This submerged drinking metaphor is confirmed in the summary line, þæt wæs gãd cyning, ‘that was a good king’ (11b), where, through the free variation of front vowel + nasal combinations and the polysemy of -ing/-ung, the last word resonates with the good cinning, ‘chinning, gaping’, drinking

64

65 66 67 68

Fred C. Robinson, ‘Metathesis in Dictionaries’, Problems of Old English Lexicography, ed. Alfred Bammesberger (Regensburg, 1985), pp. 245–65. Robinson cites hærn/hræn and hors/hros, but does not discuss the possible confusion between horn/hron, as in hornfisc, ‘garfish’ and hronfix, ‘whale’. Cf. Juliana 687, ofer beorsetle beagas þegon, ‘over the beer-bench they received rings’. Barfield, Poetic Diction, argues that the passage of time and the evolution of consciousness can generate poetry. For a treatment of the importance of wordplay and ‘mouth’ imagery, see Wilcox, ‘Famous Last Words’, p. 7. Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Humor’, p. 11, cites the ‘verbal ingenuity’ of The Battle of Maldon, 46–48, where weapons are offered as a metaphorical payment of the gafol, ‘tribute’, which the vikings demand.

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is, and also with the good cenning, ‘begetting’, Scyld accomplishes when his son is æfter cenned, ‘subsequently begotten’.69 The freedom to form new connections also affects morpheme boundaries. Two early examples may be offered. First, when the pompous Wulfgar, of the Wendla l«od, ‘of the “wandering” or “turning” people’ (348b), and famous for his mãdsefa, ‘wit’ (349a), and by implication for his ability to ‘turn a phrase’, speaks to Beowulf, he identifies himself in a dignified way as Hrothgar’s ñr ond ombiht, ‘herald and officer’ (336a). But Beowulf, himself no slouch at turning a phrase (1841–45a), picks up on the combination ñr + ond by immediately bringing up his own ™rende, ‘errand’ (345b). The young hero thus puts Wulfgar in his place by calling to everyone’s attention that he has ‘unwittingly’ called himself Hrothgar’s ‘errand-boy’. A more complex manipulation of morpheme boundaries can be seen when Hunferth ridicules Beowulf and Breca with þñ git on sund reon, ‘when you two rowed on the sea’ (512b). This is not an unclever thrust, because the first two morpheme words combine to form þñgit, ‘yet’, while the last three combine to echo the verb onsundrian, ‘to separate, sunder’. Hunferth’s words covertly extend the charge that no one could talk sense into either rash young man (510b–12a), ‘when still (in spite of everything) you two rowed away departing into the sea’. Again, Beowulf does not break step. He obviously gets the joke and goes Hunferth one better with þñ wit on sund reon (539b). This reply at first sounds like nothing more than a direct reply, ‘when we two rowed on the sea’; but on second thought it says much more. In Beowulf’s reply þñ and wit combine to suggest the þ«owot or ‘service’ he later describes (567b–69a),70 while wit and on also combine to suggest the preterite of w†tan, ‘departed’, signalling that Beowulf got the joke of þñ git/þñgit on sund reon/onsundreon and parlayed it into þñ wit/þñwit wit on/witon on sund reon/onsundreon, ‘when we in service indeed departed as we rowed away departing into the sea’. Here in alternative syntactical sequences as well as in simple combination single phonemes are made to do more than double duty, changing places and participating in two morphemes at once, as in the example of ™r-«st/™-rest. A similar phenomenon may also be observed in the characteristically elaborate play upon boar helmets and warriors wallowing across tidal mud. The f + vowel + rh, ‘boar’, sequence occurs three times in two lines (304–305) ofer hl«or beran, fyrheard, and ferhwearde, where the first may be read

69

The poet’s exploitation of the falling together of front vowels e, i, and y + nasal deserves more attention. 70 The spelling þñw may represent both þ«aw and þ«ow.

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conventionally as ‘over cheeks’ or as ‘on boar cheeks’,71 second as fyr-heard, ‘fire-hard’, or fyrh-eard, ‘boar-yard’, and the third as ferhwearde as ‘life/boar-guard’. To be sure, not all the Beowulf poet’s humor is directly theological. Hostility, however, as well as admiration and regret, enters into his revaluation of the past and allows the loss of lesser linguistic imperatives to provoke paronomastic assault. No matter how innocuous and literary his humor may appear, a hint of epochal aggression enters into his use of look-and-sound-alike words. Sometimes an accompanying assertion of God’s power is the giveaway, as in the poet’s Wigglesworthian handling of Wiglaf’s futile attempt to revive the dying Beowulf. But laughing at another human being and praising God’s power do not go well together, and humor at the expense of a man trying to save a comrade’s life seems reprehensibly strident. A closer look at this complex scene will cement the connection between the poet’s humor and his world view. Here, according to the conventional heroic reading, Wiglaf wehte hyne wætre, ‘would wake him [Beowulf] with water’ (2854a), but he [Wiglaf] ne sp«ow, ‘failed’, ð«ah h« Ãðe w«l, ‘though he [Wiglaf] tried well’ (2855b), so that a grim andswaru, ‘grim answer’ (2860b), was «ðbeg«te, ‘easily received by’ (2861a), the coward retainers.72 A Christian reading, however, loosens this monochromatic literalism and allows us to see that the poet is using an extended concatenation of ‘water’ images, running through Wiglaf’s efforts, in order to show the utter uselessness of pagan ‘baptism’ to save dying men. In a subtly reflexive way the passage itself becomes the ‘great joke’ upon ‘heroic cowards’, which is to say, the ‘grim answer’ Christianity has for all pagans.73 In brief, first there is wehte, ‘to rouse from unconsciousness or death’, but also ‘to purge’, hinting at a reasonable allusion to the medical practice of reviving people with a wecedrenc or ‘emetic,’ ãþ ðæt h« sp†we, ‘until he [the patient] spews’.74 Then there is the phrase wiht ne sp«ow, which may thus be read ‘he [Beowulf] did not spew’, from sp†wan, describing Beowulf’s failure to respond to Wiglaf’s ministrations.75 And here (2854b) and below (2857b), the word wiht may be read as an adverb ‘(not) at all’ or 71 72 73 74 75

The preposition on may be spelled o. Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., ‘Beowulf 301–308: Mock-Heroic Arrival of the Hero’, English Language Notes 36.1 (1998), 1–8. There is no need to emend geongum (2860a) to the singular. A similar reflexiveness marks the sustained sartorial metaphor running through 2864–91. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Oswald Cockayne (London, 1864–66), II, 170, 268. Edwards, ‘Alcohol into Art’, points to the second meaning of sp«ow, but only within the metaphor of drinking, p. 96.

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as a noun ‘creature’. Next, in the context of ‘water’ and the ease, difficulty, and resultant effectiveness of human efforts, a vowel + ð resonance links the form Ãðe in the phrase Ãðe w«l with yð, ‘wave’, as well as with «aðe, ‘easily’, while the adverb w«l hints at the noun well, ‘well-spring’. And, finally, to make sure that no one has missed the joke, the poet then caps his watery wordplay with a verb, «ðbeg«te, which may derive from either -begi(e)tan, ‘to obtain’, or from -beg«otan, ‘to pour out’, and whose first element «ð- («að-) echoes Ãðe.76 The loyal Wiglaf would purge Beowulf to bring him back to life, but he failed, ‘though he tried as best he could and used wells of water’, and ‘readily poured out’ his scorn upon his cowardly – pagan – comrades. Even a brief sketch of the poet’s play with ideas and sounds, however, brings the problematic marriage of theology and Gegeneinanderlachen into sharp relief.77 The unattractive response accompanying this assertion of God’s power reveals an intimate and not entirely charitable connection between the poet’s evangelical world view and the derisive edge of his ‘humorous’ language. Such new paronomastic resonances have, since Addison’s day, been tossed out of court as ‘accidents of language’,78 and that is precisely what they are and what they must be before they can be put to artistic use. The rational dismissal of wordplay forgets what lawyers know very well – accidents have to happen before they can be exploited. ‘Connections that are felt to exist do not suddenly go away when they are proven to be scientifi-

76

The poet exploits the same wordplay with the paronomastic oxymoron yðgewinne, ‘struggle of the waves’, ‘easy [«aðe] struggle’, and in yðe c«ap, ‘[no] easy/wave bargain [by the sea]’ (2412a, 2415b). Throughout the poem ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ correlate thematically with Christian and pagan. 77 The complexity of the passage beggars translation, especially when one considers the play upon wiht (here and at 2854b), ‘at all’, ‘creature’, and upon the disyllabic dêð, as ‘does’, ‘death’ (d«að), and ‘dies’ (digeð), and upon the resonance between ‘deeds’ (d™dum) and the ‘dead’ (d«adum): wehte hyne wætre; him wiht ne sp«ow. Ne meahte h« on eorðan, ð«ah h« Ãðe w«l, on ðñm frumgñre feorh gehealdan, n« ðæs Wealdendes wiht oncirran; wolde dãm Godes d™dum r™dan gumena gehwylcum, swñ h« nà g«n dêð. (2854–59) Waking water brought nothing from him. He could not, though he used waters well, Keep the life in his chief on earth, No way call God’s doomed creature back. The rule of God would guide the lives Of all men, then, as He now does through death. The best pagan efforts cannot rescue Beowulf; he dies as God wills. 78 The Spectator, 61–63 (10–12 May 1710). See note 4 above.

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cally untenable.’79 As entertaining as an anecdotal demonstration of semantic resonance may be in its own right, however, the connections between language and culture that such wordplay suggests are more important. Linguistic accidents happen, which is to say, words and meanings collide, when cultural imperatives can no longer control phonological, morphological, and syntactical traffic. A Christian poet is quite happy to use pagan words in a linguistic demolition derby, and in this way his epochal Schadenfreude becomes a central instrument in his ambivalent revaluation of pagan culture. Looking at the past through his new seriousness leads to a habit of exploiting semantic resonance in the form of radical wordplay in what amounts to a throw-away language rapidly ceasing to be a living tongue. This is not ‘an abnormal process, but a normal process with abnormal features’.80 The Beowulf poet at one and the same time is a Christian using what he felt to be a pagan language, a speaker of Latin as well composing in a Germanic dialect, and, like Spenser,81 an English poet composing in what he felt to be an archaic form of his own language.82 Singly or together, these conditions would be enough to transform his Old English into a dead language breathing its last on a Christian life-support system. The upshot would be a general conflation of forms and meanings, in which the increasing number of look-and-sound-alike words would indeed become ‘echo words’ or, rather, echoes of words, as their linguistic particularity was reabsorbed into new cultural universals. A failure of minimal ‘emic’ features would lead to widespread blending of forms and meanings through semantic resonance.83 Many more examples could be adduced and more elaborately argued; but clearly, two choices remain: (1) the Beowulf poet exploits his Old English medium or (2) he does not. Stylistic consistencies strongly suggest that he does. What lawyers and poet–priests do with accidents is seldom an accident; both make their way with words. It is highly unlikely that his sustained and thematically consistent use of the accidents of language could itself be an accident – no more of an accident, it must be kept in mind, than 79 80 81 82

Ruthven, ‘The Poet as Etymologist’, p. 35. L.G. Kelly, ‘Punning and The Linguistic Sign’, Linguistics 66 (1971), 5–11. Tripp, Literary Essays, iv. This suggestion may have wider significance than has yet been realized; see Roberta Frank, ‘The Battle of Maldon: Anachronism or nouvelle vague’, in People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. Ian Wood and Niels Lund (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 95–106. 83 The Sanskrit term for ‘semantic resonance’ is dhvani, but this depends upon the association of ideas and lacks a phonological or morphological component. Tripp, ‘Hand and Mind: Dhvani, the Concept of Semantic Resonance, and the Composition of Beowulf’, in Literary Essays, pp. 211–25.

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the presumptive literal solutions of the nineteenth century. In any case, an out-of-court dismissal of intentionality is a metaphysical rather than a literary or linguistic judgment and precedes the act of reading. A personal preference for a single, anfeald reading, moreover, is peculiarly anachronistic, not only because it reverses, but also because it fails to meet the poet’s twifeald challenge to past and present audiences. The linguistic complexity of his ambivalent yet aggressive indifference to the past can no longer be dismissed as simple theological assimilation. After a tour de force of sartorial wit worthy of Carlyle,84 the poet extends his wordplay in asking his audience if they ‘got it’. He warns, D«að bið s«lla . . . þonne edw†tl†f, ‘Death is better . . . than a life of shame’ (2890b–91b), which it certainly is. But ‘death’ is also better than a life of repeating and explaining one’s wit.85 The poet’s doubleness has been described in many ways, usually moral, religious, or historical. Essentially, differences between his world and the one he describes, as a reflex of asserting his own, set the stage for basic conflicts of language and value. The doubleness of these he accommodates by taking advantage of – and contributing to – the rapid changes overtaking late Old English and by fashioning them into a way of transforming paganism and defining Christianity in the direction of his own growing humanism.86 A fading pagan world teetering on the edge of moral and linguistic insignificance can be given a verbal push with ‘unlocked’ words like wyrd, man(n), and syn(n), which now resonate with ‘fate’, ‘providence’, ‘language’, ‘change’, ‘creation’, ‘man(kind)’, ‘sin’, ‘huge’, ‘incessant’, and ‘forever’ – all happy connections for a Christian poet convinced that the word of God had become the new fate of sinful man, and so on through the vocabulary of the heroic life. There is nothing new about key pagan words gradually acquiring Christian senses.87 What is new in Beowulf about instances like metod as both the old pagan Measurer or the new Christian God, or about ece as ‘sacred (like an oak)’ or ‘eternal (in a Christian way)’,88 is that such Protean changes become the raw material of the poet’s ‘mischievous insinuation’, as he 84 85

86

87 88

Tripp, ‘Sarcitor Antesartus: Wordplay and Literary Translation of Beowulf’, Literary Essays, pp. 279–92. The poet’s play on edw†t/edwit(t), disguised by the use of a macron, is signaled by the peculiar choice of gewitte (2882a), ‘wit, intellgience’ for an apparently animal dragon’s ‘head’. See my ‘Power as a Measure of Humanism in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–13. Albert Keiser, The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English Poetry (Urbana, 1919). Karl Schneider, Sophia Lectures on Beowulf, ed. Shoichi Watnabe and Norio Tsuchiya (Tokyo, 1986), argues for this and a number of challenging etymologies.

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exploits the humorous possibilities of semantic resonance. Before such words died or changed sides, they could for a while carry a onefold ‘pagan’ sense, or twofold ‘Christian’ senses; and this semantic resonance deserves a larger role in advancing the study of the poem. For this reason, another reshuffling of Klaeber’s stacked deck, in which there seem to be more Kings than Queens and certainly no Joker, will not do. ‘Klaeber should not be Beowulf in the twenty-first century’,89 and for another good reason, that an abundance of Chaucerian ‘game’ resonates in the Beowulf poet’s ‘earnest’. There are enough ‘funny places’ in his ‘epic’, so that humorless ‘heroic seriousness’ fits him no better than humorless ‘high seriousness’ does Chaucer, who also had to wait a long time before people laughed at his jokes.90

89

Fred C. Robinson, ‘Beowulf in the Twentieth Century’, Proceedings of the British Academy 94 (1998), 45–62. 90 Thomas Wharton in 1754 first recognized the importance of humor in Chaucer. See Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, ed. Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, 3 vols. (London, 1925), I, lii–liii.

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Heroic Humor in Beowulf E.L. RISDEN

Several years ago in a lecture called ‘How the Heroes Talk’, T.A. Shippey enumerated tacit or understood speech patterns that determined whether exchanges between Germanic heroes should lead to peace or battle. In subsequent published essays he has elaborated on these patterns based on Paul Grice’s rules of conversational logic.1 These discussions may also help explain how the heroes (and their poets) joke, as exhibited particularly in Beowulf. In the medieval Germanic world formal exchanges between heroes (or among gods) may use ostensible humor as a way of establishing dominance, and while such ‘wars of words’ may lead to violence, they simultaneously exhibit what E.V. Gordon called, referring to Old Norse literature, the ‘cheerfulness of the man who feels that he is a master of life’2 and a moral/practical warning to avoid placing oneself in danger of vengeance. For example, in a flyting, while that cheerfulness might increase one’s chances of survival, the hero must use insults prudently, to avoid placing himself in much greater danger later and to situate himself in a position so he may accomplish his goals in the present. The humor in Beowulf, though, goes beyond flytings to include irony and wordplay. Determining the humor of a culture from a thousand years ago requires a degree of brazen guesswork, but analysis of passages that at least present the potential for humor offers some interpretive options that we may consider against the heroic backdrop of grotesque monsters and inconsistent courage. In the would-be flyting between Beowulf and Hunferth, the poet adopts the traditional superiority ploy to set up opportunities for humor. Often insults, self-deprecation, or inequitable comparisons set up humor rather than actual dominance as their intended outcome. That technique has been 1

See ‘Principles of Conversation in Beowulfian Speech’, in Techniques of Description: Spoken and Written Discourse. A Festschrift for Malcolm Coulthard, ed. John M. Sinclair, Michael Hoey, and Gwyneth Fox (London, 1993), pp. 109–26, and ‘Speech and the Unspoken in Hamðismál’, in Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt, ed. M.J. Toswell (Toronto, 1995), pp. 180–96. 2 E.V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse, rev. A.R. Taylor (Oxford, 1981), p. xxxii.

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so important historically that many humor theorists (following Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes) have argued it as the essence of humor. Here Grice’s rules may help us illuminate how the Beowulf poet can break rules of conversation to create humor – or potentially dangerous problems. Grice enumerates four maxims of cooperative conversation:3 1. 2. 3. 4.

Quantity: Give the right amount of information. Quality: Statements should be honest or true. Relation: Statements should suit the point. Manner: Statements should be clear, considerate and brief.

In conjunction with these rules he proposes the notion of conversational implicatures, instances in which speakers deviate from the expected norm to imply something. Breaches of conversational etiquette include blathering, lies, jokes, and insults. Divergence from expectations in relation and/or manner might lead a hearer to infer a joke or insult, or perhaps both, on the part of the speaker. Irony, too (rather than lying) may appear as a result of breaches of Grice’s maxims, and humorous volubility may also result from an excess in quantity. Such divergence is what we see, for example, in Lokasenna. In the senna or mannjafnathr, Old Norse versions of the flyting, speakers undergo a battle of wits through insults or boasts as a diversion, to establish dominance, or as a ritual to initiate a new member into the group. But as experience teaches us, insults can get out of hand, and in Lokasenna, they do. Loki, jealous at hearing praise of his hosts’ servants, kills one, then is expelled by the other gods. He returns, finds them sullen, and trades boasts and insults with the other gods allied against him. While the Aesir reject Loki for his hateful nature, he amuses himself (and presumably his human audience) by insulting the gods one by one, even those who would avoid a fight if they could. Bragi even offers Loki gifts to refrain, but he will not, accusing Bragi (and also Byggvir and even Þor) of cowardice. He accuses Idun, Gefjun, Frigg, and Freya of being whores, Oðin of unjust and womanly behaviors, Njorð of sexual perversions, and Tyr of cuckoldry, while calling attention to the fact that Fenrir bit off his hand. Loki enters the hall ready for a flyting; Bragi doesn’t want him admitted, but Oðin grants him a place and drink, calling him ‘Wolf’s Father’ and setting things in motion. The immediate purpose of the exchange, I judge, is humor, as participants who need cooperative conversation to assuage an already strained situation instead break rules of manner and relation, attacking each other rather than directing themselves to the point. The insults include threats

3

H.P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 22–28.

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and lack the purpose of unifying the group, which may have happened, despite the insults, if Loki had observed the rule of quantity, knowing when to stop. Loki clearly wins the battle of wits, but he so imprudently insults the others (breaking Grice’s maxim 1 more so than 4, since insult is the purpose of the exchange), finally angering Þor, yet refusing to fight him, and threatening to destroy them all with fire, that he makes them eternal enemies and must flee the hall and hide himself as a salmon. The gods eventually catch up with him and bind him in the underworld, where he will remain until his release at Ragnar›k, the final, world-destroying battle. Knowing that result and looking back on the exchange, one may guess that Lokasenna’s literary purposes may include not only humorous pleasure in the insults (because they hit their mark and bring sometimes pompous gods down a peg – including Loki, who runs away), but also the value of knowing when one has gone too far, because we may not be able even to guess the consequences of abusing accepted patterns of conversation. The implicature, that even the gods have enough to hide that they should avoid insult and censure, highlights the fact that what is done seemingly in jest arouses anger sufficient, eventually, to destroy the world. Beowulf’s flyting is a similarly instructive example, but it elicits special interest because it diverges from the pattern: as Carol Clover has argued, the flyting normally includes a series of claims, defenses, counterclaims, a ‘repertory of insults’; in a sense, in demonstrating his tenacity, Beowulf spoils the fun by cutting short the game.4 In doing so he also diverges from the patterns Grice suggests as normal and mannerly. Before Beowulf is fully situated at Hrothgar’s court, Hunferth, jealous at the audacity of the young hero, engages Beowulf in a battle of insults. Hunferth, seemingly appropriately, recalls Beowulf’s youthful rowing or swimming match with Breca, asserting that Beowulf did not fulfill his boast to defeat his fellow – certainly an insult, but not a threatening one. Beowulf responds not in jest, but with a tenacity and purposefulness that foreshadows his focus in battle. He recounts his experience, undermining Hunferth’s charge by explaining how he did achieve his boast and more, but then in his own turn, shows his fiery warrior spirit, going perhaps too far in what may have been intended only as an initiation game. First, he reasonably points out that if the Danes, including Hunferth, were good enough warriors, they wouldn’t need the help of an outsider; then, by accusing Hunferth of the worst of all possible crimes in the Germanic world, brother-slaying, which denudes family honor indefinitely because it cannot be avenged or cleansed, he brings the insult match to an abrupt end. Like Grendel, Hunferth is identified thereby

4

‘The Germanic Context of the Unferþ Episode’, Speculum 55 (1980), 444–68, at 453.

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with the children of Cain, a tacit suggestion that Beowulf may kill Hunferth as well as Grendel, should he need to. With that lurking threat, the possibility for a humorous exchange disappears. Hunferth should perhaps have known better, but the poet may be uncovering a flaw in Beowulf (imprudence can accompany tenacity, and the results may be terrifying or even deadly), or he and his audience may have enjoyed the flair with which Beowulf checkmates the match. Beowulf breaks Grice’s rules 1 and 4 as he defends himself at length, allowing Hunferth no opportunity to reply or save face, because one could find no greater insult than ‘brother-slayer’. Perhaps he breaks rule 3 as well since he strikes to the heart of Hunferth’s sin, seemingly missing the point of the game, which is to trade a series of insults both to prove his mettle and win membership in his host’s community. As Ward Parks argues, while Hunferth, by engaging Beowulf, implicitly compares himself to the young hero, ‘the guest–host flyting generally observes conventions designed to contain contestational aggression’; Beowulf dispatches the verbal aggressor, proves himself quick-witted, and earns his place as a hero fit to fight for the Danes against the monster.5 Perhaps by breaking the rules without untoward consequences Beowulf adds to the audience’s pleasure in his verbal victory. The hero, though, may too nearly approach dangerous pride when, in countering Hunferth’s claim that he failed to achieve his boast to beat Breca, he explains that not only did he not lose, but he also cleared the sea of monsters (lines 553–69). At that point do we laugh with Beowulf for his ability in the verbal contest, or laugh at him for boasting too much? Shippey has shown how the exchange between the Danish coast guard and Beowulf also presents potential for conflict, how each nearly directs a ‘face threatening act’ against the other, but both show awareness of the possibility of ‘conflictive potential’, so each stops short of insults that might require martial responses.6 This exchange also offers potential for humor in the coast guard’s nearly obsessive use of understatement by means of litotes in lines 244–50: No her cuðlicor cuman ongunnon lind-hæbbende; ne ge leafnes-word guð-fremmendra gearwe ne wisson, maga gemedu. Næfre ic maran geseah eorla ofer eorþan, ðonne is eower sum,

5

Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions (Princeton, 1990), p. 72. 6 ‘Principles of Conversation’, p. 121.

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secg on searwum; nis þæt seld-guma, wæpnum geweorðad; næfre him his wlite leoge.7 (Not more openly have shield-bearers undertaken to come here, nor were you certain you would have formal leave of our warriors, the consent of kinsmen. Never have I seen greater man among nobles of the earth than is one of you, a warrior in armor; nor is that a ‘hall-soldier’, honored by weapons. Never may his appearance belie him.)

The multiple litotes and statement by negation dominate this speech. The coast guard who delivers it to the landing Geats is seeking a polite way to question the intruders about their mission and yet warn them that their intentions had better be peaceful, and the humor comes from the tangle of negation as he tries to manage the situation. He handles a delicate situation successfully, but uncomfortably, and the reader can understand, share, and appreciate his discomfort – especially considering that the poor fellow probably spends most of his life alone watching for invaders and having to keep his courage up without even seeing an enemy, just in case. As Shippey points out, he must speak cautiously, but not fearfully, so he dances about the edges of Grice’s maxims 3, 1, and 4. He gives unnecessary information in his observations of Beowulf’s physical presence; he adds an unnecessary adjuration (‘Never may his appearance belie him’ – why suggest that it may?); one wonders why he feels the need to make these statements, which might better remain tacit, when what he really needs to do (and does thereafter) is get to the point and ask what the visitors want. The implicature is that if the Geats don’t give a proper answer, the coast guard will bar their entry – but how could he do that? He could hardly stop them alone, so the coast guard must be debating their intentions and rehearsing in his mind the proper course of action – including the possibility of fleeing for help – for any of several replies. Politeness and duty here conflict with curiosity and fear. If the coast guard had fumbled terribly, one might feel embarrassment, but the deft managing of emotions results in a humorousbecause-minimal-but-significant transgression of conversational maxims. Beowulf’s more obvious instances of humor involve irony and wordplay. Traditional theories have argued that humor comes (1) from efforts to make ourselves feel superior to others, (2) from sudden awareness of incongruities, (3) from release of sexual or aggressive tensions, (4) from exposure of paradoxes within a context identified as ‘humorous’, or (5) from heightened arousal immediately demonstrated to be safe or incon7

Quotations come from C.L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf, With the Finnesburg Fragment, rev. W.F. Bolton, (London, 1973). Translations are my own.

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sequential.8 Among these theories incongruity seems to be the catch-all, since by means of incongruity one can create situations explainable by the other theories. Incongruity can be explained by how one breaks Grice’s rules, when what a speaker within the poem says doesn’t conform with expectations of amount, truth, focus, of clarity and consideration. For example, from line 1002 and following, after the fight with Grendel, as the Danes examine Grendel’s grip, the poet remarks, ‘No þæt yðe byð/ to befleonne – fremme se þe wille –/ ac gesecan sceal . . . nyde genydde . . . gearwe stowe,/ þær his lic-homa, leger-bedde fæst,/ swefeþ æfter symle’ (Not so easy is it to flee – do it he who will. . . . One must seek, compelled by fate, that place readily where his body-covering in the bed of death sleeps fast after the feast). No matter who we are, hero or supernatural beast, we may not escape fate, and, in the appetizing tradition of the Middle Ages, we who have feasted will soon become the object of feasting, food for worms. This doleful, ironic passage in one sense says the obvious: Grendel did not have an easy time fleeing, because Beowulf held on long enough to pull his arm out by the socket. In another sense it fails to say the obvious, because the poet has already shown the obvious: Beowulf’s courage held, and Grendel’s did not, showing the superiority of the hero over the monster that has terrified a people. It also shows the absurdity of trying to flee death if one is fated to die – the courageous, superior few, like Beowulf, have no attachment to the body and its pleasures. The poet seems to conform to Grice’s rules, but the humor comes from the circumspection, the consideration shown the monster, not insulting him outright when that is what the audience would expect and even hope for – a breach of Grice’s maxim 3. Previously, when Grendel attacks Heorot, we see the visual incongruity as Grendel’s arm gradually rips out of the shoulder-socket, Beowulf doing no more than holding on as Grendel struggles to escape the hero’s grip. Grendel flees into the night, leaving Beowulf standing there examining the bloody grip, admiring his handiwork. In case we didn’t get the visual image, the poet tells us a few lines later, when the Danes hang Grendel’s arm above the door as a trophy, that the King commands that ‘Heort innanweard/ folmum gefrætwod’ (the inside of Heorot be decorated by hands) (991–92). The pun breaks maxim 3, because it incongruously introduces wordplay where we expect ‘serious’ glorification of the hero’s feats. A similar pun appears in line 2137, when Beowulf describes his battle 8

Traditional theories of humor include superiority theories, incongruity theories, psychoanalytic/release theories, cognitive theories, and arousal–safety theory. See Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Humor: An Introduction’, Humor, the Psyche, and Society, ed. Berger, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 6–15, and Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht, 1985).

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with Grendel as ‘þær unc hwile wæs hand gemæne’, ‘between us two there was hand-joining’ (or ‘hand-sharing’), a metaphor that sounds more like an act of friendship than a life-and-death struggle. Another appears later, when Beowulf has returned home and describes Hondscio’s death: ‘him Grendel wearð,/ mærum magu-þegne, to muð-bonan’ (Grendel became the mouth-slayer of the famed young thane) (2078–79). The verbal image again creates a martial incongruity: a young soldier normally dies in battle by the sword, not by being eaten; the resolution comes in the fact that Beowulf is speaking (horrifyingly) literally, and later he avenges the loss. Beowulf breaches maxim 4, in that the pun has a crassness that to some extent denigrates his fallen comrade. In the famous battle scene between Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother, the monster is actually gaining the upper hand, as she causes the hero to stumble: ‘Ofsæt þa þone sele-gyst ond hyre seax geteah’ (She then sat on her hall guest and drew her knife) (1545). Fred Robinson has recently argued reasonably that we should translate that she ‘set upon’ her hall guest rather than sat on him,9 but even if ‘set on’ translates ofsæt’s denotation more accurately, the punning suggestion of ‘sat on’ remains, with its incongruous sexual undertones (a breach of maxim 2, since the suggestion is not only dishonest, but repulsive), the implicature deriving from Beowulf’s killing the she-beast with a ‘sword’, the blade of which then melts away, leaving only a hilt in the hero’s hand (suggesting his ‘relief’ at the conclusion of the encounter?). In addition, we find the simply odd image of the female monster sitting on the renowned hero called by the poet her ‘guest’. At least Grendel’s Mother shows more courage and tenacity than her son (an incongruity, since he, not she, has the reputation of unconquerability), who pulled out at the first sign of resistance. These instances of possible narrative humor are interesting, if rare. On the whole, the poet seems to have preferred irony and understatement, since an ironic tone accompanies the poem nearly from beginning to end: for all Scyld’s accomplishment as king, at his death he departs we know not where, and Beowulf with Wiglaf’s help defeats the dragon, saving his people and winning them treasure – only to have his folk bury the treasure with him and find themselves subject to likely invasion thereafter. Even irony, which one may call a breach in the maxim of manner when a clear statement of purpose would be more helpful, reinforces the implicature that we can’t trust in the people and things of this world, even in the hero’s own strength. Beowulf’s gnomic encouragement, ‘Wyrd oft nereð/ unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen deah’ (lines 572–73), leaves us only one temporary hope: if we are so fated, we die; if we have courage, we may survive. Such 9

‘Did Grendel’s Mother Sit on Beowulf?’ in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Douglas Gray, et al. (Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–7.

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irony doesn’t provoke belly-laughs, but it does show the absurdities of the world through the incongruity of saying one thing by means of another, and the poet must have hoped that the audience would leave the poem superior to what they were before they heard it. Though humor is not an extraordinary or essential element of Beowulf, aspects of it integrate with the mood and themes of the poem and contribute notably to its overall effect. And while the poem does not for a modern audience elicit raucous laughter, it does offer some hint of what an Anglo-Saxon audience may have considered funny, especially in a heroic context, and the humor does seem to support the heroic code at the heart of Anglo-Saxon culture.

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Humor in Hiding: Laughter Between the Sheets in the Exeter Book Riddles D.K. SMITH

In many ways the Exeter Book riddles are an extended exercise in uncertainty. As riddles they are designed to leave us guessing, and as cultural artifacts they raise at least as many questions as they answer. The manuscript in which the riddles are preserved can be dated to the second half of the tenth century, and its script and its inclusion in the Exeter Cathedral library identify it clearly as a product of a monastic culture. But just as clearly, the collection contains poems which are undeniably lewd, plainly bawdy, implicitly sexual, and, even now, quite surprisingly funny. And therein lies a quandary every bit as puzzling as the riddles themselves, for despite years of critical investigation into their solutions, their sources, their possible functions, it is still unclear what these humorous, sexual poems were doing within a religious culture that forbade both sex and humor. The riddles are found in a single manuscript, Exeter Cathedral MS 3501, which was donated to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric no later than 1072.1 There are ninety-five riddles in all, as numbered and edited by Krapp and Dobbie, and they appear within an apparently miscellaneous, certainly eclectic, collection of poetry that ranges in subject from the sacred to the profane.2 A great deal of work has tried to shed light on their place in this anthology and their role in the culture. Some critics see the riddles primarily as educational. Morgan claims the riddles ‘contain the

1

For a brief introduction to the Exeter Book see Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill, 1977). For a more detailed, revisionist discussion of the Exeter Book in its tenth-century context, see Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993). 2 George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York, 1936). For ease of reference, riddle numbers refer to the now conventional numbering of this edition, but riddle quotations are drawn from the more up-to-date text of Williamson’s edition cited in n. 1.

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greater vision of the folk and offer wisdom useful to living their lives’.3 Nelson suggests that some riddles, such as Riddle 50 (fire) and Riddle 33 (ice), may offer metaphorical insight into human emotions, anger and hatred, as much as into the natural phenomena they evoke.4 While Lerer, seeking to place the riddles within a context of ‘instructional paradigms’, suggests they have much in common with wisdom poems like the Maxims or The Order of the World in that ‘they juxtapose all forms of learning and familiar knowledge’.5 From the meditation on the soul and body of Riddle 43 to personifications of sea and storm and sword, these riddles offer puzzling descriptions that oblige the solver to see a familiar object or phenomenon in new and instructive ways. But there is a group of eight riddles that fit less easily into this didactic model because they offer instruction in a realm that arguably doesn’t really require any, and because, even as instructional poetry, they seem out of keeping with their ecclesiastical setting. Riddles 25, 44, 45, 54, 61, 62, 63, and 87 take a variety of forms and approaches to their material, but what they have in common is sex. They are double entendres – what Tupper refers to as ‘puzzles of double meaning and coarse suggestion’.6 They lead their audience right up to an obvious and embarrassing solution which can only be sexual, and then offer a perfectly innocent alternative in its place. Tupper implicitly dismisses them as folk-riddles, and in the years since, these poems have been largely ignored or seen as nothing more than a light and playful counterpoint to more serious poetic works. Yet to see their playfulness and ‘coarseness’ without considering the cultural work that they might be peforming is to miss more than half their significance. These sexual riddles were almost certainly copied out and read by monks who were sworn to high seriousness and chastity, and to dismiss the poems as a kind of comic relief is simply to gloss over both the nature of the comic and the question of precisely what sort of relief they offered. The monastic life, as defined by St Benedict, was resolutely opposed both to bodily concerns and to laughter. The Rule of St Benedict warns its members against ‘worldly conduct’, ‘desires of the flesh’, and pretty much anything funny. ‘Scurrilitates vero vel verba otiosa et risum moventia, aeterna clausura in omnibus locis damnamus, et ad talia eloquia discipulum aperire os non permittimus’ (But as for buffoonery and talk that is vain and 3

Gwendolyn A. Morgan, ‘Dualism and Mirror Imagery in Anglo-Saxon Riddles’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5.1 (1992): 74–85, at 76. 4 Marie Nelson, ‘Four Social Functions of the Exeter Book Riddles’, Neophilologus 75 (1991), 445–50. 5 Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln, NE, 1991), p. 102. 6 Frederick Tupper, Jr., ed., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston, 1910), p. li.

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stirs laughter, we condemn such things everywhere with a perpetual ban, and forbid the disciple to open his mouth for such conversation).7 Given this, it is difficult to understand how poems that seem clearly to have contravened these rules were, first of all, selected for the expensive and time-consuming labor of copying, and later allowed to remain on the page instead of being scraped away and written over. While we may never be certain how or when the sexual riddles came to be included in this collection, their very existence suggests they must have served some purpose in the reformed monastic culture that preserved them. And just as clearly, they must have functioned in a way that allowed their audience to perceive their value even as it encouraged them to overlook the potentially offensive nature of the implied subject matter. The sort of doubleness this suggests, the potential for disguising something offensive, is a key aspect of these riddles, and one which gives us some insight into how they worked. Perhaps the best way to examine their role in monastic culture is first to consider how these riddles might have functioned in the less restrictive context of secular entertainment, for by deconstructing the way in which they entertain – what exactly makes them funny – we can get a clearer idea of the sort of cultural work they perform in other settings. In all likelihood the riddles would have been recited aloud for their lay audience since, as Kelly suggests, despite evidence of extensive use of written records in the secular bureaucracy, ‘the case for widespread literacy in the modern sense among the early Anglo-Saxon laity must remain unproven’.8 In such a setting the humor of the sexual riddles would likely have formed part of ‘a structure for the competitive exercise of verbal skills’ and a culturally sanctioned arena for aggression.9 Certainly the give and take of Unferth and Beowulf following the scop’s singing in Heorot offers a paradigm both for the dialogic nature of the scop’s performance and for the potentially competitive context of his entertainment.10 Such a competitive context is implicit in these sexual riddles since there would arguably be nothing funny about them if they were not implicitly offensive.11 Even in a secular setting, in which the scop offered his riddles around the mead bench in the hall, the sexual solution existed as something 7 8

9 10 11

St Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Justin McCann (London, 1952), chap. 6 (p. 37). Susan Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 36–62, at 61. Nelson, ‘Four Social Functions’, p. 445 Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd edition (Lexington, 1950), lines 499–612. In both senses of the word: aggressive and liable to give offense.

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threatening that needed to be avoided or protected against. As Tanke argues, ‘the riddle poser seeks to elicit a sexual rather than a non-sexual solution, in order to expose the solver’s knowledge of, and desire for, sexual representation’.12 In this view, the humor of the form lies largely in forcing the solver into naming the sexual solution, so that the riddler can turn around and, by offering an innocent solution, highlight the listener’s own apparent depravity. ‘One might speculate that the original game consisted of inducing the riddle-solver to guess the “wrong” solution, that is the anatomical one, in order to offer him the “plain” solution and proof of his salacious imagination.’13 Thus the humor of these riddles would have arisen from the confusion of high and low discourse and the imagined incongruity between the sexual solutions and the polite setting. The inappropriateness of the low, sexual imagery within the context of public, social interaction would have been highlighted by the sudden twist of the innocent solution and the resulting reassessment of the sexual clues in light of the non-sexual answer. In this context the riddler’s success, and the resulting laughter, rests on the potential for shame and embarrassment – the chance to catch his victims with their imaginative pants down. Yet, if these riddles have the power to threaten their victims with the potential for humiliation, that is only half the equation. Even more important is their ability, through the humor they generate, to defuse that same implicit threat. This power of humor to protect us from shame and embarrassment rests on its ability to transform. As a number of humor theorists have suggested, the success of a joke turns on its invocation and then resolution of a sense of incongruity, on ‘the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things’.14 A joke presents the world in one light, and then reorders it. Within a Freudian framework there are a variety of jokes, and a variety of work they may perform, but ‘[w]here a joke is not an aim in itself – that is, where it is not an innocent one – there are only two purposes that it may serve. . . . It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure).’15 Although Freud’s concept of ‘exposing’ ‘obscenity’ is in many ways simplistic, it provides a useful point of entry into the dynamics of these sexual riddles. According to Freud, the creation of an obscene joke involves a transfor-

12

John W. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale: Ideology and Figuration in the Sexual Riddles of the Exeter Book’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 21–42, at 23. 13 Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 299. 14 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1960), p. 7. 15 Freud, Jokes, p. 115.

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mation of smutty images and words into a form which is culturally acceptable. ‘It is the task of jokes to take the place of smut and so once more to open access to a lost source of comic pleasure.’16 The joke form provides a framework for inappropriate and sexual material which would otherwise not be allowed, and in the transmutation from unacceptable smut to obscene joke, the elements of sexuality are re-ordered and camouflaged.17 In order to be enjoyed, references to sex must be transformed or, at the very least, disguised. In the Freudian view this disguise is crucial in the face of the societal taboos that inhibit direct enjoyment of sexual humor. ‘The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving what was lost. . . . We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.’18 The polite and civilized mind cannot enjoy talk of sex unless it is carefully coded in an allusive and indirect form. In the act of interpreting an obscene joke, the listener gains a sense of pleasure, but this pleasure is possible only when, through the process of disguise and decoding, the listener manages to evade his own internal censors. The joke, then, especially the obscene joke, provides a means of enjoying sexual imagery that would otherwise be blocked by our own sense of what is proper and polite. Freud’s theory posits a society in which undisguised sexual images are unacceptable and sexuality is repressed: a society not unlike Anglo-Saxon England. Magennis points out the tendency of writers in a wide range of Old English literature to downplay and censor the role of sexuality, even in stories with biblical sources, ‘because of the moral qualms about dealing with sexuality’.19 And in his study of Anglo-Saxon sexual attitudes Davies notes a strong preoccupation with the moral dangers of sexual activity. ‘Since the established doctrine was that sex was sinful, even within marriage sexual desire and sexual expression had to be kept under restraint.’20 As he points out, it was a sin in the eighth century merely to see your wife naked, and it remained so in the eleventh. In addition the extensive lists of penances levied against sexual activity, both in and out of marriage, 16 17

Freud, Jokes, p. 275. ‘The smut becomes a joke, and is only tolerated when it has the character of a joke’, Freud, Jokes, p. 118. 18 Freud, Jokes, p. 120. 19 Hugh Magennis, ‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons? Attitudes to Sexuality in Old English Prose and Poetry’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 26 (1995), 1–27, at 12. 20 Anthony Davies, ‘Sexual Behaviour in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, in This Noble Craft, ed. Erik Kooper (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 83–105, at 88.

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suggest the degree to which sex was restricted and repressed, and also, implicitly, the degree to which it was an ongoing concern. Within such a society the pleasure of the sexual riddles, like the pleasure of Freud’s obscene joke, would come from fulfilling a purpose which could not otherwise be fulfilled, and the amount of laughter generated would be proportional to the amount of internal resistance to the undisguised imagery. ‘By the help of a joke, this internal resistance is overcome in the particular case and the inhibition lifted. . . . [B]oth for erecting and for maintaining a psychical inhibition some “psychical expenditure” is required. And, since we know that in both cases of the use of tendentious jokes pleasure is obtained, it is therefore plausible to suppose that this yield of pleasure corresponds to the psychical expenditure that is saved.’21 It amounts, therefore, to a kind of psychic economy, in which jokes, by allowing us to circumvent our own self-imposed restrictions, release all the energy that we might have used to repress our enjoyment. Jokes function, therefore, not only to bring certain desirable images to light, but also to protect us from them. They provide a socially acceptable way of gaining access to the sexual imagery without having to call it up directly. This requires that the repressed images be altered and restructured into jokes, much as the repressed images of the subconscious are reordered into dreams. This process of restructuring Freud calls ‘joke-work’, and its purpose is to keep the forbidden images accessible by disguising them. ‘The joke-work . . . shows itself in a choice of verbal material and conceptual situations which will allow the old play with words and thoughts to withstand the scrutiny of criticism.’22 In other words, the joke, if properly constructed, allows the listener controlled and safe access to images and thoughts which would otherwise be repressed by the internalized strictures of polite society, even tenth-century polite society. In this context, the sexual riddles would have provided the means to both address and repress sexual knowledge. They would have created safe images which could be used to evoke the forbidden ones. But if Freud’s theory explains how these riddles would have functioned in a secular setting, it still leaves us with some serious questions about how they might have worked in other settings. A form designed to make sexual material more accessible seems at odds with a monastic or ecclesiastical culture in which participants were expected ‘Os suum a malo vel pravo eloquio custodire’ (to keep one’s mouth from evil and depraved talk).23 We must build on this idea of ‘joke-work’ to find a more complex model of

21 22 23

Freud, Jokes, pp. 144–45. Freud, Jokes, p. 159. Benedict, Rule, chap. 4 (p. 29).

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how the sexual riddles function, if we are to explain their place within the Exeter Book’s monastic context. As Knowles describes it, ‘life within the monastery is a common life of absolute regularity, of strict discipline, of unvarying routine’.24 Within this discipline every hour was accounted for. Each day marched steadily from Prime through Nones to Compline, from prayer to work to contemplation. The central focus of this routine was the church liturgy, and much of the time was spent in prayer, but within this strict schedule there were several periods when reading was encouraged. As the Rule of St Benedict states, ‘Mensis fratrum lectio deesse non debet’ (At the meals of the brethren there should not fail to be reading).25 One of the brethren was to be chosen each week to read aloud from texts chosen for their instructional and uplifting value. For the most part they would have read to an audience that remained silent so that all might listen and contemplate. The monks were not even allowed to ask questions for fear of disorder, though occasionally ‘nisi forte prior pro aedificatione voluerit aliquid breviter dicere’ (the superior, if he thinks fit, may say a few words for the edification of the brethren).26 It is unclear whether the riddles could have been read at such a time, though it is possible their potential for ‘edification’ might have earned them a place, and the implicitly dialogic form of riddles suggests they might function in such a setting that provides both a speaker and an audience, albeit a silent one. At the same time there were other opportunities for more private reading in which the riddles might also have played a role. As the Regularis Concordia states, after laying out the schedule of prayers, ‘Ceteris enim horis secundum regulae praeceptum, quia tempus lectionis est, lectioni tantummodo uacantes, silentium diligenti cura in claustro custodiant’ (The remaining hours of the day are times for reading; and therefore, in accordance with the ordinance of the Rule, the brethren shall spend them in reading only, keeping strict silence in the cloister).27 Although the daily schedule, and therefore the time devoted to reading, changed with the church calendar, on average about four hours a day were devoted to lectio as a form of private meditation and instruction.28 This reading was aimed at the spiritual improvement of the individual, and the choice of books was for the most part limited to ‘the Scriptures, the early monastic literature and 24 25 26 27 28

David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council 940–1216 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 4. Benedict, Rule, chap. 38 (p. 93). Benedict, Rule, chap. 38 (p. 95). Thomas Symons, ed., Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London, 1953), p. 54. See Symons, Regularis Concordia, p. xxxiii.

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the writings of the Fathers of the Church’.29 While it is true the riddles are neither scriptural nor patristic, they are arguably monastic, and their store of wisdom and their poetic insights into the nature of the world might well be seen to contribute to an individual’s spiritual good. That they are too secular need not disqualify them. As Alcuin’s famous criticism of the monks of Lindisfarne proves, heroic and secular tales found their way into monastic settings, and although we may be left wondering what Ingeld has to do with Christ, we can surmise that on more than one occasion entertainment slipped in on the coat-tails of edification. In his insightful study of sexual representations, Tanke offers some clues on how this could have been done. Examining how these sexual riddles might have constructed and defined concepts of sexuality within Anglo-Saxon culture he notes, ‘Criticism has been unanimous in characterizing the double-entendre riddle in Old English as a game of rhetorical seduction and censorship.’30 By this means, he suggests, the riddler entices the solver into flouting cultural rules against sexual representation, but only in order to condemn and suppress this representation by offering the ‘correct’ and nonsexual solution. ‘To pass this test of sexual representation and reaffirm their adherence to the symbolic laws of the riddle community, solvers must resist the poser’s desire that they expose their knowledge of sexuality.’31 Such a form of sexual censorship would have been well suited both to the monastic community that existed at Exeter during the tenth and early eleventh century and to the non-monastic but equally disciplined rule that Leofric established when he moved his see there in 1050. In a form of private meditation individuals reading the riddles could have enacted their rejection of bodily desire by eschewing the sexual solution in favor of the innocent one. In this way they might well have been seen as developing their own hermeneutic skills by finding their way through the minefield of salacious clues to the ‘correct’ answer. Such a theory is, of course, not without its difficulties. Monastic authorities are likely to have preferred a more repressive approach to such frankly sexual material, avoiding even the possibility of sin rather than condoning temptation. Yet the existence of the riddles in Leofric’s collection offers its own evidence that they were indeed read, and it suggests that the riddles, even the sexual ones, may have been given more leeway than other, less duplicitious texts. To understand why this is so we need to understand the complex ways in which these poems function and the inherent depth of

29 30 31

Knowles, Monastic Order, p. 5. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 29. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 30.

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their duplicity. And we need to understand, as the Anglo-Saxon riddler doubtless did, that riddles are, by their nature, difficult to control. As Jember notes, ‘the riddler always has some strategy, some trick in mind designed to confuse the solver and thereby lead him away from the riddler’s own intended solution’.32 But the riddler’s goal is not to lead the solver away from one answer toward another, but rather to confront him with both. Riddles, and particularly these sexual riddles, depend on this simultaneity. In Derridean terms they offer, in simultaneous but conflicting terms, both sign and supplement. They elicit the sexual solution even as they suppress it. According to Tanke, the solution of double-entendre riddles requires that ‘an artifical semantic hierarchy’ be created in which ‘one of the two subjects simultaneously represented must be credited as “real” and the other as unreal’.33 But this underestimates the complexity of the form, assuming as it does that the fundamental purpose of these riddles is to promote one answer or the other. It is far more illuminating to consider how the riddle must, necessarily, promote both, for the most important thing these riddles give to a representation of sexuality is a sense of their own self-effacing duplicity. Jember claims for the Anglo-Saxon riddler ‘a sophisticated understanding of the reflexive and symbolic nature of language’,34 and if this is so, it is not too much to believe that the riddler could be aware of the symbolism of not speaking, the reflexivity of an implied answer. Williamson argues that ‘the solver must imagine himself a door and open it’,35 but in fact that is only the most obvious move. On another level, the solver must imagine a door for him or herself, and then keep it closed. This is crucial because, concealed or not, the sexual solution is always present. And this concealment behind the polysemous images of the riddles’ clues allows the riddler to evoke sexual imagery even without giving it speech. In this way these riddles do more than amuse; they protect and control as well. The presentation of sexual innuendo in riddle form both gives and holds back with the same gesture. The riddle offers a teasing and titillating subject to view and simultaneously contains it within a safe framework, thus allowing the audience the pleasure of recognition at the same time that it provides a protective distance from the potentially offending subject. In this light the sexual riddles provide an arena in which those aspects of the body that cannot be completely suppressed find expression through a sense of play and freeplay. 32

Gregory K. Jember, ‘Literal and Metaphorical: Clues to Reading the Old English Riddles’, Studies in English Literature (Tokyo) 65 (1988), 47–56, at 47. 33 Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 28. 34 Jember, ‘Literal and Metaphorical’, p. 53. 35 Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 25.

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Take the example of Riddle 44 (Williamson’s 42). Wrætlic hongað bi weres þeo frean under sceate: foran is þyrel. Bið stiþ ond heard; stede hafað godne. Þonne se esne his agen hrægl ofer cneo hefeð, wile þæt cuþe hol mid his hangellan heafde gretan þæt he efenlang ær oft gefylde. (A wondrous thing hangs alongside a man’s thigh under the clothing of the lord: there is a hole in front. It is strong and hard; it has a good firmness. When that servant raises his own garment over his knee, he desires to greet with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole that he, equally long, had often filled before.)36

One solution, though not, perhaps, the first to leap to mind, is ‘key’. But if ‘key’ is the answer, what exactly is the question? Or rather, if the riddle poses a series of clues, how many different things can those clues mean? Implicitly the answer is: a great many. Riddles are by definition puzzles in which words do not always mean what they say. Or rather, they are puzzles in which words mean everything that they say, in different ways and at different times. In this way a riddle, any riddle, can be seen as an enactment of the Derridean concept of différance, in which meaning is always a function of difference and deferral circulating in a freeplay of associations.37 In these sexual riddles an awareness of freeplay is doubly important, because ultimately it is only that which allows them to succeed. Although these sexual riddles operate along lines similar to Freud’s obscene jokes, they do so with a variation that has everything to do with the nature of riddles and their difference from jokes, for if jokes have a great deal to do with the way something is said, riddles are all about the way something isn’t said. Riddles arrange the necessary ingredients of a joke – the same sense of incongruity, the potential for transformation – in an ambiguous framework whose purpose is largely to confuse. The resolution comes with the riddle’s solution, but that solution is withheld. ‘The understanding and agreement in riddling is reached through the riddlee’s deducing a vital logical link that is concealed in the utterance of the riddler.’38 36 37

Translations of the riddles are my own. For a fuller discussion of the concept of différance see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981). 38 W.J. Pepicello, ‘Pragmatics of Humorous Language’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 65 (1987), 27–35, at 33.

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The riddle’s audience accomplishes this when they both decode the riddler’s clues, and discover the link that connects them. In the case of these sexual riddles that logical link is the one that connects the harmless imagery and the sexual. Yet, at the same time the associative links which connect the meanings also keep them in a state of flux. In the end, an understanding of these riddles depends on a realization that there is no single understanding but only a continuing awareness of different meanings all in play at once. This becomes particularly clear in the case of Riddle 44. As we read the clues of the riddle, the solution appears embarrassingly obvious, and that obviousness is part of the trick. Wrætlic hongað bi weres þeo/ frean under sceate: ‘a wondrous thing hangs beside the man’s thigh’. What is most striking, considering how immediately the answer leaps to mind, is how little time the riddler spends in describing the object itself. He concentrates instead on what it does. The object hangs, which, in and of itself, would not be particularly illuminating but for the fact of where it hangs: beside a man’s thigh, under the lord’s garment. We are told not what it is, but where it is, and yet where it is gives us all the clue we need. While the physical description is anything but explicit, the riddler associates his mystery object with a male body (wer), and more particularly with a portion of the body which is normally kept covered (weres þeo). The poem draws its audience immediately into Bakhtin’s world of the carnivalesque, in which the upper and lower bodily strata are subject to sudden reversals, and the closed, controlled body becomes uncontainable. More specifically, the poem directs our gaze down, toward the lower half. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque involves a complete inversion of normal society in a realm with its own rules and its own behavior. ‘We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside out,” of the “turnabout,” of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations.’39 All that is normally hidden may be brought to the forefront. As Stallybrass and White have suggested, ‘cultural categories of high and low, social and aesthetic . . . are never entirely separable’.40 Along with attempts to separate the vulgar from the refined, the impure from the pure, there are competing pressures to bring them together. There is a desire for that which is suppressed, and this desire, this implicit contradiction between what the ruling culture forbids and what it desires, is expressed most clearly in the context of the low. 39

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), p. 11. 40 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), p. 2.

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A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other . . . but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life.41

In Riddle 44 we see this blurring of high and low immediately. We are implicitly in high-status company with the knowledge that it is frean sceate, ‘a lord’s garment’, but then the high is turned low when we are led beneath it. In a similar way the movement from high to low is reflected in the change in the description of the figure from lord (frean) to servant (esne). Later, the nature of what is uncovered shows the implicit merging of high and low with the image of his hangellan heafde. We are in the familiar Bakhtinian territory of bodies turned upside down, for here the hanging thing is personified, and although it is positioned well below the waist, it is given its own head. These conflations of the high and low are crucial to the way in which the riddle constructs its first level of meaning, for if the fleshly associations conjured up are in part an expression of the carnivalesque spirit, they are also a deliberate attempt to control the context in which we interpret the clues we are given. Throughout this riddle the focus has been on uncovering, and in this way the riddler makes clear he is intent on revealing what should be hidden. The lower body is no longer safely contained, and in an implicit parallel, the object of the poem, like the carnivalesque body, is itself open: foran is þyrel, ‘there is a hole in the front’. By positioning this open object in relation to the lord’s body, the poem ensures that we will read its description in bodily terms, and by placing it beneath the cloak in proximity to all else that lurks there the poem controls the way in which we interpret it. By this point in the poem the mysterious object is a good bit less mysterious. The poet hasn’t named it, but with his carnivalesque interminglings he has given an implicit sense of its nature. And with subsequent description he helps solidify our impression. Bið stiþ ond heard; stede hafað godne. ‘It is stiff and hard; it has a good stede’: a good site or position, a good stability, or, as Williamson suggests, succumbing to the overwhelming tenor of the poem, a good firmness.42 And not only is the object firm, but the adjectives themselves and the description they offer seem to be getting increasingly precise and concrete. They begin to define the object’s physical appearance, giving us something definite to say about it. We may

41 42

Stallybrass and White, Politics, p. 5. See gloss of the word stede in Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 450.

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not know what it is, but at least we know what it’s like: hard and stiff. And then we learn how it is used. The most vivid part of the poem lies in its description of the object in use, and this use, in the context of the Bakhtinian associations already put into play, is not unnaturally focused on desire. When the man raises his own garment above his knee, putting into action what we have, so far, only surreptitiously observed, the poem makes his desire clear. Wile þæt cuþe hol/ mid his hangellan heafde gretan: ‘he desires that known, familiar hole’, or, to read a little further, ‘he wishes to greet’ it ‘with the head of his hanging thing’. Desire is overflowing its boundaries. Nothing is contained. By this point in the poem, the object is embedded so fully into the context of fleshly bodies and desire that we are virtually obliged to read the clues within that framework. The overwhelming tenor of the poem constrains the meaning that we find there. But if the meaning is constrained, it is not fixed. The context of the word choice may lead us toward a specific interpretation, but within the same set of clues there is an active pressure to destabilize the meaning even as we are offered it. There are several points within this poem where the instability of meaning is most obvious; where the clues we are given lead us simultaneously in two separate directions like Derrida’s brisure or hinge marking ‘the impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence’.43 Despite its vividness and the apparent precision of bi weres þeo the riddle begins on a note of indeterminacy with the word wrætlic. This is an adjective implicitly describing a noun, but the noun itself is absent. This is not particularly unusual in Anglo-Saxon poetry, but here it functions in a peculiar way. The adjective describes, but it describes without naming, so that the solution of this riddle presents itself immediately as both a logical and grammatical vacancy. Something like this is often the case for riddles, where the whole game is to start with what is unknown and work toward it, filling in the meanings and the connotations around the missing object, so that we gradually come to know it by the shape and texture of the space it doesn’t fill. But the choice of wrætlic is striking because of the breadth and indeterminacy of its connotations. Williamson translates it as: ‘wondrous, rare, magnificent, elegant, artistic’.44 Crossley-Holland gives us ‘strange’.45 Bradley gives us ‘curiosity’.46 In its use in other poems it modi43

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 69. 44 Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 463. 45 Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., The Exeter Book Riddles, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 48. 46 S.A.J. Bradley, trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1982), p. 379.

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fies an equally various range of objects, describing the voice of God in Andreas (line 90), the belly of the Phoenix (Phoenix, line 307), and the decapitated head of Grendel being carried to the hall on the shaft of a spear in Beowulf (line 1647). In addition the word is used in various other riddles, including describing a bow, a set of bagpipes, and perhaps a sword rack.47 Whatever these subjects have in common, it seems to have little to do with appearance, except perhaps that their appearance is not human. In a riddle that emphasizes the bodily context of its human solution, the fact that the first description is so un-human sets up an immediate paradox. The ordinary familiarity of a man’s thigh is contrasted to this adjective of the extraordinary. For if all these wrætlic objects are to some degree wondrous – whatever that may mean – what ties these different senses of wondrousness together is their strangeness. In the riddles particularly, this evocation of strangeness is used not just to describe the objects but to hide them, to estrange them from our understanding. Although this riddle proceeds with a gradual process of familiarization as the object in question grows more intimate and human, it begins as something alien and strange. The doubleness of the riddle is always already in play, and what seems like an initially vivid description offers only a sense of the object’s abstraction. The description hides as much as it shows. Its indeterminacy destabilizes the meaning that, on first reading, may have seemed so firmly anchored in the bodily imagery. In the same way the ending of the riddle offers another hinge point around which the meaning can shift. Again it comes at a point of vividness and apparent specificity. In the last piece of this puzzle, and as an implicit parallel to the man’s desire, we are given the nature of his familiarity with þæt cuþe hol, for he desires that familiar hole þæt he efenlang ær oft gefylde: the hole ‘that, equally long, he had often filled before’. And it is this line which both puts the last anchoring piece in this verbal puzzle and at the same time disrupts any single, univocal reading. For although the word efenlang is unanimously glossed as ‘equally long’ or ‘just as long’, its grammatical role in the poem is uncertain. Or rather, it is certain, but indeterminate. It is identified by Williamson as an adjective which could be either accusative or nominative, modifying either the cuþe hol or he. That is to say, either the hole is equally long – of the same size as the hanging thing – or else the hanging thing was efenlang ær, equally long before, at the time it had previously filled that familiar hole. It was equally long once, but not always. It is this difference that separates the two potential solu47

Riddles 23, 31, and 55. See Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, pp. 192, 196, 208. As Crossley-Holland notes, a variety of different solutions have been offered to this last riddle, including shield, scabbard, gallows, cross, and harp, though Krapp and Dobbie offer the solution sword rack.

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tions. The object either changes its length or not. It is either a marvelous, stiff, hard, firm key – or it’s not. Or rather, it is both a marvelous, stiff, hard, firm key and not. In the spirit of Derridean freeplay, the meaning of this riddle, like the individual meanings of its component words, is necessarily in a state of flux. The sexual and the innocent blur and blend together. In this, also, the sexual riddles are in keeping with the carnivalesque spirit, for part of their function is to reach out and connect their playful sexuality with the rest of the world. ‘Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.’48 In writing this, Bakhtin refers to bodies which are quite literally overflowing their limits: eating, bleeding, defecating – intermingling themselves with their surroundings. While the sexual bodies of the riddles do not overflow in the same exuberant way, they display the same sense of instability, albeit in a linguistic, rather than physical way. The bodies and body parts in these double entendres are constantly transgressing their limits; they are determined to be what they are not. A harmless and ordinary key transforms itself into a penis, and then safely back into a key. A young man churning butter blurs, in our imaginations if not before our eyes, into a couple making love.49 An object displays all the eagerness and tumescence of an erect penis, but then resolves itself back into a lump of dough.50 In each of these riddles the fluidity of imagery and language stands in for the fluidity of the physical form itself, and offers a body which flows into and out of the world in which it is placed. In this evocation of the sexual body, in its hidden and surreptitious form, these riddles call up all the vitality and energy that Bakhtin sees in the carnivalesque. And in each case the shifting terms of understanding reach out to connect the sexual body to the ordinary, mentionable world of butter churns and housekeys and baking bread. All the different associations are in play. In the end this means that the riddler, and by extension the audience, gets to have it both ways. They get to keep both solutions, the sexual and non-sexual. Or, to put it another way, they get to have the sexual answer, without actually having to admit it. Since there is always a way of casting the riddle in innocent terms, the audience can imagine the sexual answer without admitting it has done so. The language of these sexual riddles offers a kind of implicit deniability, which, paradoxically, provides the very means and proof of the sexual imagination. In Derridean terms, the denial of sexual imagery inevitably evokes its supplemental opposite: the 48 49 50

Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 26. Riddle 54; see Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, p. 207. Riddle 45; see Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, p. 205.

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sexual imagery itself. The two exist as a dyad of opposites, so that, under cover of sexual denial and the social camouflage it provides, the riddles’ audience gains unrestricted access to sexual imagery/energy. Different riddles provide different mechanisms for this, but in all of them the structure of the language implicitly provides a margin of safety, of distance, between the audience and the improper imagery of the sexual interpretation, while simultaneously allowing the most intimate imaginative access. In Riddle 54 (Williamson 52) this is most clearly shown in the way the riddle is framed: that is it offers the illusion of no frame at all. As in Riddle 44, the role of the riddler, and the participatory role of the audience, is downplayed by a riddle that disguises itself as a story. Unlike other examples in which the reader is forced to relate to a subject position by the use of the first person pronoun (for example, Riddle 62’s opening: Ic eom heard ond scearp), the audience of Riddle 54 listens to the adventures of characters with whom they have no explicit connection. This is particularly important because Riddle 54 offers, on its surface, little room for any other sort of deniability. Hyse cwom gangan þær he hie wisse stondan in wincle; stop feorran to hror hægstealdmon, hof his agen hrægl hondum up, hrand under gyrdels hyre stondendre stiþes nathwæt, worhte his willan: wagedan buta. Þegn onnette; wæs þragum nyt tillic esne; teorode hwæþre æt stunda gehwam strong ær þonne hio, werig þæs weorces. Hyre weaxan ongon under gyrdelse þæt oft gode men ferðþum freogað ond mid feo bicgað. (A young man came walking to where he knew she was standing in the corner; he stepped there from afar the lusty bachelor, he raised his own garment up with his hands, he thrust under the girdle of her standing there I know not what stiff thing. He worked his will: they both shook. The servant hurried; he was for a time useful, a capable servant; nevertheless the strong one grew weary at every moment sooner than she, tired of that work. In her began to grow under the girdle that which good men often love in spirit and buy with money.)

From the beginning the main participant in the action is identified unequivocally. Hyse cwom gangan þær he hie wisse/ stondan in wincle: ‘a young 94

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man came walking to where he knew she was standing in the corner’. Unlike Riddle 44, there seems little ambiguity here. He is a hror hægstealdmon, ‘a strong, lusty bachelor’. And what he does seems clearly stated as well. Hof his agen/ hrægl hondum up, hrand under gyrdels/ hyre stondendre stiþes nathwæt,/ worhte his willan: wagedan buta: ‘he raised his own garment up with his hands, and thrust under her girdle something stiff. He worked his will. They both shook.’ Almost from the beginning the riddle defines its territory as the realm of the carnivalesque, focusing on the lower bodily strata, leading us under gyrdels/ hyre stondendre, ‘under the girdle of her standing there’. Similarly, in social terms, the lustiness of the young man is later linked to a lower social stratum with his identification as esne, ‘a servant’. Although the portions of the female body in question remain hidden from sight beneath gyrdels hyre, they are available to stiþes nathwæt, ‘I know not what stiff thing’, and therefore implicitly to the young man’s touch, thus recreating in a single image the Bakhtinian conflict between desire and suppression. The object of the young man’s lust is hidden but accessible, and the riddle moves swiftly toward the accomplishment of his desire. Although the reader may not be indicted as a participant in the action, the riddle drags him or her into the role of voyeur, for there seems, at first glance, no second way of reading this story. As in Riddle 44, location controls interpretation. The terms in which we first imagine the man’s desire are controlled by the information that it is accomplished beneath a feminine girdle. There is no way of knowing that the man is only churning butter, for there is no point at which the flow of meaning is explicitly diverted away from the human, sexual interpretation. The closest we come to such a point is the last half line, ond mid feo bicgað: ‘In her began to grow, under the girdle, that which good men often love in spirit and buy with wealth.’ Although the last image seems jarring, with its suggestion of buying the product of this apparent lust – a suggestion that, in retrospect, applies more easily to butter than to a child – it doesn’t succeed in reconfiguring the previous clues. Given the weight of the implicitly sexual imagery preceding it, the last half-line merely adds an additional measure of incongruity which only serves to increase the level of humor when the confusion is ultimately resolved. Taken as a whole the riddle seems to constrain us within the bonds of its reading. But once again this constraint is more implied than real. Even as it manipulates us to stay within those bonds, the riddle provides points of potential divergence. While the first subject of the poem is named explicitly, the second never is. The mechanism of the riddle requires that we assume an equivalence which is not there. The young man’s partner is described with only a pronoun, hie, and the knowledge that, whatever ‘her’ condition, she is able to stand. In this case it is the gendered nature of the 95

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grammar itself, where ‘her’ can stand for either person or thing, that both allows for and disguises the indeterminacy of meaning, for she is never named as a woman. She is stondendre, ‘the standing one’,51 and the riddle implies that, because she is capable of that much volition she is capable of more. We are told wagedan buta, ‘they both shook’, but it is that first implicit image of male/female pairing that urges us to assume that the cause of their shaking was mutual. In each case, multiple meanings are inherent in this description, and it is only the implicit context established in the first line that weights one meaning more heavily than the other. Yet, even as the riddle molds the reader’s response, it also provides a clue to the inherent indeterminacy of meaning which serves as a kind of escape route, or at least as a kind of implicit denial of intent. For although it is quite certain that the young man ‘thrusts under her girdle’, it is quite uncertain just what it is that he thrusts. The word nathwæt, literally ‘I know not what’, does not just indicate that the riddler isn’t telling us the nature of the object. He is claiming not to know. He is letting himself off the hook. As far as he knows, it is something perfectly inoffensive, like the pole of a butter churn. And although this might simply be taken as a riddler establishing his own objectivity, he is also implicitly unanchoring his meaning. For it is once again at the point in the riddle when the key object is to be identified, when that one last piece of the puzzle would fix the solution, that the language offers uncertainty rather than knowledge and a multiplicity of meanings rather than a single answer. On the surface the sort of denial inherent in the word nathwæt might suggest only a certain coyness on the part of the riddler. But in a deeper sense it contains the very essence of the riddle since it alone ensures the final and essential uncertainty of these riddles. It enacts, by its own vacancy, the need for indeterminacy, the knowledge that in order for this riddle’s solution to be complete it must be inconclusive. The structure of the riddle is constantly working against our attempt to solve it, to resolve it. The riddler presents the solution as something inherently unknowable, but in this case denying one solution is the same as implying several. In the end all the uncertainty simply means that a single solution is insufficient. The only completely correct response is one which keeps in play several contradictory meanings at once. The riddler and his audience can deny one solution – I know not what – only by accepting all of them. So common is this move in these sexual riddles that it can be taken as a kind of paradigm for this deliberate decentering of meaning and knowledge. It is made again and again in this particular subset of riddles and 51

The feminine dative singular form would seem to associate the word clearly with her and not with the stiþes, the stiff thing, as Crossley-Holland seems to suggest.

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almost nowhere else. The word nathwæt and the parallel nathwær appear six times in the surviving Old English literature but, with the exception of one appearance in Riddle 93, the words appear only within this small corpus of sexual riddles, and always at that point of potentially disastrous closure. Take Riddle 45 (Williamson 43), for instance: a poem that is little more than a short, vivid, blatantly erotic description attached to a disclaimer. Ic on wincle gefrægn weaxan nathwæt, þindan ond þunian, þecene hebban. On þæt banlease bryd grapode, hygewlonc hondum; hrægle þeahte þrindende þing þeodnes dohtor. (I discovered in the corner I know not what thing growing, swelling and standing up, raising its covering. A proud/licentious bride grasped that boneless thing, with her hands; the lord’s daughter covered the swelling thing with a garment.)

‘I discovered in the corner nathwæt, I know not what thing.’ Here, and in each case, the pivotal word bears a double emphasis. I know not what, and I know not what. With the first, the riddler extricates himself from the scene and from any connection to the potentially offensive object – after all, he merely discovers it. And with the second he extricates the meaning from any single confining interpretation. Not only does he paint himself out of the corner, but he paints the corner itself into a kind of hallway that carries the meaning on. Nathwæt, in its deferral of meaning, functions as an emblem of the Derridean trace. Its meaning constantly recedes, changing with each new signifier, throwing the riddle into a deliberate disarray. All possible answers are equally and simultaneously correct. In freeing this work from the constraints of a stable meaning the authors of these riddles have done more than just manage to create humor and avoid embarrassment. They have provided the means of gaining access to a range of sexual imagery that might otherwise have been unavailable. They provided both a metaphorical way to allude to sexuality, and a way to avoid having to speak it. In their playful way, these riddles demonstrate the fluid nature of language itself. Their very nature provides a means of signifying without naming. They are the literary manifestation of the post-structural break in the language: they are a language that embraces absence. In these riddling descriptions there is a deliberate separation, a blurring of the distinctions, between signifier and signified. They are the implicit enactment of Derrida’s dissemination of meaning. In the way they hide and blur the very images they evoke, these riddles show the manner in which meaning is 97

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never fixed, changing and evolving out of a continuing series of associations and distinctions. ‘A text remains . . . forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.’52 Meaning is never fixed, it is constantly being altered and deferred by the web of its interrelations to other meanings. So it is with these sexual riddles. They are presented as a puzzle with a solution. There is a description that seems to call for an answer. But, in a very real sense, there is no answer, or rather, the puzzle is the answer. The question can be successfully resolved only by withholding the solution. In each case the answer exists in its own absence, in what cannot be said. The correct sexual words cannot safely be voiced; they can only be imagined. The riddles’ full meanings can only be implied. They offer wildly divergent and contradictory solutions, like Plato’s own pharmakon which contains both the poison and the cure. And in the end they succeed in constructing a delicate balance of knowing and unknowing, a way of simultaneously hiding and revealing what we both desire and fear, a way of maintaining two conflicting visions which can only be held together by laughter.

52

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 63.

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Sexual Humor and Fettered Desire in Exeter Book Riddle 12 NINA RULON-MILLER

Fotum ic fere, foldan slite, grene wongas, þenden ic gæst bere. gif me feorh losað, fæste binde swearte Wealas, hwilum sellan men. 5 Hwilum ic deorum drincan selle beorne of bosme, hwilum mec bryd triedeð felawlonc fotum, hwilum feorran broht wonfeax Wale wegeð ond þyð, dol druncmennen deorcum nihtum, 10 wæteð in wætre, wyrmeð hwilum fægre to fyre; me on fæðme sticaþ hygegalan hond, hwyrfeð geneahhe, swifeð me geond sweartne. Saga hwæt ic hatte, þe ic lifgende lond reafige 15 ond æfter deaþe dryhtum þeowige.1

I walk upon my feet, and tear up the ground, the green fields, as long as I have life. If life is taken from me, I bind fast the dark Welsh, and sometimes better men. Sometimes I give a brave man drink from my bosom, sometimes a very proud bride treads on me with her feet. Sometimes a darkhaired Welsh-woman, brought from far, a foolish drunken servant-girl, on dark nights lifts and presses me, wets me in water, sometimes warms me well at the fire, sticks into my bosom her wanton hand, turns me round often, sweeps across my blackness. Say what I am called, who when living despoil the land and after death serve men. (W.S. Mackie)

What’s so funny about female masturbation? Most readers today would be hard-put to find anything amusing in the exposure of a woman’s private sexual act. Indeed, it seems that the author of Riddle 12 did not find his topic funny either: although almost one half of the riddle is devoted to the detailed narration, veiled in double entendre, of a wonfeax wale’s (dark-haired female Welsh slave’s)2 auto-erotic activity, rather than laugh1

Poems from the Exeter Book are cited from George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York, 1936). In Craig Williamson’s The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill, 1977), and in other recent commentary, Krapp–Dobbie Riddle 12 is numbered 10. The Modern English translation of Riddle 12 at the beginning of this essay is from The Exeter Book, Part II, ed. W.S. Mackie, EETS o.s. 194 (1934; rpt., London, 1958), pp. 101–03. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations are my own. 2 John W. Tanke is reluctant to label the wealas and wale in Riddle 12 as either ‘Welsh’ or

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ter, or even a smile, Riddle 12 elicits its narrator’s sneer. However, as humor theorist Lawrence La Fave observes, ‘humor and laughter are not synonymous’.3 In this essay I will attempt to locate the humor that an Anglo-Saxon audience may have derived from a joke about female masturbation by drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s analyses of the purposes of jokes as well as upon later theories of the psychology of humor. I will propose alternate translations and new interpretations of the entire riddle, and will show that, although the riddler’s main concern seems to be the exposure and denigration of a woman’s private sexual act, there are several occasions for more genial entertainment in this text, in particular the pleasure of discovering the instability in a sexist joke as we watch the butt of the joke slip from the woman to the ox, and indeed, to the riddler himself. I will also examine and discuss some of the ‘sketches of the daily realisms of Old English life’4 embedded in Riddle 12 that might provide insights into Anglo-Saxon monastic culture, Anglo-Saxon leather-working technology, and Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward sexuality and servitude. In order to investigate the mechanisms of humor in Riddle 12, we must first identify an audience. Dating the riddles’ composition has proved a futile endeavor, although several commentators argue that many of them, including Riddle 12, may have been composed as early as the eighth century.5 Fortunately, we are on firmer ground for dating their transcription. The scholarly consensus is that the Exeter Book was compiled in the ‘slaves’, preferring to leave the words untranslated to avoid the tendency in commentary on the riddles to ‘naturalize social classifications’, ‘Wonfeax wale: Ideology and Figuration in the Sexual Riddles of the Exeter Book’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 21–42, at 26. The scholarly consensus, however, is that the wealas and wales in the riddles most likely refer to Welsh slaves or servants. See, for example, David A.E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 1995), at, for example, pp. 43, 52–53, 70; Debby Banham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: In Search of the Origins of English Racism’, European Review of History 1 (1994), 150–53; and Margaret Lindsay Faull, ‘The Semantic Development of Old English Wealh’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 8 (1975), 20–44, at 30. Most other riddle scholars identify Riddle 12’s wale as Welsh, including such standard editions as Mackie (Exeter Book, p. 101) and Williamson (Old English Riddles, p. 167). In this study I follow the scholarly consensus and assume that the wonfeax wale is Welsh. 3 Lawrence La Fave, ‘Humor Judgments as a Function of Reference Groups and Identification Classes’, in The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues, ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (New York, 1972), pp. 195–210, at 197. 4 Charles W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry: A Critical Survey of the Poetry Written before the Norman Conquest with Illustrative Translations (London, 1943), p. 134. 5 E.g., Pelteret, Slavery, p. 51; Laurence K. Shook, ‘Riddles Relating to the Anglo-Saxon Scriptorium’, in Essays in Honour of Anton Charles Pegis, ed. J. Reginald O’Donnell

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second half of the tenth century by a monk in an Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, possibly, as Patrick W. Conner argues, at Exeter itself.6 Of course, an Anglo-Saxon monastery is only one of several possible sites for the reception of the Exeter Book riddles, but it is one we can identify with certainty. In this essay, I will assume a tenth-century monastic community as the site of Riddle 12’s transcription, recital, and circulation. I will suggest that this riddle was a text shared ‘Between Men’, men who lived in the homoerotically charged atmosphere of a medieval monastery, and who traded erotic badinage as a way to covertly express homosocial desire.7 The riddles containing sexual double entendre seem especially suitable for such entertainment because their sexual content, although readily accessible, can also be easily denied. There are ninety-five riddles in the Exeter Book, of which fourteen, including Riddle 12, deal in some way with sexuality.8 Commentators conventionally label seven of the sexual riddles ‘ “classic” double-entendre riddles’, where ‘an ambiguity, sustained throughout the text, between a sexual and a non-sexual content’, yields two solutions, one ‘innocent’, or ‘correct’, and the other ‘obscene’, or ‘wrong’.9 For instance, the sexual

6

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(Toronto, 1974), pp. 215–36, at 216; Frederick Tupper, Jr., ed., The Riddles of the Exeter Book (Boston, 1910), p. 96; and Joyce E. Salisbury, Medieval Sexuality: A Research Guide (New York, 1990), p. 26. For a review of the scholarly debate on dating the riddles, see Williamson, Old English Riddles, pp. 5–12. Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), e.g., pp. 20, 29. Robin Flower posits several different hands, ‘The Script of the Exeter Book’, in The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, ed. R.W. Chambers, Max Förster, and Robin Flower (London, 1933), p. 83; later scholars argue for the same hand throughout. See Conner, Exeter, pp. 112–19, for a full discussion. Laurence K. Shook finds ‘comments on and jests about the tools of [the scribe’s] trade’ throughout the riddle collection, leading him to suggest that the scribes who compiled the riddles also composed them, ‘Scriptorium’, pp. 215–16, 218. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), introduction, pp. 1–20, on male homosocial bonding. David W. Porter observes, ‘For one growing up in the monastery, to be sexual must have meant to be homosexual, to state a patent truth, and not all manifestations of sexuality can have gone unshared’, Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, trans. and with an intro. by David W. Porter and ed. by Scott Gwara (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 14, n. 29. However, as we will see below, heterosexual desire was certainly not unknown in medieval monasteries. On homoeroticism in the Anglo-Saxon monastery, see Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago, 1998), e.g., pp. 153–62. I am grateful to Allen Frantzen for providing me with parts of his manuscript while Before the Closet was in press. Editors differ on both the total number of riddles and on the number of sexually suggestive riddles. See Williamson, Old English Riddles, pp. 3ff. on numbering; and Ann Harleman Stewart on the identification of sexual riddles, ‘Double Entendre in the Old English Riddles’, Lore and Language 3 (1983), 39–52, at 39–40. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, pp. 31, 22–23.

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innuendo that runs throughout Riddle 54, whose ‘innocent’ solution is ‘churn’, invokes the ‘obscene’ solution, ‘[hetero]sexual intercourse’, while Riddle 61 (Helmet, or Shirt) and Riddle 62 (Poker, or Gimlet) elicit, respectively, the additional solutions ‘vagina’ and ‘penis’. Critics generally agree that Riddle 12 does not follow the ‘classic’ double-entendre pattern, because, in their view, only lines 7b–13a contain sustained double entendre.10 Rather than considering a series of details that all point to the speaking riddle subject, and, therefore, to the riddle’s solution, in order to solve Riddle 12 the reader/auditor must first answer five miniature riddles, each with its own solution. These miniature riddles are posed by Riddle 12’s speaking subject, an ox who tells how he ‘serves men’. The first four are easily answered: when alive, the ox serves men by pulling a plow; when dead, his skin is fashioned into articles made from ox-hide: leather bindings; a leather drinking vessel; and leather shoes, or perhaps a leather rug. The identity of the fourth article, which appears in lines 7b–13a, remains the topic of scholarly debate.11 In these lines, an ambiguous leather article is presented in a miniature riddle that elicits a double solution accepted by most modern critics: a female Welsh slave, who is ostensibly fashioning or cleaning an article made of ox-leather, is also, or instead, masturbating alone by a fire.12 Commentators often marvel at the presence of sexually suggestive riddles in a book that was ‘undoubtedly transcribed in an atmosphere of (nominal) celibacy in the scriptorium of some monastery’,13 a book Bishop Leofric apparently considered a suitable donation for the library at Exeter Cathedral.14 For instance, Edith Whitehurst Williams finds in these ‘aston10 11

See, e.g., Stewart, ‘Double Entendre’, p. 45; and Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23. Critics have suggested ‘glove’, ‘jerkin’, ‘hat’, ‘boots’, ‘bed covering’, and ‘coin purse’ (see Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 41, n. 30). The identity of the fourth article is further discussed below. 12 As he himself observes, Tanke is the first critic to name the wonfeax wale’s sexual act ‘female masturbation’, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 33. Earlier commentators allow themselves only vague allusions to an obscenity, e.g., Paul F. Baum, ‘[line] 13 . . . probably carries a salacious innuendo’, Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, NC, 1963), p. 24; Bogislav von Lindheim, ‘the lines following [line 7] are leeringly obscene’, ‘Traces of Colloquial Speech in Old English’, Anglia 70 (1951), 22–42, at 34; Frederick Tupper, ‘the allusion [is] obscene’, Riddles of the Exeter Book, p. 96; and Williamson, ‘the double entendre of these lines [7ff.] should be clear’, Old English Riddles, p. 167. 13 Edith Whitehurst Williams, ‘What’s So New about the Sexual Revolution? Some Comments on Anglo-Saxon Attitudes toward Sexuality in Women Based on Four Exeter Book Riddles’, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 137–45, at 138. 14 See Max Förster, ‘The Donations of Leofric to Exeter’, in The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, ed. Chambers, et al., p. 10. Christopher A. Jones observes that even the best scholars use the term ‘monastic’ ‘so loosely as to mean almost anything’. Jones

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ishing’ riddles ‘a number of wholesome and spontaneous attitudes’ to female sexuality untouched by patristic dogma, ‘which defined woman as nothing short of bestial – lecherous, shrewish, evil in every way’.15 Williams argues, rather, that the sexual riddles demonstrate that ‘sexual pleasure . . . lay within the province of women’; in these riddles, there is ‘no sanction against this pleasure since women are not portrayed as degraded or exploited’.16 Ann Harleman Stewart is also astonished to find sexually suggestive riddles in the Exeter Book. Asking, ‘What are these poems doing in a collection of otherwise generally serious poetry – a collection presented by a bishop to his cathedral?’ she too considers the riddles’ portrayals of sexually active women surprisingly benign. Stewart argues, for instance, that Riddle 25, which features a woman both peeling an onion and grasping a penis, is ‘comic rather than crude, ribald rather than lascivious, with a sort of affectionate ridicule that is the opposite of prurience’. Like Williams, reasonably expecting a less wholesome attitude from an ecclesiastical or monastic milieu, Stewart finds instead that the Anglo-Saxon riddlers ‘viewed relations between the sexes . . . a joyful business’.17 John W. Tanke also argues for the riddlers’ benevolent attitude toward women, stating, ‘[T]he majority of sexual personae who appear in the double-entendre riddles are presented in an ethically neutral or even positive light.’18 As all three of these critics note, however, Riddle 12 is an exception: unlike her female counterparts in other sexual riddles, the wonfeax wale is

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argues that a proper understanding of Exeter Book’s Guthlac A requires that we ‘look . . . to the flowering of Anglo-Saxon “Benedictine” monasteries (cenobia) in the eighth century and especially the tenth’, and that we consider ‘the reforming ideals of those responsible for its being copied ca. 970 for inclusion in the Exeter Book’, ‘Envisioning the Cenobium in the Old English Guthlac A’, Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995), 259–91, at 263–64. Jones accepts Patrick W. Conner’s three-booklet hypothesis as well as Conner’s argument that the booklet containing Guthlac was the last of the three to be compiled. Conner argues that the contents of this booklet ‘reflect a marked shift in literary taste that accompanied the mid-century monastic reform movement’. Conner further argues that the booklet containing the riddles was the second one to be copied; it includes ‘compositions both in the Continental style of the pre-reform period and compositions which focus on the issues important to the Benedictine monastery during and immediately after the process of reform’, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, pp. 110–19, 148. If Conner’s hypothesis is correct, the riddles may have been copied and circulated during a time of transition when their monastic reading community had not yet been successfully reformed. Williams, ‘Sexual Revolution’, p. 137. Williams, ‘Sexual Revolution’, p. 138. The ‘four riddles’ that Williams focuses on and refers to in her title are Riddles 25 (Onion), 45 (Dough), 61 (Helmet, or Shirt), and 91 (Key), but her discussion on pp. 137–38 refers to the entire set of sexual riddles. Stewart, ‘Double Entendre’, pp. 38, 49, 42, 49. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23.

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‘held up for contempt’.19 Although she is not explicitly compared with her ‘betters’, as are the wealas in line 4, her epithet, ‘wale’, is most likely also derogatory.20 In addition, the darkness of her hair and skin is pointedly rehearsed: she is wonfeax (dark-haired) and, like the wealas (Welsh men) in line 4, sweart (dark-skinned), in sharp contrast to the noble, blond, and fair-skinned women who appear in other Old English poetry dealing with women.21 For instance, Judith’s handmaiden is blachleor (bright-cheeked) (Judith, line 128); Juliana shines with glæm (radiance) (Juliana, line 167); and Eve is fægrost (fair) and wlitegost (radiant) (Genesis B, lines 457, 627).22 In the riddles, rather than wonfeax, a nobleman’s daughter in Riddle 80 is hwitloccedu (fair-haired), and even the ridiculous copulating hen in Riddle 42 is a blonde (hwitloc). Like wonfeax, sweart is a pejorative term. As David A.E. Pelteret observes in his study of Riddle 12, ‘Elsewhere in Old English poetry . . . [sweart] describes hell [Genesis B, 487], devils [Christ III, 898], the raven, a symbol of death in war [Finnsburh, 34], and . . . sin [Juliana, 313].’ Pelteret also notes that, in Riddle 12, sweart’s ‘contrast with sellen [better], which can also mean ‘‘morally/spiritually better’’, heightens its association with sin and the devil’, and that the use of sweart in Riddle 12 ‘is particularly interesting for the history of ideas as it provides an early example of the association through imagery of physical appearance with moral qualities’.23 The wale is also called, ‘apparently gratuituous[ly]’,24 dol (stupid, foolish, or silly) and druncmennen, a hapax legomenon that probably

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Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23. See also Stewart, ‘Double Entendre’, p. 45; and Williams, ‘Sexual Revolution’, p. 141. Williams argues that the wale is not condemned for her gender: ‘[Her] degradation does not rest on a male–female distinction but on one of class, a slave–free difference.’ See, e.g., Banham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’; and Pelteret, Slavery; both further discussed below. Faull observes that, although ‘all Anglo-Saxons were not fair. . . . Germanic peoples may have preferred fair hair and so ascribed the opposite characteristics to the lowest ranks of society’, at least in their poetry, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 30. The translation of sweartne in line 13 will be discussed below. See Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘The Old English Poetic Vocabulary of Beauty’, in New Readings, ed. Damico and Olsen, pp. 211–21. Pelteret, Slavery, p. 52. Another sweart female body that is both repulsive and titillating appears in the ‘Death of Mary of Egypt’, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 2, EETS o.s. 76, 82 (London, 1881, 1885), pp. 12–15. As Mary Dockray-Miller points out, in this story, ‘The sexual temptation of the naked body, even an old holy body cooked by the sun [sweartes . . . for þære sunnan hæto], must be hidden’, ‘The Feminized Cross of The Dream of the Rood’, Philological Quarterly 76 (1997), 1–18, at 12. I am grateful to Mary Dockray-Miller for generously sharing her extensive knowledge of Anglo-Saxon studies with me. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23.

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means ‘drunken maid-servant’, both clearly pejorative terms.25 Finally, her hand, unlike the somewhat similarly employed hygewlonc and modwlonc (haughty and proud-minded, but see below) women’s hands in Riddles 25 and 45, is hygegalan, rendered in the standard translations as ‘wanton’, or ‘hot’.26 As Bogislav von Lindheim has observed, the meaning of wlanc/wlonc has been ‘curiously overlooked by the dictionaries’; he convincingly argues for the meaning of wlonc as ‘lustful, lascivious, desirous for sexual intercourse’ throughout the sexual riddles.27 Nonetheless, although the Anglo-Saxon riddlers – and most modern commentators – seem eager to view the merely hygegal-handed Welsh woman as ‘wanton’ and ‘hot’, they do not appear to consider the felawlonc bride in Riddle 12, the modwlonc woman in Riddle 25, or the hygewlonc lord’s daughter in Riddle 45 especially lustful or lascivious. Rather than ‘wholesome’, ‘joyful’, or ‘ethically neutral’, the Anglo-Saxon response to the masturbating wonfeax wale seems more in keeping with modern scholarly expectations of patristic misogyny, where the female ‘swart part’ conjures images of hell, devils, death, and sin.28 In response to the widespread scholarly amazement at the notion of medieval monks telling risqué riddles, especially considering the strictures in the Benedictine Rule and Regularis Concordia against ‘scurrilitates . . . vel verba otiosa’ (jokes . . . or small talk) and ‘fabulis aut otiosis . . . loquelis’ (tales or gossip),29 we might recall the double monastery at Coldingham, where, according to Bede’s unhappy tale, everyone in the 25

26

27 28

29

Although the pleasures of mead- and wine-drinking are praised throughout Anglo-Saxon literature, drunkenness was often considered a disgrace. See, e.g., Riddles 11 and 27, and the disparaging accounts of drunkenness in Judith (lines 21–31) and Juliana (line 487). See also Hugh Magennis, who argues that, in Beowulf, rather than ‘moral degeneracy’, drinking is more often ‘a symbol of social cohesion’, ‘The Beowulf Poet and his druncne dryhtguman’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985), 159–64, at 159, 164. According to Bosworth and Toller, gal means both ‘light, pleasant’ and ‘licentious, wicked’, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (1898; repr. London, 1972), p. 359. Both Mackie, Exeter Book, p. 103, and Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., The Exeter Book Riddles, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 16, give ‘wanton’; Williamson uses ‘hot’, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 170. I do not wish to dispute the standard renderings; however, as I will further discuss below, the ambiguous word gal may have been chosen intentionally to suit both an ‘innocent’ and an ‘obscene’ solution. Von Lindheim, ‘Colloquial Speech’, pp. 28, 34. I am indebted to Michael Alexander for his translation of Riddle 12’s swifeð me geond sweartne as ‘I must stroke her swart part’, The Earliest English Poems (Berkeley, 1970), p. 130. Justin McCann, The Rule of Saint Benedict (London, 1952), p. 36; and Thomas Symons, Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London, 1953), p. 55; hereafter, Rule and Regularis Concordia.

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community, ‘men and women alike, [was] either sunk in unprofitable sleep, or else awake only to sin. Even the cells, which [had been] built for prayer and study, [were] converted into places for eating, drinking, gossip, or other amusements’, such as, perhaps, the telling of riddles.30 In addition, we have several surviving colloquies, dramatic dialogues used in monastic schoolrooms for teaching Latin, that, as David Porter observes, ‘in no way [conform] to the seriousness of monkish comportment’, for instance, Ælfric Bata’s Colloquy 25, which gives ‘an outrageous example of what Benedict by way of prohibition calls “idle words, such as move to laughter” . . . where the master and a troublesome student exchange scatological insults’; and Bata’s Colloquy 9, where a raucous monastic drinking party is enacted;31 and the colloquies in Liber de raris fabulis where monks are depicted asking for and receiving kisses from women, preparing to ride off to town for a beer, drinking to excess, and encouraging young boys to accompany older monks to the latrine.32 Although these portrayals of monkish misbehavior may be more fiction than fact, they suggest that at least certain medieval monks allowed their imaginations free rein.33 When discussing the functions of humor in the double-entendre riddles, most critics posit a riddler engaged in an act of aggression.34 Craig Williamson, for instance, suggests that the game ‘consisted of inducing the 30 31 32

33

34

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R.E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 253. Porter, Anglo-Saxon Conversations, pp. 13–14, 136–43, 98–107. G.N. Garmonsway, ‘The Development of the Colloquy’, in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in some Aspects of their History and Culture, Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London, 1959), pp. 248–61, at 254–56. For Liber de raris fabulis, Garmonsway gives ‘Stevenson’s colloquy no. I, from Bodley 572’. As David Porter notes, ‘Regularis Concordia specifies, presumably to prevent the opportunity for pederasty, that not even a master should be alone with a student’, Anglo-Saxon Conversations, p. 14 (see also Regularis Concordia, p. 8). The penitentials give several references to homosexual acts performed between monks and boys; see, e.g., Frantzen, Before the Closet, pp. 156–62. In her discussion on the gradual infiltration into Anglo-Saxon England of the continental Christian ‘stereotype of woman as seductive temptress’, Stephanie Hollis argues that ‘The real moral of the story [of Coldingham] is that, in the opinion of Bede, women were much too dangerous [for men] to share a monastery with. . . . The long term effect of repeating such scandals was undoubtedly to assist in the creation of a climate of opinion that favoured segregated monasticism – and the stricter enclosure of female religious’, projects that Hollis amply demonstrates were dear to Bede, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 100, 102. Most humor theorists emphasize the function of aggression in humor. See, e.g., Jeffrey H. Goldstein, Jerry M. Suls, and Susan Anthony, ‘Enjoyment of Specific Types of Humor Content: Motivation or Salience?’, in The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, pp. 159–71, at 159–60; and Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, 1997), pp. 546–48.

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riddle-solver to guess the “wrong” solution, that is the anatomical one, in order to offer him the “plain” solution and proof of his salacious imagination’.35 Ann Harleman Stewart agrees and imagines the following encounter: ‘[W]hen the decipherer arrives at an obscene solution, the riddler can disclaim all responsibility for it. Ha! He can say, in effect, it’s all in your mind: the real solution is this – and produce an innocent referent like an onion, a key, or a churn.’36 Reinhard Gleissner also emphasizes humor as aggression in his study of the sexual riddles, arguing that the riddle-poser’s objective was to expose and ridicule the riddle-solver, who ‘is practically always a dupe. . . . Double-entendre riddles rather obviously lead the hearer to an erotic solution in order then to expose him with the “actual” decent solution.’37 Posing sexually ambiguous riddles may have also provided an opportunity for a monkish riddler to flaunt his superior moral integrity through ‘mockery, ridicule, and laughter at the foolish actions’ of his dupe, a function of aggressive humor that many humor theorists consider ‘central to [all] humor experience’, and which they label ‘the superiority principle’.38 It is certainly not difficult to imagine Anglo-Saxon monks, cautioned continually against the sin of pride, wishing to assert their superiority by comparing themselves favorably to others, or, perhaps, to create a hierarchy or to maintain an existing one.39 Yet, as Steven Pinker reminds us, ‘Not all humor is malicious.’40 Gleissner suggests a more benevolent motive on the part of the riddlers: telling a bawdy joke ‘allows one to resist the prick of a sexual tabu which is felt to be burdensome. The tabu and the law on which it is founded are attacked and injured by the joke, whereby the laughter elicited by the joke has a liberating effect.’41 Gleissner thus modifies his humor-as-aggression model, introducing the possibility of a liberating release for both riddler and solver. Finding Gleissner’s models ‘problematic’, Tanke responds, ‘If one accepts that it is the riddler’s aim to cause the solver to express his/her desire for a sexual solution and then to reject the validity of that solution,

35 36 37

38 39

40 41

Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 299. Stewart, ‘Double Entendre’, p. 49 (Stewart’s emphasis). Reinhard Gleissner, Die ‘zweideutigen’ altenglischen Rätsel des Exeter Book in ihrem zeitgenössischen Kontext (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 14, 10, quoted and translated in Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 28. Patricia Keith-Spiegel, ‘Early Conceptions of Humor: Varieties and Issues’, in The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, pp. 3–39, at 6. Strictures against ‘vying with each other’, ‘boasting’, ‘arrogance’, ‘vanity’, and ‘pride’ appear throughout the Regularis Concordia, e.g., pp. 2, 4, 57, 63. On hierarchy in the monastery see, e.g., Rule, chap. 71. Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 553. Gleissner, Die ‘zweideutigen’ altenglischen Rätsel, p. 14, quoted and translated in Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 29.

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thereby ridiculing the solver, then it becomes clear that the riddle aims not to do battle with the law, but rather to exploit and thereby affirm it.’42 However, affirming the law through sanctioning humor also seems a reasonable scenario for a medieval monastery, especially when we consider the form of humor William H. Martineau refers to as ‘the joking relationship’, which, he says, is ‘a common phenomenon in nearly every society’. Here, humor serves a social function, allowing members of a group to express ‘grievance or controlled hostility against deviance’ while avoiding giving offense. In the ‘joking relationship’, humor is directed at someone in the group who either has not learned or has violated the norms of the group. Humor constitutes a symbol of disapproval – a subtle way of sanctioning the deviant and at the same time providing him with an opportunity to accept the humorous definition of the situation, acknowledge the incongruity of his behavior, correct his behavior, and rejoin the group without ‘losing face’. . . . The result is that the normative system is reinforced and social cohesion prevails.43

Martineau’s model of the use of humor to enforce group conformity also seems a plausible monastic experience; indeed, all of the above tableaux give credible accounts of possible mechanisms of humor in an Anglo-Saxon monastery. But, in addition to humor as aggression, as assertion of superiority, as liberating release, and as benign sanction, at least one other possible function of monastic humor remains, that of using sexual jokes to create, maintain, or strengthen homosocial bonds, a mechanism of humor that Freud, perhaps unwittingly, describes in detail in ‘The Purposes of Jokes’.44 Indeed, it seems odd that no critic has used a psychoanalytic approach when discussing the sexual riddles, although Gleissner leads the way when he suggests that the pleasure in sexual jokes is derived from violating a sexual taboo, a function of humor that Freud also discusses in ‘The Purposes of Jokes’.45 I will attempt further on in this study an interpretation based on Freudian humor theory of the riddler’s presentation of the 42

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 29. Tanke argues that the riddler’s and his audience’s ‘interest is not to flout the law at all, but rather to get the wale to flout it for them’, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 30. 43 William H. Martineau, ‘A Model of the Social Functions of Humor’, in The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, pp. 101–25, at 117. 44 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Purposes of Jokes’, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1960), pp. 90–116. 45 To the best of my knowledge, Tanke is the only commentator who has even alluded to a Freudian interpretation of Riddle 12. In a brief paragraph, he mentions Freud’s discussion on the alleviation of sexual repression through telling a sexual joke, his presupposition of the masculine gender of the participants, and his understanding that the participants desire to expose a woman; concluding that Freud’s model ‘reaffirm[s] the

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wonfeax wale, but first I want to return to Tanke’s discussion of Riddle 12 in order to investigate more fully the riddler’s treatment – and mistreatment – of the wonfeax wale. Asking, ‘Why is the wale condemned?’ Tanke compares Riddle 12 with other sexual riddles and finds ‘at least four possible reasons’ for the wale’s condemnation: ‘her gender, her status as a servant, her ethnicity (if she is understood to be Welsh), and her sexual activity’. As Tanke notes, these categories ‘all . . . intersect’;46 indeed, in Tanke’s arguments they become easily entangled, in part because of the riddles’ double solutions. However, Tanke’s categories provide a useful framework for examining the treatment of the wonfeax wale. In the following discussion, I will review and reconsider Tanke’s four categories and expand upon his comparisons with other sexual riddles.47 First, the wale’s gender. As we have seen, several commentators argue that, except for the wonfeax wale, female characters in the riddles who are engaged in sexual acts are treated benevolently, or at least neutrally. Although this is an accurate assessment of certain riddles, such as Riddles 45 (Dough) and 61 (Helmet, or Shirt), there are several others that reveal an attitude to female sexuality that is more malevolent than benevolent.48 Although I do not wish to suggest that there is nothing charming or intriguing in these riddles, I think it is important to point out the misogyny embedded in them, especially when contemporary critics seem oblivious to it. For instance, although Williams explicitly excludes any portrayal of women as ‘shrewish’ in the riddles, she seems not to have noticed Riddle 20’s ‘scold’, who insults, chides, and speaks evil to the celibate sword (heo me wom spreceð . . . firenað mec wordum,/ ungod gæleð) for his avoidance of women.49 This depiction seems closer to the church fathers’ image of

46 47

48

49

“law” of sexual difference’, Tanke leaves it at that (‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 30). For a Freudian reading of other sexual riddles, see now Smith’s essay in this volume. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 35. Tanke disagrees with Edith Whitehurst Williams, who argues that Riddle 12’s wale is derided solely for her class (see n. 19 above). As Tanke himself has pointed out, until his essay was published in 1994, Riddle 12 had ‘never received what could be called an interpretation’ (‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 32). Although I do not always agree with his conclusions, I am greatly indebted to Tanke for opening the scholarly discussion on Riddle 12 with his insightful and thought-provoking essay, as well as for providing an extensive bibliography. We might add Riddles 77 (Oyster) and 91 (Key) to the group of ‘neutral’ riddles, but their undertone of male sexual violence is disturbing to most twentieth-century sensibilities. However, see Ruth Wehlau, who argues that, for the Anglo-Saxons, sex was viewed as a ‘kind of war’, The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry (New York, 1997), p. 108. Williams, ‘Sexual Revolution’, p. 137; Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 93. The word ‘scold’ is Crossley-Holland’s: he observes, ‘The conflict between the beauti-

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women as sexually insatiable and a dangerous lure to men who would be chaste than to a ‘wholesome and spontaneous’ portrayal of female sexuality.50 The ‘affectionate ridicule’ that Stewart claims for Riddle 25 (Onion) is also questionable. To be sure, the onion-peeling/penis-grabbing woman receives better treatment than the wonfeax wale, but, if there is any affection in the riddler’s tone, it is directed toward the male speaking subject, rather than the woman. The riddler seems to commend the onion/penis, causing him to boast that he is a ‘wonderful creature’ and a ‘joy to women’ (wunderlicu wiht and wifum on hyhte) and giving him a narcissistic pleasure in both his marvelous physique and his virile endurance. Twentiethcentury commentators also seem to admire Riddle 25’s speaking subject. Williamson, for instance, notes with apparent approval the onion/penis’s Whitmanesque ‘Song of Myself’, his ‘litany of power’.51 On the other hand, commentators who discuss the woman in Riddle 25 imagine violence, power struggles, and even a frightening Lacanian disintegration of the riddle subject.52 For instance, Tanke, who, as we have seen, also argues for a general benevolence toward women, finding ‘the majority . . . presented in an ethically neutral or even positive light’, writes of the woman in Riddle 25, ‘The violence she inflicts on the masculine riddle subject is avenged by the tear she is made to yield, and the ejaculate she receives.’53 It is not at all clear, however, that the man’s statements, ‘sceþþe . . . nymþe bonan anum’ (I hurt only my slayer) (lines 2–3) and ‘Feleþ sona / mines gemotes’ (she soon feels my meeting) (lines 9–10), are aggressive, or that ‘the ejaculate she receives’ is either given or taken as an act of male vengeance. Nor is it certain that the woman is ‘made’ to yield a tear, or even that the tear is hers. Although most translators render þæt eage in line 11’s ‘Wæt bið þæt eage’ as ‘her eye’, referring either to the eye of the woman’s

50

51 52

53

ful, chaste sword and the scold, resentful at her husband’s lack of attention, is vivid and amusing, and it is a pity that only part of it survives’, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 93. In Adversus Jovinianum Jerome argued that ‘[W]oman’s love in general is accused of ever being insatiable . . . it enervates a man’s mind, and engrosses all thought except for the passion which it feeds’, quoted in Joyce E. Salisbury, ‘Gendered Sexuality’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York, 1996), pp. 81–102, at 86. Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 178. On Lacan’s theories of ‘the child’s experience of the “body-in-bits-and-pieces” ’, and ‘adult fantasies of corporeal disintegration’, see Elizabeth Groz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London, 1990), p. 34. Groz cites Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), pp. 4–5. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax Wale’, pp. 23, 32.

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face or to the ‘eye’ of her vagina, the ‘obscene’ double entendre in þæt eage could just as likely refer to his eye, the ‘eye’ of the man’s penis.54 Unlike the male speaking subject, the female character in Riddle 25 is unequivocally aggressive: she nearwað (confines), gripeð (grabs), ræseð (rushes at), reafað (ravages), and fegeð . . . on fæsten (tightly fixes) the onion/penis. As Crossley-Holland says of Riddle 62, such rough handling ‘has made some commentators squirm’.55 Tupper, Williamson, and Trautmann, like Tanke, all consider the woman’s actions ‘something of an assault’.56 For instance, Tupper notes that Riddle 25’s sexually assertive woman recalls the wonfeax wale: the phrase, ræseð mec on reodne (she rushes at my redness) (Riddle 25, line 8a), parallels Riddle 12’s swifeð me geond sweartne (she sweeps through my blackness) (line 13a), while, for Williamson, both of these lines recall ‘the description of Guthlac pursued by death at Guth. 995–96: ac hine ræseð on/ gifrum grapum’ (but it rushes upon him with ravenous clutches).57 Although Williamson finds ‘mutual delight’ in the couple’s sexual ‘meeting’ (gemotes), he considers this meeting a ‘power struggle’ and imagines the speaking subject’s alarming disintegration: ‘The onion begins . . . with a litany of power, but, after the entrance of the . . . woman . . . the “I” fractures into body, head, and skin. . . .’58 The woman also ‘dares’ (neþeð), apparently uninvited, to grab (gripeð) the penis, an act that may have aroused sexual anxiety in her Anglo-Saxon audience, as it did in another ancient text, Deuteronomy 25:12, where it is decreed, ‘A woman seizing a man’s genitals will have her hand cut off.’59 Rather than regarding Riddle 25’s woman with affectionate ridicule, it seems more likely that a monastic audience would have found her similarly disturbing. Like Riddle 20 (Sword), Riddle 54 (Churn) resonates with the fear of an insatiable woman, but in the Churn riddle, rather than a threat to male chas54

55 56

57 58 59

Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 83; Mackie, Exeter Book, p. 117; and Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 29 all translate þæt eage as ‘her eye’. As Stewart points out, ‘Eage “eye” for the [male] aperture appears three times [in the Riddles] (25.11, 37.4, 87.6); in Riddle 25, it is a pun on the “eye” of the phallus and the woman’s eye’, ‘Double Entendre’, p. 46. Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 109. Moritz Trautmann, ‘Alte und neue Antworten auf altenglischen Rätsel’, Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik 19 (1905), 188, quoted in Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 211. Tupper, Riddles of the Exeter Book, p. 125; Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 211. The translation of swifeð me geond sweartne is discussed below. Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 178. On the ‘anxiety . . . raised at the possibility of the woman touching a penis’ in Deuteronomy and the Talmud, see Alice Bach, ‘Good to the Last Drop’, in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, ed. J. Cheryl Exum and David J.A. Clines (Sheffield, 1993), pp. 44–45.

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tity, it surfaces as impotence anxiety.60 As Williamson notes, like Riddle 25, Riddle 54 opens with ‘a burst of machismo’. He then again pictures mutual delight, a power struggle, and the riddle subject’s dissolution, arguing that, after the man’s ravishing treatment of the passive woman in the corner . . . [t]he dichotomy between active and passive, male and female . . . disappears. . . . The young man returns in line 7, not to power but to his place as object in a female fantasy. The narrative voice swings over: the man is a servant, sometimes useful, too often tired before the work’s end. The lady’s power is in the making: she bears the butter. The cost of love is dearer than our hero dreams.61

But it is hard to see how the narrative voice shifts to the woman as well as how a servant who is too tired to serve her might feature in a woman’s sexual fantasy. Williamson’s remark about ‘the cost of love’ is also puzzling: if the cost of love is a child, it is something the riddle tells us men are willing to pay for (men . . . mid feo bicgað, lines 11a–12). Perhaps the cost of love is that male ‘enervat[ion]’ which Jerome warned was the inevitable consequence of congress with an insatiable woman.62 Rather than wholesome, affectionate, or ethically neutral, Riddles 20, 25, and 54 may be closer to patristic misogyny than we might wish to think. Nonetheless, no matter how intimidating, the women in these riddles are neither derided nor condemned. The fact that, like her female cohorts in other riddles, the wonfeax wale is a desiring female may arouse her riddler’s anxiety, then, but as the comparisons with other women in the sexual riddles have shown, gender alone cannot account for the extraordinary contempt that is visited upon her. However, as we will see in the following analysis of the servant-class riddles, when the wale’s gender is combined with her sexual activity, the reason for her condemnation becomes clear. Tanke’s second reason for the riddler’s contempt is the wonfeax wale’s status as a servant. His discussion of the treatment of servants in the sexual riddles focuses on the concept of the ‘good servant’ who performs ‘useful work’. He argues, for instance, that the tillic esne (good [male] servant) in Riddle 54 (Churn) receives the riddler’s approval because his ‘sexual activity is represented as useful work’. Explaining that ‘[t]illic means not only “good” but “capable”, that is useful, productive’, Tanke notes that the tillic 60

Impotence anxiety also surfaces in Riddle 61 (Helmet, or Shirt), line 7: coition occurs only Gif . . . ellen dohte (if he had strength), aptly translated as, ‘if the man could keep it up’, by Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 65. 61 Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 196. 62 See note 50 above.

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esne in Riddle 54 produces both butter and a child, and that the products are described as things which ‘ “good men often love with their hearts and buy with money” ’. In Tanke’s view, ‘Riddle 54 represents procreation as a commercial activity governed by “good men” ’. In contrast, the wale’s ‘sexual gratification does not involve men . . . it lies outside the circuit of production and procreation’.63 When we disentangle the double solutions to these riddles, however, we find that, like the tillic esne’s ‘innocent’ churning of butter, the wale’s ‘innocent’ activity is also useful work, fully inside the circuit of production: in the ‘plain’ reading, she is toiling over a leather object. And, as both Williamson and August Prehn no doubt correctly assume, the wale’s ‘innocent’ activity does involve men: she performs this task for her ‘lord’ and/or ‘lover’, or, at the very least for her household.64 But, as Tanke notes, in the ‘obscene’ reading, unlike Riddle 54’s child-producing esne, the masturbating wale apparently produces only pleasure, her own pleasure. The reason for the riddler’s contempt, then, seems to be that, rather than serving men, the wonfeax wale serves herself.65 When we compare the wale to male servants who produce only their own pleasure, however, we find that men who masturbate are not condemned. For instance, in the ‘plain’ readings to Riddle 37 (Bellows) and Riddle 62 (Poker), the male servants, like the leather-working wale, are engaged in useful work. The þegn (male servant) in Riddle 37 uses his bellows to start or maintain a fire, while the suþerne secg (southern man; probably, foreigner, and also servant) in Riddle 62 wields his poker for some kind of productive, albeit ambiguous, work.66 However, their ‘obscene’ activities, accepted by most commentators as male masturbation – and in Riddle 62 also as anal intercourse67 – are sexual acts that are surely outside the circuit of production and procreation.68 In the sexual riddles, then, ‘useful work’, when conflated with non-reproductive male masturbation and, perhaps, male–male anal intercourse, is not condemned; it is held 63 64

65 66 67 68

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 37. Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 170; and August Prehn, ‘Komposition und Quellen der Rätsel des Exeterbuches’, Neuphilologische Studien 3 (1884), 176: ‘Vielleicht bezeichnet ersteres ein Wamms und deutet auf den Geliebten der schwarzlockigen Welschen hin, u.s.w.’ (‘Perhaps at first it [the riddle subject in lines 7b–13a] signified a jerkin and referred to the lover of the dark-haired Welsh-woman, etc.’), quoted in Tupper, Riddles of the Exeter Book, pp. 95–96. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 35. In Crossley-Holland’s rendering, the suþerne secg ‘engineers an opening’, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 66. See Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23. It is possible that the servants in Riddles 37 and 62 both ‘serve men’ in their sexual activity: each riddle implies the interaction of two men serving each other while engaged in a male–male sexual act.

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in contempt only when conflated with non-reproductive female masturbation. We will return to this problem shortly, but first, let us examine Tanke’s third reason for the wale’s condemnation, her ethnicity. Tanke’s discussion of servants in the sexual riddles is constricted by his refusal to identify the wonfeax wale as a slave.69 Although he demonstrates that gender is the main issue in the servant–class category, his approach forces him to ignore the fact that none of the men he compares to the wale is a slave. Rather than wealh, they are referred to as esne, secg, and þegn (servant, servant/man/hero, and servant/freeman) thus automatically qualifying for better treatment than the wonfeax wale. Faull, who is almost as reluctant as Tanke to label the riddles’ wealas and wales, is, nonetheless, willing to consider Riddle 12’s wonfeax wale a Welsh slave: she notes that feorran broht (brought from far away) in line 7b ‘might suggest that this wealh had come from Wales, which before the Norse invasions supplied the Anglo-Saxons with slaves taken in border raids’.70 In his commentary on Riddle 12, Kevin Crossley-Holland sums up the scholarly discussion on the meaning of wealh: ‘The Old English word wealh . . . means “Welshman”, “Cornishman”, “slave”, and “shameless one”.’71 Reminding us that these multiple meanings reflect ‘the old bitter conflict between Celt and Saxon in the fifth and sixth centuries, when many Britons were taken into slavery’, Crossley-Holland asks us to ‘[c]onsider the wars of the Middle Ages, the long tormented history of Ireland, the present nationalist parties and policies’ and states that ‘in many ways, the struggle still continues’.72 Debby Banham also traces the present-day ‘general feeling of the English that they are superior to the Scots, Irish, and Welsh’ to the Anglo-Saxon era: ‘English efforts to conquer the Welsh and Scots go back into the early Middle Ages, to the submission of Welsh and Scottish kings to Edgar in 973, and Edwin’s attack on Gwynedd in the seventh century.’73 Margaret Lindsay Faull observes that the first written occurrence of wealh appears in the seventh-century Laws of Ine, where we find examples of the ‘inferior social position’ of the Welsh in Anglo-Saxon England. In Ine’s laws that deal with wergeld (the compensation for a person’s life), the free wealh is ‘accorded only half the value of his English counterpart’, while, in laws concerning oaths, ‘a man charged with stealing or harbour69 70 71

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 26. See also note 2 above. Faull, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 30. Bosworth and Toller give for wealh, II a., ‘a shameless person’, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, p. 1173, further discussed below. 72 Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 90. 73 Banham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’, p. 155. We still hear today slang words that reflect a negative stereotype of the Welsh: the verb ‘to welsh’ (to cheat), and the noun ‘welsher’ (an untrustworthy person).

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ing stolen cattle had to produce an oath of sixty hides if he were accused by a Wealh, whereas if the accuser were English the oath required was doubled’.74 As Banham notes, both Bede and the writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote disparagingly of the British, as did Felix, who ‘associat[ed] British hosts with demonic visions’ in his Life of Guthlac. Banham observes that in these texts ‘we have, as usual, the views of the dominant groups only’; for instance, in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, ‘the British . . . consistently act as a foil for [the English]. . . . Where the English are industrious and brave, [the British] are lazy and cowardly; where the English are God-fearing and obedient to Rome, the British, even when Christian, behave like pagans. . . .’ Banham further observes that, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the scribes write of Hengst and Horsa telling ‘their countrymen of “the fertility of the island and the indolence of the British” ’; these scribes also frequently report that ‘an English leader “fought against the British” . . . but we are never told which British. . . . Undifferentiated Britons oppose the establishment of English kingdoms, apparently motiveless, intransigent and without a hope of ultimate success.’75 Other disparaging references to the Welsh in Old English literature appear in the eleventh-century History of Kentish Royal Saints, where ceoriendes wales (querulous female slaves), along with noisy wagons, disturb the peace,76 and in the tenth-century West-Saxon Gospels, where wealh is used pejoratively in a passage that compares a wicked servant (malus servus) to a faithful and prudent one (fidelis servus et prudens). As Pelteret observes, these Gospels show that wealh had probably become a pejorative term by the tenth century; although the Anglo-Saxon translator used the non-pejorative þeow to translate the Latin servus in every other instance, in Matthew 24:50 he used wealh for malus servus.77 A few Old English glosses also use wealh in a negative sense, for instance, in a tenth-century manuscript containing Aldhelm’s De laudibus virginitatis, 74 75

Faull, ‘Semantic Development’, pp. 20–21. Banham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’, pp. 145, 148, 144, 145–47. Banham refers to Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 109–11. 76 London, Lambeth Palace, MS 427, fol. 211: ‘ðrittegum gearum ne gestilde næfre stefen cearciendes wænes ne ceoriendes wales’ (for thirty years the sound of the creaking waggon and the chiding slave never stilled) quoted and translated in Pelteret, Slavery, p. 321. 77 The Latin, ‘veniet dominus servi illius in die qua non sperat’, where ‘servi’ refers to the ‘malus servus’ in Matthew 24:48 (Biblia Sacra, ed. Robert Weber [Stuttgart, 1969], p. 1565), is translated ‘þonne cymþ ðæs weles hlaford on þam dæge ðe he na ne wenþ and on ðære tide þe he nat’ (R.M. Liuzza, ed., The Old English Version of the Gospels, vol. 1, EETS o.s. 304 [Oxford, 1994], p. 51). See also Faull, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 27; and Pelteret, Slavery, p. 322.

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the Latin protervorum (wanton, shameless, impudent) is glossed ‘valana’.78 Several derivatives of wealh also imply derogation of the Welsh. For example, Ælfric used wealode in his Ash Wednesday sermon to describe a man who refused to go to Mass and who spoke wealode mid wordum, meaning ‘strangely’, ‘in a foreign manner’, ‘impudently’, ‘shamelessly’, or, perhaps all four.79 Ælfric also uses weala to describe inferior wine in his Glossary: ‘weala win is equated with crudum uinum, which means “rough, unmatured wine”, as against hlaforda win for honorarium uinum’.80 Wilisc is also derived from wealh and can mean specifically ‘British’, ‘Celtic’, or ‘Welsh’; or simply ‘foreign’.81 It is used in Bald’s Leechbook, where wilisc eala (Welsh and/or foreign ale) is apparently a cure for satyriasis: ‘Gif mon sie to wræne wyl hindheoloþan on wiliscum ealað drince on neaht nestig’ (If a man be over-virile, boil water agrimony in welsh ale; he is to drink it at night, fasting).82 Although Pelteret translates Leechbook’s wilisc eala as ‘Celtic ale’, and Swanton as ‘Welsh ale’, Faull argues for its use here as a ‘status term’ rather than an ethnic one: ‘The use of the genitive plurals, weala and hlaforda [nobles’] obviously refer to the social classes who would be drinking the wines, so weala win would be the wine of the slaves and wealh a status term rather than an ethnic one.’ However, it is possible that weala here does indicate Welsh ethnicity. Although there are several Old English compound words where wealh denotes general foreignness, such as wealh-land, ‘foreign land’ and wealh-hafoc, ‘foreign hawk’, there are also ones that specifically denote Welshness, for instance, wealh-cynn, ‘the Celts’, and wealh-þeod, ‘the Welsh people’.83 In the riddles, Welsh personae appear at least three times, possibly five: twice in Riddle 12; once in Riddle 52 (Yoke of Oxen [but see below]); once in Riddle 72 (Ox), if we accept Williamson’s identification of the sweart hyrde (dark herdsman) in line 11 as Welsh;84 and once in Riddle 49 (Bookcase), where a þegn (male servant) in line 5 is sweart ond saloneb (dark and

78

79 80 81 82

83 84

Moriz Haupt, Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum (Leipzig, 1853), p. 527. Faull lists this and several other Old English glosses in tenth- to thirteenth-century manuscripts that stress the ‘negative aspects of wealh’, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 34. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, pp. 264–65. Quoted in Faull, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 31. See Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 325–26. Thomas Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols. (1864–66), vol. 2, rev. by Charles Singer (London, 1961), p. 144. Translation is by Michael Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, 1975; rev. edn 1993), p. 259. Pelteret, Slavery, 326; Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 259; Faull, ‘Semantic Development’, p. 31; and Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, pp. 1173–74. Williamson, Old English Riddles, pp. 296–97. See also Pelteret, Slavery, p. 52.

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dark-faced), possibly also Welsh. Commentators have suggested as solutions to Riddle 52 ‘flail’, ‘well buckets’, ‘broom’, as well as ‘yoke of oxen (led into a barn by a female slave)’.85 It is interesting to note, however, that in the riddles Welsh people appear almost without fail in some relation to binding, or bovines, or both.86 In Riddle 12, swarthy Welsh men are tightly fettered with ox-leather bonds, and a dark Welsh woman works on an object made of ox-hide. In Riddle 72, an ox once tended by a sweart hyrde (dark herdsman) is bunden under beam (bound under yoke) and treads the mearcpaþas Walas (the paths on the Welsh march). The most likely solution to Riddle 52, therefore, would be ‘yoke of oxen led by a female slave’, since the riddle subjects are associated with binding (ræpingas . . . nearwum bendum/ gefeterade fæste togædre, ‘bound ones . . . with narrow bonds fettered fast together’), as well as with a female Welsh slave (Wale). And, although Williamson writes of the mearcpaþas Walas in Riddle 72, ‘it is not clear why the ox should have been characteristically defined as walking the boundary or country of the Welsh’,87 there may be no cause for puzzlement here, considering the frequent conflation of Welsh and oxen in the riddles. Pelteret observes that ‘The Anglo-Saxons had a very large vocabulary of status terms’,88 a necessity for a society deeply preoccupied with class and ethnicity. A servant or slave, as well as a Welsh person, bound or free, would clearly not have been held in high regard by the ‘literate elite’ who composed and read the poetry in the Exeter Book.89 We can be sure that Tanke’s second and third reasons, ‘her status as a servant’ and ‘her ethnicity’, more than qualified the wonfeax wale for the riddler’s denigration. But, as we have seen, his fourth reason, ‘her sexual activity’, when combined with his first, ‘her gender’, is the main reason for the wale’s condemnation. And, as we have also observed, her masturbation is not condemned because it is non-reproductive; it is condemned because it is performed by a woman. In the end, Tanke concludes that the riddler holds the wale in contempt because ‘far from serving her lord, she serves herself’.90 85 86

87 88 89 90

See Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 106; and Williamson, Old English Riddles, pp. 295–96. Riddle 49 is the only riddle featuring a ‘dark’, possibly Welsh, person (þegn, sweart ond saloneb) that does not contain references to oxen or binding, although the riddle subject is eardfæst (fixed, earth-bound), perhaps an echo of more literal bindings in other riddles dealing with the Welsh. See Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln, NE, 1991), e.g. chap. 3, on the preponderance of metaphors of binding in Old English poetry. Williamson, Old English Riddles, p. 34. Pelteret, Slavery, p. 3. Lerer, Literacy and Power, p. 123. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 35.

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Although I agree with Tanke’s conclusion, I now hope to show that in some ways the masturbating wale serves ‘her lord’, or at least her riddler, very well. Tanke’s conclusion derives from his interpretation of lines 7b–13a. In his reading, the speaking riddle subject makes a metaphorical leap when he describes the last item on his list of leather artifacts. Arguing that each of the articles made from the ox’s skin ‘is a leather receptacle of some kind which serves the bodies of its masters’, Tanke concludes that the riddle subject ‘becom[es] finally incorporated in the body of the wonfeax wale’: ‘the sexual identity of this object [is] female genitalia’.91 However, in a text that reflects the Anglo-Saxon penchant for cataloguing,92 listing one after another article made from ox-leather, it seems more likely that the final item on the list would also be made of animal, rather than human, skin. As Tanke reports in an endnote, both Williamson and Crossley-Holland imply in their interpretations of Riddle 12 that the wale is using a leather dildo. Williamson asserts that the riddle subject ‘thrusts against the lecherous slave-girl’, while Crossley-Holland renders lines 11b–13a, ‘on my breast she places a wanton hand and writhes about, then sweeps me against her dark declivity’.93 Both suggest ‘that the wale masturbates with the leather object . . . (as opposed to reading it as a figure for her genitalia)’.94 Williamson’s and Crossley-Holland’s readings seem more in keeping with the tone of the riddle than Tanke’s, especially when we consider that medieval sexual fantasies of female masturbation invariably included the use of an artificial phallus.95 In the following discussion, I will suggest that, in the ‘innocent’ reading of Riddle 12, the wonfeax wale may be fashioning a leather bottle made of ox-hide, while, in the ‘obscene’ reading, she uses the leather artifact as a dildo. Of course, a hard leather bottle would make ‘an excellent dildo’, as Reay Tannahill writes of another ancient dildo mentioned in a medieval Chinese novel. Indeed, the excellence of a leather dildo fashioned by a shoemaker is extolled by two women in a poem by the third-century Greek poet Herodas.96 Dildos were apparently also known 91 92 93

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 33. See Lerer, Literacy and Power, pp. 99–103. Williamson, Feast of Creatures, p. 170; and Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 34. 94 Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, pp. 41–42, n. 32 (Tanke’s emphasis). 95 See, e.g., Jacqueline Murray, ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York, 1996), pp. 191–222, at 197–99; and Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, trans. Matthew Adamson, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (1985; Princeton, 1988), p. 153. 96 See Herodas, Mime 6, trans. Mary R. Lefkowitz, in Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 107–09. My thanks to Ruth Mazo Karras for providing this reference.

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and used in Anglo-Saxon England as well as in ancient Scandinavia. In the Penitentials of Bede, ‘If a nun fornicates with a nun by means of a device, she is to do penance for seven years’; and in the Flateyjarbók’s ‘The Story of V›lsi’ (V›lsa Þáttr), a female servant is offered a vingull, a horse’s penis, to use ‘between the thighs’.97 As Tanke observes, the translation of the ‘curious word sweartne in line 13’ affects the interpretation of lines 7b–13a. He translates line 13a, swifeð me geond sweartne, ‘moves through me, the dark one’, but, as he reports, ‘the majority of editors read [sweartne] as governed by the preceding me. If this reading is correct, the riddle subject is represented as masculine!’98 However, if we return the riddle subject to the ox and his hide, where, as I have argued, it most likely has remained throughout, reading sweartne as masculine no longer seems surprising. Many other translators have wrestled with sweartne, and have rendered it both masculine and feminine: in the foregoing discussion we have seen the translations, ‘my blackness’, ‘her swart part’, ‘her dark declivity’, as well as ‘the dark one’.99 I am much indebted to F.H. Whitman, whose translation of swifeð me geond sweartne as ‘making me black all over’100 instigated an investigation into Anglo-Saxon leather-working technology and resulted in the discovery of a process called ‘cuir bouilli’, a leather-hardening technique which the wonfeax wale seems to be following almost to the letter as she performs her useful work. Archaeologists repeatedly point out that cuir bouilli, or ‘boiled leather’, is a misnomer, because ‘to boil leather destroys its character’.101 Rather, after being soaked in water and molded into the desired shape, leather given the cuir bouilli treatment was ‘heated over flames of a straw fire, turning so as not to singe it, then daubed with a special mixture of colo97

98

99 100 101

Reay Tannahill, Sex in History (New York, 1980), p. 179; Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, eds., Pœnitentiale Bædæ, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, (Oxford, 1871), p. 328 (see Frantzen, Before the Closet, p. 177); ‘Saga of Saint Ólaf’, E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia (New York, 1964), pp. 256–58. My thanks to Susan Granquist, who mentioned this story on Ansaxnet and later provided extensive references. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 42, n. 35, 33, 42, n. 35. Sarah Higley discusses the grammatical problems in translating sweartne, as well as me, in ‘Swifeð, or: The Wanton[’s] Hand: Reading and Reaching into Grammars and Bodies in Riddle 12’ (paper presented at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, 9 May 1998). I am grateful to Sarah Higley for sharing her scholarship and ideas with me. Trans. Mackie, Exeter Book, pp. 101–103; Alexander, Earliest English Poems, p. 130; Crossley-Holland, Exeter Book Riddles, p. 34; and Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 33. F.H. Whitman, Old English Riddles (Ottawa, 1982), p. 171. John W. Waterer, Leather and the Warrior: An Account of the Fighting Man from the Time of the Ancient Greeks to World War II (Northampton, 1981), p. 62.

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phony (pine tree resin), beeswax and soot. The mixture is absorbed by the warm leather, which on drying and cooling turns extremely hard and black’.102 Unfortunately, as Esther Cameron reports, ‘No examples of hardened leather have yet been recovered from an Anglo-Saxon context’,103 but most archaeologists agree with John W. Waterer that the manufacture of cuir bouilli ‘continued without a break from long before medieval times until the present century’. Waterer reports that in the Middle Ages cuir bouilli was used for making ‘drinking cups, bottles, flasks, jugs, caskets, small boxes, armour, shields, and many other articles’. Particularly interesting for our purposes is Waterer’s statement that ‘bovine hide’ was preferred for making cuir bouilli because its ‘compact [fibrous] structure’ made it especially moldable, and thus facilitated the process: ‘The hardness and solidity of cuir bouilli results from the fact that the microscopic collagen fibrils . . . are compacted by evaporation resulting from slow drying under heat which, if carefully controlled, will determine the degree of solidity.’104 Waterer, who has experimented with making cuir bouilli, reports, [The] objects are moulded from vegetable-tanned leather . . . by . . . soaking in cold water until the leather is fully impregnated, laying it aside until . . . the surplus water has drained off and the leather is soft and plastic, when it can be moulded into any required shape, by hand, over formers or into moulds. . . . So long as the leather is kept moist it can be worked – for example ornamented by tooling – but when the work is finished it has to be dried in a suitable temperature. . . . The greater the heat the harder the finished article will be. . . . Many mediaeval moulded articles were beautifully decorated by incising and punching which would have been done whilst the molded object was kept in a damp state. . . . The leather after ‘setting’ would be too hard for tooling. The degree of heat necessary to produce the desired measure of rigidity must be judged by practice.

Finally, ‘When an object is . . . hardened into shape it must be “finished” according to its purpose: most everyday things were dyed black and then waxed; and those intended to hold liquid “lined” with pitch, resin or wax.’ Waterer further explains that leather bottles ‘had to be made of two or three pieces sewn together’, and, when fashioned in cuir bouilli, ‘the stitching

102 103

Esther Cameron, personal communication (e-mail to author, 30 January 1998). Esther Cameron, ‘Pre-Conquest Leather on Books and Bindings’, in Leather and Fur: Aspects of Early Medieval Trade and Technology, ed. Esther Cameron (London, 1998), p. 52. 104 Waterer, Leather and the Warrior, p. 62; John W. Waterer, Leather Craftsmanship (New York, 1968), p. 62; and Waterer, Leather and the Warrior, p. 66.

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can only be done either before treatment starts or when the object is still slightly pliant prior to the final hardening’. Waterer concludes [O]therwise completed bottles were immersed in a bath of molten wax in which they were ‘rolled’ about . . . thus ‘waterproofing’ the leather and the stitched seams: at the same time the secondary need was also fulfilled, that of waxing the exterior which was a normal part of the ‘finishing’ process.105

If we follow the wonfeax wale at work, step-by-step, we find, first of all, that she is using bovine-hide, the preferred material for cuir bouilli. She also may be stretching and fitting the leather onto a mold (wegeð ond þyð, ‘moves and presses’, line 8b); then moistening the leather to keep it damp (wæteð in wætre, 10a); then heating it from time to time (wyrmeð hwilum, 10b), carefully (fægre, 11a) so as not to singe it, over a fire (to fyre, 11a); then tooling, embossing, and/or sewing it before it becomes too hard to work with (me on fæðme sticaþ, 11b). The fæðm could be the leather’s surface, which she tools or sews; her lap, where she rests the leather while tooling it; or the opening at the bottle’s neck, into which she sticaþ, ‘sticks’, her fingers as she turns it; stician may also denote the piercing or gouging of the tooling process. As we have seen, the production of cuir bouilli required considerable skill: in this ‘innocent’ context, the wale’s hygegalan hond in line 12a may indicate that she performs these tasks with a ‘light’, or dexterous, hand.106 Once the tooling and sewing is finished, she no longer needs to keep the bottle in a damp state and again turns it often over the fire (hwyrfeð geneahhe, 12b) to complete the hardening process; finally, she sweeps, or rotates (swifeð, 13a) the bottle through the black substance (geond sweartne, 13a), composed of resin, wax, and soot, to color and seal it.107 If this reading is correct, sweartne remains a masculine adjective ‘governed by the preceding me’,108 and here refers either to the masculine ox who has become blackened leather, or, as a substantive noun, to ‘blackness’ or a ‘black substance’.109 Scholars and students who have attempted to make cuir bouilli often mention the tremendous exertion needed to stretch the water-soaked leather. For instance, Waterer finds it ‘no easy task’, and a member of the 105 106 107

108 109

Waterer, Leather Craftsmanship, p. 62; and Waterer, Leather and the Warrior, pp. 69, 62, 64, 66. See n. 26 above. As Paull Baum notes, swifeð ‘ “sweeps” in l. 13 is Chaucer’s word swive’, Anglo-Saxon Riddles, p. 24. Higley discusses in detail the possible prurient meaning in Old English of swifeð in ‘Swifeð, or: The Wanton[’s] Hand’. See Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 42, n. 35. Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, p. 945.

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Society for Creative Anachronism instructs colleagues who wish to produce molded leather, ‘Pull and push and yank and curse until you get it stretched over a form’.110 The wonfeax wale may also have struggled as she stretched and molded the leather. She would no doubt have been flushed and breathless as she worked, thus perhaps arousing a fantasy of masturbation in those watching her,111 a conjecture that finally brings us to Freud and his theory of sexual jokes. Like many other humor theorists, Freud considers the posing of a sexual joke an act of aggression. After stating the ‘fundamental facts’, that the ‘desire to see the organs peculiar to each sex exposed is one of the original components of our libido’; that this desire is a sublimation of ‘a primary [childhood] desire’ to ‘touch the sexual parts’; and that, in adults, ‘[a]s so often, looking has replaced touching’, Freud, characteristically, divides the genders into active men and passive women. Apparently in his day, women did not make sexual jokes: in Freud’s model, their contribution is to indulge their ‘inclination to passive exhibitionism’, while men are reduced to the sexual pursuit of these female exhibitionists. Sublimating their desire to look and touch, men ‘must make use of words’ instead. As a universal model, Freud’s theory is deeply flawed, of course, but it does seem useful for an analysis of Riddle 12. For, in Freud’s view, sexual jokes between men are always based on the imaginary ‘presence of a woman’. According to Freud, these jokes originate when a man finds a woman sexually attractive and approaches her with ‘wooing speech’ in the hope of ‘a corresponding excitement in the woman’. If the woman fails to respond in kind, the man’s ‘sexually exciting speech becomes an aim in itself in the shape of smut’. Freud continues, The woman’s inflexibility is therefore the first condition for the development of smut. . . . The ideal case of resistance of this kind on the woman’s part occurs if another man is present at the same time – a third person . . . [who] soon acquires the greatest importance in the development of the smut. . . . The men save up this kind of entertainment, which originally presupposed the presence of a woman who was feeling ashamed, till they are ‘alone together’. So that gradually, in place of the woman, the onlooker, now 110

Waterer, Leather and the Warrior, p. 68; and ‘Making Leather Armor’, collected and edited by Mark S. Harris, 21 August 1997, available at http://www.pbm.com /~lindahl/rialto/armor-leather-msg.html. Posted by Dan Butler-Ehle to Newsgroups: rec.org.sca, 16 November 1993. 111 A leather-working slave would have been a familiar sight to most Anglo-Saxon monks. Many monasteries enjoyed the services of lay people, both female and male, with whom the monks interacted daily. See, e.g., David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216 (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 439–41; and Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 178–79.

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the listener, becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near to assuming the character of a joke.112

Freud defines ‘smut’ as a substitute for the actual ‘exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed’; he continues, By the utterance of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it. It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut.113

In his discussion of sexual jokes, Freud, who reluctantly acknowledged his own homoerotic desire,114 appears to repress the homosocial maneuvering he so clearly describes, where ‘the presence of a woman’ and the desire to see her genitals obscures the men’s use of the woman as an ‘object of exchange’ and a ‘conduit’ for ‘cementing the bonds of men with men’.115 Although there is no reason to doubt that homosocially bonded men might wish to look at a woman’s sexual organs and to share the excitement of this voyeuristic act, Freud’s scenario also reveals the men’s desire, as they exchange smut ‘alone together’, to see each other exposed. To return to Tanke’s question, ‘Why is the wale condemned?’ although she is already well set up for derision because of her gender, her status as a slave, her sexual activity, and her ethnicity, a psychoanalytic interpretation suggests that the riddler also condemns her because he has allowed himself to indulge in and share an act of imaginative voyeurism of which he is ashamed. The fantasy of ‘the presence of a woman who is ashamed’, the wale whose genitals the riddler imagines he has exposed and whom he can ‘watch’ with his peers, temporarily provides a liberating release from the taboo of homosocial desire. Indeed, as they ‘watch’ the wonfeax wale masturbate, the riddler and his auditors might also imagine their own masturbation, and, perhaps, their mutual masturbation, such as that implied in Riddles 37 (Bellows) and 62 (Poker).116 As Ruth Wehlau has argued, 112 113 114

Freud, ‘The Purposes of Jokes’, pp. 98–99. Freud, ‘The Purposes of Jokes’, p. 98. See Freud’s letters to Ernest Jones, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times (New York, 1988), pp. 274–77. 115 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 25–26. Sedgwick cites Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210, at 174. 116 See note 68 above. Dyan Elliott argues convincingly that masturbation was a constant preoccupation in the medieval monastery, ‘Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray: Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 1–23.

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Riddle 12 is concerned with ‘alternating terms of power and subservience’: ‘While [the wale] takes liberties with the oxhide, the riddler takes liberties with her by presenting her as an object of sexual fantasy.’117 But in the end, the joke is on the riddler: watching him watching the woman, we also watch the sexual taboo reaffirm itself with a vengeance as the riddler attempts to mitigate his shame by projecting it onto the wonfeax wale. Sarah Higley has observed that ‘one could read the indictment of female masturbation as the central message of this poem’, as indeed, I have. It is certainly satisfying to watch the butt of a sexist joke slip from a gratuitously maligned woman to her Freudian ‘assailant’, but, as Higley also observes, ‘the joke of the riddle is that it makes us compromise our sense of the order of things: what should be peripheral (what the woman is doing instead of what the solution to the riddle is) becomes central’.118 Having moved the target of the joke from the wonfeax wale to her riddler, let us now, by taking a look at Riddle 12 as a whole, at least partially extricate ourselves from becoming the riddler’s dupe in turn. As we have seen, riddle commentators argue that Riddle 12 does not fit the model of the classic double-entendre riddle, where ‘an ambiguity, sustained throughout the text’ yields two solutions, one ‘innocent’, and the other ‘obscene’.119 I would suggest, rather, that sexual innuendo permeates Riddle 12 from start to finish. The theme of the use of leather in master–slave relationships resonates throughout the riddle, in what seems an anticipation of modern-day leather fetishism. In this text, masters are served by fettered beings, from the speaking subject, a yoked, and then slaughtered, ox, to the male Welsh slaves bound by leather thongs, to the ‘better’ Anglo-Saxon men, who are similarly bound, to the leather receptacles that serve their masters, the ‘implicitly well-to-do’ bryd and deorum,120 to the masturbating female slave who, as we have seen, ‘serves men’ in more ways than one. In addition, in this erotically charged riddle, both the felawlonc bryd who treads on leather and the ambiguous leather bosm that furnishes drink seem to allude to sexual acts. And, as Higley notes, the riddler uses throughout ‘the stock Old English vocabulary for sexual innuendo – hygegalan, “wanton”, þyð, “presses”, fæðm, “bosom”, “breast”, “lap”, “depths”, “embrace” [and] sticaþ, “stick” ’,121 and also the sexually suggestive bosm, slitan, tredan, hwyrfan, swifan, and reafian (‘bosom’, ‘slit’, ‘tread’, ‘rotate’, ‘swivel’, and ‘ravage’). With these con117 118 119

Wehlau, Riddle of Creation, pp. 110–11. Higley, ‘Swifeð, or: The Wanton[’s] Hand’. Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, pp. 31, 22–23. Pelteret mentions ‘the sexual ambiguity that runs throughout [Riddle 12]’, but does not elaborate, Slavery, p. 53. 120 Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 33. 121 Higley, ‘Swifeð, or: The Wanton[’s] Hand’.

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siderations in mind, as well as the possibility that the wonfeax wale may be both fashioning and masturbating with a cuir bouilli bottle, I offer two translations of Riddle 12 that might show that it is, indeed, a ‘classic’ double-entendre riddle. In the ‘innocent’ version I have attempted to minimize Riddle 12’s sexual innuendo and its preoccupation with servitude, and also to narrate the leather-working process with which this riddle seems so intensely concerned. In the ‘obscene’ rendition I have emphasized the riddle’s sexual undertones and have worked to transmit its fixation on binding and fetters and masters and slaves, as well as its sudden turn to a voyeuristic fantasy of female masturbation. ‘Innocent’ Version

‘Obscene’ Version

I go on foot, I plow the soil. the green fields, when I am alive. If life departs from me, I tightly bind dark Welsh men, sometimes better men. Sometimes I give drink to a noble man, to a lord from my interior; sometimes a stately woman steps on me with her feet. Sometimes, brought from afar, a dark-haired Welsh woman, a foolish, drunken maid, on dark nights lifts and presses me, moistens me with water; at times she heats me, carefully, over a fire; she pierces my surface with her skillful hand; she turns me often, rotates me through a black substance. Say what I am called, I, who living break up the soil, and after death, serve men.

I strut on my feet, I slit the earth, the virgin fields, while I have life. If life is loosed from me, I fetter fast dark Welsh slaves, sometimes better men. Sometimes I offer drink to a beloved man, to a warrior from my depths; at other times an ardent bride treads me with her feet. Now, carried off from far away, a dark-haired Welsh slave-woman shakes and squeezes me, stupid, drunken slave, in the dark of night she becomes moist with wetness, now gets nicely hot by the fire; with her wanton hand she thrusts me into her womb; she writhes excessively, she swivels me all around her blackness. Say what I am called, I, who living violate the land, and after death, serve men.

Despite their many other concerns, in the end both translations point to the ‘unanimously’ accepted ‘plain’ solution, ‘ox’, or ‘ox-leather’.122 Let us return, then, to this creature, who, after all, is the main character of Riddle 12, and, as I suggested above, also, in a sense, the primary butt of the riddle. The ox twice asserts, at the beginning and the end of Riddle 12, that he ‘serves men’ only after his death, and describes his experience when alive as one of pleasure and freedom. Indeed, the ox seems to enact a kind of auto-eroticism as he exults in his powerful virility, strutting about, slitting and plundering the green fields – but the joke is on him. Believing he serves 122

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 23.

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only himself while living, when he ravages the raw fields the ox is in reality bound and enslaved, yoked to a plow and serving men. Like his cohorts in Riddles 38 (Bullock) and 72 (Ox), he begins his life virile, potent, and free, but, also like them, his fate in life is castration and drudging for men. Although the ‘correct’ solution to Riddle 12 is surely ‘ox’, or ‘ox-leather’, I propose that its ‘wrong’, or suppressed, solution is ‘fettered desire’. The wonfeax wale serves men even in her most private moments. The ox, as he tells us, ‘dryhtum þeowige’ – he slaves for and is enslaved by men. The riddler’s voyeuristic pleasure is tinged with disgust, demonstrating that he too is enslaved, fettered by forbidden, frustrated desire, which he assuages by using and degrading a woman. Tanke argues that ‘Riddle 12 is a meditation of sorts on the subjects of slavery, sexuality, and the body’. In his reading, this meditation contrasts ‘the physical enslavement of the wealas and the physical “liberation”, through masturbation, of the wonfeax wale’.123 However, we have seen, no one is truly liberated in Riddle 12. The prancing ox enjoys an imaginary freedom, while, in actuality, he continues to ‘serve men’. The wonfeax wale may also enjoy a temporary freedom through her auto-eroticism, but in this riddle she is on display for the sexual gratification of men. As for the men she serves, they too are enslaved: bound and fettered, they are ‘slaves of God’ and ‘live under the yoke of the Rule’.124 All perform useful work, but, like the plowman’s in Ælfric’s Colloquy, their work is hard because they are not free.125

123 124

Tanke, ‘Wonfeax wale’, p. 34. Symons describes the illustration (reproduced in Regularis Concordia, ed. Symons, opposite p. ix) from MS BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, fol. 2v, of a ‘kneeling figure’ who ‘represents the monks who . . . bound themselves by vow to obey the Concordia, which is . . . typified by the scroll with which the monk is binding or girding himself’, Regularis Concordia, p. lv, n. 3. On the theological terminology of servitude, see Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 41, 62. The concept of bearing the ‘yoke of the Rule’ appears frequently in the Regularis Concordia. On the illustration, see also Benjamin Withers, ‘Interaction of Word and Image in Anglo-Saxon Art II: Scrolls and Codex in the Frontispiece to the Regularis Concordia’, Old English Newsletter 31.1 (1998), 36–40. 125 Ælfric’s plowman laments, ‘[The work] is very hard, because I am not free’ (micel gedeorf hit ys, forþam ic neom freoh), Ælfric’s Colloquy, ed. G.M. Garmonsway (London, 1939), p. 21. I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who shared their time and knowledge with me as I worked on this essay, and, especially, Jonathan Wilcox, a supportive and gracious editor. Parts of this essay were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature, San Francisco, 22 November 1997; and the Queer Middle Ages Conference, New York, 5 November 1998.

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GENDER, HUMOR, AND DISCOURSE IN ÆLFRIC’S LIVES OF SAINTS SHARI HORNER

‘Why do you speak so much foolishness?’ Gender, Humor, and Discourse in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints SHARI HORNER

The humorless reputation of Anglo-Saxon England is well-known: it is generally perceived to have been a gloomy place, its literature often seen as grim, bloody, and above all somber in its treatment of Germanic warriors or Christian heroes. For students first encountering Old English literature in undergraduate survey courses, this reputation is solidified by the editorial introduction in the Norton Anthology of English Literature: The world of Old English poetry is predominantly harsh. Men are said to be cheerful in the mead hall, but even there they think of struggle in war, of possible triumph but more possible failure. . . . Even in its most lyrical moments there is an austere dignity to Old English verse, which rarely strays from the themes of the glory of God and His champions and the pain and sorrow of this world.1

Perhaps even less likely to provoke the interest of many non-specialist readers is the following misguided comment from the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: ‘Anglo-Saxon culture, which predated Christianity in England, was oblivious of or hostile to women.’2 If these views have become the canonical ‘rules’ about Old English literature, it is time to start examining the exceptions to those rules. This essay will suggest not only that a certain number of Old English prose texts incorporate both playful and serious humor to promote Christian doctrine, but also that they do so by means of strong, wise, witty, and eloquent women characters. One exception to the view that Old English literature is usually harsh 1

M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, 2 vols. (New York, 1993), I, 4. 2 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, 2nd edn (New York, 1996), 5.

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and depressing has always been the riddles, generally seen as evidence of playfulness among the Anglo-Saxons. Yet the problem with relying on the riddles as our sole evidence for an Anglo-Saxon sense of humor is that (in spite of their inclusion in the Exeter Book) the kind of earthy wit and wisdom found in them has typically not been associated with monastic life. More commonly, in fact, the humorless reputation of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical and monastic culture has been attributed to the Benedictine prohibition against laughter.3 The evidence from the Benedictine Rule would suggest that if we want to find anything funny in Anglo-Saxon literature, we need not look to the monastery, because a sense of laughter or of pleasure can only be found in the secular world. Is the combination of humor and religious literature therefore an impossible one for Anglo-Saxon culture? Not at all. Within the Old English literary corpus, we can find surprising strategic and didactic uses of humor in texts intended for monastic and non-monastic audiences alike: the lives of female virgin martyrs. Humor in hagiography is actually quite common. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Curtius examines ‘Jest in Hagiography’, showing that from Prudentius (ca. 400) onward, Christian hagiographers found it useful to include ‘grotesque humor within a sacred poetic genre’; moreover, the use of grotesque humor (usually linked to the saint’s torture) is ‘part of the ecumenical stock of motifs of the early Christian passio’.4 In other words, although modern sensibilities may find the combination of humor and torture distasteful, medieval writers regularly used humor to embellish scenes of violence. It is thus likely that audiences came to expect humorous elements as traditional parts of the genre, and that humor was actually a generic convention rather than an anomaly in many saints’ lives. Curtius’s point raises a question: why did hagiographers include humorous elements in sacred narratives? What function could humor serve in texts that depict graphic torture for didactic purposes? It may be true, of course, that humorous scenes provide simple comic relief. To take one well-known example: St Lawrence, being tortured on a bed of burning coals, appears to take great pleasure in verbally sparring with his torturer, Decius. When Decius orders Lawrence to give an offering to the pagan gods, for example, Lawrence responds: ‘Ic offrie me sylfne þam ælmihtigum gode on bræðe wynsumnysse’ (I offer myself to the almighty

3

See Arnold Schröer, Die angelsächsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benedictinerregel, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 2 (Kassel, 1888), ch. 4, 18/7–9. 4 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), 425–26. In fact, Curtius finds the comic elements in Prudentius’s Life of St Lawrence to be already present in Prudentius’s source text (426).

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God with an odor [bræðe] of pleasantness).5 By evoking the sense of smell (bræðe) when his flesh is being roasted, St Lawrence perfectly captures the ‘grotesque humor’ to which Curtius referred. But the saint goes even further, by suggesting to his torturers that since he’s fully cooked on the one side, they should feel free to turn him over, roast the other side, and eat.6 Surely early medieval audiences must have taken pleasure in both the saint’s imperviousness to pain, and in his ability to outwit his persecutors by playing verbally both on their words and on his own predicament. In hagiography, though, the point of such humor is not merely pleasure, but the use of pleasure to teach a spiritual message. Consistently, hagiographic humor turns the torturers into objects of ridicule, while at the same time elevating the martyrs to positions of superiority and dominance – regardless of how young or how weak the virgin might initially appear, or however hopeless his or her case might seem to be.7 In addition to St Lawrence’s famous cooking directions from his torturous griddle, another well-known example of hagiographic humor is found in the Old English Martyrology’s account of Saints Agape, Chionia, and Irene. In this tale, the three virgins inspire the lust of Dulcitius: Þa sona swa he þa fæmnan geseah, þa wæs he onstered mid scondlice luste, ond he eode on nihtlice tid on þæt hus þær þa fæmnan to Criste hi gebædon, ond he þohte þæt he hi gebismrode. Þær wæron inne geseted hweras ond pannan, ond he þa þurh godes miht wæs oncierred fram þæm fæmnum ond clypte þa hweras ond cyste þa pannan, þæt he wæs eall sweart ond behrumig. ... (As soon as he saw these virgins, he was excited to shameful lust, and at night he entered the house where the virgins prayed to Christ, intending to defile them. Kettles and pans had been put in there, and by the power of God he was turned away from the virgins, and he embraced the kettles and kissed the pans, so that he was all black and sooty. . . .)8

When Dulcitius emerges, believing that he has raped the virgins, he is so blackened by grease and grime that his own men flee, mistaking him for a terrifying monster. The virgins are martyred but not raped, thus preserving their spiritual and physical integrity, while Dulcitius is made to look like a 5

Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series; Text, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford, 1997), XXIX, lines 210–11 (p. 425). Translation mine. 6 Curtius traces the evolution of this comment of St Lawrence’s from its earliest roots in Ambrose (European Literature, p. 426). See also Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Famous Last Words: Ælfric’s Saints Facing Death’, Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1994), 1–13, at 7. 7 See also Curtius, European Literature, p. 428. 8 George Herzfeld, ed. and trans., An Old English Martyrology, EETS o.s. 116 (London, 1900), 52–53.

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fool, both unable to distinguish women from greasy pans, and more importantly, outwardly covered with grime in a way that mirrors his inner filth.9 Unlike St Lawrence, however, Agape, Chionia, and Irene are removed from the action; they themselves are not responsible for outwitting Dulcitius, but rather divine intervention prevents him from distinguishing pans from women. St Lawrence, on the other hand, is the agent of the humor, and thus the agent of the torturer’s diminishment. This is, in fact, the more common strategy for didactic humor found in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints; for the most part, Ælfric’s saints depend on their own verbal skill to belittle their torturers. When the saints – especially female saints – use verbal wit to expose the weakness of their torturers, we get the best of both St Lawrence’s world and that of Agape and her sisters. Ælfric’s female virgin martyrs rely not only on divine intervention but also on their own wits, giving the audience a twofold sense of satisfaction and pleasure. There is not only the surprising incongruity of the ostensibly frail young woman getting the better of a powerful and violent man; but also she accomplishes this deed through her own agency and wit. The saint exposes the torturer’s foolish ignorance – in particular, as we shall see, his excessive literalism, or rather his inability to understand other than literally. As Curtius writes, ‘The pagans, the devils, the men of evil may behave as savagely as they will – they are the fools, and the saint reduces them ad absurdum, unmasks them, dupes them’ (428). Members of the audience have the pleasure of knowing better than to succumb to such foolish literalism, and the satisfaction of knowing themselves to be spiritually superior to those who do. This incongruity between the young, apparently powerless virgin and her physically and politically powerful persecutor is, of course, a commonplace of most virgin–martyr narratives. But within certain lives, the saint exploits the incongruity, drawing our attention to it by means of direct discourse – in other words, she seems to prolong the dialogue between herself and her persecutor expressly for the purpose of exposing his weaknesses. Through the power of speech, then – and specifically through humorous dialogue – the saint exposes and dismantles the apparent hierarchies of gender and power that, on the surface (that is, literally), mark the relationship of the saint and persecutor. While incongruity is a common feature of all virgin–martyr narratives, in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints Lucy, Cecilia, and Agatha, the saint’s verbal wit becomes her primary means of exposing her torturer’s inadequacies.10 9

Old English Martyrology 52–55; cf. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s much better known tenth-century dramatic version of the story. 10 On Ælfric’s sources for the Lives of Saints, see Peter Clemoes, ‘Ælfric’, in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E.G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 176–209; and Patrick Zettel,

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These three saints do more than simply make their torturers look foolish – they simultaneously teach their audiences an important spiritual lesson about reading, interpretation, and understanding. In each case, the torturer’s foolishness stems specifically from his stubborn literal-mindedness – that is, from his inability to understand the saint (and her words) figuratively. Typically, the saint exposes this foolishness through a certain playfulness with the persecutor’s own language. Not always exactly wordplay, this particular brand of play depends on the torturer’s consistent misunderstanding, on his inability to interpret the saint’s words other than literally, and on the audience’s ability to accomplish what he cannot. A clear example of wrongheaded literalism is seen in Paschasius, the persecutor of St Lucy. In accordance with generic convention, Paschasius, a pagan, both woos the saint and tries to convince her to worship false gods. When Lucy refuses on both counts, Paschasius is infuriated, especially when Lucy continues to argue with him: ‘hí spræcon fela . / oð þæt he hire swingele behet . gif heo suwian nolde’ (LS IX, 68–69; ‘They spoke at length, until he ordered a beating for her if she would not be quiet’).11 When Lucy asserts that the words she speaks are not her own, but God’s, and that the Holy Ghost speaks in her, Paschasius is confused: ‘wunað se halga gast on þe eornostlice’? (LS IX, 77; ‘Does the holy ghost really live in you?’). Lucy’s reply, that she is ‘godes templ’ (God’s temple) and the ‘halgan gastes wunung’ (Holy Ghost’s dwelling place) prompts Paschasius to order that she be defiled at a whorehouse, ‘þæt se . halga gast þe fram fleo . ðonne þu fullice byst gescynd’ (LS IX, 83; ‘so that the holy ghost will flee from you, when you are foully shamed’). He believes that the literal (sexual) rupture of Lucy’s body will release the Holy Ghost. However, Lucy proves remarkably immune to torture. When the pagans try to drag her towards the brothel, her body will not budge. They tie ropes to her, and finally try harnessing a team of oxen to her body, but to their immense frustration, she remains motionless. The humor obviously results from the physical incongruity: the young woman overcomes not only her persecutor but even large animals. The final irony comes when Paschasius himself is bound in chains and paraded before the dying virgin. Yet beyond the satisfaction of the vir‘Saints’ Lives in Old English: Latin Manuscripts and Vernacular Accounts: Ælfric’, Peritia 1 (1982), 17–37. It is not my intention here to provide a source study of Ælfric’s Lives, though such a study would be most welcome. Rather, I am interested in reading the Lives of Saints as they might have been received within the specific cultural contexts of late Anglo-Saxon England, by audiences who were not themselves necessarily conversant with the source texts (as Ælfric himself explains in the prefatory comments to the Lives of Saints). 11 All citations from the Lives of Saints are from Walter W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881–1900; rpt. in two volumes 1966); parenthetical references are to life and line number. Translations are mine.

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gin’s triumph, the pleasure in this text must also result from the audience’s awareness of their own ability (in contrast to Paschasius) to understand Lucy’s spiritual meaning. The Holy Ghost lives in her because she is God’s avowed virgin, and because, as Lucy herself says: gif þu me unwilles gewemman nu dest . me bið twifeald clænnysse . geteald to wuldre . Ne miht þu gebigan minne willan to þe . swa hwæt swa þu minum lichaman dest. . . . (LS IX, 90–93) (If you corrupt me now, against my will, a twofold purity will gloriously be conveyed to me. You cannot bend my will to yours whatever you do to my body. . . .)

In other words, here is the lesson in spiritual reading: the literal body is of no final significance; the Christian spirit (the will) is everything. This is exactly the lesson that no literal-minded torturer will ever learn. St Cecilia verbally bests her persecutor, Almachius, in a very satisfying scene. After they have reportedly debated at some length, Almachius asks her, ‘Nast þu mine mihte’? (LS XXXIV, 313; ‘don’t you know my strength?’). Cecilia replies: Ælces mannes miht þe on modignysse færð . is soðlice þam gelic swilce man siwige ane bytte . and blawe hí fulle windes . and wyrce siððan an þyrl þonne heo to-þunden bið on hire greatnysse þonne togæð seo miht . (LS XXXIV, 315–19) (The strength of each man who walks with pride is truly just as if someone should sew up a bladder and blow it full of wind and then make a hole [in it] when it is inflated; then, in its greatness, the strength goes out.)

Cecilia’s comical image of the overinflated, then deflated, bladder mocks Almachius, of course, but also it perfectly images the dialogue between saint and torturer – in each case, the torturer is puffed-up; and each time the saint’s verbal skill deflates that false power. As they continue to debate, Almachius becomes so infuriated by his own inability to compete verbally with the saint that he leaves off arguing and resorts to physical violence, thereby demonstrating his predictable focus on the saint’s literal body, and Cecilia is soon martyred. The clearest example of a saint exposing her persecutor’s foolish literalism through her verbal wit is found in the Life of St Agatha. As with all torturers, there is little doubt that this one, Quintianus, is wicked, and his power only transitory. But socially and politically, like all pagan persecutors, he does wield power within the narrative. Moreover, that power is 132

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gendered, because Quintianus wants Agatha for explicitly sexual reasons. The humor in this Life derives from Quintianus’s unbending literalism and the saint’s ability not just to outwit him, but to outlast him – to sustain the argument beyond what his intellect will bear. As in the Life of St Lucy, here Quintianus believes that he can break Agatha’s will by sending her to a brothel; he wants the prostitutes to instruct her in their methods. Yet when they fail, the prostitute Aphrodosia warns him, ‘Stanas magon hnexian . and þæt starce ísen/ on leades gelicnysse . ærðan þe se geleafa mæge/ of agathes breoste . beon æfre adwæsced’ (LS VIII, 29–31; ‘Stones may get soft and strong iron may become like lead, before the faith in Agatha’s breast can ever be extinguished’). Subsequently, Quintianus devises a very specific kind of torture for Agatha – he orders that her breast be cut off, presumably in a literal-minded attempt to extinguish that faith once and for all. Aphrodosia – the prostitute – proves wiser than Quintianus, however; not only is Agatha’s faith left intact, but her breast is almost immediately restored through divine intervention. But Agatha’s speeches are the main cause of Quintianus’s fury. He cannot get the better of her verbally, and he is too impatient to spar indefinitely. Agatha consistently turns his words to her own advantage (in the manner of St Cecilia), frustrating and embarrassing him. When he asks her about her background, for example, the following exchange takes place: Agathes þa cwæð . ic eom æðelborenre mægðe . swá swá eall min mægð me is to witan . Ða cwæð se dema . Hwi dest þu ðe sylfe . ðurh wace þeawas . swilce þu wyln sy . Agathes andwyrde . Ic eom godes þinen . and mycel æðelborennys . bið þæt man be cristes ðeow . Quintianus cwæð to þam cristes mædene . Hwæt lá næbbe wé nane æþelborennysse forðan þe we forseoð þines cristes ðeow-dóm . Agathes andwyrde þam arleasan and cwæð . Eower æðelborennys becymð to swa bysmorfullum hæftnede . þæt ge beoð þeowan synne and stanum . (LS VIII, 41–52; emphasis added) (Agatha then said, ‘I am from a noble family [and] just so all my relatives would vouch for me.’ Then the judge said, ‘Why do you treat yourself with weak habits as if you were a slave?’ Agatha answered, ‘I am God’s handmaid and one who is Christ’s servant is very nobly born.’ Quintianus said to the virgin of Christ, ‘What then? Don’t we have any nobility because we reject the servitude of your Christ?’ Agatha answered the wicked man and said ‘Your

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nobility becomes such shameful bondage that you are servants to sin and stones.’)

Through the repetition of key terms and concepts – æþelborennysse, ðeow-dom – Agatha plays on Quintianus’s words, elevating her own position from noble birth to her position as God’s handmaid. She turns Quintianus’s mocking use of wyln, ‘slave’, into the view of herself as þinen, ‘handmaid’, and reminds him (and us) that true nobility rests in precisely such servitude, that is, Christian servitude is true nobility, while earthly nobility is the lowest form of servitude. Quintianus sets himself up when he asks whether nobility can exist without Christian servitude. Agatha rejects that possibility, and in the process completely undercuts Quintianus, revealing his earthly nobility to be not divine servitude but rather bysmorfullum hæftnede, ‘shameful bondage’, since he is the servant not of a god, but of synne and stanum, ‘sin and stones’. Quintianus responds to Agatha’s verbal proficiency by cutting the conversation short, turning instead to physical violence when his verbal and intellectual skills fail him. Yet he gives her one final chance to worship his false gods. When Agatha sharply refuses, violence ensues: ‘Þa hét quintianus . hí mid handum slean/ gelome on þæt hleor . þæt heo hlydan ne sceolde’ (LS VIII, 69–70; ‘Then Quintianus ordered her beaten continually on her face so that she could not shout out’). In his literalism, he evidently believes that her mouth is the source of her words (a mistake similarly made by the torturers of Saints Lucy and Lawrence both). When Agatha continues to denounce him and his gods, Quintianus cannot be bothered to understand the details of her argument, instead asking her, presumably rhetorically, ‘Hwi clypast ðu swa fela ideles?’ (LS VIII, 82; ‘Why do you speak so much foolishness?’). Although Agatha explains that she will remain impervious to torture, Quintianus orders her thrown in prison. The next day the torture commences. Quintianus has not yet moved beyond literal understanding (nor will he). When he orders her breast cut off, Agatha replies, ‘ic habbe mine breost on minre sawle . ansunde . / mid þam ðe Ic min andgit eallunga afede’ (LS VIII, 126–27; ‘I have my breast in my soul, completely whole, [and] I will entirely feed my understanding with it’). At her mention of what we know is spiritual food, Quintianus gives orders that Agatha’s food and drink be cut off – again, he misinterprets her figurative reference to spiritual nourishment as a literal reference to real food. Both the saint’s clever eloquence, and the torturer’s rhetorical weakness, are means by which the text uses language to disempower the torturer; as a result, words conquer bodily acts, a solid Christian principle. The shared joke between the saint and the audience thus encompasses not only simple satisfaction but also spiritual enrichment. Humor theory gives us two useful models for understanding the 134

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hagiographic humor in the Lives of Saints Lucy, Cecilia, and Agatha. Superiority theories argue that humor gives pleasure when we compare ourselves favorably to those who are in some way inferior to us. The pleasure found in the recognition of others’ weakness is inevitably linked to the recognition of our own relative strength. In a related vein, incongruity theory is simply the ‘difference between what one expects and what one gets’.12 The application of these theories to virgin martyr narratives – and to the audiences of those narratives – is straightforward. The audience, identifying with the saint, easily recognizes that she and they are superior to the pagan persecutors (undoubtedly a useful attitude to foster in a time of continuing Viking persecution). The saint’s verbal ability to diminish the persecutor magnifies their disparity. As Arthur Asa Berger has recently written, by studying ‘the relationship between humor and power . . . we . . . can see that humor can be a subtle and powerful means of social control by dominant elements in society. And it is, at the same time, a force for resistance by subordinate elements in society.’13 In saints’ lives, we see both processes at work: within the narrative, the saint, ostensibly subordinate to the powerful pagan, does indeed use verbal humor as a force for resistance. Yet the informed Christian audience will know that the opposite is also true. The saint’s eloquence and wit exposes the torturer as the weak one, while the saint becomes more powerful. The saint – who initially appears subordinate – uses humor through dialogue as a means of resistance and thereby verbalizes the actual power relations between the two. Her verbal display shows Christian superiority and, comfortingly, reaffirms what the audience should already know. The incongruity between the saint and her torturer is the source not only of humor in saints’ lives, but also of their spiritual meaning: the genre dictates that the physically inferior saint will always triumph, against the odds, over the spiritually inferior torturer. We would expect, of course (if we were reading literally), a young woman who was stretched on a rack, mutilated, placed on burning coals or in a boiling cauldron, to suffer enormously, but of course she does not. Hagiographic convention ensures that that expectation is thwarted, and that the saint takes pleasure in the physical tortures. The disparity between saint and torturer is further manifested through the torturer’s stubborn literalism; when the saint speaks in figurative or spiritual terms, the audience understands her that way. The torturer’s failure to understand once again denies expectation (since her meaning seems obvious) and reinforces the audience’s sense of superiority over such nonbelievers. 12

Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Humor: An Introduction’, Humor, the Psyche, and Society, ed. Berger, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 6–15 at 8. 13 Arthur Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor (New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), p. 2.

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When Quintianus asks St Agatha, ‘Hwi clypast ðu swa fela ideles?’ he is angry but also genuinely curious, since in his world, words will never be as effective as the literal weapons of torture. But hagiography teaches its audience precisely the opposite lesson – the literal body may be destroyed, but the spiritual truth of the saint’s (ultimately God’s) words is enduring. Saints Lucy, Cecilia, and Agatha teach us that such lessons don’t have to be painful – on the contrary, they can be sources of great satisfaction. Some thirty years ago, Rosemary Woolf argued that the Old English Juliana was ‘designed for the pleasure and edification’ of its audience.14 That poem, Woolf suggested, featured both a sensational plot and a skillful heroine – a combination sure to please its readers. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints offered its readers essentially the same sources of pleasure and learning. Through their humorous exposure of the torturer’s intellectual and verbal weaknesses, these lives of female virgin martyrs demonstrate that Old English literature does indeed make strategic use of humor in unexpected places.

14

Rosemary Woolf, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E.G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 37–66, at 46.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints’ Lives HUGH MAGENNIS

The importance of incongruity as a defining quality of humor is widely recognized by theorists and has been referred to already in this book.1 In incongruity, which may be purely intellectual, as in punning and verbal irony, or may also involve some kind of human interest, as in farce or comedies of errors, experience contradicts expectation; a lack of fit is perceived between elements which are surprisingly brought together. Incongruity is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak,2 and so one of the problems of studying humor from a distant period, such as that of Anglo-Saxon England, is that it is difficult to be sure whether what strikes a modern reader as humorous would have been so to original audiences and readers.3 How can we tell whether something was designed to be humorous 1

On incongruity theories, see Patricia Keith-Spiegel, ‘Early Conceptions of Humor: Varieties and Issues’, in The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues, ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee (New York and London, 1972), pp. 3–39, at 7–9; Jerry M. Suls, ‘A Two-Stage Model for the Appreciation of Jokes and Cartoons: An Information-Processing Analysis’, in The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, pp. 81–100; Paul E. McGhee, ‘On the Cognitive Origins of Incongruity Humor: Fantasy Assimilation versus Reality Assimilation’, in The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, pp. 61–80, and ‘A Model of the Origins and Early Development of Incongruity-Based Humour’, in It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (Oxford, 1977), pp. 27–36; Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Humor: an Introduction’, Humor, the Psyche, and Society, ed. Berger, American Behavioral Scientist 30.3 (1987), 6–15; for other theories, see Keith-Spiegel, ‘Early Conceptions of Humor’, pp. 4–13. 2 See McGhee, ‘Origins and Early Development’, p. 29, where humor is defined as ‘most essentially a type of cognition’ and as ‘a cognitive–affective experience’. 3 On the difficulty of identifying humor in Old English poetry, see Frederick Bracher, ‘Understatement in Old English Poetry’, PMLA 52 (1937), 915–34; reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., and Stanley J. Karhl (Hamden, CT, 1968), pp. 228–54, at 237.

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or not, or would have been taken as humorous by people at the time? In general, however, it is reasonable to say that the Anglo-Saxons clearly did appreciate humorous incongruity and took pleasure in unlikely correspondences and juxtapositions. Much of the enjoyment of the riddle form, a type of literature especially associated with Anglo-Saxon England, comes from the witty expression of apparent incongruity: the Exeter Book riddles refer, for example, to a mouthless creature singing at the mead-bench (a reed pipe, Riddle 60); an excellent garment but not made of fabric (a coat of mail, Riddle 35); a moth that eats words (a bookworm, Riddle 47); and so on.4 They ingeniously exploit paradox and seeming self-contradiction, teasing the reader towards pleasurable recognition of discrepancy. Particularly notable with regard to humor among the Exeter Book riddles are the sexually suggestive ones. These are obviously designed to amuse. They do so not because of their indecorous meaning but because of the cleverness with which this indecorous meaning is expressed.5 Evidence of Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the incongruous is apparent both in Old English poetry and in prose.6 Well-recognized examples in poetry include the use of the mock heroic and bathos in Judith,7 and the exploitation of grimly comic irony in Beowulf. A striking instance of the latter comes in Beowulf’s account of his combat against underwater creatures, when he says that he ‘served’ (þenode) them with his sword at the banquet at which they intended to feast on him: Swa mec gelome laðgeteonan þreatedon þearle. Ic him þenode deoran sweorde, swa hit gedefe wæs. Næs hie ðære fylle gefean hæfdon, manfordædlan, þæt hie me þegon, symbel ymbsæton sægrunde neah. (lines 559–64) (Repeatedly, spiteful adversaries harassed me hard. I ministered to them with my excellent sword as was appropriate. The perpetrators of evil did not have the pleasure of that feast – of devouring me as they gathered around their banquet at the bottom of the sea.)8

4

5 6 7 8

Riddle numbers here refer to those in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 1931–53). Citations of and references to Old English poetry throughout this essay follow The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. See further the essays by Smith and Rulon-Miller in this volume. For a useful overview, see Jonathan Wilcox, ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor: Towards a Taxonomy’, Thalia 14.1–2 (1994), 9–20. See Fredrik J. Heinemann, ‘Judith 236–291a: A Mock Heroic Approach-to-Battle Type Scene’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970), 83–96. The translation of Beowulf is from S.A.J. Bradley, trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London,

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Beowulf plays insistently with the language of decorous feasting in the incongruous context of mortal combat against beings from the savage world of nature in the depths of the sea. The comic potential of incongruity is delicately handled by the Old English translator of the romance Apollonius of Tyre.9 There is comic dramatic irony, for example, in the scene in which the princess gives a written answer to her father, who has asked her to choose between three suitors (chs. 20–21). She really does not want any of the suitors, since she loves the unsuspecting Apollonius, who has been acting as her tutor and whom she now gets to deliver the letter. She writes that she chooses ‘the shipwrecked man’, a puzzle to the king: Ða ða se cyningc hæfde þæt gewrit oferræd, þa niste he hwilcne forlidene heo nemde. Beseah ða to ðam þrim cnihtum and cwæð: ‘Hwilc eower is forliden?’ Ða cwæð heora an se hatte Ardalius: ‘Ic eom forliden.’ Se oðer him andwirde and cwæð: ‘Swiga ðu; adl þe fornime þæt þu ne beo hal ne gesund. Mid me þu boccræft leornodest and ðu næfre buton þare ceastre geate fram me ne come. Hwar gefore ðu forlidennesse?’ Mid ði þe se cyngc ne mihte findan hwilc heora forliden wære, he beseah to Apollonio and cwæð: ‘Nim ðu, Apolloni, þis gewrit and ræd hit. Eaðe mæg gewurðan þæt þu wite þæt ic nat, ðu ðe þar andweard wære.’ Ða nam Apollonius þæt gewrit and rædde and sona swa he ongeat þæt he gelufod wæs fram ðam mædene, his andwlita eal areodode. Ða se cyngc þæt geseah, þa nam he Apollonies hand and hine hwon fram þam cnihtum gewænde and cwæð: ‘Wast þu þone forlidenan man?’ Apollonius cwæð: ‘Ðu goda cyning, gif þin willa bið, ic hine wat.’ Ða geseah se cyngc þæt Apollonius mid rosan rude wæs eal oferbræded, þa ongeat he þone cwyde and þus cwæð to him: ‘Blissa, blissa, Apolloni, for ðam þe min dohtor gewilnað þæs ðe min willa is.’ (ch. 21, ed. Goolden, pp. 32–34) (Then when the king had read over the letter, he did not know what shipwrecked man she meant. Then he turned to the three young men and said: ‘Which of you has been shipwrecked?’ Then one of them who was

1982), pp. 408–94, at 426. Another possible joking reference to ‘feasting’ on the part of Beowulf is pointed out by George Clark (‘The Hero and the Theme’, in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln, NE, 1997), pp. 271–90). Referring to lines 445–51, Clark notes that ‘Beowulf jokes cheerfully in Heorot that if Grendel wins the coming battle, Hrothgar will not have need to feed his guest any longer because the guest will be feeding Grendel, whose eating habits are sloppy’ (p. 278). Clark is surely correct in seeing a grim joke here in Beowulf’s comment that Hrothgar will not have to bother about burying him because Grendel will eat him, but the reference to Hrothgar not having to feed his guest any longer does not appear in the poem and is Clark’s own addition. 9 Peter Goolden, ed., The Old English Apollonius of Tyre (Oxford, 1958); translation is by Michael Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, revised edition (London, 1993), pp. 234–50.

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called Arcadius said: ‘I have been shipwrecked.’ Another answered him and said: ‘You keep quiet! Plague take you, so that you be neither whole nor sound! You studied book-learning with me, and you have never been outside the city gates without me. Where did you suffer shipwreck?’ When the king could not find out which of them had been shipwrecked, he turned to Apollonius and said: ‘Apollonius, you take this letter and read it. It may well be that you who were present there may know what I do not know.’ Then Apollonius took and read the letter, and as soon as he realized that he was loved by the girl his face completely reddened. When the king saw that, then he took Apollonius’ hand and went with him a little apart from the young men, and said: ‘Do you know the shipwrecked man?’ Apollonius said: ‘Good king, if you please, I know him.’ When the king saw that Apollonius was all suffused with blushes, then he understood the remark and said to him thus: ‘Rejoice, rejoice, Apollonius, for my daughter desires that which is my will!’ trans. Swanton, pp. 245–46)

This passage contains several comic elements, but depends for its overall effect on the various levels of ignorance of the characters involved. There is a lack of fit, or congruence, between the facts of the situation and the perception of the characters. Though the passage is merely translated into Old English and not an original composition, it is clear that the writer is fully appreciative of the humor of the scene, which is well conveyed in the Old English version. For example, the sense of the plain Latin verb erubuit, ‘he blushed’, is heightened in the Old English passage in the more descriptive phrase ‘his andwlita eal areodode’ (his face completely reddened).10 Jonathan Wilcox has referred to the ‘comedy of embarrassment’ in this scene and has emphasized, in the context of the theme of shipwreck in the overall narrative, the verbal play in the passage on forlidenan man, ‘shipwrecked man’.11 Old English hagiography, however, is not an obvious place to look for such comic elements. This is the literature of religious edification, highly decorous and serious, featuring venerable men and women acting virtuously and heroically, even unto death. Indeed in the unworldly early medieval Christian tradition in which Old English saints’ lives exist there is something dubious about mirth itself, or at least about laughter.12 Smiling and cheerfulness can be appropriate for the saint, even perhaps, as in the

10

The Latin is quoted from Goolden’s edition of the Old English version, which prints a facing Latin text: for erubuit, see p. 33, line 22. 11 ‘Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor’, pp. 16–17. 12 On repudiation of laughter, see my article ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, with Particular Reference to the “Hleahtor Wera” of The Seafarer’, English Studies 73 (1992), 193–204; for a survey of patristic views, see Neil Adkin, ‘The Fathers on Laughter’, Orpheus, n.s. 6 (1985), 149–52.

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story of the monastic poet Cædmon, the occasional jest,13 but not unbridled laughter. The only times that saints seem to laugh outright in hagiographic texts are in acts of defiance or derision. They do not laugh from delight: laughter, as in heroic literature, is an intentional public gesture in hagiography rather than a spontaneous reaction. Even smiling is infrequent in saints’ lives. Particularly in the passiones of the martyrs, which enact a deeply serious struggle between good and evil, saints have little occasion to smile (though they may use smiling as a kind of dismissive rhetorical weapon).14 And the audience response appropriate to the saints’ lives genre is clearly one of reverence and admiration. Humor, apart from tendentious humor disparaging the enemies of the saint (as in the example from the life of St Lawrence, discussed below), could easily be a bathetic distraction from such a response.15 Incongruity, of course, does not always or necessarily provoke mirth anyway. It can also stimulate wonder and joy, without mirth, and equally it can cause shock, dismay, or sorrow. Joyful or wondrous incongruity would certainly have been familiar to Anglo-Saxon audiences from the Bible, where such incongruities abound, from the wolf dwelling with the lamb to the meek inheriting the earth. The parables of Jesus widely exploit the idea of incongruity. The wonders and miracles of the New Testament and the Old are by definition incongruous in terms of the normal laws of nature. The episode of Sarah bearing a child in her old age, for example, is an instance of wondrous incongruity, stimulating the joyful laughter of Sarah (Genesis 21:6). Earlier Sarah had laughed tendentiously, ridiculing the idea that she might become pregnant (Genesis 18:10–15), but her later laughter

13

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, book IV, ch. 24, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), pp. 414–21. Bede speaks of Cædmon and his brethren talking and joking (loquerentur ac iocarentur) on the night he died (p. 420); cf. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Thomas Miller, EETS, o.s. 95, 96, 110 and 111 (London, 1890–98) ‘sprecende ætgædere 7 gleowiende’ (I, 346). On the ioca sanctorum, see Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215, revised edition (Aldershot, 1987), pp. 211–13. Adkin notes that among some of the fathers even smiling ‘went too far’ (‘The Fathers on Laughter’, p. 151). 14 Ælfric has images of saints smiling in the face of torture: see Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Walter W. Skeat, EETS, o.s. 76, 82, 94 and 114 (London, 1881–1900; repr. as two vols, 1966), XIV (St George, I, 306–19), line 126, and XXXVII (St Vincent, II, 426–43), line 140. 15 On tendentious humor, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Humour’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1928), 1–6; repr. in Collected Papers V, ed. James Strachey (London, 1950), pp. 215–21. On disparagement, see Jerry M. Suls, ‘Cognitive and Disparagement Theories of Humour: A Theoretical and Empirical Synthesis’, in Funny Thing, Humour, ed. Chapman and Foot, pp. 41–45.

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is a joyful recognition of the wonder that has happened.16 And the Bible also has shocking as well as joyful incongruities. Most shocking of all is the image of Christ on the cross, a profound incongruity powerfully exploited in the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. Saints’ lives, however, more obviously celebrate sublime congruity than focus on incongruity. They celebrate the congruity of the saint with the divine, as heavenly order is shown extending into the world in the person of the saint. On the other hand, the whole idea of the saint’s life could be said to be based on a wondrous incongruity, that of the Christian mystery of the operation of grace in a world that does not deserve it. Thomas J. Heffernan has written interestingly on comparisons and contrasts between saints’ lives and romance. A crucial thematic distinction between the two genres that Heffernan identifies lies in the autonomy or, in the case of saints’ lives, the lack of autonomy of the hero. Heffernan points out that ‘the saint is moved whereas the romance hero moves’. He continues, ‘The sacred biographer locates the locus for the heroism, the correct behavior of the saint, in the gift of Providence.’17 The saint engages in great struggles, but, as Heffernan suggests, ‘Such struggles do not exist to exemplify the heroism of the individual, but, on the contrary, . . . they exist to promote an understanding that it is the gift of grace in those whom God has favored which is critical to the outcome of the struggle.’18 Grace is an instance of the wondrous incongruity of God’s intervention in the world, an incongruity that underlies the incarnation itself. Wondrous incongruity in saints’ lives is evident in the genre’s attachment to paradoxical oppositions and redefinitions of traditional categories of thought, as apparent weakness is shown overcoming power and earthly wisdom is repudiated to the perplexity and incomprehension of the enemies of the saint. Moments of humorous incongruity appear to be present in a number of Old English saints’ lives, though I would argue that such moments are often really the creation of the modern reader and were probably originally intended to inspire wonder on the part of the audience rather than being ‘designed to amuse or excite mirth’. In Ælfric’s ‘Life of St Edmund’,19 as the local people search the countryside for the head of the martyred saint, the head itself bizarrely calls out to them, ‘Here, here, here!’ (line 151). This sensational detail appears comically incongruous to a modern reader, 16

See Jonathan Wilcox, ‘The First Laugh: Laughter in Genesis and the Old English Tradition’, in The Old English Hexateuch: Cultural Contexts and Critical Approaches, ed. Rebecca Barnhouse and Benjamin C. Withers, Publications of the Richard Rawlinson Center (Kalamazoo, forthcoming). 17 Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988), p. 143. 18 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, p. 153. 19 Lives of Saints, XXXII, ed. and trans. Skeat II, 314–35.

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but would Ælfric or the writer of the original Latin passio, Abbo of Fleury, have intended it to be so? It is more likely, I think, that they have transmitted the miracle as an instance of wondrous incongruity, like the accompanying ‘micel wundor’ (‘great wonder’, line 145) of the wolf going against its nature in guarding the head against other wild animals.20 Modern readers of another Old English hagiographical text, the Legend of St Mary of Egypt,21 are similarly very likely to find ludicrous the idea that the saint during her solitary life in the desert subsisted for seventeen years on two and a half loaves (line 568), but this idea would have been wondrous rather than ludicrous to a medieval audience. Elsewhere in the same text, however, there are images that look more convincing as possible examples of humor, though these images are inherited, not contributed, by the Old English writer. In one of them the venerable monk Zosimus is described chasing after the aged ascetic Mary in the middle of nowhere: ‘Mid hrædestan ryne þenigende arn . forþam þe he gewilnode hine geðeodan þam þe þær fleah ; He witodlice hire wæs ehtende . and heo wæs fleonde’ (lines 186–88; ‘He ran on advancing with a very swift course, because he desired to associate with that which there fled away; for he was pursuing her and she was fleeing’, trans. Skeat II, 13). If the detail of Zosimus pursuing Mary across the desert, emphasized by the considerable verbal redundancy in the quoted passage, should be interpreted as humorous, the humor is at the gentle expense of the dignity of two ancient holy people, taken by surprise in the solitude of the wilderness. Whatever comic potential this scene may have had in the original Greek from which the Old English ultimately derives, it is notable that the humor of the situation is not highlighted by the Old English writer, who simply passes on the detailed narrative, as received from a Latin intermediary, with no modification or interference in the direction of either highlighting 20

For Abbo’s version, in which the wonder is described more discursively than in Ælfric, see his Passio Sancti Eadmundi, ch. 13. The Passio is edited by Thomas Arnold, Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey I, Rolls Series (London, 1890), pp. 3–25; Arnold’s edition is reprinted, with a facing translation, by Lord Francis Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of St Edmund, King and Martyr (London, 1907), pp. 6–59. The idea of heads cut off from their bodies calling out and speaking is found in ancient wonder-writings, appearing notably in Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels, trans. William Hansen (Exeter, 1996), pp. 31 and 36. The likely ‘popular’ origin of the Edmund episode is suggested by the fact that the Latin writer Abbo gives the ‘Here, here, here!’ in Old English (ed. Arnold, p. 8). 21 Lives of Saints, XXIIIB, ed. and trans. Skeat II, 2–53 (although included in Skeat’s edition, the Legend is not by Ælfric). An edition and translation of the Latin vita, a recension of which served as the source of the Old English version, is conveniently available as ‘Vita Sanctae Mariae Egiptiacae’, ed. Jane Stevenson, in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Dublin, 1996), pp. 51–98.

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or reducing the possible humor of the situation. The Latin ‘intermediary’ has itself been described as a translation which transmits its Greek original (of the late sixth or early seventh century) ‘in a remarkably unmodified form’.22 The Old English version, in turn, generally avoids adaptive intervention. Like the detail of Zosimus’s pursuit of Mary across the desert, the subsequent description in the Old English Legend of the two old people lying prostrate in front of each other for hours, each begging the other for blessing (lines 225–27), fails to induce any discernible comic signal on the part of the vernacular writer, who transmits the episode without interpretative guidance. Details like those mentioned here, which are paralleled in other early writings about the desert saints,23 were surely intended as humorous in the original legend, but there is no sign that the Old English translator is interested in their comic potential.24 22

Jane Stevenson, ‘The Holy Sinner: The Life of Mary of Egypt’, in The Legend of Mary of Egypt, pp. 19–50, at 19. On the Greek version and its origin, see pp. 19–26. 23 Analogous to the episode of Zosimus and Mary lying in front of each other is Jerome’s account of the excessive mutual deference of the aged Paul and Antony when they meet in the desert. Jerome reports that ‘a dispute arose as to which of them should break the bread and they continued to argue until the day had almost turned to evening. . . . At last it was decided that they should hold the bread at each end, and then if each one pulled towards himself, he would keep the bit left in his hands’, Vita S. Pauli primi eremitae (ed. PL 23, 17–30), ch. 11, col. 26A; trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 76–84, at 80–81. Jerome’s life of Paul has indeed been seen as an important influence on the Greek life of Mary of Egypt: see Stevenson, ‘The Holy Sinner’, pp. 29–30; cf. F. Delmas, ‘Remarques sur la vie de Sainte Marie l’Égyptienne’, Échos d’Orient 4 (1900–1901), 35–42. Mary’s extreme frugality with regard to food is also paralleled in Jerome, who goes out of his way to counter the possible incredulity of his readers concerning how little Paul ate during his years in the desert (ch. 6, PL 23, 21B–22A; trans. White, p. 77); see Kevin P. Roddy, ‘Nutrition in the Desert: The Exemplary Case of Desert Ermeticism [sic]’, in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson, Garland Medieval Casebooks 12 (New York, 1995), pp. 99–111. 24 Jerome also shows alertness to comic incongruity with reference to holy people in his Life of Malchus. For Malchus, the low point of his misfortunes is not being captured by bandits and cast into slavery but being honored by his master with the reward of a wife. Malchus, who has dedicated himself to celibacy, is rewarded for his excellent service by being given one of his fellow slaves in marriage. Jerome reports him as relating ruefully but wittily how he was compelled to spend the night with her: ‘I led my new wife into a derelict cave, with sorrow as our bridesmaid [pronubante], for we both detested each other but would not admit it’, Vita Malchi monachi captivi (ed. PL 23, 55–62), ch. 6 (at col. 58C); trans. White, Early Christian Lives, p. 124. Malchus, referring to himself as a virgin with graying hair (incanescente jam capite) now forced to become a husband, remarks on the irony that it was to escape marriage that he had run away from home in the first place: ‘What was the point of renouncing my parents, my country, my family property for the Lord, if I now do the very thing which I rejected them in order to avoid doing?’ (PL 23, 58C–D; trans. White, p. 124).

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A comparable example of possible comic incongruity occurs in the legend of St Andrew’s conversion of the Mermedonians, as related in the Old English poem Andreas and its analogues. Existing versions of the legend derive from the Greek Acts of Andrew and Matthias, composed probably in the fifth century.25 On the ship taking him and his men to Mermedonia, Andreas is unaware that the captain is really Christ. The Old English Andreas-poet is not attracted by this piece of dramatic irony, however, preferring to concentrate on Andreas’s teaching rather than dwelling on any perceived incongruity in the situation in which the saint finds himself. This poet is, like other early medieval redactors of the legend but unlike the original writer of the Acts of Andrew and Matthias, concerned about maintaining the dignity and standing of the saint throughout, even when the circumstances of the inherited story make this difficult to achieve. It is notable that Andreas and its major analogues also fail to draw attention to the unheroic seasickness of the Andreas’s warrior-followers, though this is emphasized in the Greek Acts.26 The original legend carefully develops a theme of the reluctant, or at least hesitating, saint, according to which Andrew has to go through a learning process. This reluctance is reflected in Andrew’s initial unwillingness to accept the mission to Mermedonia, and even near the very end of the story his premature departure from Mermedonia shows that his learning process is still not complete. The Andrew of the original Acts is a somewhat imperceptive and fallible figure, even, I would say, slightly comic. Andreas, like other early medieval texts, presents an approach to its hero different from that of the original, striving to recast him, according to the hagiographical stereotype, as the ideal and definitely non-comic hero, who does not hesitate at the time of trial.27 25

For a summary of details of Andreas analogues, see Frederick M. Biggs, ‘Acta Andreae et Matthiae’, in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: A Trial Version, ed. Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and Paul E. Szarmach, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 74 (Binghamton, NY, 1990), pp. 52–53. Many of the significant analogues are conveniently assembled in English translation, in Robert Boenig, trans., The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals: Translations from the Greek, Latin, and Old English, Garland Library of Medieval Literature 70, Series B (New York, 1991). For the original legend in English translation, see J.K. Elliott, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford, 1993), pp. 283–99. For a brief discussion of issues relating to the date and origin of the Acts, see Elliott, p. 240. 26 In the Acts, Andrew’s disciples are offered food so that they may be ‘strong enough to endure the turbulence of the sea’, but because of seasickness they are unable to reply to this offer: ‘His disciples could not respond to him with as much as a word; they were already seasick’ (ch. 7; trans. Elliott, p. 286). 27 Thomas D. Hill comments that ‘in hagiography consistently the saint does not hesitate’, ‘Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography’, in Holy Men and Holy

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Ælfric transmits what is clearly a witty remark by a saint in his ‘Life of St Lawrence’.28 Lawrence is tortured by being laid on a bed of iron heated underneath by hot coals. Having asserted the paradox that the burning embers bring not heat but cooling to his body – ‘nane hætan minum lichaman ne gedoð; ac swiðor celinge’ (line 215) – Lawrence goes on on to compare himself to a roast being cooked for the table. He declares to Decius, his persecutor, ‘Efne ðu earming bræddest ænne dæl mines lichaman; wend nu þone oðerne. 7 et’ (lines 218–19; ‘Behold, thou, wretch, hast roasted one part of my body, turn now the other, and eat’, trans. Thorpe I, 431). Lawrence’s quip is both clever and startlingly incongruous in the context of torture. This quip is also, however, an instance of the tendentious humor that can be part of the armory of the saint, since it is used by Lawrence to illustrate to Decius the extent of his resolution and the completeness of his invulnerability to earthly torments. Lawrence’s remark becomes a weapon against his opponent. The humor of incongruity can be seen to have a place in Old English hagiography when it operates in a tendentious way in favor of the saint, as in the St Lawrence example, or when it serves to ridicule the wicked, as in the episode in the life of St Edmund where would-be thieves in the church in which the body of the saint is entombed are miraculously frozen in flagrante delicto. Next morning they are discovered still sheepishly stuck in the same posture, holding their breaking-and-entering tools (Ælfric’s version, lines 198–213).29 Andreas has an instance of eucharistic parody in the episode in which one of the Mermedonian leaders, chosen to die to save the cannibalistic townspeople from starvation, offers to sacrifice his own son instead. The aspect of eucharistic parody is highlighted in the Old English verse treatment of the episode.30 The episode implies a parallel not Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, NY, 1996), pp. 35–50, at 39. Discussing in particular the Old English poem Juliana, Hill notes that ‘the poet rigorously excludes any depiction of doubt or hesitation’ (p. 40). On generic recasting in Andreas, see further David Ivan Currie Herbison, ‘The Legacy of Christian Epic: A Study of Old English Biblical and Hagiographical Poetry’ (Ph.D. diss., The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1996), pp. 259–88. 28 Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series; Text, EETS, s.s. 17 (Oxford, 1997), XXIX (pp. 418–28); for translation, see Benjamin Thorpe, ed. and trans., The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church: The First Part. Containing the Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Ælfric, 2 vols (London, 1844–46), I, 417–37. Lawrence’s witty remark is a famous moment in the legend as inherited by Ælfric. Its treatment in Latin versions is discussed by Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1953), pp. 425–26. 29 In hagiography, as Curtius writes, ‘The pagans, the devils, the men of evil may behave as savagely as they will – they are the fools, and the saint reduces them ad absurdum, unmasks them, dupes them’ (European Literature, p. 428). 30 See John Casteen, ‘Andreas: Mermedonian Cannibalism and Figural Narration’,

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only with the eucharist, indeed, but with the whole doctrine of the atonement, and the parallel is a preposterously ridiculous one. The incongruity of the parallel emphasizes all the more the savagery of the Mermedonians. Incongruous humor at the expense of the saint, on the other hand, does not fit the hagiographical model that celebrates the perfected saint, the model characteristically reflected in Old English texts.31 The typical saint according to this idealizing model is a powerful and assured figure. The saint’s progress is serene, lacking the uncertainties and errors of judgment that might stimulate too close an identification with him or her on the part of the audience. The saint’s progress is presented in a style that has been well described as ‘iconographical and typological’,32 a style the basic tendency of which is to avoid the personal and the idiosyncratic. Hagiography so conceived will not normally be concerned with issues of human interest and its heroes will not be presented as individuals, subject to personal weaknesses. Referring particularly to Ælfric, the most prolific and assuredly one of the most generically conscious of hagiographical writers in Old English, Michael Lapidge has commented on the lack of individualizing detail in saints’ lives: Ælfric regarded himself as the apologist of the universal church: and it would have been no compliment to tell him that his hagiography imparted individual characteristics to individual saints. On the contrary, Ælfric would wish his saints to be seen merely as vessels of God’s divine design on earth, indistinguishable as such one from the other, all worthy of our veneration and all able to intercede for us with the unapproachable deity.33

‘Idealizing’ hagiography is characteristic of the early Middle Ages generally but is cultivated with particular insistence by Old English writers. Gordon Whatley, discussing the Old English tailoring of hagiographical Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974), 74–78; see also James W. Earl, ‘The Typological Structure of Andreas’, in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1980), pp. 66–89, at 79; and Robert Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Lewisburg, PA, 1991), pp. 71–73. 31 Humor at the expense of the saint in a Middle English hagiographical text is discussed by Gregory M. Sadlek, ‘Laughter, Game, and Ambiguous Comedy in the South English Legendary’, Studia Neophilologica 64 (1992), 45–54. Sadlek comments that ‘laughter directed at a saint rather than at his unbelieving antagonists would seem to undermine the purpose of sacred biography’ (p. 45). 32 See James W. Earl, ‘Typology and Iconographic Style in Early Medieval Hagiography’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1978), 15–46; see also Hill, ‘Imago Dei’, pp. 41–45. 33 Michael Lapidge, ‘The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 243–63, at 261.

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material for unlearned vernacular audiences, has recently demonstrated how Ælfric eliminates episodes ‘in which the saint seems quite powerless and ineffectual’,34 and he finds a similar tendency to omit unsettling details in non-Ælfrician Old English prose lives, particularly where there is a danger that the dignity of the hagiographical hero might appear to be compromised. The principle of grace, mentioned above, does, however, allow for other types of hagiography, in which the protagonists are more fallible and more human and engage in real struggle. Some types of hagiography have imperfect heroes. Such a type is exemplified in the early passio of Sts Perpetua and Felicitas, in which the reader has a sense of the heroism of people who are not divinely sealed from ordinary fears and concerns;35 it is exemplified too in the lives of reluctant or hesitating saints, like St Andrew;36 and in stories of saints, like Mary of Egypt, who are engaged in a continuing internal struggle to improve their lives and who remain subject to temptation.37 ‘Idealizing’ hagiography tends to externalize such struggles, as in the case with the Old English poem Guthlac A, in which the saint battles against physical devils rather than having to contend with temptations to sin. The Latin Vita S. Guthlaci, following the model of the vita of the desert father St Antony, describes a spiritual crisis in which Guthlac begins to experience overwhelming despair.38 The reference to Guthlac’s temptation to despair is transmitted faithfully in the Old English prose translation of

34

35 36

37

38

E. Gordon Whatley, ‘Lost in Translation: Omission of Episodes in Some Old English Prose Saints’ Legends’, Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997), 187–208, at 191. Elsewhere, Whatley writes of Ælfric’s ‘vigilant and protective handling of sacred narrative’ (‘Pearls Before Swine: Ælfric, Vernacular Hagiography, and the Lay Reader’ [forthcoming]). See Heffernan, Sacred Biography, pp. 62–64. Another ‘hesitating’ saint is St Thomas. Thomas’s reluctance to go to India as a missionary at the command of the Lord is still conveyed in Ælfric’s Old English version of his legend (Lives of Saints, XXXVI (Skeat II, 398–425); see lines 22–28), but this is much reduced compared to the account in the Greek Acts of Thomas, in which Thomas expresses to the Lord not once, as in Ælfric, but twice his unwillingness to go to India: see Acts of Thomas (trans. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 447–511), ch. 1 (pp. 447–48). On the Acts of Thomas in Anglo-Saxon England (with particular reference to Ælfric), see Frederick M. Biggs, ‘Passio Thomae’, in Sources: Trial Version, ed. Biggs, Hill, and Szarmach, pp. 62–63. In the solitude of the desert, Mary still thinks of the foods she once enjoyed (see the Old English version, lines 530–37), and she has had to fight against sexual thoughts (lines 521–28). See Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956), ch. 29 (pp. 96–97). Cf. Evagrius’s Vita beati Antonii abbatis (ed. PL 73, 125–94) (Evagrius’s translation of Athanasius’s Greek original was the version known in the West), ch. 4 (col. 129B–C); trans. White, Early Christian Lives, pp. 7–70, at 11.

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Felix’s Vita39 but does not appear at the corresponding part of the Old English poem (lines 114–40). Guthlac A presents the temptations experienced by Guthlac as the promptings of good and bad angels, outside the mind of the saint himself. Guthlac himself is unfaltering in his resistance to evil: ‘God wæs Guðlac!’ (‘Guthlac was good!’ line 170a). Guthlac in Guthlac A, typical of the hero of iconographic hagiography, is impervious to temptation. He is also, unlike, say, Perpetua and Felicitas, impervious to fear. Where idealizing hagiography inherits ‘un-ideal’ elements from the more inclusive traditions deriving from late antiquity, the tendency is to assimilate these to the idealizing model, though they sometimes remain as inheritances of different models. The despair of Guthlac reflects a model featuring spiritual growth and conflict (and is omitted in Guthlac A). The episode of Andrew’s premature departure from Mermedonia, mentioned above, is a similar instance of imperfection in a saint who is undergoing a learning process. Another example of human weakness in the behavior of the saint occurs in the legend of St Margaret. In the most popular Latin version of this legend the theme of the fear of the heroine presents an unassimilated intrusion into what is otherwise a story of unperturbed dominance by Margaret over everything that opposes her. Only when the devil suddenly appears to her in her prison cell in the form of a dragon does she suddenly and very briefly become fearful (ch. 12).40 Fear on the part of the saint is not mentioned elsewhere in the passio and in the one scene in which it does figure it is switched off, as it were, as abruptly as it had been switched on.41 It is interesting that one of the Old English versions of the legend, that in MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 303 (CCCC), omits entirely the reference to Margaret’s fear of the dragon-devil. In this version Margaret’s confident progress to victory is uninterrupted.42 39

Paul Gonser, ed., Das angelsächsische Prosa-Leben des hl. Guthlac, Anglistische Forschungen 27 (Heidelberg, 1909), ch. 4, lines 68–73; trans. Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, pp. 88–113, at 95. 40 Passio Sanctae Margaretae, ed. and trans. Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis, The Old English Lives of St Margaret, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 9 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 194–219: ‘Sancta autem Margareta facta est ut herba pallida et formido mortis cecidit in eam’, p. 204 (‘The blessed Margaret became as pale as grass and the fear of death came upon her’, trans. p. 205). 41 As Clayton and I pointed out in our recent discussion of this passio, ‘The transition from fearful girl back to perfected saint is abrupt and instantaneous, the devil suddenly destroyed by the sign of the cross’ (The Old English Lives, p. 36). In our discussion, Clayton and I noted that ‘From the beginning Margaret is on a higher level than her adversaries and her progress is one of triumph rather than of testing’ (p. 39), which makes her momentary failure of nerve in the face of the dragon all the more remarkable. 42 Ed. and trans. Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives, pp. 152–71: see pp.

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Similarly, fallibility of the saint is briefly apparent in the Latin passio of St Juliana. Like Margaret, Juliana is afflicted by a devil in her prison cell (ch. 6). This devil does not appear in the form of a fierce monster, however, but in that of an angel, enticing Juliana to submit to her enemies. Juliana is momentarily deceived into thinking that the devil is an angel and is thrown into confusion before falling to prayer and receiving divine reassurance.43 In his Old English poem Juliana, Cynewulf presents his heroine as composed and resolute in this scene and he omits any reference to her being deceived by the apparition (lines 267–71). The earlier Latin passiones, both of Juliana and of Margaret, had made use of a theme of some kind of crisis in the progress of the saint, a crisis which occurs in the prison cell. The Old English adaptors generally present versions in which the suggestion of crisis is removed, because saints, as represented in hagiographic tradition as they practise it, do not have crises.44 Andreas is one Old English saint’s life with a hero who is not consistently presented as a perfected saint, as I have noted above already. Andreas is a text that presents a hero not fully assimilated to the model of composure and invulnerability reflected in other early medieval examples. Unlike Margaret in the CCCC version of her legend and Juliana in Juliana, Andreas even has something of a spiritual crisis both in his prison cell and in the place of torture. He shows himself to be humanly worn down by his suffering rather than, like Margaret and Juliana, being transcendently immune from bodily torment. Andreas is not a perfected saint when he cries out disheartened for release from his suffering:

162–63. The other Old English version, in MS British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (ed. and trans. pp. 112–39), retains the reference to Margaret becoming afraid (fyrht, p. 122). 43 See Acta Auctore Anonymo S. Julianae, ed. Johannes Bollandus and Godefridus Henschenius, Acta Sanctorum, Februarius, Tom. II (Antwerp, 1658), 873–77, at p. 876C–D; trans. Michael J.B. Allen and Daniel G. Calder, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1976), pp. 121–32, at 125–26. 44 Cf. Whatley’s discussion of episodes in Ælfric’s ‘Passio Apostolorum Petri et Pauli’, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies I, XXVI (ed. Clemoes, pp. 388–99; trans. Thorpe, I, 365–85). Whatley points out that ‘Ælfric’s vigilant eye notices two . . . passages in the Latin text, in which one or other of the apostles is seen momentarily to falter and lose the commanding composure and unshakable faith that are inherent in the conventional image of male sanctity that is visible eleswhere in the narrative’ (‘Pearls Before Swine’, forthcoming), and he explains how Ælfric eliminates in his version of these episodes the potentially unsettling features which might detract from the apostles’ ‘aura of calmly decisive power and authority’. Whatley’s focus is not on Ælfric’s excising of humorous elements, but he notes that in one of the episodes ‘the dramatic interest and humorous tension of the original scene have been sacrificed’.

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Ongan þa geomormod to gode cleopian, heard of hæfte, halgan stefne weop werigferð. (lines 1398–1400a)45 (Then dejected in spirit he called out to God, bold in his bondage, with his holy voice; weary-hearted he wept.)

Such lines display a conflict between heroism and human weakness, a conflict that the Andreas-poet does not succeed in resolving. Different hagiographical approaches coexist uneasily in Andreas, as the poet attempts to recast a narrative of the saint’s spiritual development in terms of a tradition in which the saint does not really develop.46 An Old English text that does not attempt the kind of recasting and flattening we have been observing so far is the anonymous prose Legend of the Seven Sleepers.47 The Legend of the Seven Sleepers is a rare surviving example of an Old English hagiographical work that responds positively to the idiosyncrasy and human interest that it finds in its source rather than de-emphasizing such features in accordance with the prevalent vernacular hagiographical practice. The legend, deriving ultimately from the Greek world and dating perhaps from the fifth century, combines a doctrinal theme with a popular tale of a centuries-long sleep. Ælfric also has a version of this legend, in his second series of Catholic Homilies, based on a source very similar to that used by the anonymous writer.48 As I have explained elsewhere, Ælfric’s response is radically different from that of the anonymous writer. The inherited material clearly has elements that conflict with some of the principles of hagiographical writing as practised by Ælfric, and so he recasts it in such a way as to excise such elements. He reproportions the narrative and removes the inherited dimension of human interest in the situation of the saints.49 45 46

Cf. also lines 1278–90. Herbison argues that the Andreas-poet ‘attempts to turn romance into hagiography and change the theme from that of developing sainthood into one of achieved sainthood’; he concludes that ‘Despite all efforts, the underlying narrative remains resistant to hagiographical representation’ (‘The Legacy of Christian Epic’, p. 288). 47 Ed. and trans. Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, XXIII (I, 488–541) (the Legend of the Seven Sleepers is, like the Legend of St Mary of Egypt discussed above, a non-Ælfrician work included in the Ælfric collection); a version of the Latin source (as referred to below) is edited, with translation, as an appendix to my edition The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers, Durham Medieval Texts 7 (Durham, 1994), pp. 74–91. In the present chapter, references to the Old English version are to Skeat’s edition, with cross-reference to my edition. 48 XXVII, lines 182–232, ed. Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series; Text, EETS, s.s. 5 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 247–48; trans. Thorpe II, 425–27. 49 See my essay, ‘Ælfric and the Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, in Holy Men and Holy Women, ed. Szarmach, pp. 317–31, in which I point out that the saints in Ælfric’s version

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I did not discuss humor in my piece on Ælfric but it is clear that whatever comic potential Ælfric might have found in his source was of not the slightest interest to him. Indeed Ælfric removes everything from the narrative that does not contribute directly to the theme of the glory of the miracle, and he certainly has no time for humor. The anonymous writer, on the other hand, in producing a free adaptation of a Latin source, is evidently stimulated and delighted by the spirit of the legend of the sleepers, including its dimension of humorous incongruity. This writer does not follow Ælfric in attempting to transform the legend in accordance with a different hagiographical model. What are the elements of humorous incongruity in the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and, given the general tendency of Old English hagiographers to flatten and idealize inherited material, how confident can we be that we are justified in interpreting these elements as intentionally humorous anyway? It will be useful at this stage, I think, to give a brief summary of the legend as it appears in the anonymous Old English version and its Latin source (itself in turn based on a Greek original). The story opens at Ephesus during the persecution of Christians by the emperor Decius. The setting is one of great fear, since people who will not sacrifice to the pagan gods are being put to death. Many Christians give in but among those who do not are seven noble youths, attached to the court of Decius himself. Their leader is called Maximianus. Decius gives these youths time to come to their senses and accept the gods. Instead of doing so, however, they flee to a cave outside the city and from there secretly, and nervously, continue their Christian life of prayer and good works. They are soon discovered and Decius has them walled up alive in the cave by having its mouth blocked with heavy stones. Two Christians leave a record of these events, written on lead tablets, concealed among the stones of the cave. Instead of being the end of a story of edifying martyrdom, the account of the walling up of the saints turns out to be literally only the pre-text of another story that takes place centuries later. The narrative switches now from the middle of the third century to the middle of the fifth, to the time of the Christian emperor Theodosius (the Second). During the reign of Theodosius a malignant heresy has sprouted up, denying the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. God observes the distress of Theodosius in this ‘are not shown as people with whom the audience can identify or sympathize. They exist on a rarified and emotionless level, on which there is no concern with worldly need or with fears. In their transfigured state at the end of the narrative their faces may shine like the sun, but the saints are also in a sense transfigured from ordinary life in the rest of the narrative as well, being presented as changeless icons rather than as striving human beings at a time of trial’, p. 326.

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matter and does not wish the church to be led astray. In this context he brings it about that a shepherd removes the stones from the mouth of the cave and he causes the seven youths to revive. Waking up, the youths think they have been asleep for only one night and they are still terrified about being arrested by Decius’s soldiers. They need their daily provisions, however, and so one of them, Malchus, is sent into the city for bread and to find out what the news about them is. Malchus thinks it strange that there are stones outside the cave. Arriving in the city he is astonished to find it completely changed, even having crosses over the gates. He concludes that he must be dreaming. When he attempts to buy bread at the market, the marketmen wonder where he has got his ancient coins from and he himself is at a loss to understand their suspicion. Unable to explain himself, he is brought before the city official, who interrogates him aggressively about the coins, getting more and more exasperated as he questions him, at cross-purposes, about his family. Malchus is also interviewed, mildly, by Bishop Marinus, who senses that God has caused a great wonder to take place. Eventually, Malchus leads his captors to the cave, where the other youths are found, along with the lead tablets documenting their story. Marinus sends a message to the emperor Theodosius, telling him that God has provided a revelation of the resurrection of the body. Theodosius hastens to Ephesus and the cave, where he embraces the seven and weeps for joy over them. Maximianus addresses him, saying that God has raised them to show to Theodosius the truth that there is a resurrection of the body (the Old English text breaks off in the middle of this speech). After this (according to the source of the Old English) the seven saints bow their heads again in sleep and give up their spirits. Later a magnificent shrine to them is set up. Structural analysis of this legend reveals two interrelated plots, that of the vindication of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body (the ‘doctrinal’ plot) and that of the experience of the seven youths, particularly Malchus (the ‘sleepers’ plot). The tale of the centuries-long sleep functions essentially as a miraculous revelation, an exemplum confirming the truth of the doctrine of the resurrection. In the context of the legend’s overall doctrinal message, the personal experience of the sleepers, as opposed to the significance of their miracle, could be considered (as it is by Ælfric) to be of little relevance. In the seminal Greek versions of the legend, however,50 as in the anonymous Old English version and its Latin source, it is the ‘sleepers’ plot that dominates. Even the ‘doctrinal’ plot is personalized to some extent, in the 50

For brief discussion of Greek versions, and further bibliographical details, see my Anonymous Old English Legend, pp. 2–3.

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anxious figure of Theodosius, but the real focus of interest is in the experience of the sleepers. In the anonymous Old English version, the account of the heresy and the revelation of the miracle of the sleepers, when Bishop Marinus leads the Ephesians to the cave and then sends for Theodosius, takes up less than a quarter of the text (lines 348–434 and 748–840; Magennis, lines 317–89 and 688–772). The theme of bodily resurrection is not mentioned at all until line 361 (Magennis, line 330). Attention is focused instead on the ‘human’ side of the story. Well over three-quarters of the Old English text is concerned with the Decian persecution, the walling-up of the saints and their experience when they wake up (lines 1–347 and 435–748; Magennis, lines 1–316 and 390–687); the expedition of Malchus to the city of Ephesus takes up a third of the text on its own (lines 472–748; Magennis, lines 430–687). At the centre of the tale of the sleepers is a ‘comedy of errors’ situation, since the youths think they have been asleep for only one night. There is a central humorous incongruity between their perception and the reality. The tale is rich in dramatic irony, at the expense of characters who rather than being powerful and assured Christian heroes are unsuspecting pawns in a larger story. The humor is centered particularly on one person, interestingly not the leader of the group but the perplexed youth Malchus, who is constantly out of his depth and is about as different in personality from a Margaret or a Juliana as one could imagine. This unlikely hero seems not even to have made a very good job of getting bread for his colleagues in the Ephesus of his own time, let alone in the Ephesus of the future. As he sets out for the city, the others complain to him about the bread he bought for them the previous day: ‘Bring us bet behlaf þonne ðu ær brohtest’ (lines 468–69; Magennis, lines 426–27; ‘Bring us better bread than you did before’). It is Malchus above all who supplies the element of human interest on which the humor of incongruity of the legend is focused. Instead of an undifferentiated group, the legend presents a leading character, whose predicament is amusing and with whom the reader or audience is led to identify. The central humorous elements in the anonymous Old English version have been inherited from the Latin (and ultimately from the Greek) but in most cases they are notably extended or highlighted by the adaptor. When Malchus leaves the cave to set out on his expedition to Ephesus, for example, the audience knows that his fear about being captured by Decius’s soldiers is entirely misplaced and feels amusement at his nervousness. Twice in this passage, in both the Old English and Latin versions, the audience is reminded of the misapprehension of the saints concerning their perceived danger (Old English, lines 470–71 and 495–97; Magennis, lines 429–30 and 451–53; cf. Latin, lines 214–15 and 225–26); they are worrying unnecessarily. When Malchus sets out to buy the bread he is surprised 154

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to see the stones strewn around the mouth of the cave. The Old English has a subtle modification of this, however, for in this version it is said that he wonders about the stones only slightly – ‘healfunga’ (line 491; Magennis, line 448). The implication is that he is so preoccupied (mistakenly) about being found out in Ephesus that he hardly even notices the inexplicable appearance of the stones. As he sneaks51 towards Ephesus he has enough on his mind without starting to worry about these stones. The Old English version dwells fascinatedly on Malchus’s puzzlement as he tries to make sense of the changes that have come over the city, apparently in just one night. The first climax of his confused progress comes in the scene between him and the marketmen, in which he tries to buy bread using coins from the time of Decius. This is a scene of mutual incomprehension, a comedy of errors with Malchus at a loss to explain the attitude of the marketmen, and the marketmen assuming that he must have found ancient treasure and wishing to get a share for themselves. The essential elements of the scene have been taken over from the Latin, including Malchus’s ludicrously panicky offer to let the marketmen keep their bread and his money as well (lines 581–84; Magennis, lines 533–34; cf. Latin, lines 259–60). But although the essential elements are taken over from the Latin, the Old English writer extends this scene to three times its original length, bringing it to life through the use of visual description and lively dialogue.52 One delicately humorous addition that the writer makes to the source is to refer, in the passage just mentioned, to the ‘bargain’ – ‘ceap’ (line 585; Magennis, line 535) – that Malchus strikes with the marketmen in letting them keep the money and the bread. And the longer the scene goes on the more hopelessly at cross-purposes the two sides become. As the suspicion of the marketmen increases to the point of annoyed hostility, Malchus’s situation becomes more sinister. Ironically, he is in danger in Christian Ephesus. He has a rope tied round his neck and is dragged through the streets to face the city official. As is familiar from Shakespearean comedy, misunderstanding here threatens to turn to nightmare. The scene between Malchus and the city official is also much extended in the Old English, again in the direction of emphasizing the mutual incomprehension of the participants. The city official, logical and forensic in his 51

The verb cleacode (line 493; Magennis, line 450), a hapax legomenon, is not clear in its exact meaning but the context suggests little sense of dignity about it. It is accompanied by the adverb earhlice, ‘wretchedly, miserably’. 52 Pauline Stafford has suggested to me that the attention given to the market scene in the Old English Legend may reflect the growth of markets in later Anglo-Saxon England. She has also pointed out that the problems that the marketmen have with Malchus’s unfamiliar coins would have been readily appreciated in this period, in which the coinage changed frequently.

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approach, becomes greatly exasperated, while Malchus becomes more frightened and bewildered. Just before the scene with the official there is an interesting addition, which also deserves mention here. As he is being dragged through the streets before being brought to the official, Malchus’s thoughts are of self-preservation. Here the Old English writer introduces the idea that Malchus wishes to please his questioners so that they will have pity on him. The Latin has simply, ‘Et uolebat Malchus satisfacere eis quoniam nihil inuenerat et non poterat’ (line 273; ‘And Malchus wished to satisfy them that he had found nothing, but he was not able’). The Old English writer shows considerable sensitivity to the unheroic but understandable workings of Malchus’s mind in extending this to refer to his desire to make as good an impression as possible on his captors: ‘and he þam folce æfre swa georne huru mid his eadmodnysse cweman wolde . þæt he þurh his fullan eadmodnysse hreowan sceolde’ (lines 621–23; Magennis, lines 570–71; ‘and he ever wished very eagerly to please the people with his humility, so that he should arouse pity in them by means of his complete humility’). The audience is encouraged to feel sympathetic amusement at Malchus’s cringing here, and at his quick (but ineffectual) thinking. But the momentum of the story is now moving towards serious physical injury to Malchus, and the wisdom of Marinus is needed to avert looming disaster. It would be possible to go further than identifying humorous moments in the Legend and a general tone of sympathetic amusement in the scenes featuring Malchus. Underlying the story of the sleepers is what is basically a comic plot structure. The plot is one of disruption of the normal course of events by a strange happening (the magic sleep), leading to confusion, bewilderment, and danger for the main character, but with resolution of all incongruity achieved in the end, partly through the mediation of a figure of wisdom (Marinus); the resolution of incongruity brings about a better outcome than seemed possible at the beginning of the story. This structure, which derives from romance, underlies such Shakespearean comedies as Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. It is somewhat transformed in the legend of the Seven Sleepers because of the necessary presence of the hagiographical theme of martyrdom but is still clearly recognizable in the story. Instead of suppressing this plot structure or ignoring it, as Ælfric does, the anonymous Old English writer heightens it through style and narrative emphasis. Rather than pursuing such questions of deep structure, I have been concerned in the present essay to show that at least one Old English writer believed that humor, particularly the humor of incongruity, could have a place in saints’ lives, despite the seriousness of the genre’s purpose and predominant approach. Saints’ lives, as inherited from antiquity, were a genre made up of diverse components, coming from different kinds of 156

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sources. Among the different types of writing that fed into saints’ lives were history, romance, wonder-tale, and even comedy. As the genre developed in the early Middle Ages, writers evidently became more concerned to emphasize the distinction between saints’ lives and other kinds of writing. Malcolm Godden has written recently about the ‘troubling qualities’ that Ælfric found in hagiography and about a possible anxiety he had, in particular, concerning the distinction between hagiography and history. Godden discerns a shift in Ælfric’s hagiographical practice, contrasting his early method, as represented in lives in the first series of Catholic Homilies, with his later approach, as represented in lives in the second series and in Lives of Saints: The movement away from a form of narrative that uses plain prose and sets the saint’s life in a historical context and toward a form that employs a style modeled on verse and repeatedly signals its difference from historical narration may have been one of the factors by which Ælfric reconciled himself to the troubling qualities of hagiography.53

Ælfric became increasingly concerned about questions of form in hagiography, as Godden shows. And Ælfric was not alone in Anglo-Saxon England in his concern to produce a generically consistent hagiography. I have suggested here that other Old English writers, like the Andreas and Guthlac A poets, the CCCC 303 St Margaret translator and Cynewulf, also worked to remodel their material in certain ways, so as to increase the idealization of their saints and to emphasize the celebration of them in iconographic terms. The anonymous adaptor of the legend of the Seven Sleepers is conspicuous in not recasting inherited material in this direction, thus demonstrating a more inclusive view of hagiography than that reflected in most other Old English writings. The Legend with its imperfect hero transmits and amplifies aspects of a broader tradition, inherited from antiquity, which could celebrate incongruity as well as congruity as part of the material of hagiography, even where the incongruity was at the humorous expense of the saint. In celebrating incongruity the Legend partakes in a tradition of hagiographical writing that conveys a strong sense of the power of grace operating in the world.54

53

Malcolm Godden, ‘Experiments in Genre: The Saints’ Lives in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies’, in Holy Men and Holy Women, ed. Szarmach, pp. 261–87, at 281. 54 I would like to thank Gordon Whatley and Jonathan Wilcox for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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INDEX Abbo of Fleury 143 Adam of Bremen 19 Addison, Joseph 49–50, 66 Advent lyrics 16 Agatha, see Ælfric aggression in humor 65, 74–76, 81–82, 106–08, 122 aggression in laughter 28–29 Alcuin 86 Ælfric 9–10, 19, 41, 126, 127–36, 141n.14, 142–43, 146–48, 150n.44, 151–52, 156–57 Life of St Agatha (Ælfric, Lives of Saints VIII) 130–31, 132–34, 135–36 Life of St Cecilia (Ælfric, Lives of Saints XXXIV) 130–31, 132, 135–36 Life of St Edmund (Ælfric, Lives of Saints XXXII) 142–43, 146 Life of St Lawrence (Ælfric, Catholic Homilies I, XXIX) 19, 128–30, 134, 141, 146 Life of St Lucy (Ælfric, Lives of Saints IX) 130–32, 134–36 Ælfric Bata 3, 106 Andreas 35, 38, 60, 62n.62, 92, 145–51, 157 Andrew, see Andreas Apollonius of Tyre 139–40 appositive style 53 auxesis 21–22 Bakhtin 5, 8, 89–93, 95 Battle of Brunanburh 28–29, 35, 38 Battle of Maldon 2, 6–7, 11–32, 36–38, 45–46, 47, 68n.63 Bede 7, 47–48, 105–06, 141n.13 Bede’s Death-Song 7, 46–48

Benedictine Rule 2–3, 9, 14, 48n.29, 80–81, 85, 105–06, 128 Beowulf 2, 7–8, 14–16, 24, 29, 33–34, 35–38, 49–69, 71–78, 81, 92, 138–39 lines 1–11 60–64 lines 229–319 24, 59 lines 244–50 74–75 lines 304–05 64–65 line 336a 64 lines 445–51 138n.8 lines 484–88 33 lines 499–606 73–74, 81 lines 512b, 539b 64 lines 559–64 138–39 lines 611–12a 14–15, 35 line 730b 29, 36 lines 991–92 76 lines 1002b-08a 76 line 1545 77 lines 2078–79 77 line 2137 76–77 lines 2852b–61 65–66 lines 2890b–91 68 lines 3020–21a 15 line 3105b 60 Bible 28n.42, 141–42 Genesis 9:22 37–38 Genesis 18:10–15 37, 141 Genesis 21:6 141–42 Deuteronomy 25:12 111 Judith 14:13–14 39 Psalms 2:4 48n.28 Ecclesiasticus 21:23 14 Matthew 24:50 115 I Corinthians 3:2 56n.37 Bryggens Museum, Bergen 4 Cædmon 141 carnivalesque 5, 49, 89–93

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Cecilia, see Ælfric Chaucer 5, 60, 69, 121n.107 Chesterfield, Lord 27 Christ 9, 142, 145 Cicero 57 cognitive anthropology 11–12 congruity 5, 10, 142, 157 cuir bouilli 119–22, 125 cultural competence 5, 14, 25–26 Curtius, Ernst Robert 128–30, 146nn.28 and 29 Death Song of Ragnar Loðbrók, see Krákumál Deor 2, 7, 43–45 Derrida 8, 87–88, 91–94, 97–98 Descent into Hell 7, 35–38 Dickens, Charles 41 dildo 118–19 Distichs of Cato 41 double entendre 9, 80, 93, 101–03, 106–12, 124–26 doubleness of humor 51, 53, 57, 59, 92; see also double entendre Dream of the Rood 142 Durham Proverbs 7, 41–43, 47 Edmund, see Ælfric efenlang 92–93 Elene 35–36, 38 ellen 20, 61 embarrassment 39, 75, 82, 97, 140 ethnopsychology 12 Felix, Life of St Guthlac 115, 148–49 fettered desire 9, 126 Finnsburh Fragment 2, 7, 40, 44, 104 flyting 8, 71–74 freeplay 87–88, 93 Freud, Sigmund 4–5, 8, 82–85, 100, 108–09, 122–24 fun-deficiency 15–16 Gegeneinanderlachen 53n.22, 56, 66 Genesis A 37–38

36, 43,

Genesis B 36–37, 48, 104 Grettir’s Saga 2 Grice, H.P. 8, 72–77 grinning 23–24 grotesque humor 40n.12, 128–29 Guthlac A 102n.14, 148–49, 157 Guthlac B 62n.59, 111 Guthlac, OE prose version 148–49 hagiography, see saints’ lives hall, merriment in 4, 14–15, 46, 81, 127 Hávamál 27–28, 42 Hazlitt, William 53–54, 57–58 Henryson, Robert 34, 36 heroism defined 32, 40 Homer 21–22, 25 homosexuality 106, 113 homosocial desire 101, 108, 123 hubris 6–7, 20 humor passim humor theory 4–5, 8, 34, 51, 71–72, 75–76, 82–84, 100, 107–09, 122, 134–35, 137 hurting humor 34, 36 hygegal 105, 121, 124 implicatures 72–77 in-joke 14 incongruity 4–5, 8–10, 76–78, 82, 88, 95, 108, 130–31, 135, 137–38, 141–47, 152–57 insults 3, 72–76, 106, 109 irony 19, 27, 29–30, 33–34, 52n.15, 54n.26, 71–72, 75–78, 131, 137–39, 144n.24, 145, 154–55 Jerome 110n.50, 112, 144n.23, 144n.24 John Chrysostom 9 jokes and joking 2, 4, 7–10, 14, 19, 33, 43–47, 51n.11, 52n.15, 53–57, 60, 62, 64–66, 69, 71–72, 82–84, 88, 100, 105, 107–09, 122–25, 134, 138n.8, 141n.13 joke-work 84–85 Judgment Day II 36 160

INDEX

Njal’s Saga 2, 22–24 Norton Anthology of English Literature 1, 127 Norton Anthology of Literature by Women 127

Judith 7, 28–29, 36–37, 39–40, 104, 105n.25, 138 Juliana 36, 63n.65, 104, 105n.25, 136, 150, 157 Kierkegaard, Søren 57 Krákumál 39n.10, 46–48 laughter 1–3, 6–10, 11–32, 35–40, 44–48, 50–51, 53–57, 65, 69, 78, 80–84, 98, 99–100, 106–07, 128, 140–42 Lawrence, see Ælfric lavatory humor 4; see also scatalogical humor lawyer jokes 66–67 leather bottle 118–22, 124–25 leather fetishism 124 leathermaking 9, 119–22 litotes, see understatement lives of female virgin martyrs 9–10, 128, 130–36, see also Ælfric, Lives of Sts Agatha, Cecilia, Lucy Lokasenna 72–73 Lucy, see Ælfric manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 3 Exeter, Cathedral Library 3501, ‘The Exeter Book’ 79, 86, 100–02 Margaret, Legend of St 149–50, 154, 157 Martyrology, Old English 129–30 martyrs, see saints’ lives Mary of Egypt, Legend of St (Lives of Saints XXIIIB) 104n.23, 143–44, 148 masturbation 9, 99–100, 102, 105, 113–14, 117–19, 122–26 Metrical Psalms 35, 38 misogyny 105, 109–12 mock heroic 6n.15, 51n.11, 52n.15, 138 monasticism 1–3, 33, 80–87, 100–07, 111, 123n.16, 128, 140–41 nathwæt 96–97

obscene joke 82–84, 88 obscene riddle, see double entendre Odyssey 21–22 ofermod 20, 30, 32 Phoenix 16, 62n.59, 92 Plato 27n.36, 72, 98 play 5n.13, 14, 36, 87 proverbs 7, 27–28, 41–48 punning, see wordplay reception theory 12 Regularis Concordia 85, 105–06 riddles of the Exeter Book 3, 8–9, 16, 79–98, 99–126, 128, 138 Riddle 12 8–9, 99–126 Riddle 20 109–10, 112 Riddle 25 80, 103, 105, 110–12 Riddle 30 80 Riddle 35 138 Riddle 37 113, 123 Riddle 42 104 Riddle 43 80 Riddle 44 8, 80, 88–94, 95 Riddle 45 8, 80, 93, 97, 105, 109 Riddle 47 138 Riddle 49 116–17 Riddle 50 80 Riddle 52 116–17 Riddle 54 8, 80, 93, 94–97, 102, 111–13 Riddle 60 138 Riddle 61 80, 102, 109, 112n.60 Riddle 62 80, 94, 102, 113, 123 Riddle 63 80 Riddle 72 116–17 Riddle 80 104 Riddle 87 80 ridens moriar 39 Robertson, D.W., Jr. 13–14, 20 romance 139–40, 142, 156–57

161

INDEX

Rule of Saint Benedict, see Benedictine Rule Rune Poem 35–36 saints’ lives 9–10, 19, 127–36, 137–57; see also lives of female virgin martyrs sardonic humor 7, 19, 23–24, 27–28, 33–34, 39–48 scatalogical humor 4, 51n.11, 106 scorn 6–7, 19, 21, 27–29, 35–38, 46–47, 66 semantic resonance 49–69 servant status 90, 95–96, 104–05, 109, 112–117, 133–34 Seven Sleepers, Legend of (Lives of Saints XXIII) 10, 151–57 sexual humor 3–4, 8–9, 79–98, 99–126 sexual riddles 4–5, 8–9, 79–98, 99–126, 138 sexuality 83–98, 99–126 Shakespeare 156 slave status 9, 114–18, 124–26, 134 smut 82–83, 122–23 Solomon and Saturn II 35, 38 superiority theory 51n.10, 71–72, 107–08, 135

sweart

104–05, 119, 121

taboo 4–5, 8, 83, 107–08, 124 tavern, merriment in 4, 14 tillic 112–13 understatement 8, 40, 44–48, 74–75, 77 Victoria, Queen 33 Wanderer 15, 43n.19 wealh 114–17 Wellerisms 41–42 Welsh 9, 114–17, 124; see also wonfeax wale Wife’s Lament 15, 43n.19 Wigglesworth, Michael 54, 65 wiht 65–66 wlonc 105 wonfeax wale 9, 102–05, 109–26 wordplay 5, 7–8, 33–48, 49–69, 71, 75–77, 131, 137 wrætlic 91–92 Wulf and Eadwacer 43–44 Wulfstan, 50 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos 16

162