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 contradict