The Hooting of the Divine: Free Will and Predestination in the [Owl and the Nightingale] and the [Consolation of Philosophy]

One particular poem that I have been reading slowly and carefully for my candidacy exams is the early Middle English Owl and the Nightingale. The poem, which is usually dated around the late twelfth of early thirteenth century, is a classic example of the surprisingly popular medieval genre of allegorical bird debates. In this work, there is an exchange of insults between a dour owl and a fiery nightingale, who argue about which one of them is of greater benefit to humanity. Some of their arguments fall into the realm of very low humour – the nightingale accuses owlets of “fouling … up” (96) their own nests, and the owl admonishes the nightingale for hanging around human latrines (588).

Other sections of their argument, however, are drawn into much loftier matters. After the nightingale accuses the owl of being more useful as a corpse to scare crows away than when she is alive, she takes a more spiritual turn in portraying the owl as an augury of misfortune. She says that humans are justified in hating owls for always being the harbingers of sorrow. The owl takes great exception to this, but not because it is false. She confirms that she has foreknowledge of human fortunes and that she is often blamed for them, but that it is grossly unfair that she is assigned responsibility for them. She defends herself in a speech that I have translated below:

If anyone is to fall into misfortune,
Why should he blame his sorrow on me?
Even though I saw his harm before,
It does not follow that it came from me.
If you see a blind man,
Who does not know any right way,
Whose path is heading for a ditch,
And he falls, and gets dirty,
Do you believe, if I saw it all,
That it would come about sooner because of me?
So it goes with respect to my knowledge:
When I sit on my bough,
I know and I see very clearly,
And some men come to harm right there,
Shall he, that knows nothing of this,
Blame it on me, because I know about it?
Shall he blame his mishap on me
Because I am wiser than he?
When I see that some wretch
Is near harm, I cry a great deal,
And ask greatly that he shield himself,
Because strong harm is coming toward him.
And though I cry loud and soft
It all comes to pass through God’s will.
Why do people want to complain about me,
Even though I inform them with truth?
Even if I warn them for a year,
Harm is not therefore nearer to them:
I sing to them, because I wish
That they should understand well
That something bad is close by to them,
When I send my hooting to them. (1233-1264)

[Þat eni man beo falle in odwite,
Wi schal he me his sor atwite?
Þah ich iseo his harm biuore,
Ne comeþ hit noȝt of me þaruore.
Þah þu iseo þat sum blind mon,
Þat nanne rihtne wei ne con,
To þare diche his dweole fulied,
An falleþ, and þarone sulied
Wenest þu, þah ich al iseo,
Þat hit for me þe raþere beo?
Alswo hit fareþ bi mine witte:
Hwanne ich on mine bowe sitte,
Ich wot & iseo swiþe brihte
An summe men kumed harm þarrihte,
Schal he, þat þerof no þing not,
Hit wite me, for ich hit wot?
Schal he his mishap wite me
For ich am wisure þane he?
Hwanne ich iseo þat sum wrechede
Is manne neh, inoh ich grede,
An bidde inoh þat hi heom schilde,
For toward heom is [harm vnmilde].
Ah þah ich grede lude an stille
Al hit itid þurþ Godes wille.
Hwi wulleþ men of me hi mene,
Þah ich mid soþe heo awene?
Þah ich hi warni al þat ȝer,
Nis heom þerfore harem no þe ner:
Ah ich heom singe, for ich wolde
Þat hi wel understonde schulde
Þat sum unselþe heom is ihende,
Hwan ich min huing to heom sende.]

As A.C. Cawley and others have noted, this passage echoes Book 5 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in which the speaker is particularly worried about the relationship between Divine foreknowledge and free will. The Consolation of Philosophy is a meditation in the form of a dialogue between a central speaker, ostensibly a persona of Boethius himself, who is imprisoned and about to be executed, and a personified figure of Philosophy. He is made ill by his sorrows, and the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy comes to him in order to offer a remedy for his despair. In the first book, she assesses the extent of his despair and the depth of his current knowledge. She concludes that all is not lost, but he still has a long way to go towards the truth of Providence and the attainment of happiness. In the second book, the two discuss the nature of Fortune, and provide the earliest literary depiction of the Wheel of Fortune. Lady Philosophy reminds Boethius that it is in the nature of Fortune to be constantly fickle, which sounds like something of an oxymoron, and that people should be grateful for what they have. She also notes that more possessions and worldly honours are fleeting, so they are not worth much anyway. Having warmed up her interlocuter with secular examples, she is ready to turn towards his Christian education.

In the third book, Lady Philosophy turns to the attainment of the ultimate Good, which she equates with God. She argues that all of the things that seem like happiness on earth end up bringing about more harm than good. The only way to achieve the highest good is to aspire to Blessedness, which is oneness with God. The communion of all things with God subsequently guarantees that all things are ruled by Providence – if God is in everything, than everything is governed by God’s will. In the fourth book, the conversation interrogates the problem of justice and evil men. They agree that evil men are ultimately to be pitied, because they will end up with a much worse fate than those who meet with misfortune on earth, and are not even worth a thought from men who are pointed towards blessedness. When it is time for the fifth and final book of the dialogue, Boethius is troubled by the problem of free will: if God knows about everything before it happens, then how do humans maintain free will? This is especially troubling in light of their recent conversation about evil men. If people have no choice but to act in a preordained manner, then where is the justice in God punishing the wicked? If God knows about bad things before they happen, then why doesn’t Providence stop them from happening?

This is the theological point that also seems to be troubling the bird debaters. Though the nightingale is surely not attributing any divinity to the owl, she is still suspicious of her supernatural foreknowledge. Just as the Boethius character feels cheated by an omniscient God that allows for evil deeds and punishes them anyway, the nightingale sees the owl’s foreknowledge of human misfortunes as a kind of betrayal. In the passage excerpted above, the owl is forced to take on the role of Lady Philosophy and explain that there is no correlation between foreknowledge of human events and the events themselves. Her example of the blind man is somewhat comical counterproductive in the first instance – a reasonable person would indeed blame a bystander who did nothing to stop a blind man from falling into a ditch. She is, however, echoing Lady Philosophy, who asks and answers a similar question: “When you see something happening in the present, your gaze doesn’t convey any necessity upon the object, does it? No.” (Book 5, Prosa 6). In other words, the observation of an event has no influence on its outcome. While twentieth-century physicists might take issue with this notion in certain contexts, it is true enough for both Lady Philosophy and the owl.

The owl rescues her example of the blind man in the second part of her argument, in which she reveals that she does her best to do something about the blind man falling into the ditch by warning humans. Unfortunately, however, they are unable to understand her “huing” (1264), a fact she does not seem to quite realize. She doesn’t know why humans never take heed of her warnings, and must go on to do her best to avert all of the misfortune she sees coming. Her misunderstood hooting also echoes Boethius, when his speaker skeptically asks how one might distinguish the mysterious Divine Plan from random chance. Lady Philosophy counters his skepticism by saying that “just because you don’t know the reasons for such arrangements, you shouldn’t doubt that everything is done rightly, since a good ruler governs the world” (130). The fact that humans do not always understand the signs, for Boethius and the Owl and the Nightingale poet, does not guarantee that God does not exist, but only the lack of human capacity for understanding.

Both the Consolation of Philosophy and the Owl and the Nightingale are cut off before they come to satisfactory endings. The bird debate comes to a stalemate, and the contestants fly off to seek out the wise judgement of a man named Nicholas of Guildford. The Consolation of Philosophy ends with a kind of peaceful acceptance, but we do not learn the fate of the unfortunate prisoner. It is not necessary, however, for any of the characters to experience the actual events that God knows about in advance. It is sufficient for them to make peace with the fact that God’s knowledge of future events does prevent them from exercising their free will to its fullest extent, and that God has their best interest at heart when these events do unfold. They must simply go forth and do their best to listen to the hooting of the Divine.

Works Cited:

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Scott Goins and Barbara H Wyman. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012.

Cawley, A. C. “Astrology in ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’.” Modern Language Review (1951): 161-174.

Stanley, Eric Gerald, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964.

The Working Women of Piers Plowman

As I take another read through William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one particular passage caught my attention in a new way: the author’s portrait of impoverished women as the ‘deserving poor’ in Passus IX of the C-text. I have translated lines 70 to 87 below, doing my best to preserve both the sense and the style of Langland’s original:

Nobody knows, I believe, who is neediest of all
Except for the dearth of those who dwell near, who deserve our attention,
As penalized prisoners and the impoverished in slums,
Burdened with babies and bills of debt;
What they save from spinning, they spend on rent,
On milk and on meals, to make what they can
To feed their families who are faint from hunger.

And they likewise suffer from lack,
And woe in wintertime and waking up in the nights
To rise in their rooms and rock the cradle,
Both to card and to comb, to clean and to mend,
To scrape and to scrub, to scratch out a living,
It is heartbreaking to hear and hard to discuss
The woe of these women who wait in the slums,
And of their perennial peers with palpable sorrow,
Both starving and unsatisfied, to stay afloat.
Embarrassed to beg and busy concealing
At noon and at night what they need to get by.

[Woet no man, as Y wene, who is worthy to haue
Ac that most neden are oure neyhebores, and we nyme gode hede,
Ac prisones in puttes and pore folk in cotes,
Charged with childrene and chief lordes rent;
That they with spynnyng may spare, spenen hit on hous-huyre,
Both in mylke and in mele, to make with papelotes
To aglotye with here gurles that greden aftur fode.

And hemsulue also soffre muche hunger
And wo in wynter-tymes and wakynge on nyhtes
To rise to the reule to rokke the cradel,
Both to carde and to kembe, to cloute and to wasche,

To rybbe and to rele, rusches to pylie,
That reuthe is to rede or in ryme shewe
The wo of this wommen that wonyeth in cotes
And of monye other men that moche wo soffren,
Bothe afyngred and afurste, to turne the fayre outard
And ben abasched for to begge and wollen nat be aknowe
What hem nedeth at here neyhebores at noon and at eue.]

Even in translation, it is easy to detect the incredible pathos of Langland’s description of this group of women that is rarely discussed in such early verse. Doubly marginalized by their gender and their class, women coping with abject poverty are seldom considered worthy subjects of discussion for Middle English poetry. As Geoffrey A. Shepherd has noted, there is no earlier example of poetry that “conveys the felt and inner bitterness of poverty” (172).

Derek Pearsall’s explanation of the above passage in his annotated edition of the C-Text adds another layer to the destitution of these women, saying that the lines “describe the poverty of women, whether widows or otherwise left single to bring up a family by themselves” (l. 73-83 n.). Though the desperation of these women suggests that they may not have partners to share in the task of raising children, this is not necessarily the case. There is no need to assume that women who are engaged in a daily struggle for survival, in Langland’s time as now, would be in a significantly better position if they had husbands. The notion of a division between bread-winning and domestic roles within the family is more salient in a post-industrial world, especially within an economic group that cannot afford to observe normative ideas of social behaviour.

Whether or not this passage indeed describes the plight of single mothers or that of impoverished mothers in general, it is remarkable in that it passes a ‘Bechdel test’ of sorts, which is rare in Piers Plowman. The Bechdel test is a yardstick from feminist film criticism named for the author and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which measures whether a film has at least two named female characters, and they have a conversation about something other than a man. The above passage from Passus IX does not pass the test as it is thus articulated – the women described have neither names nor voices. It does, however, distinguish itself in a similar sense. Though it involves the male narrator speaking about unnamed women, it involves a sustained passage that has nothing to do with men. This is the reason, I think, that Pearsall and others have identified these women as single mothers – it is so unusual to have such a passage in Langland’s work that many have read the absence of these women’s husbands in the text as a negative presence. If we turn away from the spectral presence of men in this passage and instead attend to Langland’s portrayal of women, we can see a new respect and heroism for women who may be wives, and thus otherwise given little consideration in fourteenth-century society.

It is often rather difficult to conduct a sustained reading of women in Piers Plowman, as most instances of gender contrast surround allegorical figures like Lady Meed and Holy Church. Though there is undoubtedly food for thought in those passages, they are less likely to give us insight into the lived experiences of women in the fourteenth century. This does not mean, however, that Piers Plowman does not lend itself to a textured exploration of women and gender in literary representation and reality. By looking at Langland’s affective response to the abject social conditions around him, we can begin to uncover greater complexity in his portrayal of women.

Works Cited

Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text. Ed. Derek Pearsall. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008.

Shepherd, Geoffrey. “Poverty in Piers Plowman.” Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton. Ed. T.h. Aston, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 169-190.

 

That came to pass, this also may!

As I continue to finalize my reading lists, I want to make sure I regularly read from all my lists, in order to form connections and keep my ideas flowing over the course of my exam process. I also want to keep practicing my Old English translation, so I have been concentrating on a poem that I have been turning over in my head since I read it for the first time several months ago in Seamus Heaney’s haunting translation: Deor. Much of its ear-worm quality comes from the fact that it has a repeating refrain – this makes it rather rare amongst Anglo-Saxon poems, as Bradley points out (362). It also particularly appeals to me because it involves a correspondence of lived experience between the speaker and figures from the past, as all are human with the capacity for suffering and triumph. Moreover, there is no distinction between the suffering of men and women – the anguish of a pregnant rape victim is depicted alongside a crippled and enslaved hero. What follows is my very rough translation of the poem, for which I consulted Murray MacGillivray’s notes and glossary, as well as several different translations. I intend to do a more poetic translation at some point in time, but this version will help provide a sense of what the poem is about before I dive any further into it.

 

Original: 

Ed. Murray McGillivray. Online Corpus of Old English Poetry (OCOEP).

Welund him be wurman    wræces cunnade.
Anhydig eorl    earfoþa dreag,
hæfde him to gesiþþe    sorge ond longaþ,
wintercealde wræce,    wean oft onfond,

5
siþþan hine Niðhad on    nede legde
swoncre seonobende    on syllan monn.
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!
Beadohilde ne wæs    hyre broþra deaþ
on sefan swa sar    swa hyre sylfre þing:

10
þæt heo gearolice    ongieten hæfde
þæt heo eacen wæs—    æfre ne meahte
þriste geþencan,    hu ymb þæt sceolde.
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!
We þæt Mæðhilde    monge gefrugnon

15
wurdon grundlease    Geates frige,
þæt hi seo sorglufu    slæp ealle binom.
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!
Ðeodric ahte    þritig wintra
Mæringa burg—    þæt wæs monegum cuþ.

20
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!
We geascodan    Eormanrices
wylfenne geþoht;    ahte wide folc
Gotena rices.    Þæt wæs grim cyning.
Sæt secg monig    sorgum gebunden,

25
wean on wenan,    wyscte geneahhe
þæt þæs cynerice    ofercumen wære.
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!
Siteð sorgcearig    sælum bidæled,
on sefan sweorceð,    sylfum þinceð

30
þæt sy endeleas    earfoða dæl.
Mæg þonne geþencan    þæt geond þas woruld
witig dryhten    wendeþ geneahhe,
eorle monegum    are gesceawað,
wislicne blæd,    sumum weana dæl.

35
Þæt ic bi me sylfum    secgan wille,
þæt ic hwile wæs    Heodeninga scop,
dryhtne dyre.    Me wæs Deor noma.
Ahte ic fela wintra    folgað tilne,
holdne hlaford,    oþþæt Heorrenda nu,

40
leoðcræftig monn    londryht geþah,
þæt me eorla hleo    ær gesealde.
Þæs ofereode,    þisses swa mæg!

 

My Translation

Welund himself knew misery by worms.
The brave man knew hardship,
had to himself for company sorrow and longing,
winter-cold misery; He often found woe,
since Nithhad by force laid a thin sinew-bond onto the better man.

That came to pass, this also may!

Beadohilde was not as sorrowful from her brothers’ death
as from her own thing,
that she certainly understood that she was pregnant;
She was never able to think confidently,
about what she should do.

That came to pass, this also may!

We found out that for Maethhilde,
many became the bottomless embraces of the Geat,
that the sorrowful love deprived her of all sleep. 

That came to pass, this also may!

Theodric possessed for thirty winters the city of Maeringa;
That was known to many. 

That came to pass, this also may!

We discovered the wolfen thought of Ermanaricus;
He occupied widely the people of the kingdom of the Goths.
That was a harsh king.
Many a man lived bound to sorrows,
woe in expectation,
often wishing that this kingdom was overcome. 

That came to pass, this also may!

He lived sorrowful, deprived of joy,
he grew dark in his spirit,
it seemed to him that the troubles would be endless.
I might then think that throughout this world the wise Lord changes enough,
shows honour to many a man, true splendor,
a portion of woes to some.

That I by myself wish to tell,
that I once was a scop of the Heodenings,
dear Lord.

The name ‘Deor’ was mine.

I had for many winters a good fellowship, a loyal lord,
until now Heorrenda, a man skilled in poetry,
received a privilege that the protecting lord once gave to me.

That came to pass, this also may!

Upon the first few readings of the poem, Deor seems like a poem of hope and determination in the face of adversity. The speaker relates various hardships of figures from Gothic legend, many details of which have been obscured by time, and insists in a recurring refrain that if their troubles came to an end, his lot likewise has a chance of improving: “þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.” (l. 7, 13, 17, 20, 27, 42). There has been a great deal of consistency in translators’ approaches to this seemingly simple line – Seamus Heaney renders it with his characteristic simple elegance by having his speaker reassure himself that “That passed over, this can too” (Heaney 7). S.A.J. Bradley, known for his linguistically accurate prose translations, gives “That passed away: so may this” (7). Even Burton Raffel, who has been known to approach Old English translation with poetic creativity (such as his insertion of ‘a convent of wooden nuns’ into his version of “A Woman’s Message” (Raffel 36)), employs the phrase “That passed, and so may this” (7). Closer philological examination of the poem shows, however, that this short phrase may not be so easy to render into modern English as it seems. While one of the meanings given in Bosworth-Toller’s dictionary for “ofereode” is indeed “to pass, pass off or away, be over, come to an end,” another is “to come upon, attack (of disease, sleep, etc. ),” “to conquer,” or “to pass a moral limit, to transgress.” While all of these meanings might indicate that an event has happened, not all of them are a reassuring statement that since the mythological figures that the speaker has depicted have ended happily. The ambiguity is heightened by the fact that the poet often leaves the end of his mytho-historical vignettes unsaid, presumably relying on his audience’s cultural knowledge of the characters depicted within – knowledge that has in many cases not survived.

 An exception to this dearth of backstory concerns the story of Weland the Smith, which provides material for the vignettes in the first part of the poem. He is well-known in Germanic mythology, and Raffel uses Weland’s story to begin his translation on a triumphant note, letting readers know that the sorrow had indeed passed. He writes: “Wayland, a legendary smith whom Nithad had crippled and enslaved, forged himself metal wings, killed Nithad’s sons, drugged and violated Nithad’s daughter, Beadhild, and flew to safety. Nithad’s kingdom was Wermland, now Western Sweden” (Raffel 57). This backstory sounds triumphant enough, if one ignores the fact that the second character that Deor compares himself to is Beadhild, the drugged and violated. Furthermore, none of this triumph is related in the poem – only Weland’s maiming and enslavement in Nithad’s “wintercealde” kingdom is poetically rendered. We hear of cruel kings, raped and abandoned women, and a city that endured the occupation of a tyrant for thirty years. Yes, these happenings pass away, but this does not mean that those to whom they happen survive them with any sense of wholeness. Rather than taking solace in the fact that the men and women of old made it through their sorrows that passed over, the speaker may be preparing himself for the horror that may be visited upon him, now that he has lost the favour of his “holdne hlaford.” In this light, it might be more accurate to translate “ofereode” as “come to pass” in the dictionary definition of “to come upon, attack” rather than simply “pass over.” This robs the poem of its hopeful outlook, but I think it might restore some of the melodrama to Deor’s narrative – he does, after all, compare the loss of his job to some of the worst hardships imaginable. We will never know if Deor’s plight passed over, but my exams also may!

 

I would welcome other perspectives on Deor translation – anyone have a favourite translation or way of rendering the refrain?

 

Works Cited

 

Bradley, S. A. J., trans. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Dent, 1982.

Heaney, Seamus. “Seamus Heaney reads Deor.” Poems Out Loud. W.W. Norton & Company. 24 August 2014                  <http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/heaney_reads_deor/&gt;.

Raffel, Burton, trans. Poems from the Old English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964.

 

A Vibrant, Variegated, and Vivacious Revival

I begin the official portion of my exam reading with a seminal book by a man whose name is one of the most magnificent in all of medieval studies: Thorlac Turville-Petre. His 1977 volume titled The Alliterative Revival aims to introduce the alliterative poetic movement of the fourteenth century as well as make it clear to his readers that there is one thing that this alliterative revival lacks – homogeneity. According to Turville-Petre, many readers have assumed for one reason or another that the poems of this period (including Langland’s Piers Plowman, the works of the Gawain-Poet, The Alliterative Morte Arthure, and a number of other romances, histories, and moral poetry) are stylistically uniform. He goes as far to refer to an early twentieth century theory that many of these texts were written by the same man “one of the most absurd literary hypotheses of all time” (28), which fell out of vogue when “it was pointed out that none of the proofs adduced in favour of the hypothesis had any substance and that the poems, being written in a variety of styles, with different metrical patterns and different dialects, could hardly be the work of one man” (28). While Turville-Petre rejects this theory as utterly ridiculous, he is slightly more patient, but still in disagreement, with those that assume an unbroken oral connection between that alliterative style of the Anglo-Saxon poets and the alliterative revival several centuries later. Overall, his argument depicts the poems of the alliterative revival as a movement of great creativity and diversity whose works resist any attempt to be reduced to derivatives of Anglo-Saxon poetry or one another.

One of the more intricate parts of Turville-Petre’s argument is his assertion that there is no good reason to believe that there was an unbroken line of oral alliterative tradition between the Anglo-Saxons and the alliterative poets of the fourteenth century. While there are many similarities between the poetry of the alliterative revival and Anglo-Saxon poetry, a closer examination of the English poetry of the intervening centuries, which has oft been neglected in literary studies (See Elaine Treharne’s Living Through Conquest), suggests that this sense of continuity may be misleading. Turville-Petre reasons that if such an oral tradition was in existence all along with no written trace, it would be difficult to reconcile this with the distinct and “loose” (8) style of Early Middle English alliterative works like Laȝamon’s Brut. Instead, he offers an alternative explanation for the most striking similarity between Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse and that of the fourteenth-century – the fact that the standard pattern of lines is based on the alliteration of all stressed syllables except for the last of the line. Turville-Petre argues that the reason that two different (albeit related) traditions might land upon this same practice is that the alliteration is a functional element designed to mark out the stressed syllables, and that “the last stressed syllable of the line is very seldom in an ambiguous position” (17). In addition, maintaining a difference between the last stress and other stresses allows it to “signal[…] the completion of a metrical unit” (17). While the author makes a convincing case both for the lack of evidence for an invisible oral tradition and the logical functionality of the alliterative style, the reader is still required to make a leap of faith to assume that two heterogeneous groups of poets separated by centuries might independently realize the efficiency of such a pattern. It seems more prudent to posit a more moderate view that the fourteenth century poets managed to revive some distantly version of alliterative verse, without necessarily requiring a robust oral tradition.

After establishing diachronic heterogeneity between Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth-century alliterative verse, Turville-Petre turns to celebrate the synchronic diversity of the later movement. His sentiments are echoed by Greg Delanty in the preface to the 2010 anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation titled The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, in which Delanty muses that “we tend to think of Anglo-Saxon poetry as issuing from the uniform voice of the great poet Anonywulf” (Delanty xv). In reality, the poetry of both traditions is full of diversity and originality, as Turville-Petre notes in prose worth quoting in its entirety:

It is the flexibility of the alliterative line that makes it so valuable to a writer of a long and diverse narrative poem full of action, description, argument, reflection and any number of topics demanding variations of pace and emphasis. In Morte Arthure and The Wars of Alexander the form proves suitable for the excitement and turmoil of the careers of those two great heroes; in Piers Plowman and Wynnere and Wastoure it can accommodate the niceties of theological discussion and political debate; in Patience and Purity[1] it can re-vivify Old Testament history. Nothing is more mistaken than the belief that alliterative style is a homogenous one. (Turville-Petre 50)

Despite the richness of the tradition extolled by Turville-Petre and several others since, many poems of the alliterative revival have not reached the ‘mainstream’ of Middle English literary studies in the same way as the work named authors such as Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Malory. Turville-Petre ends his book by musing on the beauty and suitability of alliterative verse for a variety of topics, and ventures that “it may be time for a second alliterative revival” (128). Though it may be some time before contemporary poets take up the call to write in alliterative verse, it is certainly time for a revival of the study and teaching of this work.

[1] Purity is more commonly known today as Cleanness, the second poem in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript. None of the poems in this manuscript have original titles, but have been given the names Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by modern editors. It was once pointed out to me by Dr. David Coley that if one retains the title of Purity, the four titles make up an alliterative line, with the first three titles alliterating and the fourth differing.

Translating “The Wife’s Lament”

I made this translation of “The Wife’s Lament” for a class in Translating Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was meant to be a poetic translation, so I took the musical and lamenting nature of the poem and turned it into a ballad.

“The Wife’s Lament” is one of the most enigmatic poems in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, a body of literature that is never transparent at the best of times. Each critic that approaches the poem highlights the disputation about its meaning, and Murray McGillivray admits that “because the number of actors in this sad drama is unknown … and because the current situation of the speaker is so mysterious … we are free to speculate about who the speaker is and what her situation entails” (162). Since the meaning of the source text is far from clear, a so-called ‘faithful’ translation has little chance of making sense to its translated text audience. In this translation, I have transposed the wife’s song into a popular ballad form, and accepted McGillivray’s invitation to speculate on the speaker’s situation. Following Stacy Klein’s notion of the lament as a critique of the restrictiveness of female claustration, I have imagined this song as the tale of a woman who is forced into a religious community when her husband leaves on a long sea journey, and is not recalled upon his return. She feels exiled and alone because she has been separated from her kin, and the religious life seems foreign to her. The final section of the text constitutes advice for others in her situation to cope with the monastic way of life.

The Wife’s Lament

I sadly sing this song of mine,
Of my journey of misery.
I tell the tale as I grow old
True now as will ever be.

My exile-journey is full of woe
Since my lord went out to the deep,
My dawn-cares have been full of him
And all I have done is weep.              (8)

A friendless wretch, I went to seek,
A household for my need.
But the man’s kin thought to part our ways,
And set out to do the deed.

They willed us to live hatefully
Spread far across the land,
And while I yearned to be with him,
They did as they had planned.                        (16)

My lord ordered them to cloister me,
Where I had no faithful friend,
My lonely thoughts consumed my heart,
My spirits did descend.

I found my suited man was sad,
And thinking of a crime,
In joy we said we’d part at death,
But that was a different time.             (24)

Near and far I must take heed
Of my dear one’s enmity,
He made me live in an earthen cave
Beneath an old oak tree.

This old earth-hall has saddened me,
Its locale is dark and dim:
The valleys, hills and brambles
Make this dwelling very grim.            (32)

My lord’s departure seizes me,
When I think on it each day;
I know out there are lovers,
But it is here that I must stay.

There I must sit the summer-long day,
There I may curse my ban;
I might not rest my thoughts and cares
From longing for my man.                  (40)

If anyone shares my sad lot
May he harden his heart and mind,
He needs a glad demeanor,
His breast-care for to bind.

If he takes joy in his worldly self
Or is wrenched from his native soil,
Then he will sit in sorrow,
His heart in deep turmoil.                   (48)

His roof will be a stormy slope
All full of frosted stone
In dreary hall mid waters,
My lord will stand alone.

He’ll be thinking of the Joyous House
And so much sorrow will bear,
All woeful is the lover,
Who abides his Love with care!         (56)

 

 

References:

Klein, Stacy S. “Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies.” A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes. Ed. Clare A Lees and Gillian R Overing. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 113-131. Print.

McGillivray, Murray. Old English Reader. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2011. Print.