Performance in the Anglo-Saxon poetic imagination
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
This thesis proposes a distinct, poetic conception of ‘artistry’ (the collective term
incorporating performer, performance, and musical instrument used in the thesis) in
early medieval England. Through stylistic and aesthetic analysis of Old English poetry,
informed by oral-formulaic and post-oral-formulaic theory, and theoretical strands such
as Peter Clemoes on the relationship between thought and language and Michael Drout
on tradition, the thesis accepts that representations of artistry are principally idealised,
generalised, symbolic constructs. They reveal concepts significant in the Anglo-Saxon
poetic imagination. Cultural understanding of artistry is expressed in wisdom poems
from the period, and reflected in narrative poems. In Beowulf, artistry is shown to be
intrinsic to the poem’s construction, interperformativity, and narrative cultural contexts.
In addition to brief, oblique depictions, in which singing and harp-playing is commonly
referred to, the dominant type of artistry is storytelling. The thesis thus challenges the
primacy typically afforded the ‘oral poet’, questioning the supposition that the poems
routinely represent the performance of analogous poetic material.
Idealisation is challenged in non-poetic material, indicating that the significance
and popularity in society of the kinds of secular artistry represented in poetry is
influencing Anglo-Saxon cultural behaviour, leading to admonition among certain
members of the clergy. The extant literature of a closely related culture, Old Norse
Eddic poetry, does not contain such representation, which appears unique to the Anglo-
Saxon poetic imagination in the early medieval period. After the demise of Old English
poetic form, aspects of this this distinct representation lingered, a sub-tradition of which
is discernible in Laȝamon’s Brut. Artistry in post-Conquest poetry is disconnected from
a poem’s wider narrative events and its architectonics. It becomes a crystallised,
formulaic component with routinised referentiality, partly the result of the transition
from oral to textual transmission. Artistry becomes a tradition of the archaising,
retrospective poetic imagination