| dc.description.abstract | Today, 'Anglo-Saxon origins, even in the educated or culturally Iiterate mind, remain a blank: nothing happened before 1066' 1. T. A. Shippey makes the point that the Anglo-Saxon world 'has no presence at all in modern life' ,2 particularly in contrast to the powerful presence of both the Viking World and the Arthurian one.3 England failed to retain or develop a flag, anthem, national symbology, etc., even in an era of violent European nationalism'.4 Why did England fail to develop an origin myth? Shippey suggests that England 'forfeited' its national identity in the nineteenth century, when 'the developing and potentially powerful image of Anglo-Saxon origins was sacrificed', and 'Englishness became an unwelcome political stance within the ''three kingdoms" of Britain and Ireland, as tending to exclude the non-English among Queen Victoria's subjects'; while 'the "invention" of Scottish, Welsh and lrish tradition was encouraged as compensation for progressive loss of independence and erosion of the Celtic anguages' .5 Walter Scott and many others 'created an image of co-operative British history which played a major part in reconciling contemporary Britons to British politics and the English language' .6
My aim is to examine this phenomenon in relation to England's literature, specifically its poetry. The forfeiture of Anglo-Saxon origins is apparent in the history of English poetry today, but the genesis of this history is located not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth, in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry. The present work examines the mechanisms which led to the omission of Old English poetry from Warton's History, and how this omission has affected the way we think about the origins of English poetry today.
Specifically, it is still widely held that English poetry began with Chaucer, and that there was a gap in poetry produced in England, between the 'Saxon' poetry produced by the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest, and the 'English' poetry which emerged - transformed by French prosody- two centuries or so after the Conquest. For this reason, the particular focus of the present work will be on poetry produced during the late Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English periods, and how the prosody of that poetry has been theorised, both in the early nineteenth century, when it was first noticed, and today. As David Matthews has explained, the idea of Middle English was not invented until the 1870s, and 'even when scholars began agreeing' that there was a middle between Saxon and English, 'they did not agree on where exactly it occurred'. In these 'conditions of uncertainty', he argues, 'different ideologies could stake
different claims' .7
Although Matthews refers to the question of where the English language began, the same conditions of uncertainty applied to literature, and the question of where English poetry began has still not been resolved unanimously today. This 'diversity' of texts is still troubling to theorists today. For instance, it is still widely held that the Anglo-Saxons did not use rhyme. (This issue is a major focus of Part 3.)
The thesis of this work is that Old English verse did not die: there is no discontinuity of verse forms occurring at the time of the Norman Conquest. The dissertation presents a substantial reconsideration of a classic controversy, providing fresh perspective, in a context of reception histories relating to national and cultural identity, and with particular focus on developing ideas about prosody in medieval English verse. It presents Old and Middle English verse texts in a new way, collecting in appendices a comprehensive set of verse pieces from both periods which combine the use of alliteration and rhyme.
The approach taken focuses on the reception of early English verse and offers an analytical account of critical opinion across three centuries, tracking primary material and providing historical analysis of how critical views developed and influenced each other over a long period. There is an examination of the commonly held view that there is a break in the tradition of English poetry at the end of the Old English period and that when English poetry resumes, after a gap of a couple of centuries, its poetic forms are derived from French rather than earlier English models. In particular Old English poetry has been seen as based solely on alliteration and Middle English poetry on rhyme. An obvious problem with this view is the existence of a substantial body of alliterative poetry in the later Middle English period which has obvious similarities to Old English alliterative poetry. The processes by which the notion of a discontinuity between Old and Middle English poetry developed are explained, in particular how a tendency to ignore rhyme in Old English and explain away alliteration in Middle English has contributed to the development of this notion.
Part 1 traces the beginnings of commentary about Old English verse in the eighteenth century, when the understanding of Old English verse was uncertain and it was generally taken to be Danish in character, amounting to a refusal to regard it as English at all. The most influential text of the period, Warton's History of English Poetry, set the beginnings of English poetry at the Conquest.
Part 2 focuses on the growing understanding of Old English and Middle English verse in the early nineteenth century, characterised particularly by conflict between the scholars involved, and argues that the work of the influential antiquarian Thomas Wright recapitulated and fostered the old eighteenth-century position.
However, the main work of the dissertation is carried out in Part 3, which presents criticisms of the persistence in the twentieth century of the model of discontinuity and the idea of the 'death' of English verse at the hands of the Normans. It is shown that rhyme was present in Old English poetry and that the alliterative poetry of the Middle English period follows from an Old English tradition; and a case is made that Lawman should not be seen as a man who had lost the secret of Old English verse. lt is further demonstrated that even the key figure, J.P. Oakden, who began by assuming the death of alliterative verse, had to acknowledge ultimately that native English alliterative fom1s did not die.
Since it is the thesis of this dissertation that there is no significant boundary between Old and Middle English verse, the terms 'Old English' and 'Middle English' become problematic. In general I have used the term 'Old English' as it is generally used, to refer to the body of vernacular verse produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest, but the terms 'Saxon' and' Anglo-Saxon' sometimes refer to verse produced up until the thirteenth century. | en_AU |
