Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Perhaps more than any other modern literary discipline, Old English studies has the reputation as a field of right and wrong. Its institutional idiom remains rigorously philological, a legacy of both the nineteenth-century German positivists, who developed the techniques of historical linguistics and stemmatic textual criticism, and early-twentieth-century British dons, who assembled texts and sources, variants and manuscripts, into an edifice of accuracy for their students. When I began to work in Anglo-Saxon literature in the early 1980s, this idiom was still in place, and leaders of the field could aver, in an almost Victorian progressivist vein, that “We are in a better position than our predecessors have ever been…. To our inherited philological base we have added a much improved technical understanding, encompassing advances in palaeography and in the study of sources and cultural background.”¹ All the work I had watched in other fields—the claims of theory, the challenges to traditional editorial methods, the arc of cultural critique—appeared to be making but little impact. In the early 1990s, A. E. Housman could still be the source of an appeal to textual criticism as “the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it.”²

The past two decades have seen many arguments about the history and direction of this field.³ Attempts at bringing Anglo-Saxon studies into line with literary theory, cultural studies, or the broad analyses of the contemporary academy were often met with resistance.⁴ Such approaches—with their privileging of the fragmentary over the grand récit and their gestures of exposing critical rhetoric as rhetoric—were perceived as powerful threats to the hegemony of traditional scholarship: its eulogistic emphasis, its genealogies of teaching, its praise of the past, its certitudes of bibliographical survey. It was not simply that pursuers of these projects (myself included) were wrong; they were destructive. Reviews from the mid-1980s through the 1990s of a clutch of theoretically adventurous books were filled with chronicles of local errors and global misunderstandings.⁵ It was as if the literary scholar had been charged with Housman’s challenge: as if Anglo-Saxon studies had itself become a science of discovering error (not just in text but in other critics) and trained its practitioners in the art of removing it.

The history of these conflicts has been told and retold, and I do not wish to recount it again. My purpose here is rather to explore the rhetoric of that history: to see how, behind the claims for accuracy and empiricism, or for signification and cultural critique, there lies a deep emotion and desire. For Old English is at heart a discipline not merely of detection and detail but of the sublime. The pursuit of the meaning of individual words, their etymologies, resonances, and afterlives, has always been the means by which the reader gained transcendent, emotional experience. The search for the authentic literary voice in Anglo-Saxon literature has been the search for illumination. Brilliant and glowing objects fill the pages of Old English scholars, and philology itself stands as the source of illumination for the poetry’s readers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Whether it lay in the antiquarian George Hickes’s fascinations with the odic quality of verse, or with J. R. R. Tolkien’s personal illuminations, or in Seamus Heaney’s revelation that, in the course of translating Beowulf, he had “undergone something like illumination by philology,” those who have studied Anglo-Saxon texts have found their uplift.

But mine is a historical as well as critical point. Old English scholarship begins with the sublime: with the late-seventeenth-century recovery of texts and contexts, with associations among elegies and odes, with claims for a personal and a political core to its canons. Fragments of brief and blinding brilliance were as central to the making of that canon as they were to the establishment of other literary histories in later centuries—and they are to us today. Philology, in short, is a sublime art. It centers on the close analyses of individuated passages, words, or etymons. Its practice reveals to its practitioners something about the literary text or social history. But it often also reveals something of the self.

This is a chapter, then, about the errant scholar in Old English, about figures who may find themselves marked by social upheaval or withdrawal and who quest for national, institutional, or individual salvation in the knowledge offered by the literature. The Anglo-Saxonist often seeks a literary and critical homecoming. Stories of heroic return intertwine with professional self-presentations of prodigality. For George Hickes, a fascination with Pindaric odistry led to a powerful conception of the early English literary canon. But his work went on during a time of riving social and political upheaval. His great Thesaurus—compiled in the last decades of the seventeenth century and published in three volumes from 1703–1705—remains a product of a world (in the words of one modern critic) “haunted by coercion and fear; rent by religion and politics; wary, in the aftermath of civil war, of the direction in which jealousies and fears might drive a commonweal.”⁶ Hickes looks for harmony in such discord. And perhaps, too, so did Tolkien. Best known among Old English scholars for his field-defining lecture of 1936, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” he was an immensely self-aware professional: one who (in this work as well as in other publications and in personal letters) made clear his need to rectify an error and align the errant self. Like Hickes, Tolkien concerns himself with defining a canon of Old English verse. And, again like Hickes, he seeks to draw aesthetic judgments out of philological analysis. But unlike the maker of the Thesaurus, whose work may be widely cited but is hardly read (and then largely denigrated for his textual mistakes), Tolkien is omnipresent. Can anything new be said of him? And, for that matter, can anything be added to the mass of recent readings of Heaney’s Beowulf translation (a critical enterprise also shot through with Tolkien’s inheritance)?

If there is any single publication that marks the beginnings of modern Anglo-Saxon scholarship, it is George Hickes’s Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archaeologicus, published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, from 1703–1705.⁷ Hickes (1642–1715) was one of the leading figures in the English antiquarian movement; a churchman fascinated with the linguistic, literary, and political origins of national institutions; and a scholar so prolific and enthusiastic that he could be dubbed, by one of his contemporaries, “Literaturae Anglo-Saxonicae Instauratori.”⁸ His three-volume Thesaurus, the culmination of his life’s work, contains one of the earliest sets of scholarly editions of Old English vernacular documents. Its explication of the grammar of the early English language and its Germanic associates has been considered a remarkable accomplishment for its time. Its reports of coins, jewels, and the disjecta membra of pre-Conquest diplomatics are still valuable. And in its final volume, containing Humphrey Wanley’s famous catalog of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the Thesaurus attained a status in the discipline unmatched until N. R. Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, published in 1957. J. A. W. Bennett ranked it “not far below the New English Dictionary itself” as a monument to scholarly learning and industry, and Hickes’s own contemporaries—not least Jean Mabillon—welcomed the publication with enthusiasm.⁹ Hickes himself considered the importance of his work not merely to reside in furthering the study of “antiquities” and what he called “ancient septentrionall learning” but (as he put it to one of his benefactors, the Reverend Dr. John Smith of Durham Cathedral) in maintaining “the honour of our English republick of letters.”¹⁰

For someone writing at the close of the seventeenth century, that “republick of letters” has to resonate with the claims of Augustan criticism: with the stirrings of canon formation in the English critical tradition and with notions of the powerful relationships between political identity and literary form. Such claims infuse Hickes’s understanding of Old English verse as well, and he emerges in the course of his Thesaurus not just as a grammarian, numismatist, and antiquarian but as an Augustan reader. He writes a history of early English poetry as one of ode and elegy, and his selection of texts, generic assessments, and critical judgments grow directly out of the late-seventeenth-century preoccupation with the legacy of Pindar and the example of Abraham Cowley. These two writers form the endpoints of the literary history that Hickes writes in chapter 23 of volume 1 of the Thesaurus. Titled “De Poetica Anglo-Saxonum,” this chapter reflects on the style, the genres, and the literary impact of Old English verse. It offers one of the earliest printed compilations of that poetry (including the first publication of the famous Finnsburh Fragment), and it may well be the first sustained critical assessment of Old English literature ever written.¹¹

Hickes is a fascinating figure in the history of scholarship. His own life exemplifies the profound political disjunctions that distinguish a late-seventeenth-century career as churchman and polemicist. An engaged and highly visible figure in the English ecclesiastical hierarchy—he was made dean of Worcester Cathedral in 1683—Hickes did not shy away from controversy. Wary of James II’s Catholicism, deeply concerned with the rights of kingship and the order of dynastic succession, and engaged, as many of his antiquarian peers were, in using philological and historical study to explain or justify contemporary political behavior, Hickes found himself at the center of one of the greatest controversies of the later seventeenth century. Space does not permit a review of all the nuances of his positions, but the events of the late 1680s boil down to this: Hickes, while deeply suspicious of the emergent Catholicism of James II and his potential heirs, was nonetheless committed to the king’s right to rule (he resolved this paradox under the concept of “passive obedience … as the appropriate Anglican establishment response to a Roman Catholic King”).¹² Thus, when William and Mary were crowned in 1689, Hickes found himself unable to support their rule and take the oath of allegiance required of all members of the English Church. He was suspended in August 1689 and ultimately stripped of his position in April 1691. Hickes joined a group of what came to be known as the nonjurors (i.e., those who would not take the oath), and throughout the 1690s he lived as an outlaw, staying surreptitiously with friends, traveling in disguise, using false names. How he was able to complete the Thesaurus under these conditions is itself a marvel and is the story told in great detail and with substantial reference to Hickes’s correspondence by Richard L. Harris and, as part of a larger narrative of antiquarian politics, Joseph Levine.¹³

It is no accident that Hickes should find in Anglo-Saxon verse a powerful reflection of both his political and literary times, and the Cowleyan Pindaric stood—for him, as well as for his contemporaries—as the unique site of that synthesis. Cowley’s Pindarique Odes of 1656 have long been seen as central to the building of Augustan literary politics. At one level, Cowley’s achievement was formal: to render Pindar’s apparent freeness of metrical style in English and to evoke the wild digressiveness, bold inspiration, and inventive figurative diction of the odist in the new vernacular. Cowley drew heavily on Pindar’s averrals of inspiration. “The Reader must not be chocqued,” he wrote, “to hear him [the poet] speak so often of his own Muse; for that is a Liberty which this kind of Poetry can hardly live without.”¹⁴ Structurally, such inspiration often led to an apparent formlessness in individual poems—an emphasis, as Cowley himself noted, on digressions. Cowley explains the nature of one of his poems: “this ode is truly Pindarical, falling from one thing into another after [Pindar’s] Enthusiastical manner.” He refers to “figures unusual and bold even to Timeritie” in the verse, and he writes of the “violent course” of the diction, the narrative, and the invocation.¹⁵ But, at another level, his impact was aesthetic and spiritual. He provided religious writers with a newly classicized conception of inspired, even prophetic, verse. Cowley himself associated Pindar with the “manner of the Prophet’s writing,” and later followers such as Samuel Woodford sought in Cowleyan Pindarism a precedent for an emotive, if not metrically unfettered, religious odistry.¹⁶ So, too, John Dennis saw in these moves an aspiration to the highest strain of prophetic poetry.¹⁷

But, finally, Cowley’s Pindar was the archetype for what late-seventeenth-century criticism saw as the telos of poetic expression itself. Beginning with Thomas Sprat’s assessment in his Life and Writings of Abraham Cowley (printed in the posthumous complete works of the poet in 1668), English readers came to see in Pindar what Sprat called “the boldness of His Metaphors, and length of his Digression.”¹⁸ Pindar, and Cowley’s versions of the Pindaric ode, were seen as pairing these narrative flights with great irregularity of meter, what Sprat called “irregularity of number.” But such “loose and unconfin’d measure,” he noted, “has all the Grace and Harmony of the most Confin’d.” It “affects the mind with a more various delight.” It is “large and free” (2:132). Within a decade of Cowley’s death, these terms of description and praise had crystallized into an idiom of Augustan criticism.¹⁹ By 1685 Dryden was veloping the argument that the Pindaric ode represented the highest achievement of poetic form, and he considered Cowley’s forays in the genre unmatched among contemporary poets. This kind of verse, he wrote in the preface to the Sylvae, “allows more latitude than any other” and, “As for the soul of it, which consists in the warmth and vigour of fancy, the masterly figures, and the copiousness of imagination, he has excelled all others in this kind.”²⁰ The ode came to provide public poets with a model of encomiastic oratory and, in turn, with the permission to move beyond formal structure and control to express both nationalist subjects and private selves.²¹ Rather than being hemmed in by Virgilian strictures or Horatian decorum, some poets and essayists sought a greater freedom of individual expression, and Pindar served as their model. The “Pindaric aesthetic at this stage,” writes Penelope Wilson, “relates not to subject matter or even to the past, but to personality realized in style.”²² Such personality often found its expression in the selective mining of antiquity for new and individual expressions. Cowley’s ode “To Mr. Hobs” (described by Wilson as a “Pindaric manifesto of modernism” [p. 27]) offers this great charge:

What Wilson calls “the pull of the past” in these lines lies not simply in the claims for ancient sources of inspiration but, more pointedly, in their precisely literate nature. “To Mr. Hobs” is a poem of what I would call vatic antiquarianism: a poem about finding the past ensconced in, and recoverable from, books.

This is a poem about reading, about the relationship of inspiration to erudition, and as such it forms a powerful segue to Hickes’s own great scholarly project. The “Treasures Buried” of Cowley’s fantasy becomes the etymon of the Thesaurus.²⁴ And the constant interspersals of the shards of Anglo-Saxon life and letters—be they the inscriptions, manuscripts, coins, artifacts, or the fragmenta of poetic quotations—make the project of his literary and linguistic history an assembly of such ruins.

One way of reading this passage is to apply the Pindaric manner to Hickes’s own method itself. The ode’s apparently disconnected quality may have inspired Hickes to offer up exemplary fragmenta of Old English verse. Dryden had written of the “hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse,” central to the Cowlean, Pindaric sublime.²⁶ Is Hickes himself, one may ask, incalescens here, rushing through the collection and presentation of materials whose order may seem, to the reader, arbitrary, if not asyndetic? The passages that follow, from the poems Exodus and Judith, from the Meters of Boethius, from the poetic passages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and elsewhere, pile up by accretion, becoming successively longer. It is as if, perhaps, Hickes is flipping through his books: here, a bit from Rawlinson’s edition of Boethius; there, a page from Thwaites’s Judith; and, now and then, a selection from Junius’s Caedmonian biblical poetry.

This is as powerful and passionate a vision of the force of divine wrath as may be found anywhere in Old English poetry. And yet it is, as well, as powerful a passage as may be found in the canons of the Cowleyan Pindaric. Hickes had been building up to this quotation, offering a string of texts whose subjects are the storms and floods of an unregulated world. The chapter had opened with Metrum 3 from the Meters of Boethius, with its arresting imagery of the troubled soul beset by the “strongan stormas … weoruld bisgunga” (strong storms of worldly troubles). We then get a selection from Metrum 20, the translation of the great poem of Book 3.m9 of the Consolation, here a passage on the diurnal powers of the divine. Many other selections follow, most notably from Metra 4 and 6 of the Meters, with their evocations of the terror and beauty of the world in stormy conflict: from Metrum 4, the imagery of the black storm and the hateful wind (swearta storm, laðran wind); and, from Metrum 6, the powerful storms that sweep away the rose’s beauty and the vision of the great sea beset by the northern blast.²⁸

This imagery, of course, is central to a great deal of Old English verse and is indebted to the Consolation of Philosophy itself, where crazy weather undergirds the physical allegories of the soul in terror or of divine wrath. But, here, these selections stand as markers of the Pindaric. There is a kind of epistemological meteorology at work on Hickes’s pages, a vision of the overflowing water, wind, and weather that cannot but recall Pindar’s own “enthusiastic” flights and Horace’s compelling imitation. Cowley’s “Praise of Pindar,” too, evokes the “swoln Flood from some steep Mountain,” while “The Resurrection” (that most “truly Pindarical” of his poems) enthuses: “Not Winds to Voyagers at Sea, / Nor Showers to Earth more necessary be.” The floodwaters of these Old English poems become, on Hickes’s pages, the literalizations of Cowley’s

So, too, becomes the vision of the Red Sea in the Old English Exodus, a poem now as much in more Pindaricorum as Cowley’s own treatment of the very same subject in his “Plagues of Egypt.”

It may be no coincidence that Hickes should offer, too, on these first pages of the chapter, an Old English poem markedly in contrast to the “rowling” tides of Exodus or the Meters of Boethius, a poem that is precisely concerned with building channels, banks, and dikes, the poem we know now as Durham.

The poem’s theme lies in the institutional control of landscape.³⁰ Instead of Horace’s swift mountain river running down its swollen banks, we have the river Wear, precisely circumscribing the monastery on a hill. The creatures that inhabit Horace’s poetic riverbanks—and Cowley’s, too, in his imitation—are here populating waters to support the monastery.³¹ And, indeed, what better contrast to this fish-filled river than the terrible impression of the Red Sea, rife with dead warriors and their weaponry?

As one reads on in chapter 23, poems and problems familiar to the modern Anglo-Saxonist emerge anew as exemplars of the Augustan Pindaric. In the discussion of word order and poetic figuration, Hickes notes that Anglo-Saxon verse often appears to separate words of agreement, nouns and verbs, adjectives and their nouns, and he goes on to remark on the elaborate figurative quality of the diction: “Secondly, I believe, in what I would call the Pindaric poems of the Anglo-Saxons, there is a daring (audax) and free (libera) transposition of words, a transposition quite different from the habit among orators, not only those using simple conversational style, but those who speak ornately. There would be no need for this transposition, it seems, unless some metrical law commanding that attention be paid to different rhythms and feet demanded it from the poets.”³²

Pindaric prosody is freed from rule, or law, here, and something of that idiom is captured, too, in Hickes’s Latin. He changes Horace’s lex soluta to lex requirens: a law that demands violation of the laws, a metrical form that both expresses and embodies the audacity of inspiration. Such audacity resonates precisely with the claims of Cowley’s Pindarism. The word “bold,” in the English critical tradition, seems a precise translation of Horace’s audax, and Hickes returns to it to give a new scholarly expression to a common judgment. So, too, the word libera connotes the freedom Cowley and his successors had found in Pindar. His was, Cowley had noted, a “free kind of poetry,”³⁴ and Sprat, recall, considered it a “loose, and unconfin’d measure … large and free.”³⁵

So, just what poems are these “Anglo-Saxon Pindarics,” and what is audax about them? Hickes’s examples, whatever their metrical exemplarity, do share a thematic interest. Great individual accomplishments and sacrifices are the subjects of these passages: the terror of Nero from the Meters of Boethius; the near-death of Isaac from Genesis; the fate of the fleeing Jews and the pursuing Egyptians from Exodus.³⁶ But it lies in his printings of the celebrations of the great heroic dead—the Death of Edgar, the Battle of Brunanburh, and, of course, the famous Finnsburh Fragment—that Hickes builds a canon of Old English verse designed to fit with his contemporary readers’ tastes.

Cowley’s refractions of Horace distill the public role of odic verse, and they provided the Augustan period with a template for the poet’s calling. “The insistence,” Howard Weinbrot summarizes, “on linking within terrestrial and divine communities” was central to the political impact of the Pindaric, and such a linkage controls the great elegies Hickes prints.³⁷ The Battle of Brunanburh (Thesaurus, 1:181–82) and the Death of Edgar (Thesaurus 1:185–86) become obvious examples of this encomiastic pressure. So, too, does the brief passage from Judith, centering on the beasts of battle (199–222, in Thesaurus 1:180). Hickes even goes so far as to suggest that he has been able to discern patterns of strophe, strophe, and epode in such texts, linking them by implication with the odic forms.³⁸

“The sword-light stood out, as if all Finnsburh were aflame.” This dazzling image leads Hickes, in a footnote, into an equally dazzling foray into the linguistic and literary resonances of the term swurd-leoma. “Splendor gladiorum,” he translates, and yet it is the splendor of the poetry that compels him. He moves through Eddic parallels, Latin translations, scholarly treatments of the history of swords (Nicolaus Westman’s dissertatione philologica), and, finally, to Pindar: “Simili figura, aurum, apud Pindarum, ardenti igni comparatur: Olymp. I.2, crusoz, aidomenou puz.” In this reference to the opening of the very first of Pindar’s odes, Hickes makes a clear association between the Greek and Old English panegyrics. For it is here that Pindar opens with the great allusion to the gold “like the fire flaming at night,” which leads him to reflect on the nature and sources of praise poetry. His subject is the “famous song of praise that enfolds the thoughts of wise poets,” and he enjoins: “Now take the Dorian lyre down from its resting place.” He speaks of the “grace of song,” and he announces that “I will tell you a tale far different from that of earlier bards.” All these images will find their fuller exposition in Hickes’s later arguments about the lyric and encomiastic quality of Anglo-Saxon verse. But, for now, they help the modern reader to imagine just what kind of poem Hickes thought Finnsburh was: a poem of heroic praise, whose subject matter reaches back to the deep past of a shared national and mythic history and which, like Pindar’s, offers tales of “wonder” that not only “please” the listener but can make “even what is unbelievable to be, in fact, believed.”⁴⁰

“Begin the song and stroke the Living Lyre,” invoked Cowley in his ode “The Resurrection,” and the explicit association of Pindar with lyric performance—both generically and etymologically—goes back to Roman criticism. Quintilian had called Pindar “prince of lyric poets” (“principem Lyricorum Pindarum,” Institutio oratoriae, 8.6.71), and the blend of lyric form and spiritual inspiration can be found throughout in the Institutio. What is at stake in Quintilian, as it would be for the later English seventeenth-century poets and critics, is the direct association of Pindar with lyric poetry (hence Hickes’s virtual equivalence in his phrasing, “Pindarum, Lyricumve”).⁴² Dryden, in the preface to the Sylvae, establishes these associations in terms that explicitly echo Quintilian’s formulation: “Since Pindar was the prince of lyric poets, let me have leave to say that, in imitating him, our numbers should for the most part, be lyrical: for variety, or rather where the majesty of thought requires it, they may be stretched to the English heroic of five feet, and to the French Alexandrine of six. But the ear must preside, and direct the judgment to the choice of numbers: without the nicety of this, the harmony of Pindaric verse can never be complete.”⁴³ The harmony of the Pindaric, so central to Dryden’s notion of the public, oratorical flavor of odic performance, comes into play in Hickes as well. Noting that Anglo-Saxon poetry frequently deploys alliteration, he attributes this prosodic feature not to anything inherent in Old English or Germanic versification but rather to a quality of all great poetry, stretching back to that of the Greeks and Romans. The repetition of initial sounds becomes a general feature of all poetry inspired by the muses, and Hickes then reels off a list of poets (complete with examples) who deploy it, beginning with Pindar and running through Homer, Hesiod, Dionysus, Ennius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, the Scalds, Middle English lyrics, and then what he calls (in a nod, perhaps, to both Quintilian and Dryden) “nostrorum Principes Poetae”: Langland, Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Denham, Waller, Dryden, and, finally, Cowley.

This set of alliterative examples is precisely where the Anglo-Saxon and Augustan intersect. Hickes’s selections come from the poets largely seen, by his contemporaries, as contributing to the development of “smooth numbers” in the verse line.⁴⁴ Such is the role, for example, that Waller had been seen to play: a kind of metrical way station between Donne and Dryden. As Jonathan Kramnick has discussed, summarizing a whole range of recent critical accounts, the Augustan concern with regularity in meter had both an aesthetic and a political purpose: first, in that it contributed to a controlling, ordered sense of literary unity, a creation of verbal artifacts; but, second, in that it led directly to an appreciation of the larger harmony of social purpose. “Poetry equals metered language. Meter should be regular. Regularity is the foundation of national culture.”⁴⁵

Such is the function of Hickes’s compilation of alliterating poets, and such is the telos of his Anglo-Saxon literary Pindarism. For if we look at the content of Hickes’s quotations, we see the narratives of strife and celebration central to his age. There are the disappointments of Donne’s sixth elegy: “Then with new eyes I shall survey, and spy / Death in thy cheeks, and darkness in thine eye.” Then, we read of the public conflicts in Denham’s poem on the trial of the earl of Strafford, followed by a couplet from his poem on Cowley’s death and burial. Two selections from Waller follow, the first from the widely read “Instructions to the painter” poem, followed by these memorable lines from the “Panegyric to Cromwell”: “Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse / And every conqueror creates a muse.” A selection from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel follows (perhaps the most powerfully political poem of its time, and one that sparked a range of contemporary responses). Finally, we get to “The inundation of all liquid pain,” in a selection from Cowley’s poem to Dr. Scarborough.⁴⁶

Taken together, these excerpts do more than illustrate a metrical device. They tell a story of political action keyed to their compiler’s own experiences in the final decades of the seventeenth century. Read in sequence, these selections contribute to a narrative of service and betrayal, treason and great trial—a narrative fully in keeping with the stories told in Hickes’s sermons and letters. They share a common vocabulary: hatred, pity, death, darkness, fate. “It is some comfort for me to think that I am a sufferer with the law,” Hickes wrote to Edmund Gibson in 1691, announcing in that same letter, “I am an exauctorat man”—an amazing appellation, a word that conjures up the destruction of authority itself.⁴⁷ And, for a man so wracked by personal dissent, alliteration, too, could teach him something. Look at his sermon, preached in Worcester on May 29, 1684. Here, like Dryden, Hickes uses the story of Absalom and Achitophel to exemplify rebellion (“You see what Impostors Absalom and Achitophel were,” Hickes avers). The sermon reflects on a man, a church, and a nation in a state of upheaval, and its description of the ejection of the bishops from the House of Lords must be read in conjunction with the Cowleyan Pindarics in the Thesaurus: “The Lords at first refused to consent to such a fundamental alteration, perceiving very well what might be the consequence thereof, upon which the people were brought down in Multitudes to the Parliament Doors, to cry against the bishops several days successively, till the Terrors of those Tumults did force them to Consent.”⁴⁸ “The Terrors of those Tumults”—an alliterative half-line if ever there was one. Hickes uses alliteration here as he would describe it in the Thesaurus: as the mark of an inspired voice.⁴⁹

Hickes, then, is well aware of the political and literary effects of the sonic. The harmonies of Anglo-Saxon verse, or of the smooth numbers of his Augustan canonical poets, contrast brilliantly with the deep political disjunctions of his time. The Worcester sermon—like so many other of his preacherly performances—shows something of a prophetic Hickes, and, in this, he is not out of line with literary critics of his time.⁵⁰ Like his close contemporary, John Dennis, he finds harmony to be central to the praise of God and the prophetic strain. Compare the quotations I have offered from Hickes’s Thesaurus to the remarks of Dennis on Old Testament prophetic poetry: “Poetry was one of the Prophetick functions…. Praise God with songs of the Prophets composing, accompany’d with the Harp and other Instrumental Musick.”⁵¹ Indeed, Dennis’s claims may well stand for Hickes’s here: “There can certainly be no better way to reform the World, than the reading of those Writings which we believe to be divinely inspired” (1:372).

Harmony, lyric prowess, heroic encomium, and divine inspiration—all come together to reveal that Hickes’s true concern, which he shared with his critical contemporaries, was the sublime. While Longinus had been known in English translation since 1652, it was not until the 1670s that On the Sublime began to be read and widely used, and, by the century’s end, the Longinian sublime had, in Norman Maclean’s words, “merged quickly” with the reception of Cowley to create a new concept of the odic form.⁵². Dennis, in his 1701 essay “The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry,” developed these associations in great detail, and he offers in the course of his discussion a string of poetic passages remarkably similar to Hickes’s. His selections from Virgil, Dryden, and Milton are rich with scenes of weatherly terror, such as this one from Dryden’s translation of Virgil.

Dryden’s Virgil (a work, interestingly enough, that Hickes owned) becomes, in passages such as this one, Dennis’s prime example.⁵³ But, he goes on to argue, “There is certainly no Subject so great as the Power of God,”⁵⁴ and it would seem that Hickes agreed. He transformed, through Latin translation, the exordial formulae of the Old English Genesis into the idioms of an Augustan critical aesthetic.

God here becomes the sublime head of all creatures. To imagine the poet’s responsibility (officium) as praising in words and loving in spirit the guardian of the heavens is to re-create the task of the inspired poet—and, in turn, to aver with Dennis “That Passion is more to be deriv’d from a Sacred Subject, than from a Prophane one.”⁵⁶

Hickes found that subject at the close of chapter 23 in the calendrical text known as the Menologium. As Hickes recognized, the list of festivals of the Anglo-Saxon church that makes up this poem segues, toward its close, into something else: clearly, a different poem but written in the same scribal hand as the Menologium. We know that something else as the separate, gnomic text now called Maxims II. For Hickes, it is clearly something special. He states, in a footnote: “At the end of this Calendar there is appended this poem, somewhat in dithyrambics [quasi dithyrambicum], whose first verse appears in written in red capitals. The poem concerns the mores of men, the condition of animate and inanimate natural things; additional subject matter includes the forms, habitations, ethics, and theology described in asyndetic gnomes and maxims, and with such elegance, splendor, and propriety that my Latin is incapable of presenting it.”⁵⁷

Here, at the close of chapter 23, are Anglo-Saxon dithyrambics unimpeded—and, in turn, a critical review of the Pindaric mode. The elegance (elegantia) of the Maxims recalls the elegant (elegans) quality Hickes had attributed to Durham; the splendor here recalls the splendor gladiorum of that shining light in Finnsburh (and, of course, its Pindaric association); and the reference to the asyndetic quality of the gnomes takes us back to Hickes’s earliest reference to the Pindaric manner and the asyndeton of the poet incalescens. The flow of gnomic utterances is now incapable of translation, incapable, in other words, of being constrained by the Latin of the scholar. Modern critics have found this poem similarly “moving,” in large part “because of the way its clear, precise images link up unexpectedly and suggestively.”⁵⁸ Hickes is not far off in his assessment; indeed, he may be the first reader to define this kind of verse as “gnomic,” and he certainly anticipates the legacy of critical response that has long tried to negotiate, in the words of T. A. Shippey, between this poetry’s “barely imaginable purpose and [its] undeniable charm” (p. 12).⁵⁹

Throughout “De Poetica Anglo-Saxonum,” Hickes has sought to imagine both the purpose and, if not the charm, then certainly the power of Old English verse. In its assemblies of that verse may be discerned a chronicle of poetry divinely inspired, a form of critical assessment made, in Dryden’s words, by the presiding ear. In his attentions to the sung, sounded, and heard qualities of poetry, his fascination with its “numbers” and its syllables, and his interest in alliteration, Hickes constructs for Old English verse a public, vocal, lyric quality—a quality of voice that, as he says of alliteration, is fundamentally celebratory. Like Cowley, Hickes found in religious verse something akin to the Pindaric, and his broad associations between that tradition and the Anglo-Saxon offers us a captivating window into how Augustan readers read their literary past.

We thus may think of Hickes as playing a role in what Paul Fry called many years ago “the poet’s calling in the English ode”:⁶⁰ a way of defining the social and public quality of the poetic vocation in specifically generic terms. Hickes makes it possible for us to reimagine Anglo-Saxon poetry as part of an odic, rather than an epic, form. Instead of locating the Anglo-Saxon idiom in the Homeric, and instead of pursuing what Roberta Frank has dubbed “the search for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet” along the models of the epic singer,⁶¹ Hickes seeks to make Old English verse participate in the odic nation building and bardic poet forming of his age. He offers a vision of the poet’s calling, and he makes it possible to reconsider well-known poems in new, and not necessarily narrowly Augustan, ways. The Finnsburh Fragment, in his presentation, becomes something of an Anglo-Saxon Olympian: a mythological reflection on heroic death, framed in the conflagrations of a similarly heroic conflict. Might we then see the Meters of Boethius or Caedmon’s Hymn as way stations in a line of vatic voices stretching from Pindar to Cowley? Could Caedmon’s tale itself, as told in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and subsumed into the Thesaurus’s narrative, be understood as a seventeenth-, and not a seventh-, century account of what Fry calls “the ode from its first appearance [as] a vehicle of ontological and vocational doubt?”⁶²

Such rhetorical questions may return us to Cowley. “We’re ill by these Grammarians us’d,” he claimed at the beginning of his ode “Life.” Perhaps Hickes, too, had been ill used by those who followed him, though some of his contemporaries may have at least intuited what he was doing critically. The antiquarian and ecclesiast Edmund Gibson, in a 1695 letter to Arthur Charlett (a mutual friend of Hickes), seems to get the point of Hickes’s work (though not of his unbridled enthusiasm) on Anglo-Saxon: “Dr H … s has given us a glorious character of their Poetry, and will hardly allow the Ancients to take place of them in that particular. I have read some of it formerly, but could never meet with any thing that relish’d half soe well as Homer or Virgil. It must be granted ’em, that their expressions are full and Lofty, and carry in them something that’s powerful enough. But ’tis at least three years since I medl’d in that way; which has worn off the Little I knew of them.”⁶³ Gibson is clearly in tune with the idioms of the Pindaric, recognizing in the “full and Lofty” quality of the Old English poetic expressions just what Hickes had wanted us to see: a power that could make the Anglo-Saxon stand with Homer and Virgil.

Hickes’s reputation rests uneasily between the dithyrambs of the poetae and the scholarship of the grammatici. His linguistic and textual assemblies were widely praised and deeply influential, even as his critical perspective was apparently ignored by his followers. Wotton abridges this material clear out of existence, and Elizabeth Elstob (perhaps Hickes’s best-known scholarly heir) clearly has no interest whatsoever in the Pindaric associations that frame “De Poetica Anglo-Saxonum.”⁶⁴ By the time Old English verse became the purview of the analyses of nineteenth-century English, German, and Scandinavian philologists—and by the time Beowulf had asserted itself as the defining poem of the Anglo-Saxon canon—Hickes’s rambling Latin and enthusiastic flights, together with his complete ignorance of that epic, may have put off all but the most diligent of readers.

But there is a compelling, critical afterlife to the Thesaurus, one not often explicitly acknowledged by his successors and, I think, one systematically effaced by modern critics of the discipline. True, many copies of the Thesaurus lay unsold at the time of Hickes’s death, and Hickes himself lamented the apparent lack of enthusiasm for his work.⁶⁵ And yet its critical idioms percolated up through later-eighteenth-century reflection. The interest in the lofty and sublime character of Anglo-Saxon poetry, apparently in willful contradiction to just what those poems were about, is clearly due to Hickes’s influence. Joseph Henley took up Hickes’s claims explicitly in his 1726 Introduction to an English Grammar, when he noted that, in “the judgment of Dr. Hickes, … there is an Air of the Sublime in Caedmon … equal to that of the Greatest Masters, whether Greek or Latin.”⁶⁶ John Campbell’s Rational Amusement (1741) applied Hickes’s association of Caedmonian verse with Pindar to define Welsh medieval poetry as “odes,” controlled (much as Hickes’s saw Old English verse controlled) with “wonderful Regularity, Elegance, and Harmony.” Campbell even considered such verses “Pindaricks in Welch.”⁶⁷

Campbell has, most recently, been read bemusedly by Roberta Frank, who cannot quite understand how he could praise the “sublime sentiment,” “furor poeticus,” and “inspired, enthusiastic” outpourings of a poem such as Durham.⁶⁸ So, too, she finds it odd that Robert Henry, in his 1774 History of Great Britain, would locate “that strong propensity to the sublime and ardent strains” in Anglo-Saxon verse or that Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry of the same year, would praise that verse in similar terms, when, apparently, the only poems they really knew in detail were the Battle of Brunanburh and the Death of Edgar. But the point is not that these texts, as Frank states, “seemed to be written by clerics or monastic chroniclers” but that they were printed by Hickes (pp. 18–19). The reading of Old English verse in these later-eighteenth-century environments is shaped by Hickes’s critical contextualizations. Just what Durham, or Brunanburh, or the Death of Edgar may historically have been is not as pressing as what they critically had been made: exemplars of the Anglo-Saxon Pindaric, poems of national celebration, heroic virtue, or—as, specifically, in the case of Durham—of the landscape controlled by a shaping hand and set in contrast to the roiling storms and uncontrolled waters of the Pindar-like poems of the Meters of Boethius or Exodus. In fact, Warton’s opening dissertation “Of the origins of romantic fiction in Europe” is shot through with references to Hickes’s Thesaurus and with an awareness of the Anglo-Saxon literary inheritance clearly shaped by his Pindarism: references to the “Runic odes” and to the “sublime and figurative craft of diction” in the northern poets and, in particular, an extended translation and discussion of the Battle of Brunanburh all bear the stamp of his close reading of Hickes.⁶⁹

Traditional accounts of Anglo-Saxon studies have considered the revival of interest in Old English poetry to have been a product of the later eighteenth century: the age of Gray’s odes, of Johnson’s Dictionary, of Warton’s History, of the Society of Antiquaries, and, ultimately, of Thorkelin’s and Grundtvig’s rediscovery of Beowulf.⁷⁰. Indeed, such a constellation of phenomena has been seen, too, as constituting the discovery—or something of the invention—of literature as we have come to understand it: that is, of an autonomous category of aesthetic experience, human in theme, nationalist in purpose, and concerned with constructing the system of its canonical texts and authors.⁷¹ Hickes offers the possibility of an alternative early English literary history, one recognized by eighteenth-century enthusiasts but eventually effaced by the post-Beowulf ian tradition of epic analysis and philological historicism. And yet the fact remains that, for all his enthusiasm and excess, and for all his seeming wrong-headedness about the Pindaric quality of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Hickes does intuit many of the basic features now recognized as central to it by scholars: the centrality of alliteration; the encomiastic function of heroic narrative; the power of the gnomic.

If George Hickes seems modern, then what of Tolkien? Recently, he has been dubbed nothing less than the “author of the century,” the writer who has most captivated twentieth-century readers and whose fantasies and scholarship have offered touchstones to debates on literature and language, childhood and maturity, politics and personal response.⁷² He remains the best-known scholar of medieval English literature, and his work has been subjected to a range of finely nuanced studies, reading the criticism and the fantasy, his own and Anglo-Saxon poetry, together to reveal his appreciation of the power of philology. T. A. Shippey has defined that power in a benchmark critical account of such dual readings: “The regularity and rigour of its [i.e., philology’s] observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts.”⁷³ As Shippey argues (in his analysis of Tolkien’s detailed, but today largely unread, scholarly article on verb forms in Middle English devotional prose), such rigor can resuscitate a dead, distinctively English society. The implication of his philological inquiries “was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French.” Tolkien’s philological patriotism, not unlike Hickes’s, was, in part, due to a sentimental attachment to the provincial (for Tolkien, it was his ancestral Worcestershire; for Hickes, it was his childhood Yorkshire), where linguistic remnants of Old English still survived in dialect and where the churches, public buildings, and local customs still preserved something of older practices or artifacts. Tolkien’s Old English scribes, in Shippey’s words, “are gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them” (p. 32).

This criticism is but the tip of the great pedestal that has raised Tolkien to iconic status in Old English academic circles.⁷⁴ He is seen as the first original of scholarship: a figure who intuited the truly literary qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry, especially of Beowulf; an English reader who could rescue an Old English literary heritage from interloping German Philologen; a mythologist who could draw on the archetypes of fairyland to script out moral fables for a postwar world. And yet in spite of—or, I venture, because of—his distinctive Englishness and intuition, Tolkien is a critic of the Anglo-Saxon sublime. Much like Hickes, he seeks a moment of almost divine illumination in the philological detail. Like Hickes, too, he seeks to recover not just the texts, forms, and idioms of Anglo-Saxon verse but to define its overarching genre, in this case, the elegy. And like Hickes’s, Tolkien’s is a critical aesthetic motivated by the literary politics of errancy.

Tolkien’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy of 1936, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” sought to save the literary integrity of the poem from the hands of dismembering historians.⁷⁵ Responding to a half-century of philological and archaeological inquiries, “The Monsters and the Critics” redefined Beowulf as both an object of inquiry and a subject of professional discourse. The poem stands not as a repository of information but as an aesthetic whole. Powerful verse overshadows historical content; the thrill of the imagination overtakes our resistance to the improbable; deep themes replace superficial plots; the artifice of form effaces the artifacts of archaeology. Monsters are good, critics are bad; monsters are poets, critics are historians; monsters bring the poem to life, critics kill it.

This is the received version of Tolkien’s account and its reception—an account that is as much a central myth of Anglo-Saxon studies as are, for example, stories of the saving of the poem’s manuscript from the Cotton Library fire in 1731 or arguments about the superiority of Friedrich Klaeber’s edition over all others.⁷⁶ Of course, that these are myths does not deny their occasion or their import. But that they are myths means that their retelling brings their tellers and their audiences into a shared bond of professional identity. They have been elevated as the great salvational moments in Beowulf scholarship. Rescue and restoration (what Shippey called philology’s ability to “resurrect”) are the centerpieces of Old English scholarly narrative. Nowhere is rhetoric of revival more vivid than in the opening of Tolkien’s lecture. He begins by noting that the critical tradition of Old English studies has overwhelmed the original texts: “The original books are nearly buried.” He goes on:

Tolkien begins by disinterring the dead. From a buried book and a deceased scholar, he conjures up a work of art. And he does so, first, by recovering the poem’s proper name. Instead of calling it The Beowulf, “as it used to be called,” he renames it simply Beowulf. He strips the poem of its classical patina (as we call Homer’s works The Iliad and The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid). He eponymizes its title (the poem and the hero now become interchangeable). And he encapsulates both its plot and its theme in such eponymy. It is a poem about “man on earth” (p. 23), a poem about its hero. Names and naming are a controlling strategy of Tolkien’s argument. Not only do we now have a new poem, but we have the name of the originary figure of Old English studies, Joseph Bosworth, the first chaired professor in the field at Oxford. By contrast, we have only the anonymities of writing on the poem, the unnamed critics who, between Bosworth and Tolkien, are lumped together under the distancing epithet of Beowulfiana: “It has been said of Beowulf …,” but we dare not ask who said it.

Tolkien, perhaps like St. Augustine, knows when he has read enough, and what he has read tells him that most writing on the poem has been marginal—or, to put it more precisely, that what has been said of the marginality of Beowulf is more accurately true of its criticism: “It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges…. I think it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy, far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art” (pp. 3–4). What precisely Tolkien means by these terms—poem, art, criticism—will become clear by the lecture’s end. In fact, the business of “The Monsters and the Critics” is as much to define these key terms as it is to appreciate the poem through them. Tolkien is interested in a poetry of power. At times, he says, the “poetry [is] so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content” (p. 5). Such power, though, is not an invitation to analysis but instead lies as an opening to appreciation. The legacy of W. P. Ker, for example, has led some to label Beowulf an “enigmatic poem,” an appellation Tolkien clearly would resist. What, in the end, restores the poem’s literary value is its sense of unity, its blend of form and content: “Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in it the elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony” (p. 31). This is high praise, but it is also high elegy, words spoken over what was labeled on the first page of the lecture a “buried” book. Compare this phrasing, and Tolkien’s encomiastic idiom throughout, with that great eulogistic moment at the close of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Mark Antony on Brutus is to Tolkien on the poem. It is not just that both speakers praise the heroic dead; not just that both invest in a language of manhood and deft control. Both make the object of the eulogy the emblem of a national identity. The poem Beowulf becomes the best of the Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf, Tolkien writes as he moves toward his close, “is not an ‘epic,’ not even a magnified ‘lay.’ No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather ‘elegy.’ It is an heroic-elegiac poem; and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge” (p. 33). By refusing to affiliate the poem with the genres of the classics, Tolkien goes back to his opening critical feint: renaming the text without the classicizing definite article. No Swedish prince or treacherous friend defeats the hero—in other words, there is no tragic moment of martial interchange or deceit, the very stuff of both the classical and the Shakespearean stage. Beowulf does not fall with “et tu, Brute,” on his lips. But all this Englishness is but a ruse. The word “elegy” itself is borrowed from the Greek, regardless of how native is the dragon that inspires it. Tolkien is searching now for something close to the sublime, something that he can only express in the terms of the classical tradition. For in his great appeal to Beowulf’s universality, Tolkien extends this paradox of criticism: a classic that is not a classic, an English poem that invites, perhaps at times unwittingly, discussion in the idioms of the classical and not the vernacular philologist. “At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts—lixte se leoma ofer landa fela—and there is the sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps” (p. 35). And yet so, too, is Tolkien maddened by the sound of harps. Not for him the affiliations with the lyric, the Pindaric, the heroic Greek that would appeal so to George Hickes. But, like Hickes, Tolkien cannot resist the light. Recall, now, how Hickes found in the Finnsburh Fragment that splendid sword-light that illuminated both the drama of the poem and the meaning of his literary past. Swurd-leoma, for Hickes, led him to the great philological digression I mapped out earlier, and it led him to direct association with Pindar. For Tolkien, the light only seems to be vernacular. His discussion here is, in the end, as classical as anything in the Thesaurus. What he has done, in essence, is to rewrite the experience of Beowulf as a classical vision: Scipio Africanus looking down upon this little world, as he does in Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio; or, in a moment inspired by this late Roman text, the close of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, when the dead hero looks down from his heaven on “this litel spot of erthe” and hears not the harps of men but the “hevenyssh melodie” of the “erratik sterres.”⁷⁸ Tolkien’s harmony is not the sound of harps or lyres but the music of Old English verse.

“The Monsters and the Critics” remains an amazing piece of literary criticism, even though it seems so anticritical. The transhistorical appreciation of a literary work outweighs whatever “enigmatic” theoretical agendas it invites or, for that matter, whatever narrowly historical conditions that fostered its creation and transmission. The purpose of its criticism is to define the poem’s formal unity, to celebrate its quality as an aesthetic object, and—this, it seems to me, is the real legacy of Tolkien’s lecture—to construct a way of writing about it. What “The Monsters and the Critics” does is to bequeath a rhetoric of Beowulf criticism: a notion not so much of what the poem is about as of the proper ways of writing about what it is about. The strategies of celebration and citation, of elegiac tone and eulogistic purpose, are all presented here for the first time, and they control the fundamental assumptions of Old English scholarship for the next fifty years.

These fundamental assumptions, however, are not those defining the position of a critic or the constructions of a method. They are, instead, those of a genealogy of critical auctores. There is a patrimony to the practice of Old English studies, traceable through the chaired professorships, dissertation directors, and textual critics who have constituted not just the instructive personnel of Anglo-Saxon but the living memory of its history. There was an anecdote in circulation in the early 1980s that before the publication of the Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature by Stanley Greenfield and Fred Robinson the single most important piece of information on the history of Anglo-Saxon scholarship was Robinson’s home phone number. Such a tale, which I myself heard on a panel at the Modern Language Association of America Convention, says much about the personalization of the field. Its reliance on oral lore and institutionalized figures led, as a consequence, to the construction of a coterie or club of those sharing in the vital social codes and currency of academic commerce. Old English studies re-created, in its academic practice, the comitatus it imagined for the heroic performers in and of its fictions.

Yet, even when the Greenfield-Robinson Bibliography was published, its editors maintained the inherited construction of the field as an inheritance. They offered this obeisance (complete with untranslated German) to define the scope of their project: “In deciding what constitutes Old English ‘literature’ as opposed to other types of writing in the vernacular, we have in general been guided by the formulation of Richard Wülker in his Grundriss of 1885: ‘Ausgeschlossen habe ich alle Denkmäler, welche man in einer Literaturgeschichte ausschliessen würde, weil sie kein selbstständiges Interesse haben’ (p. vi).” What are the presuppositions behind this avowal? On the one hand, they purport to eschew self-conscious reflection on the definitions of the subject or the methodology of study in favor of intuition and common sense: a privileging of the “selbstständiges Interesse,” those things of self-apparent interest. Literary works for Wülker, much as for Tolkien, are Denkmäler, monuments or memorials, with an aesthetic autonomy independent from cultural conditions or social production. But note that this is not a guide to understanding but a principle of exclusion, and Greenfield and Robinson announce that they have occasionally departed from its strictures. Their Bibliography includes entries on Aelfric’s Grammar, “since it is a work by the leading literary figure of his age,” as well as sections on Old English scientific writings and late Old English texts, “including a few which some scholars have preferred to call early Middle English (e.g., ‘The Grave’ and ‘William the Conqueror’), but nothing that is generally regarded as Middle English has been included.” Finally, they announce, again with an untranslated appeal to German authority, “The distinction between literary and historical scholarship is not always clear…. As Wülker ruefully remarked, ‘Überhaupt liess sich die Grenze zwischen dem, was aufzunehmen, und dem, was wegzulassen war, nicht immer so scharf ziehen.’”⁷⁹

Rhetorically, these statements from the Greenfield-Robinson Bibliography sustain the citational and patrimonial program of Tolkien. Wülker stands in relationship to the modern bibliographers as Bosworth stands for Tolkien, as the originary authority to whom one constructs appeals of control. Both Tolkien and Greenfield-Robinson hold to the fundamental, and therefore tacit, assumptions of the autonomy of the literary text. Indeed, it is that very autonomy that defines something as a literary text and thus enables one to demarcate the Grenze between it and the historical. In these terms, literature, as well as literary scholarship, is to be distinguished from history. But it can also be associated with certain social values or ethical positions. The tone of Tolkien, much like the tone of Greenfield and Robinson, is always recuperative. For the latter, Aelfric is recuperated as “the leading literary figure of his age,” a named author in a world of anonymous scops. Similarly, certain texts such as “The Grave” and “William the Conqueror” are retrieved from that unsure midworld between Old and Middle English, though just who has “generally regarded [other works] as Middle English” is never made explicit.

Tolkien’s criticism and Greenfield-Robinson’s bibliographic scholarship are linked not just in their rhetoric or in their celebration but in their sense of an institutional purpose. They relocate the student in a sure landscape of historical and personal accounts: of scholars passing on endowed chairs, of publications savored in great libraries, of universities that stand in spite of social unrest or political change. Much has been made of Tolkien’s role in all this and, in particular, of the creation of his academic and public career. But little has been said about those institutional documents, and I turn now to two texts that illustrate the errancies of Tolkien’s scholarship and heroism and mark the Anglo-Saxonist as the returning hero.

Apart from “The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien’s best-known work of literary criticism is his 1953 essay “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.”⁸⁰ Ostensibly a reading of the Battle of Maldon, the piece is largely taken up with Tolkien’s own poetic fantasy on the return of Beorhtnoth’s body to his homeland and, in turn, with a mediation on the ofermod (pride or reckless confidence) that led Beorhtnoth to give in to the Vikings and permit the defeat of the English and the loss of his own life. But Tolkien had voiced many of these thematic concerns over a quarter of a century before, in his letter of application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.⁸¹ The letter of application and the “Homecoming” lecture effectively bracket Tolkien’s academic career. The first was written in 1925, when he was thirty-three and had barely published anything. The second was published in 1953, when he was sixty-one; The Lord of the Rings had just been finished, and the major philological work of his career had been completed. For all their differences in purpose and their distance in time, they are fundamentally the same.

The letter of application is a story of homecoming, an account of personal belonging shaped through scholarships, schools, and teachers. Tolkien begins by writing out his academic genealogy: Exeter College exhibitioner; classical moderations; first-class honors in English; the Lancashire Fusiliers; work on the Oxford English Dictionary; Dr. Bradley’s assistant. Then, we get the five years at Leeds. “I began,” he says, “with five hesitant pioneers out of a School … of about sixty members.” The academic success story of philology at Leeds is a story of numbers. Tolkien claims to have increased the number of students in the area and to have filled classes in a spectrum of courses ranging from Old and Middle English through Icelandic and Welsh. But this is also a story of indoctrination: of domesticating the wilds of philology and making it a fit field for the young: “Philology, indeed, appears to have lost for these students its connotations of terror if not of mystery.” It is impossible—at least for me—to read this letter without thinking of it as a professorial response to the coastguard’s question of the hero in Beowulf. I have to know, he says, just who you are and where you come from. “Hwæt syndon ge?” he asks, and then: “ofost is selest / to gecyðanne hwanan eowre cyme syndon” (it is best to know soon where you come from and why [Beowulf 237, 256–57]). And Beowulf responds. He tells the coastguard of his birth, his father, his exploits, and his boasts (260–85). The litany of Leeds accomplishments for Tolkien fits rhetorically into this paradigm, as does the boast—it is now nothing less—for appointment. As Beowulf says,

Like his hero, Tolkien has cleansed a place of mystery and terror. He has made philology safe for the young, sought out, too, diplomatic rapproachments between linguistics and literary study, two areas that had been fraught with confrontation: “An active discussion-class has been conducted, on lines more familiar in schools of literature than of language, which has borne fruit in friendly rivalry and open debate with the corresponding literary assembly.” Tolkien plays the diplomat here. The linguists, he had stated earlier, are at Leeds “in no way isolated or cut off from the general life and work of the department.” And such détente, if not collaboration, will be his goal in the Oxford chair: “If elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair I should endeavour to make productive use of the opportunities which it offers for research; to advance, to the best of my ability, the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both; and to continue in a wider and more fertile field the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young” (emphasis mine). These are the claims of academic politics. Tolkien’s homecoming will bring a new peaceable kingdom to Oxford literature and language. Indeed, the conception of the enemy here is one of misunderstanding, a conception central, too, to his views of the political tensions both in Beowulf and Maldon. And, of course, there is enthusiasm. Tolkien’s final claim returns the reader to the opening of his letter, where he notes that the chair would “afford such opportunity of expressing and communicating an instructed enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon studies” (emphasis mine).

Just what is this “instructed enthusiasm”? Its odd, almost oxymoronic pairing of the controlled and the excitable seems, at first reading, but a symptom of the English academic rhetoric of the age. But behind it, I believe, lies the idiom of George Hickes and the legacy of a conception of Old English poetry and scholarship as precisely a form of instructed enthusiasm. Recall Hickes’s discussion of Caedmon and the power of the lyric poet. “To compose poems and to sing with an educating spirit were taught to be one and the same thing.” This notion of the educating spirit, of inspiration calibrated to a profound pedagogy, resonates with Tolkien’s vision of a philological professor. His goal is to instruct in enthusiasm, not just to foster an appreciation of language or literature but to stimulate an appreciation for the voice of Anglo-Saxon verse.

More than a quarter of a century later, ensconced in his chair, Tolkien himself could give voice to that verse. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” presents itself as an assay of ofermod. It seeks to understand the nature of heroic action in The Battle of Maldon, to define its hero, Beorhtnoth, in the light of other early English literary figures, and to characterize not just the literary but the cultural idiom of that fragmentary poem’s narrator. Terms such as “uttermost endurance,” “indomitable will,” “richness,” “chivalry,” “heroism,” “art,” and “thought” pepper Tolkien’s readings. By the end, “The Homecoming” has become as much a reflection on the elevating aesthetics of Anglo-Saxon literature as “The Monsters and the Critics” had been.

The poem deals with the discovery and return of the fallen body of Beorhtnoth. Torhthelm and Tidwald survey the battle scene, express horror at the piles of fallen men, discover Beorhtnoth’s body, and return it for a proper burial. But, in the process, they reveal two ways of looking at the world. Torhthelm is the imaginative poet: someone who always sees fantastic figures lurking behind everyday occurrences, who breaks into evocative verse at the slightest provocation, and who can rephrase the hard facts of war and sorrow in terms of the myths and metaphors of northern European narrative. In Tolkien’s words of introduction, he is a youth, whose “head is full of old lays concerning the heroes of northern antiquity.”⁸² Tidwald is the hardheaded realist, an old farmer who constantly feels compelled to remind Torhthelm that the sounds of night are not the cries of the ghosts or wolf-men of a terrifying and mysterious past but rather just the hoots of owls in an ordinary present. He takes the omens and anxiety of his companion and recasts them as brute facts and actions.

For Tidwald, all this is just what his “eyes fancied.” “My lad, you’re crazed,” he says.

One can imagine here not just the voice of the old Saxon but the voice of the professor himself. “Your fancies and your fears make foes of nothing.” So, too, said Tolkien, in effect, to his Leeds students. To have removed the “terror if not [the] mystery” of philology had been his task there, and his imagined warrior now faces something of a similar challenge. Tidwald takes Torhthelm’s fears and makes them everyday. Owls, to him, are not omens; they are only owls. Torhthelm is seeking something—Beorhtnoth’s body but, in essence, really something more—but it is Tidwald who carries the lantern. They see the gruesome dead before them, but Torhthelm sees only what the poets tell him. As he states, in language rich with simile and metaphor:

He looks for what, as he says, “the songs tell us.” But Tidwald looks only for what is there.

So might the scholar say in his study, poring over strange texts with little light and fading vision. Tidwald sees these dead as just “dead and done-for.” But Torhthelm sees vivid—if not vivified—horror in their faces.

When they find Beorhtnoth’s body, this debate goes on. Torhthelm gives vent to a great dirge, an elegy to Beorhtnoth and to all fallen heroes, proffered in rhetoric so rich that we can only marvel at Tolkien’s ability to imitate the language of his poetic inheritance. But Tidwald brushes all aside.

Tidwald must bring us back to earth. He must remind his companion, and Tolkien’s readers, that the landscape of the battlefield is not the realm of poetry or the imagination but the purview of the modern world. In Christian days, it is the “monks [who] mourn him.” Beorhtnoth—now like all modern dead—will be led home not with the kennings of the past but with the “learned Latin” of our modern rituals. “If you spent less in speech,” Tidwald reprimands Torhthelm, “you would speed better.”

The roads are rough for English men in Tolkien’s day, as well. Tidwald rephrases Torhthelm’s verbal flourishes into the blunt vernacular of rattle and bump, and, in doing so, he poses the emergent question for this essay and, indeed, for Tolkien’s philological career. For what is the place of the poetic in philological inquiry? What are the possible relationships between the Torhthelms and the Tidwalds of the world?

To answer such a question, Tolkien spends the final third of “The Homecoming” arguing for the poetic power of the idea of ofermod. Its meaning, he suggests, lies not so much in any exact translation of moral condition or martial action. Instead, we need to understand the term evocatively—as part of a larger history of heroic largesse stretching from Beowulf through Gawain and the Green Knight. Whatever character flaw Beorhtnoth may have had was formed by his “aristocratic nature” framed in poetry: “Why did Beorhtnoth do this? Owing to a defect in character, no doubt; but a character, we may surmise, not only formed by nature, but moulded also by ‘aristocratic tradition’, enshrined in tales and verse of poets now lost save for echoes” (p. 15). For Tolkien, Beorhtnoth’s “folly” is, in the end, really more a literary trope than a moral failure. If he is “magnificent … but certainly wrong,” the consequences of his error should be left to poets and not politicians (or perhaps, even, philologists):

Poets, Tolkien avers, are above chivalry, even if nobles are not—and this seems to me to be precisely the point of the entire “Homecoming” performance. For what Tolkien has done is to present both the poetic and the critical interpretation of the Battle of Maldon. For the latter, he explores the literary and linguistic resonances of ofermod; details the historical environment in which the battle happened; locates the poem on the continuum of literary history. But, for the former, he places himself above such matters and makes Beorhtnoth’s homecoming—and even Tolkien’s own—a matter of the personal sublime.

Torhthelm and Tidwald are the two sides of the problem and the two voices of Tolkien. He begins the essay, let us say, in Tidwald’s voice, with a factual account of names and dates. But he ends in the voice of Torhthelm, with an appeal to the poetry and with the recognition that, just as in Torhthelm’s youthful memory, the meaning of the poem as a whole lies in the “tales and verse of poets now lost save for echoes.” But Tolkien’s two characters embody the controlling conflict in Old English studies as a whole: debates between philology and literary criticism. In this, they go back to “The Monsters and the Critics” and to the letter of application for the Oxford chair. For, in the end, what are we meant to see in the text of Beowulf or on the battlefields of Maldon? Should we attend, like Torhthelm, to the monsters lurking just beneath the field of vision; or, like Tidwald, shall we ask only for the clear light of scholarship? Tolkien had figured himself forth as something of a slayer of those monsters in his application for the chair. He has removed from his Leeds students the air of “terror if not mystery” from philology and replaced it with “an active discussion-class … on lines more familiar in schools of literature than of language.” The mysterious may find itself dispelled, and the more familiar territory of the classroom is revealed.

Once again, we have the image of illumination. Philology throws light on things, and the savor of both history and legend, its “great drama,” lies in little syllables. And yet what syllables these are! The name Attila is, in fact, not Hunnish but Gothic, clearly a loan word from his Germanic-speaking minions. It comes from the Gothic word atta, the baby-talk term for father, and attila thus must mean little father (p. 447n). What thrills the nerves of Tolkien, then, is the encoding of the father-son relationship in such a little word. What his philology now makes “almost vividly present” is the vision of the father passing on the legacy of literary criticism to the son: of praising him for his Tidwald-like delivery (“clear, generally unemphatic”) but, at the same time, recognizing his Torhthelm-like skill at vivid presentation. The father and the son—and, in turn, the whole genealogical quality of Anglo-Saxon scholar-ship—find themselves now illuminated in the philological sublime.

Tolkien here may, in some sense, pass the torch to Christopher, and (in language resonant of the encomium to Beorhtnoth) he ends his letter calling the paper “of vast nobility and importance.” He was, he wrote, able to “retire to bed really happy.” And maybe, too, could Tidwald and Torhthelm. For their recovery of Beorhtnoth’s body reflects on the nature of Old English scholarship itself. The rescuing of literary texts from the pedantries of philology or the excesses of a critical theory is, as I announced at the beginning of this chapter, the defining narrative of Anglo-Saxon studies. Beorhtnoth’s body is the corpus of that work, the body of materials marked, mutilated, and beheaded and yet nonetheless enshrined in the institutions of the learned. Like Maldon itself, a scarred, headless fragment of a text, his body is the object of a loving recovery by those assigned to do it. Whether we read it, and all literature, like Tidwald or Torhthelm, is, of course, the lesson of “The Homecoming.” But, at the very least, we can, like Tolkien after his son’s lecture, retire to bed happy knowing that that corpus lies safely enshrined among the learned.

For many critics of my generation, such a celebration of the literary corpus—let alone bedtime complacencies about its canonicity—would be alien. The hierarchies valorized by Tolkien and his heirs were those of inheritance, of genealogy and social ritual, that placed the literary and academic body where it was thought to belong. Of course, much late-twentieth-century theory has challenged these verities. From deconstruction’s often playful reversal of familiar polarities through the New Historicism’s supposition that the culturally marginal is the symbolically central, academic discourse has, in essence, seemed to answer Tolkien’s opening critical feint. “It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges…. I think it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it.” So some had said of theoretically minded readings of Old English verse—and yet some of those very theorists explicitly set out to find the marginal at the center.

Few things in Beowulf have captivated critics of my stripe as much as the sword hilt that the hero recovers from Grendel’s mere. Midway through the poem, after Grendel has been killed, his mother has avenged his death, and Beowulf sets out to kill this second monster. The hero travels down beneath the bloody lake that, legends say, holds her home. Beowulf finds his evil quarry, fights her hand to hand, and sees the great sword Hrunting (a gift from the once skeptical but now sympathetic Unferth) fail upon her form. He spies another giant sword lying there. He lifts this sword, cuts off Grendel’s mother’s head, and then a light appears and the water clears. Then, he cuts Grendel’s head off, and, in the monster’s blood, the blade melts. Beowulf thus returns to the surface, and to Hrothgar’s court, with two souvenirs: the head and the hilt. When Hrothgar accepts the hilt, back in Heorot, he examines it and finds it engraved (the poem’s word is “writen”) with a story about a great clash of giants, a flood, and the retributions of the Lord. And written on the hilt, apparently in runes (þurh run-stafas rihte gemearcod), is the name of its first owner (Beowulf, 1687–98).

I shared with many critics a preoccupation with this object.⁸⁵ It stood as a figure for the poem itself. It reminded me of that moment in the Iliad, when Bellerophon bears the enigmatic inscription—the semata lugra, or baleful signs—that will eventually kill him. Both these objects functioned as unique written texts in poems of an oral origin (or, at the very least, poems that similarly were concerned with representing their own oral texture in repeated scenes of bardic performance). The hilt provides the opportunity for Hrothgar, then, to function as a kind of reader, and his so-called sermon that follows this scene in the poem reflects on the social function of literature and the nature of performance. There is a tension in the alliterative pairings of the words “run” and “raed” (writing and speech, or secret and open counsel), one that appears throughout Germanic poetry and that suggests something of a hermeneutic impulse in craft-literate societies.

The sword hilt stands as the nexus of theory and philology. As the only piece of writing in Beowulf—however obliquely envisioned—its very entry into the narrative replaces the primacy of speech with the originality of writing. It challenges the authoritative presence of performance by the authorial stance of the incised text. When the hilt becomes the object of critical analysis, it stands as a metonymy for the poem as a whole, the center of the story. One might consider it an ideal place to locate the textualization of Anglo-Saxon culture, the place to link the inheritances of the Germanic and the ministrations of the Christian, and the place to begin a substantial query of the oral-formulaic quality of early English verse (and, in turn, the embrace of that theory by professional Old English scholars). And yet the modern theoretical fascination with the hilt ironically reenacted the very narrative of Anglo-Saxon scholarship itself. By making it the center of the poem, the critic replaced a performance with an artifact. As the recovered object from the mere, the hilt embodied that controlling myth of scholarly recovery that has so dominated discourse in the field. For, by miming Beowulf’s own act of retrieval and Hrothgar’s own act of interpretation, the modern critic projects a heroic hermeneutic all his or her own. The true act of recovery here, the true act of salvation, is the act of critically interpreting the poem.

I once had argued vigorously for this position.⁸⁶ I had claimed that, by representing a textual self-consciousness within the poem, the hilt may be recovered as the object of a theoretical inquiry concerned with the self-referentiality of texts. By enabling the mimetic replication of recovery and restitution, the critical valorization of the hilt could illustrate what Paul de Man saw as the inherent tension at the heart of theory (the ironization of the language and the metalanguage) or what New Historicism came to see as the paradox of the master’s tools (in the words of Aram Veeser, “that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes”).⁸⁷. Finally, I suggested that by seeking to replace the traditional centers of Beowulf criticism with an object relegated to its margins, the theoretically minded reading of the hilt invites critiques of traditional Old English scholarship—a scholarship that found its rhetoric and ideology in Tolkien’s original gesture of replacement.

Reviewing these responses, I see now that this episode in Beowulf stands as but a way station on the search for the sublime. The critic’s journey mimes the hero’s, and the sword hilt becomes the place where the modern, textually minded reader seeks to find the written artifact in what has long been seen as but the legacy of oral performance. The hilt emerges from the mere as damaged: as headless, enigmatic, and seemingly useless as the battered body of Beorhtnoth in Tolkien’s poem. And my fascination with the hilt may also link me with another Tolkienian moment. In listening to his son’s lecture, Tolkien notices something seemingly ancillary to the talk that nonetheless illuminates the subject—and, more importantly, himself. The hilt is the illuminating moment, the swurd-leoma akin to Finnsburh’s fragmentary light that so inspired Hickes. Lixte se leoma, leoht inne stod. When Beowulf cuts off Grendel’s mother’s head, the light appears, and the place brightens up (Beowulf, 1570). The sword blade melts away, and all that is left is the runic hilt. But this Old English formulaic phrase reminds us of that moment earlier in the poem, when Beowulf and his men first see Heorot from their ship: lixte se leoma ofer landa fela (its light shone over many lands [Beowulf, 311]). This is the line that Tolkien quotes when he imagines Grendel coming. It is the light of the literary sublime, the light that maddens the monster almost as much as the sound of harps does. For all the claims of theory, we are still searching for the light.

And so is Seamus Heaney. Perhaps the most touted rescue of Old English poetry in recent years has been his translation of Beowulf.⁸⁸ Doled out, in tantalizing bits, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the translation was spurred on by the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and it now stands as the first major literary text that students will encounter in the volume.⁸⁹ Heaney’s Beowulf is thus already instantly canonical (in a way that few translations ever get to be), and yet it carries with it something of a double imprimatur. For in addition to its placement in The Norton Anthology, it comes from the hand of our canonical poet: the Nobel prize–winning Irishman, whose lyrics have chronicled the growth of an expressive literary and political self-consciousness. Heaney has always had a taste for the linguistically archaic—for the sound of early speech, for the etymological resonances in both English and Irish, for the exquisite play of history and language.⁹⁰

But in his Beowulf, Heaney’s philology was greeted with some skepticism by professional Anglo-Saxonists. The translation of the first word, “Hwæt,” as “So,” in what Heaney states is a glib impersonation of the “Scullion speak” of his own family retainers, was an obvious point of ingress for those, like T. A. Shippey, who would find in this translation “two folk narratives: a personal one and an academic one.”⁹¹ For Nicholas Howe, “‘So’ sounds too understated, too domestic for the start of a poem such as Beowulf.” The deep, epic past seems flattened out; the “tight, compressed style” of the poem finds itself colloquial, almost, at times, too “folksy” in this version. But, of course, it is a folksiness of an embattled folk. As Howe points out, this is a translation come out of an imaginary “Whitby-sur-Moyla,” a place half Anglo-Saxon and half northern Irish, joined by an improbable French preposition that, ironically and historically, links both.⁹² Heaney’s Beowulf is thus an event, akin to Hickes’s or Tolkien’s confrontations with Old English poetry: an evocation of the philological sublime, an attempt to place the poetry in a tradition of a European literary history, and an engagement with the errors—literal as well as metaphorical—of the text.

From the start, this translation stands as an act of personal redemption. Like Tolkien, whom he cites approvingly, Heaney begins his introduction by naming. To call something by a name is to gain power over it, a theme obsessively striped through his own early verse, and Heaney here begins: “The poem called Beowulf….” Called by whom? By the poem itself? Surely not. By critics? Well, we see none but Tolkien. Calling will be the theme of Heaney’s introduction, for the question really lies in just what this text is. There is something delightfully strange about the poem, he admits. “Readers coming to the poem for the first time are likely to be as delighted as they are discomfited by the strangeness of the names and the immediate lack of known reference points.” He goes on.

Notice the vocabulary here: “enshrined,” “native epic,” “the dark ages,” “dispel.” There is the contrast not just between the classical and the vernacular but between the sacred and the profane, the elevated and the native, the lucent and the dark. Part of Heaney’s job is thus to illuminate in the root sense of that word, to bring a light unto the darkness. Such imagery will be familiar to readers of Heaney’s earlier poetry: “All I know,” he announces in “The Forge,” “is a door into the dark.” To dispel, in his introduction, is to demystify, to scatter whatever spells may have been cast by the poetry’s dark magic. So when Grendel appears “as a kind of dog-breath in the dark” (p. xviii), he carries with him the smell not just of the fearful monsters of the distant past but of the still familiar creatures who inhabit Heaney’s literary barnyards: the drowned feral cats of “The Early Purges”; the rogue bull of “The Outlaw”; or the weird “turnip-man’s lopped head” at Halloween that

Such poetry rings with an almost uncanny familiarity for anyone accustomed to the shape of Grendel’s habitation—here rendered in the voice of Heaney’s Hrothgar.

These creatures live in an “unhallowed light.”

So, to dispel the poem’s puzzlement, Heaney relies on some critical verities. He stresses the poem’s “mythic potency,” alludes to Yeats, and calls up archetypes of phantasms, agons, and deep imagery. The poem’s use of gold—“gleaming solidly in underground vaults, on the breasts of queen or the arms and regalia of warriors on the mead benches”—becomes, in Heaney’s vision, something like the glories of that earlier Irish poet’s Byzantium, “persisting underground as an affirmation of a people’s glorious past and an elegy for it” (p. xvii). The transience of earthly wealth finds its survival in the language of the poet. Beowulf is not so much an elegy for a past age as the occasion for an elegiac reading. It reflects on the ways in which poetic language can, paradoxically, both inhume the past and bring it back imaginatively to life. Writing of the poem’s monsters, Heaney observes that the poem needs them “as figures who call up and show off Beowulf’s physical might and his superb gifts as a warrior” (p. xviii). But surely what he means is that the poem needs them as figures who call up and show off the poet’s imaginative might and his superb gifts as a storyteller—for which we may read, as well, Heaney’s own recognition that they pose a challenge to his own gifts as a translator.

And, with each death, there comes not just the keening of a person but the lament of a people. Politics—not Swedish wars or English dynastic disturbance but modern, everyday conflict—is never far from this Beowulf. Episodes such as the well-known “Father’s lament” rise, he avers, “like emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure.”

This great extended reading offers up a vision of the postcolonial sublime. Like all sublime experiences, it trades in fragments, in the burst of “lyric intensity” (a phrase that could come right out of an Augustan or a Romantic reader of Longinus). The brilliant metaphor—“the keel of the poetry”—takes us back to the stormy seas not just of Beowulf but of the Cowleyan Pindaric. And where that keel is set is in the “element of pure comprehension,” a phrase that recalls, as well, Tolkien’s grand praise of the poem’s “elements … all most nearly in harmony.” The light of fire rises as it does throughout so many of the texts I have surveyed here, and the political resonances of these passages in Beowulf come for Heaney (as all sublime experiences must come) in immediate recognition. And, if that recognition helps us “find ourselves the better,” it may be a betterment as much aesthetic or spiritual as political, a betterment akin to Longinus’s own sense of hupselon, elevation. The soul “takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it itself had produced what it had heard.”⁹³

And yet it is Heaney himself who is producing what we hear. His own translation stands, in this discussion, as the vehicle of, as well as testimony to, the sublime experience. And such translation is the agon of his age. If Norton’s invitation opened up a door into the dark—if this is, to recall the phrasing of the early section of his introduction, Heaney’s encounter with a dark age of poetry—then it is philology that turns on the light. Reviewing his experience of early English language in school, in the university, in the shards of the words that still survive in local dialect, Heaney remarks how he discovered the true meaning of the Old English verb “þolian.” It means “to suffer,” but it survives, too, in British, Irish, and American dialects: “What I was experiencing as I kept meeting up with thole on its multicultural odyssey was the feeling which Osip Mandelstam once defined as a ‘nostalgia for world culture.’ And this was a nostalgia I didn’t even know I suffered until I experienced its fulfillment in this little epiphany. It was as if, on the analogy of baptism by desire, I had undergone something like illumination by philology” (p. xxvi).

Much like Tolkien listening, in old age, to his son’s presentation, Heaney undergoes illumination by philology. The study of the word reveals not just a history of culture but a history of the self. While Tolkien’s fascination with atta, attila, placed him in the role of little father to his newborn academic son, Heaney’s obsession with þolian makes him now the rightful son and heir to generations of “my father’s people.” “I realized,” he writes, that he wanted Beowulf to sound as if it were “speakable by one of those relatives” (p. xxvii). But if this is a philological move, it is also a rhetorical one. Not only does it jar his reader into recognition; not only does it move us into the sharing of Heaney’s brilliant “epiphany.” It recalls, too, the clear directives of rhetorical theory—the very principles of argument laid out in the Rhetorica ad Herennium for schoolboys of a millennium and a half. I have already quoted this passage in my introduction, but it bears repeating now as it affirms the tropes of Heaney’s turnings:

Translating Beowulf becomes a return to the past, an encounter with the philological sublime that takes us back to the poet’s childhood, to the overarching concerns of paternity and inheritance that mark the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies. The Scullions function, rhetorically, as Bosworth does for Tolkien, or Wülker for Stanley Greenfield and Fred Robinson, or Tolkien himself for legions of Old English critics, as the invocation of a paternalistic authority, as the source of philological knowledge and literary judgment. Even when Heaney admits he is wrong, he has the family, in essence, to back him up. The Norton Anthology’s appointed scholarly chaperone was Alfred David, and, as Heaney notes in a concluding acknowledgement: “Al’s responses were informed by scholarship and by a lifetime’s experience of teaching the poem, so they were invaluable. Nevertheless, I was often reluctant to follow his advice and persisted many times in what we both knew were erroneous ways.” Heaney persists in his errors, I think, much as Beorhtnoth persisted—at least, in Tolkien’s interpretation—in his. Both follow a higher calling, one not really moral but literary, and the arbiter of error in both cases must remain not the philologist but the poet. Heaney’s authority, even when he really is wrong, lies in rhetoric of the inheritance he has established in his introduction: the sure voice of the Scullions, the unimpeachable rectitude of the political experience that he, as his kin, have undergone. If Alfred David brings to Beowulf a “lifetime’s experience of teaching the poem,” Heaney brings a lifetime’s experience of having lived it.

But, in the end, for all the politics of Heaney’s verse, and for all the politicizing gestures of his introduction to the Beowulf translation, I find him more poetic than political. And, in sum, I think this true of Anglo-Saxon studies in the large. I have called this chapter an elegy, and I mean this appellation in a clutch of interlocking ways. For I have focused on the elegiac quality of Anglo-Saxon scholarship itself: its fascinations with the past, with a nostalgic re-creation of events, with the genres of ode and elegy, and with the controlling interest in its own disciplinary inheritance. But I have also called my work an elegy because I seek to praise the as-yet-inhumed body of its discipline. Rather than dismissal, drudgery, and darkness, I find in its history illumination. And, if there remains a future for Old English, it may lie less with the ministrations of philology (new or old) or with the polemics of theory than it does with a return to the poetry itself. Anglo-Saxon studies has continuously recapitulated the controlling idioms of its subject: journeys of exile and return; moments of enlightenment; recoveries of powerful, inscrutable objects. I have traced such a rhetoric of scholarship not just to call attention to its feints or fallacies but to work through it—to pass in and out of philological inquiry in order to return to literature. “We search among the Dead,” wrote Cowley, “for Treasures Buried.” “The original books,” lamented Tolkien, “are nearly buried.” Shall we be Tidwald or Torhthelm in bringing back for ritual interral the decapitated corpus of our hero? Shall we find written texts in Beowulf’s heroic dive? And, if we do, we may find light in Grendel’s dygel lond.