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God's exiles and English verse : on the Exeter anthology of Old English poetry
This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as 'The Exeter Book'. Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text, published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed'n 2006), has re-named the manuscript 'The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry'. The book gives us intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all of the poems of the Anthology.0'God's Exiles and English Verse' is the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.0The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral instruction.
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The Old English Phoenix as a Model of Saintly Embodiment
The Old English poem The Phoenix is often read as a straight-forward allegory for the eternal life that awaits Christians. There has been some recent interest in the poem from scholars working on landscape and animal studies; the poem is frequently put in conversation with the Old English Physiologus because it is also an “animal poem.” This article argues that returning The Phoenix to its manuscript context within the Exeter Book, between the poems Azarias and Juliana, highlights the phoenix’s function as an allegory for explaining complicated issues surrounding sainthood, particularly concerning the body. The phoenix demonstrates virginity and continued chastity, enclosure, and the ability to live in both earthly and divine time, all of which are frequent pillars of holiness in early medieval English hagiography. This study suggests that the grouping of Azarias, The Phoenix, and Juliana within the Exeter Book was an intentional editorial decision made on the basis of shared purpose and theme, and offers a new reading for The Phoenix that forefronts the hagiographical features and didactic interests at play within.
Journal Article
The Wanderer and the Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy
The Old English poem known as The Wanderer has long been said to rely on the device of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in its descriptions of stormy and frozen land- and seascapes. This piece of literary-critical terminology has strong ties to both Romantic and realist aesthetic ideals of the nineteenth century, and this paper outlines the assumptions which underpin the term and questions our continued use of it when discussing The Wanderer. By pointing us towards the external world as a projection of the interior psychological world of the ‘wanderer’ figure, the term obscures two key features of the text. Firstly, the label sweeps to the side the literal significance of the material world to which the poem’s central speaker responds, despite the fact that this landscape bears marks of divine anger and potency and seems to participate in the Augustinian tradition of the degraded Sixth Age of the World. Secondly, the term points us towards a dramatic characterisation of a single heroic-age nobleman in a manner that the text is itself relatively uninterested in pursuing, instead emphasising conditions of exile, isolation, and despair as universalised spiritual problems. Seeing this poem as governed by pathetic fallacy distracts us from such facets, when other interpretive frameworks have more to offer.
Journal Article
Housel and hyhtplega: The Play of the Eucharist in the Exeter Book
This article examines the productive difficulties with which the Exeter Book riddles generate a state of mind appropriate for theological meditation, by considering the reversed violence of Eucharistic remembering and the ludic pleasures of the enigmatic text. I examine closely Riddle 85, which has been unanimously solved as ‘fish and river’ on account of its clear debt to the twelfth Aenigma of Symphosius, and, having acknowledged the attractiveness and the limitations of the one other commonly suggested solution, ‘soul and body’, propose a new solution, ‘the housel inside the body’. This proposed solution shares with ‘soul and body’ the meditation upon the material encountering the immaterial, but it better accounts for the seeming interchangeability of the two parts of this riddle’s solution, by considering the mutual inhering of Christ and communicant in the Eucharist. I read Riddle 85 in the context of Ælfric’s writing on the Eucharist, and also consider the hyhtplega, or joyful play, by which Christ leaps in Christ II, and by which the would-be riddle-solver must contemplate simultaneously a multiplicity of solutions.
Journal Article
Objects That Object, Subjects That Subvert: Agency in Exeter Book Riddle 5
A sequence of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book allow an implement to speak. This article focuses on one example, Riddle 5, generally solved as either a shield or a cutting board, to show how each interpretation gives voice not just to an inanimate object but also to a non-elite member of early medieval English society—either a foot-soldier or a kitchen hand. The two solutions come together because the two answers are captured in a single Old English word—“bord”—and also because the two interpretations resonate in parallel ways, creating sympathy for down-trodden members of society who rarely get so much attention in the surviving poetic record. This article argues that Old English riddles provide an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor.
Journal Article
Old English Enigmatic Poems and Their Reception in Early Scholarship and Supernatural Fiction
The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding this history of reception allows us to see the influence of Old English poetry on modern creative medievalism, including the unexpected influence of medieval “enigmatic” poetry on the modern genre of supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that the scholarly reception of folios 122v–123v of the Exeter Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.
Journal Article
Wyrd Poetics: Collapsing Timescapes and Untimely Desires in The Ruin
John Niles suggests that Old English poems often “demand […] attention not only to the possible nuances of meaning of every word, but also to the spaces where no words are written and no story told”. Such spaces, he argues, invite readers into a kind of intellectual “play” that constitutes, in fact, participation, even collaboration, in the creation of meaning. However, what of more literal spaces in texts, not perceptual gaps composed by a poet, but rather material gaps “crafted” by manuscript damage? What more radical, “veered” reading follows if we pay attention to the physical damage, neither to lament the loss nor to restore what might have been there once, but rather to collaborate with its void? The damage to the final folios of the Exeter Book manuscript means that we read a different poem from any “intact” or “original” text we may try to (re)create; we read something that not only responds to, but also reifies the material effects of time and wyrd, the powerful other-than-human force that plays so prominent a role in the poem. This essay seeks to unsettle the text by engaging with both the poem’s extant words and the silent spaces of wyrd’s traces “inscribed” upon the material manuscript.
Journal Article
Honeyed Words and Waxen Tablets: Aldhelm’s Bees and the Materiality of Anglo-Saxon Literacy
The honey on the community's table, the beeswax on the writing tablets on which these words were composed, and the bees that produce both, are all perceived and (at least partially) rendered meaningful through the lens of allegory and monastic ideology. [...]returning to Aldhelm and his particularly complex deployment of apiary metaphor to theorize literacy and monastic virginity, I explore the connections between physical realities and cultural, intellectual concepts in works read and echoed by writers such as Ecgburg that reveal the essential materiality of monastic literacy. \"7 Or as the Old English Exeter Book Riddle 40 renders the lines in translation, Ic eom on goman gena swetra Þonne þu beobred blende mid hunige; swylce ic eom wraþre þonne wermod sy, Þe her on hyrstum heasewe stondeþ.8 [I am sweeter on the tongue than bee-bread (honeycomb) mingled with honey; I am also more bitter than wormwood is that grows grey in the grove.] A medieval exegete such as Aldhelm or Bede might well remind us that the Eucharist is prefigured by the manna in the desert, described as tasting \"like wafers made with honey\" (Exodus 16.31). Monastic writers routinely associate intellectual rumination-reading and contemplation of text-with the rumination of a clean animal chewing its cud (Lev. 11.3 and Deut. 14.16); this metaphor reveals the fundamental interdependence on the domestication of cattle and sheep-a practice of animal husbandry that also provides skins for manuscripts.19 Indeed, the production of manuscripts from animal skins has been the subject of numerous recent explorations of materiality and medieval literacy.20 The Old English Exeter Book Riddle 26 exposes the process of manuscript production from the
Journal Article
Unriddling the Exeter Riddles
The vibrant and enigmatic Exeter Riddles (ca. 960–980) are among the most compelling texts in the field of medieval studies, in part because they lack textually supplied solutions. Indeed, these ninety-five Old English riddles have become so popular that they have even been featured on posters for the London Underground and have inspired a sculpture in downtown Exeter. Modern scholars have responded enthusiastically to the challenge of solving the Riddles, but have generally examined them individually. Few have considered the collection as a whole or in a broader context. In this book, Patrick Murphy takes an innovative approach, arguing that in order to understand the Riddles more fully, we must step back from the individual puzzles and consider the group in light of the textual and oral traditions from which they emerged. He offers fresh insights into the nature of the Exeter Riddles' complexity, their intellectual foundations, and their lively use of metaphor.
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