Glowing Paradoxes and Glimmers of Doom: A Re-evaluation of the Meaning of Old English fāh in Poetic Contexts

Abstract

The Old English adjective fāh’s distinctive semantics and deployment, particularly in verse, ought to be accorded more prominence in our interpretations of the language, literature and thought-worlds of the Anglo-Saxons. While the rich ambivalence of this word is often implied and, occasionally, briefly discussed by critics, much more can be said about its denotations, connotations, contextual relevance and poetic artfulness. The senses usually ascribed (‘hostile’, ‘stained’, ‘variegated’, ‘shining’…) may appear context-fitting enough, but are often ad hoc and over-specific; their fragmentation conceals important features of the adjective’s semantics and of the poetic style with which fāh is intimately bound up. This article, using a philologically-minded literary-critical approach, seeks to unravel the complex semantics of fāh through an analysis of its relationship with sins, blood, treasure, swords and serpents in its literary contexts and trans-contextually. It is argued that the linguistic and literary evidence supports in most cases only one, broad and multifaceted but unified and internally coherent area of meaning. Essentially, fāh signifies ‘gleaming’, but this core denotation is always underlain by intense, dramatic mental/visual images reflecting or foreshadowing doom and death. The remarkable extent in nature and function of this semantic nexus contributes to an enhanced understanding of several poems, including the solving of interesting cruces. This investigation opens up a fuller appreciation of paradoxicality in Old English and helps us recognise the problematics of boundaries and semantic gaps in relation to the poetic language’s extraordinarily associative nature.