How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems. Daniel Donoghue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 238.

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewHow the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems. Daniel Donoghue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 238.Elaine TreharneElaine TreharneStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn asking how an early medieval English reader accessed and understood the poetry of the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book, the Beowulf manuscript, the Junius manuscript, and the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Daniel Donoghue focuses on the ways in which poetic textual information is selected, transmitted, and possibly received: What choices did pre-Conquest scribes make with regard to layout and cues for interpretation, and how were these understood? Countering teleological narratives that understand the cultural acquisition of literacy to be evolutionary—about progress—Donoghue offers accessible readings of poetry in its varied manuscript context. To better access how readers functioned, Donoghue asks to what uses contemporary eye-movement studies in the field of psychology might be put in assisting the scholar to understand how scribes anticipated readers’ responses. Sensitive to the aural, oral, and visual components of Old English poetry, he presents a case for the pervasiveness of competence in the poetic tradition for an “ordinary” Anglo-Saxon that he likens to “dark matter” (6–7) of astrophysics. This is partly manifested through the written record in the hidden competencies of readers familiar with that tradition, and in systems of punctuation and succeeding syntax to assist the readers’ comprehension that differed from Latin conventions already in existence by the eighth century, when Cædmon’s Hymn survives in its earliest extant English written forms.In chapters 1 and 2, Donoghue critically evaluates terminology and assumptions about literacy (textuality), orality, and transitional literacy through examination of episodes fundamental to an apprehension of readers’ practices in the Middle Ages. He shows how, for example, spoken and silent reading coexisted and might often have been context based, and that the often-used binary now requires more careful nuancing. Thus, for example, he proposes that in Beowulf, Hrothgar does not read the runic inscription of a sword hilt aloud to an assembled audience; he reads it to himself, before speaking to those present (Beowulf, lines 1687–98). This, together with the clearly anticipated silent reading of Cynewulf’s runic signatures, illustrates the existence of the practice in early England. As such, Donoghue makes us question scholarship that makes extensive and oversimplified distinctions between oral and written, spoken and read modes, which he highlights by attending to modern research on how forms of communication are received neurologically.For Donoghue, pulling together the threads of the oral-transitional-literate debate with insights from philology, cognitive psychology, and other fields leads him to consider different paradigms of analysis—from that of a “dialect continuum” (48–49) to a model where instead “of a gradual evolution of orality yielding to literacy,” there was “a longer period of an oral poetics sustaining written transitional texts in a more or less stable environment” (53); that is, orality and literacy “could be, and were, in a dynamic and supplemental relation with each other” (76). Such a model means that elaborate information cues were not deemed necessary by Old English poetic scribes for their readers, even though, as Donoghue shows, a systematic range of punctuation, capitalization, and spacing methods were available to those scribes.In chapter 3, Donoghue suggests that the sparse use of graphic cues in Old English poetry highlights the readers’ interpretative abilities: their knowledge of the working conventions of vernacular verse, including formulas, such as half-line nominal phrases, and syntactic patterns. Such conventions are closely linked to the (somewhat irregular) punctuation system, which generally permits scansion of a complete metrical verse line, since what comes after the medial point is as important as what comes before. This complex interplay of poetic metrical, syntactic, and graphic components is further demonstrated in chapter 4, “Eye Movement,” where Donoghue’s central argument is that reading practices have changed little over time, and modern eye movement analyses can be usefully deployed to examine how the scribes of early medieval manuscripts anticipated the skills of future readers. Anglo-Saxons, like modern readers, read word by word, and negotiated compound words and unstressed function words with the aid of punctuation and capitalization. This is a fascinating approach to the knotty problems associated with the early poetic record, and it often offers convincing evidence that orality significantly influenced the writing of verse. The book, with its wide variety of examples from Old English and other poetic traditions, begins to makes sense of what has previously seemed to be an inconsistent methodology in the copying of poetry by these early medieval scribes, confirms the tradition to be a living mode of expression, and insists that early readers would have recognized verse as such.In his final chapter, “Less a Conclusion than an Opening Up,” Donoghue looks at later Old English poetry (“expanded alliterative verse” [170]), such as Judgement Day II and the Chronicle poems in London, British Library, Tiberius B. i, alongside the “classical.” He shows that the correlation between meter and syntax weakened in the later period and the “exclusive” poetic syntax diminished in use (168), but that the oral tradition and skilled users of it continued throughout the eleventh century and well beyond.In How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems, who readers were (how many of them, and in what conditions they read), who the scribes might have been, and how their individual practices worked, are not the focus of this largely generalized account of early textual cultures of production and reception. There are some startlingly assured statements about what early English scribes, “peasants,” and readers must or must not have known, and there is little use of qualification, though Donoghue acknowledges, “We may never know who these readers were, but we can learn some things about them by inspecting what scribes thought would suffice” (10). The problem with this assurance is that by “scribes,” Donoghue is really talking about a dozen or so individuals who copied the main poetic texts over a period of some one hundred years, and most of those poems survive in only one manuscript version. Moreover, how many readers actually engaged in a detailed personal reading of these works, negotiating the punctuation and long-line exposition of the poems in the way that Donoghue suggests? Ten? Ten thousand? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We can learn much from this interdisciplinary and diachronic set of approaches. We certainly end our reading with an uplifting conclusion to a book that is persistently positive about Anglo-Saxon readers’ abilities to reflect a buoyant and long-lived vernacular poetic tradition that existed (and one feels joyously existed) among both the literate and the illiterate in early England. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 4May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707911HistoryPublished online January 31, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.