Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature by Jonathan Wilcox (review)

Abstract

946 Reviews he argues that straight sexuality is often more radically diverse than its supposedly more dissident counterparts. 'To be alive is to desire', afnrms Dollimore, and 'to desire is to be deeply and maybe destructively confused, sooner or later' (p. 36). That Dollimore makes sense out ofthe confusion, while never losing sight ofthe provisional and elusive nature of his critical efforts,makes this book required reading foranyone with an interest in how literature can reflectupon what it truly is to be human. Ruskin College, Oxford Nick Kneale Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Ed. by Jonathan Wilcox. Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. vii+162 pp. ?40; $75. ISBN 0-85991-576-x. Who can resist a collection of essays that indexes Dream of the Rood next to 'double entendre' and 'dildo'? 'Grinning' and Genesis B} Hdvamdl and 'hall, merriment in'? While Humour in Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Jonathan Wilcox, displays some of the usual shortcomings of the contemporary academic essay collection, it makes up for these with a better-than-average unity of purpose and a lively execution. This slim collection (162 pages, including index) gives us essays on humour and heroic poetry (John Niles on Byrhtnoth'slaughterin The Battle ofMaldon, Raymond P. Tripp, Jrand E. L. Risden on Beowulf), studies of the humour in the 'dirty riddles ' of the Exeter Book by D. K. Smith and Nina Rulon-Miller, and essays on the laughter produced in the context of Old English saints' lives by Shari Horner and Hugh Magennis. T. A. Shippey contributes an excellent wide-ranging essay defining and exploring Anglo-Saxon humour across a number of texts, and Wilcox prefaces it all with a deft and informative introduction. The usual caveat about essay collections applies here: the studies, while uniformly rewarding to some degree, can be uneven. Shippey's essay seems particularly useful as an introduction and thought-provoking examination of the whole subject; Niles's essay, while perhaps a bit prolix, also strikes me as opening out usefully onto wider issues of literary and cultural criticism. The essays by Tripp and Risden might make one pause: Risden's for the fact that it seems to rehearse the usual arguments about grim humour in the poem and not to advance the question much; Tripp's by basing his analysis on his idiosyncratic views of the poem. (This is not the place to go into Tripp's arguments in depth; one can perhaps get a sense ofthe hermetically enclosed world in which he works by noting that in a 20-page article he cites a number of his own studies ofthe poem no fewer than seventeen separate times. While Tripp brings a welcome wide, humane learning to the poem, his array of assumptions about Beowulf makes his analysis of the work's humour difficultto accept.) The essays on the sexual riddles and humour in the saints' lives are by turns ingenious and over-ingenious; one has the sense sometimes with both pairs of essays (Smith/Rulon-Miller and Horner/ Magennis) that the texts under examination are being squeezed for every last bit of jocularity they might conceivably generate. Wilcox well expresses the book's value in his introduction: 'The present volume is the firstbook-length treatment of Anglo-Saxon humor. Not many scholars have touched on the topic in any way: general surveys are rare and slight, while specialist studies of humor in individual works are surprisingly scarce' (pp. 5-6). Seen from this standpoint, this is an important volume?as a whole the various essays collect the relevant secondary sources and provide sensitive readings of the most obvious primary materials. There is certainly a sense here that the volume opens the door to a field that could be usefully pursued to some degree, especially when Old English texts are put in dialogue with Old Norse and Latin materials, as most of these essays do in one way or another. MLR, 98.4, 2003 947 The literary criticism of Old English texts needs some direction at the moment, some profitable avenues that might lead Old English texts and traditions into wider arenas accessible to general readers in other periods, both later medieval and beyond. Laughter, a universal human experience...