Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts by John D. Niles (review)

Abstract

1?8ARTHURIANA JOHN D. NiLES, OldEnglish Heroic Poems and the Social Life ofTexts. Studies in the EarlyMiddleAges. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xiii, 372. isbn: 978-2-503-52080-3. €80. Like its recently released companion volume, OldEnglish Enigmatic Poems andthe PUy ofthe Texts, this volume brings together a number ofJohn Niles's innovative articles, supplements them, and in the process offers a stimulating and original contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Here, in an Introduction that identifies various critical schools as 'flights from meaning,' Niles lays out the critical procedure that has been the hallmark of his career: a close attention to philology of the most traditional kind joined to a larger critical eye towards not simply the artistry of a poem but also the cultural work that it performs—the qualities that would have given it historical meaning and impact. Describing OldEnglish Enigmatic Poems as being 'in conversation' with the various critical movements he surveys (11), Niles manages, as only a very few critics do today, to appreciate a poem's artistry even as he describes its cultural embeddedness and the tensions that affect its critics as well as the poem itself. The initial essay, 'Locating Beowulfin Literary History,' thus takes on the issue of the poem's meanings in connection with its date. While acknowledging that earlier, short lays may have circulated orally—must, in fact, have done so—Niles persuasively argues that this particular poem with its particular thematic concerns and narrative twists is most likely to date from the tenth century. The argument rests on the historical situation ofpost-Alfredian England as well as on the poem's presentation of characters like Scyld and Wiglaf, but what gives it force is the way Niles ties in historical examples of the recording of oral works. 'Beowulf Niles suggests, 'is the projection of two great desires: first, for a distinguished ethnic origin that would serve to merge Angles, Saxons, and Danes into a single more-or-less united people, and second, for an ethical origin that would ally this unified race with Christian spiritual values' (56). Niles's historicism, then, approaches Old English poetry not simply from the view of what a particular word or reference meant but from that of how a poem in its entirety would have functioned within Anglo-Saxon culture, particularly that ofthe tenth century. Widsith, he suggests, 'is ofinterest for the ways in which it synthesizes historical and geographical knowledge so as tojustifyan emergentAnglo-Saxon social order, lending that order the patina ofantiquity while wrapping irs controlling ethos in an aura of Tightness or inevitability that derives from its articulation through the formal speech of the imagined poet-sage, Widsith himself, the celebrant of ancient kings' (84). History is very much what we make of it, and this was as true for the Anglo-Saxons as it is today. One of the essays first published here, 'Anglo-Saxon Heroic Geography,' delivers this point with particular force. This kind ofgeography designates 'geographical ideas that, whatever theirbasis, are subsumed into a mode of seeing that has a validity independent ofthe actual features ofthe physical world' (123). So, the issue isn't who really lived where but who was understood to live where—or, perhaps, who had to live where—as part of a larger nexus of cultural, political, and traditional concepts. And in this vein, in light oftenth-century desires to validate an REVIEWS109 Anglo-Danish past, it made good sense for Anglo-Saxons to understand the Geats, who figure so prominently in Beowulf, as synonymous with Bede's Jutes. The volume's final essay, also original, is 'Heaney's Beowulf Six Years Later.' Taking on a host ofAnglo-Saxonists who have criticized the translation for one reason or another, Niles suggests that it is in fact 'the most successful presentation thathas yet been made ofan Old English poem in the form ofa modern English verse translation' (326—27). Noting both Heaney's academic credentials and his long-standing interest in the Middle Ages and earlier, Niles sees the poem as a purposeful appropriation of a literary monument: 'When Heaney uses an archaic dialect word such as "wargraith " instead ofa more transparent term such as "war...