Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt ed. by M.J. Toswell

Abstract

It is hard to refute Tiefensee’s call for careful, consistent scholarship and her insistence on rigorously thinking through the ramifications of theoretical ideas (whether they are raised in criticism or interviews or fiction) even if one doesn’t subscribe to her Derridean agenda. The Old Dualities is part of an important re-thinking of way the discipline of Canadian literary studies functions and how it positions itself in relation to other fields of endeavour, like literary theory and philosophy. Like bitter medicine, this book might most productively be taken with a spoonful of sugar (or perhaps a grain of salt) as a potentially useful and challenging corrective. m a n in a jon es / University of Western Ontario NOTES 1 In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988), Linda Hutcheon writes, “In many ways it is probably redundant to call Robert Kroetsch a postmodernist; he is Mr Canadian Postmodern” (160). 2 In this respect Tiefensee’s book extends the work of David Clark [“Forget Heidegger: or, Why I Am Such a Clever Postmodernist,” Canadian Poetry 26 (1990): 75-86] and Darren Wershler-Henry [“The (W)hole in the Middle: The Metaphysics of Presence in the Criticism of Robert Kroetsch,” Open Letter Series 8, No. 3 (1992): 58-75]. 3 See Peter Cumming, “ ‘The Prick and Its Vagaries’: Men, Reading, Kroetsch,” ECW (1995): 115-39. 4 See Stan Dragland, “Potatoes and the Moths of Just History,” ECW (1995): 98-114. M.J. Toswell, ed., Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). x, 223, $65.00 cloth. The title of this collection — which suggests something rather broad and theoretical — is perhaps a bit misleading. Nine of the twelve essays in the festschrift are on Old English poetry, two on Middle English, and one on Old Norse. Approaches to the poems differ, but recurrent preoccupations are metrical classification, the application of modern linguistic theory, and the relationship between orality and literacy or “bookishness.” Contributors include both long-established and new scholars. All the essays are readable, some more searching than others. In her Introduction, Mary Jane Toswell deplores the lack of attention to style in recent studies of Old English, a deficiency the present volume seeks to remedy by bringing together a set of papers dealing with stylistics, that is, the analyis of literary style using the tools and terminology of linguistics. The idea is an excellent one. Unfortunately, only Thomas Shippey’s essay puts it into practice in a really systematic way. Toswell herself seems not quite at home with linguistic terminology. The “phonemics of alliterative 223 effects” (8) sounds slightly odd. So does the listing of context and register as two of the “five elements of linguistic interaction,” along with sounds, syntax, and vocabulary. Again, most of these essays are based on confer­ ence presentations, and occasionally could use a little more rigour. John Miles Foley and Brian Shaw, in their essays on the translation technique of Andreas, refer to the Greek source, the Acts of Andrew and Matthew, in English translation — his own translation of the Praxeis in Foley’s case, the Calder and Allen translation of the closest Latin version in Shaw’s. It is sensible to translate foreign languages, but one would like to see the original given in an endnote — as Eric Stanley does when referring to Ebert’s work (211, n. 2). Some of the papers, particularly those by Foley, Shippey, and Stanley, display the scholarly ease of men who have made their mark. But they have written more penetratingly elsewhere. The presentation is usu­ ally careful, and I noticed only a couple of actual errors: apo koinou as apo koinu (Introduction 9); 3rd pers. sg. lufad as “the obvious present plural” (Macrae-Gibson and Lishman 105). Probably the book is strongest in its contributions to metrics. Several essays — those by Thomas Cable, Robert Creed, James Keddie, Duncan Macrae-Gibson and John Lishman, and Geoffrey Russom — deal with this subject. Cable argues that in Middle English prosody the metrical treatment of final -e is to be distinguished from that of scribal practice. Creed studies...