Some Objections to the Formulaic Theory of the Composition of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry

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SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE FORMULAIC THEORY OF THE COMPOSITION OF ANGLO-SAXON NARRATIVE POETRY Marcia Bullard's principal area of concentration is Anglo-Saxon. Her recent dissertation, "A Rhetorical Analysis of Beowulf," is an effort to expand the understanding of the poem's composition "by demonstrating the presence of classical rhetorical devices, topics, and commonplaces in it." Miss Bullard is expecting to receive her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley this year. She has been an instructor in English at the University of New Mexico since 1962. Only one theory of the composition of Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry currently enjoys wide acceptance . This, of course, is the formulaic theory developed, among others, by Francis P. Magoun, Jr. in his essay, "Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," which first appeared in 1953. Deriving his general theory from the studies of Albert Lord and Milman Parry, Magoun concluded that about seventy percent of the first fifty verses of Beowulf occur elsewhere in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and that "were the surviving corpus [of about 30,000 lines], say, twice as big . . . there well might be almost nothing in the language here used that could not be demonstrated as traditional."1 Among the studies which have derived from the work of Lord and Magoun is Robert Diamond's study of "The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf"; Diamond says that about sixty-three percent of the verses of the Cynewulf poems recur !Francis P. Magoun, Jr., "Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum, XXVHI (1953), 450. See also Albert B. Lord, "The Singer of Tales," unpubl. diss. (Harvard, 1949), and Milman Parry, "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making, II: The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XLin (1932), 1-50, esp. pp. 12-17 ("Tlie Art of Oral Poetry"). within the corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry as a whole and that about forty-three percent of them are repeated within the corpus of Cynewulfs own signed poems.2 R. P. Creed concludes that four hundred different whole verse formulas in Beowulf are repeated at least once within the poem, some as many as twelve times, and that three thousand formulas of other dimensions are repeated within the poem.3 Stated simply, the method by which these statistical results are arrived at checks the lines in a poem against the lines in the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry and also against the lines in the poem itself to determine which lines recur; if a given line or half line recurs, under the same metrical conditions, the line is marked as formulaic. As treated by most students of the formulaic school, this theory of formulaic composition takes as a general postulate that an oral singer, composing before a live audience, 2Robert E. Diamond, "The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf," Philological Quarterly, XXXVIH (1959), 234. See also Diamond's unpubl. diss. (Harvard , 1953) by the same title. 3Robert Payson Creed, "On the Possibility of Criticizing Old English Poetry," Texas Studies in Literature and Language , m (I960), 97. See also Creed's "Studies in the Techniques of Composition of the Beowulf Poetry in the British Museum MS. Cotton Vitellius A.XV," unpubl. diss. (Harvard, 1955). 11 needed a body of already formulated lines and phrases upon which to draw in order to be able to compose orally. Certain other members of the formulaic school do not agree that Anglo-Saxon poetry was composed orally,4 but they all agree that the essential basis of composition was the formula. As Diamond says, the "poetic formulas are traditional, and they, together with a body of traditional story material, are what the poet memorize[d]."5 I would like to state some objections to the formulaic theory and also to raise some other questions about the composition of AngloSaxon poetry. My objections concern two things: first, the fact that there is as yet no published list of all the formulas; and second, the fact that the theory makes a dichotomy between "formulaic" and "literary" composition. Furthermore , the definition of "formula" as it has been presented so far is...