The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

Abstract

The literary culture of early medieval England was thoroughly bilingual: prose and poetry were composed in Latin and Old English.2 Prose in Latin survives in greater quantity than prose in Old English while the numbers for poetry are more evenly split: 270 Anglo-Latin poems are extant compared to 244 Old English poems, by one reckoning.3 It is not enough, however, to note the coexistence of these two languages and their circulation (jointly or separately) in manuscript. Early English literary culture was not simply the “sum” of its Old English and Latin “parts” but was also rather more. Each language was involved with the other behind the scenes, as scholarship on pre-Conquest poetry has made especially clear. Many poets who composed verse in Old English would also have known Latin—the more prestigious, more institutional language.4 By the same token, Latin verse did not exist in a vacuum: certain prosodic features in the Latin poetry of Aldhelm, for instance, are thought to have been inspired by vernacular poetry.5 The copresence of both languages is palpable and can be sought, even in nominally “single-language” verse.But what about the mixed-language poetry of early medieval England? What does it reveal of the inner workings of this bilingual literary culture, beyond the readily gleanable observation that Latin and Old English were both languages of literacy? One admittedly wishes for a larger data set to consider in mulling over the question. The corpus of surviving pre-Conquest mixed-language verse consists primarily of the three “major” such poems: The Phoenix concludes with eleven Old English-Latin verse lines (if Alleluia counts as Latin, more on which below); the poem Aldhelm combines Latin, Old English, and some Greek; and the poem known as A Summons to Prayer mixes Latin and Old English evenly.6 Some other bilingual verse has survived, such as the Latin-English proverbs preserved in both London, British Library MS Cotton Faustina A. X and London, British Library MS Royal B. 2. V.7 Yet one might have expected to inherit a more robust body of mixed-language verse from such a bilingually literate and literately bilingual culture. More—perhaps much more—may have been lost.But other testaments to the fundamental, indeed material bilingualism of early English poetry do survive. One excellent example might come as a surprise, in light of its given name: the “Exeter Book of Old English poetry” (Exeter, Dean and Chapter MS 3501) has a notable amount of Latin—certainly the most versified Latin of any of the four “Old English poetic codices.”8 Riddle 90’s five lines are entirely Latin; they are joined by the Latin half lines of The Phoenix and also by the half line lux et tenebre (l. 100b) in the poem alternately titled Azarias or Canticle of the Three Youths.9 There is also the Finit at the end of Homiletic Fragment III and The Partridge as well as the phrase sancta Hierusalem at Christ I line 50b. While Latin is not structurally constitutive of all these works in the way it is for the three mixed-language poems named above, it is nevertheless a consistent presence in the Exeter Book: texts ranging from a single Latin word to an entire Latin work can be found in the manuscript.Another kind of proof of the Exeter Book's deep Latinity is the fact that the volume is full of direct translations from Latin and has other obvious dependences on Latin literature. We can be confident that most of the poets whose work it preserves were bilingual to a considerable degree. Christ I, for instance, is a loose rendering of the Latin Advent antiphons, and Guthlac B is based closely on the final chapters of Felix of Crowland's Latin vita.10Canticle of the Three Youths derives from deuterocanonical Biblical content.11 In addition to its mixed-language conclusion, the first half of The Phoenix is a loose translation of the Late Antique poet Lactantius’ De ave phoenice.12 Michael Lapidge has proposed a specific manuscript of the acta sanctorum as the one (or very like the one) from which Cynewulf may have been working as he adapted the Latin text for the Old English Juliana.13Vainglory stands in the tradition of Prudentius's Psychomachia.14 Patrick W. Conner has incisively situated The Riming Poem within the realm of complex Anglo-Latin hermeneutic verse, and the three animal poems—The Panther, The Whale, and The Partridge—together enact an English version of the Latin physiologus genre, as has long been noted.15 Even in less obviously Latinate texts, Latin remains a relevant context: Lindy Brady has recently proposed a twelfth-century Latin vita as an analogue for Wulf and Eadwacer.16 Although though they are in the vernacular, the Exeter Book riddles are, in the words of Andy Orchard, “intimately connected” to the Latin riddles, even “parts of the same literary tradition.”17 The poem known as Pharaoh is based on the Biblical Book of Exodus, and the Lord's Prayer is a translation—a very loose translation—from the Latin.18 And these are only some of the more obvious examples. The Latin of the Exeter Book is, on aggregate, both visible and invisible, surface-level and structural. We should speak, then, not of an Exeter Book of Old English poetry but rather of an Exeter Book that stands as sterling witness to the bilingual poetic culture of early England.If the two primary corpora of pre-Conquest mixed-language verse were to be set out in a Venn diagram, the circles would overlap at The Phoenix. It is one of the few mixed-language poems to survive from early medieval England, and it is one of the poems in the Exeter Book that is at least a partial translation of a Latin source. It is therefore particularly well positioned to illuminate the possibility and potential of this bilingual literary culture, to reveal how language choice could itself be a skillfully deployed literary act—in other words, to answer the question I pose above: what can mixed-language pre-Conquest verse reveal of the inner workings of this bilingual literary culture?The bilingual ending of The Phoenix offers one answer by engaging what I call the “interlingual mode”: a style of writing—either poetry or prose—that operates in two or more languages at once. As I shall demonstrate, the first and final lines in the conclusion of The Phoenix do not shuttle back and forth between Old English and Latin as much as they exist in both languages simultaneously. They thereby reward the reader who does not simply code-switch but instead thinks more extendedly in the two languages in unison—interlingually, in so many words—so as to receive some kind of payoff in each, and thus in both.19 In my use of the prefix “inter-,” I envision something closer to the imbricated separation conjured by “interstitial” or “intergalactic” rather than the fused connection implied by “intermarriage” or “interstate.” Accordingly, I identify the interlingual mode, as it operates in this poem, to be the product of conscious effort on the part of the Phoenix poet to construct poetic lines that remain thematically resonant with—add additional layers of meaning to—the larger work upon being mentally translated by the reader into the text's “other” language. The copresence of both languages is crucial, as is their difference from one another: it is their difference that invites comparison and makes their ultimate harmony all the more significant.My understanding of the “interlingual mode” is informed by and indebted to, even as it diverges from, previous theorizations of a hybrid “interlingualism” by scholars of multilingualism and of Chicanx language mixing in particular. The similarities and differences between these concepts, which each name a kind of linguistic interaction in a multilingual culture (and share a prefix in so doing), are instructive and illuminating. “Interlingualism” and the “interlingual mode” are both rooted in a form of “both/and” multilingualism, though the two phenomena differ based on how fundamentally distinct the component languages are assumed to be.20 In Chicanx communities, “interlingualism” most often refers to, in Juan Bruce-Novoa's words, “the mixing of two languages [here, Spanish and English] . . . because the two languages are put into a state of tension which produces a third, an ‘inter’ possibility of languages.”21 He elaborates elsewhere: This practice rejects the supposed need to maintain English and Spanish separate in exclusive codes, but rather sees them as reservoirs of primary material to be molded together as needed, naturally, in the manner of common speech. This interlingual form is the true native language of Chicano communities, even though some members speak only English or only Spanish—as a whole, the language spectrum covers these and every potential blend.22While interlingualism encompasses an entire “spectrum” of language use, the interlingual mode acknowledges and upholds the component languages as separate codes, each with attendant affiliations and associations.23 Put another way, instead of asking interlocutors and readers to dwell in a hybrid linguistic space, as Bruce-Novoa argues that Chicanx communities and writers do, the interlingual mode of The Phoenix asks readers to inhabit two distinct language spaces simultaneously, as one primary language draws on the resources of a copresent second language in order to achieve certain ends.24I suggest, furthermore, that the interlingual mode in The Phoenix is mobilized to religious, indeed eschatological ends. By encouraging the reader to think in two languages at once, the poem moves the reader closer toward imagining the language of Paradise, an imagining that makes the concluding depiction of Paradise all the more stirring. Through locating and sounding out this Paradise, this essay ultimately recovers the dimensions of a new kind of literary achievement for the period: a literature that could exist in the space between Latin and Old English because it was both Latin and Old English. In early medieval England, the interpretive possibility of the linguistically liminal was everywhere to be found. Just as the inscribed space between words came to grant meaning on the page, just as the figurative space between Old English verse hemistiches enabled textual exegesis, so too could the imagined space between languages be a site of significance in the earliest English literature.25In the first half of its nearly seven hundred lines, The Phoenix depicts the life cycle of a phoenix in an eastern locus amœnus and, in its second, situates the life and continual rebirth of this legendary bird within the realm of Christian allegory.26 The parallels are there for the taking, paradisiacal low hanging fruit: Þisses fugles gecynd fela gelicesbi þam gecornum Cristes þegnumbeacnað in burgum, hu hi beorhtne gefeanþurh fæder fultum on þas frecnan tidhealdaþ under heofonum, ond him heanne blædin þam uplican eðle gestrynaþ. (ll. 387–92)(The nature of this bird—very like that of Christ's chosen thanes—reveals in the cities how with the help of the Father they uphold bright joy in this perilous time under the Heavens and obtain exalted glory for themselves in the homeland on high.)27The Phoenix poet worked, in part, from Latin source material. Scholars have long known that the first half of the poem is a loose translation of De ave phoenice, composed (as mentioned above) by the North African poet Lactantius in the third or fourth century CE.28 The Phoenix poet also drew on other Latin sources for the second half of the poem, though which sources these were is less well established; Ambrose's Hexameron and a commentary on Job attributed to Philip the Presbyter seem likely candidates, and other possibilities have recently been proposed.29 The identification of some of the poet's primary sources has created a rich body of scholarship on the poet's translation strategies, particularly in the first half of the poem.30 The overarching conclusion is that the Phoenix poet took a thoughtful and additive approach to translation, viewing it as a means of enriching a text and imbuing it with added significance.The mixed-language conclusion of The Phoenix, however, is not translated. To the best of our knowledge, it does not derive from a single source but instead represents the poet's own strategies of composition. And what he has composed is artfully stitched together. For the poem's final eleven lines, the half line before the medial caesura is Old English, and the half line after the caesura is Latin (with Alleluia as a special case I discuss further below).Hafað us alyfed lucis auctorþæt we motun her meruerigoddædum begietan gaudia in celo,þær we motun maxima regnasecan ond gesittan sedibus altislifgan in lisse lucis et pacis,agan eardinga almæ letitiæ,brucan blæddaga, blandem et mitemgeseon sigora frean sine fineond him lof singan laude perenneeadge mid englum. Alleluia. (ll. 667–77)(The author of light has granted to us that we might merit here to acquire with good deeds joys in Heaven, where we might reach the greatest kingdoms and sit on the high seats, live in the delight of light and of peace, have dwellings of holy gladness, enjoy prosperous days, gaze upon the Lord of victories, gentle and mild, without end, and sing praise to him with eternal reverence, (we) blessed among the angels. Alleluia.)31In this passage, the Latin fulfills the requirements of the Old English prosody: it completes the necessary alliteration in every line. On occasion, the Latin also follows its own language's metrical rules, with several of the half lines functioning as hexametrical endings.32 Some of these, furthermore, appear to have been poetic stock in trade: as Janie Steen has noted, both sedibus altis and laude perenni appear in both Aldhelm's Carmen de virginitate and Alcuin's Ymno de sancto vedasto; they (or close variants thereof) also both appear in liturgical chants.33 This sourcing offers clues about the poet's patchwork practice, and it raises the possibility that other common poetic phrases and literary affiliations—in Latin or Old English—might be encoded in these lines.Drawing heavily on Latin and on Latin literature right at the conclusion of over six hundred lines of Old English verse also lets the poet demonstrate that the Latin and Old English poetic traditions could be fully congruous. After all, the Latin and Old English of the poem are completely enmeshed. For Steen, the languages complement each other, particularly in terms of their respective poetic devices: The welding of Latin fragments with vernacular verse symbolizes the Phoenix-poet's artistic achievement in bridging the Latin and vernacular traditions. In the macaronic, hexameter endings toe the line of Old English poetic ‘rules,’ just as in the poem as a whole, an array of Latin material is reshaped as ‘traditional’ Old English verse. Just as the Latin lines are surrounded by Old English in this ending, so are the Latinate devices of anaphora and the simile surrounded by vernacular aural patterns—especially the harmonics of repetition. And just as these Latin lines are adapted into the structure of Old English verse, so are the Latinate devices in the whole poem drawn into the wider structure of the allegory.34For most of the poem, in other words, the Phoenix poet “translates” recognizably Latin poetic conventions into recognizably Old English ones. These poetic modes merge in the conclusion, where both are on display. To invoke again the imagery of sums and parts, this type of argument underscores the artistry of The Phoenix by showing how finely wrought and thoughtfully put together this sum of parts is: Steen describes the finale as “bridging” the two poetic traditions. But the linguistic dynamics of this final passage also transcend the boundary between the two languages. By drawing simultaneously on the literary traditions of Latin and Old English, these lines reach beyond the poetic and the aesthetic to enter the realm of the eschatological—for the reader who is paying close enough attention.By beginning the mixed-language portion of the poem with the line “Hafað us alyfed lucis auctor” (the author of light has granted to us) (l. 667), the Phoenix poet leads with an interlingual pun, a subtle nod to the fact that he is thinking and working in two languages.35 The Latin “lucis auctor” (author of light), a name for God, more or less calques in Old English as leohtfruma, literally “light-origin.”36 And OE leohtfruma never appears without being preceded by lifes: the phrase lifes leohtfruma (light-origin of life) appears in Old English poetry thirteen times, across a variety of works.37 The epithet occurs six times—nearly half its total tally—in Genesis A.38 The term takes on a literal meaning in that narrative, first appearing when God, finished with the work of creation, wakes up Eve: wif aweahte and þa wraðe sealdelifes leohtfruma leofum rince. (ll. 174–75)(he awoke the woman, and then the light-origin of life swiftly gave her to the beloved man.)The phrase is a vehicle of direct address to God in Daniel, Andreas, and the Kentish Psalm.39 Guthlac uses it twice in quick succession to describe God in Guthlac A: the saint clearly found it compelling.40 The epithet also appears in Meter 11 of the Old English Boethius, which adapts Book 2, Metrum 8 of the Latin original.41 In reworking this passage, the Old English translator elides the Latin text's mention of Phoebus and refers instead to the Christian God as lifes leohtfruma, thereby silently reassigning Phoebus's role as bringer of dawn and origin of light: Þa gesetnessa sigora wealdend,lifes leohtfruma, læt þenden he wilegeond þas mæran gesceaft mearce healden. (ll. 71–73)(The ruler of victories, the light-origin of life, sets those commandments for as long as he wishes to preserve boundaries through this illustrious creation.)As we can see, Phoebus is nowhere mentioned, and the Christian God is now in charge of light. Within Old English verse, the poetic formula lifes leohtfruma is important, versatile, and—perhaps most important for our purposes—relatively frequent: it is known and knowable.In the line “Hafað us alyfed lucis auctor” (l. 667), the -lyf- at the core of alyfed evokes the lifes that someone well-versed in Old English poetry would expect to precede an epithet that names God as the author of light: the well-known Old English formula lifes leohtfruma is here transmuted into alyfed lucis auctor. The implicit lifes also works to fill in a kind of blank in the text of The Phoenix: this first line tells us only that God “has granted” something “to us,” not what he has granted. The answer, of course, is life: but, in the conclusion to The Phoenix, it is not mortal life that is being discussed but rather eternal life. The rest of the passage develops the idea that God can grant us eternal life, but the implication is already there in the first line of the passage, scrambled across two languages but nevertheless decipherable to someone who knows their Old English. The poet is thinking in Old English and Latin simultaneously, and to appreciate the artistry, the audience is expected to do the same. Knowledge of eternal life is the reward.The passage begins with interlingual, paronomastic play, and so too does it end. Early English writers often used wordplay to encode and invoke complex theological understanding, so it is no surprise to find puns in a passage describing paradise.42 But the final line of The Phoenix—“eadge mid englum. Alleluia” (blessed among the angels. Alleluia) (l. 677)—goes one step further. With its juxtaposition of englum and Alleluia, it refers to the most famous example of wordplay in early English literature: Pope Gregory I's punning remarks upon glimpsing several Angles, the pagan inhabitants of England from whom the term Anglicus or “English” derives, in a Roman marketplace. The wordplay is rooted in the lexical similarities between “Angles” and “angels” and between “Alleluia” and “Ælle.” With both englum and Alleluia supplied, the missing third term in the chain of affiliation is the “English.”Knowledge of these puns and lexical affiliations was widespread in early medieval England. The Gregorian story is recorded in two eighth-century Northumbrian Latin texts, which may have developed independently of one another: the anonymous Whitby Vita Gregorii and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum. The account in chapter 9 of the Whitby Life is distilled to a spartan back and forth: Deo intus admonente, cuius gentis fuissent, inquisivit. . . . Cumque responderent, “Anguli dicuntur, illi de quibus sumus,” ille dixit, “Angeli Dei.” Deinde dixit, “Rex gentis illius, quomodo nominatur?” Et dixerunt, “Aelli.” Et ille ait, “Alleluia. Laus enim Dei esse debet illic.”43(urged from within by God, he asked from what people they came . . . When they said, “Those from whom we come are called Angles,” he replied, “Angels of God.” Then he asked, “What is the name of the king of that people?” And they said, “Ælli.” And he said, “Alleluia, for praise of God should be there.”)Bede's version in the Historia ecclesiastica is “slightly more diffuse, but considerably more elegant,” with the key difference being Bede's subtle exegesis of Gregory's puns:44Gregory goes on to pun on the name of the Angles’ king, Ælle, when he calls for Alleluia to be sung among them—for them to be converted, so that they might experience salvation and eternal life.Both accounts of the Gregorian puns make a point to refer to the popularity of the episode: the Whitby Life describes it as a “narratio fidelium” (story among the faithful), and Bede prefaces it by saying, “Nec silentio praetereunda opinio, quae de beato Gregorio traditione maiorum ad nos usque perlata est” (Nor should we fail to mention the story about St. Gregory that has been passed down to us by our ancestors).47 Gregory's comments, moreover, were a source of ongoing reflection and delight to those who translated the Historia into English prose.48 In Roberta Frank's own memorable formulation, “[i]t is remarkable how many episodes from the annals of early British history owe their preservation in popular tradition to the wit and playfulness of the words in which they were recorded.”49 There is no better preserved or more popular example than these playful bons mots.Nor is The Phoenix the only Old English poem to invoke the Gregorian pun-complex. The missing third term in the final line of The Phoenix is spelled out in a complementary formulation in Guthlac B: Us secgað bechu Guðlac wearð þurh godes willaneadig on Engle. (ll. 878b-80a)(Books tell us how Guthlac became, through God's will, blessed among the English.)Whereas The Phoenix asks us to make the leap from “angels” to “English,” this moment in Guthlac B proffers “the English” and asks us to think of “angels.” The redolence of this moment is heightened by the role angels play in the saint's story—englas appear frequently in both Guthlac A and B—and the invocation of Engle here reminds the audience that Guthlac's status among the English has been made possible by the englum. In the logic of this punning dyad, one term—whichever one it is—adduces the other: the two go hand in hand. The Phoenix poet would have expected his audience to make the connection he sets up for them.The Phoenix poet knew that wordplay involving “English,” “angels,” and “Alleluia” could prompt a profound meditation concerning the salvation of the English. So would the poem's audience: upon seeing the collocation of englum and Alleluia in the final line, an informed reader would have been cued to supply the missing third term. With both “angels” and “Alleluia” already provided, the last piece of the puzzle is “English.” Just as the reader must think back to Old English poetic formulas to find “life” in the first line of this passage, so too must they complete the chain of wordplay to learn whose salvation, whose eternal life, is at stake in the last. It is their own.The interlingual mode is thus integral to the conclusion: it begins and ends it, providing a foundation on which the intervening heavenly chorus may be constructed. I should note here that engaging the interlingual mode is not necessary for understanding the passage's literal meaning about what awaits pious Christians: code-switching between Old English and Latin while reading enables that. What an interlingual reading of the passage offers is access to the idea that it is specifically the eternal “life” of the “English” at stake. This deeper meaning is available to the reader who not only knows what all the words mean but who also knows how the words are rendered in the other languages of a text's context and can make the requisite literary connections. The interlingual pun “Hafað us alyfed lucis auctor”—because it requires the audience to translate lucis auctor into Old English, producing leohtfruma, and then to recall the Old English poetic formula lifes leohtfruma—is more linguistically involved than, for example, an appreciation of the verbal echoes on either side of the medial caesura, such as “secan ond gesittan sedibus altis” (reach [the greatest kingdoms] and sit on the high seats) (l. 671).50 The former, which requires the reader to think between languages, is interlingual; the latter, which exists there, in the text, without work from the reader, is bilingual. And the concluding interlingual pun and Gregorian intertext only fall into place once OE engel is also remembered—translated—as Latin angelus, with all its concomitant lexical affiliations. Alleluia, for its part, is a constant across both text and intertext. It itself also acts as a cue to think interlingually.As triumphally conclusive as the Alleluia may appear, its use here is not inevitable. In fact, this is its only appearance in Old English verse despite it being “very frequently used” in the liturgy.51 (It appears roughly one hundred more times in prose and glosses.) The also liturgical amen, by contrast, appears sixteen times in Old English poetry, not including the injunction to say “Amen” three times in the metrical charm for barren land. The term is here by design, chosen to elicit and complete certain poetic effects in the passage. One of these effects is undoubtedly song, as Alleluia is often described as something sung or otherwise situated in a musical setting.52 This effect would fit with the context supplied by the Gregorian pun: as Bede tells it, Gregory specifies that he wants Alleluia “to be sung” (cantari) among the Northumbrians.53 It also fits with the circumstances presented in the poem: an Alleluia chorus is assuredly an appropriate conclusion to a poem that is full of unarticulated song. It is only in the last half line that we finally hear the words.54This Alleluia also ends the poem with an interlingual finality. Alleluia, a Hebrew loanword into Old English as well as Latin, was an object of ongoing lexical interest in early medieval England for its status as a fundamentally, almost continually translatable word. In the eighth-century Leiden Glossary, Alleluia is glossed as Laudate dominum.55 In the tenth century, Ælfric explained in his homily for Septuagesima that “Alleluia is ebreisc word þæt is on leden Laudate dominum and nan gereord nis swa healic swa ebreisc” (Alleluia is a Hebrew word that means, in Latin, “Praise the Lord,” and no language is as noble as Hebrew).56 That Ælfric should translate Alleluia not into English but Latin reflects what was, for Ælfric, the absolute centrality of Latin to theological engagement, even as he praises Hebrew in the same breath.57 Byrhtferth, Ælfric's contemporary, was more interested in completing the chain of translation in his discussion of Septuagesima: “Þurh þa man sceal witan hwænne man sceal þæt ciriclice leoð forlætan þe Ebrei hatað Alleluia, and Lydenware hatað Laudate Dominum, and Englisce þeoda ‘Godes lof’ gecigað” (Thus will one then know when to stop the ecclesiastical song that the Hebrews call Alleluia, and the Latin speakers call Laudate Dominum, and the English people “praise of God”).58The unusual history and cachet of Alleluia, I suggest, caused both men to forget or at least forgo their typical attitudes to language. Byrhtferth here evinces what Damian Fleming has described as Ælfric's desire “to connect his English-speaking students to a continuum of languages.”59 By contrast, Ælfric here might be charged with Fleming's characterization of Byrhtferth's attitude toward Hebrew: “He uses his advanced knowledge of languages to separate himself and those like him . . . from those readers who can only identify with English.”60 It is Byrhtferth who works “to connect his English-speaking students to a continuum of languages” and Ælfric whose treatment of the term effectively “separate[s] himself and those like him . . . from those readers who can only identify with English.”61 To be sure, Laudate dominum would have been readily comprehensible to someone with even rudimentary Latin. Nevertheless, in their explications of Alleluia, Ælfric and Byrhtferth are acting out of character—and more like each other. This word, it seems, was both ordinary (and thus not in need of further gloss when Ælfric would typically have been happy to offer it) and of particular linguistic interest (and thus the subject of Byrhtferth's excited scrutiny). The styles of explanation offered by Ælfric and Byrhtferth reveal that Alleluia was a word of known depth and resonance in early medieval England, and for a learned reader, it would have evoked the convergence of multiple languages. Alleluia, therefore, not only completes the Gregorian intertext that makes the poem's interlingual pun possible but also, within the parameters of a single word, encapsulates the core idea of the interlingual mode: in a multilingual culture, words can carry their translations with them and can imply their own existence in another language.62Underscoring the literate nat