The Trumpet and the Wolf: Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry

Abstract

Battle and warfare are prominent topics in Old English poetry, reflecting their importance to the self-conception as well as the practical concerns of the warrior class who governed AngloSaxon England. The representation of warfare in poetry constitutes both a codification of experience, a means of reflecting on contemporary events such as Scandinavian raiding and invasion, 1 and at the same time an idealization, part of a shared imaginary centered on the heroic, migration-age past, lordship and comitatus bonds, courage and violence, and the material culture of treasure, weaponry, and the hall (Howe 1989; Niles 2007; Tyler 2006). The poetry is traditional in its diction and themes. Old English poems portray battle and warfare in ways that are sometimes highly stylized but also have aspects of realism. The present essay focuses on one element of battle-description in Old English poetry that is both conventional and to some extent realistic: the portrayal of battle as noisy. Noise is a very common ingredient in Old English poetic battle scenes and perhaps an unsurprising one, but it is not inevitable. Classical and medieval Latin poetry often mention noise as part of battle, but historical writings do so much less often. Moreover, as we shall see, noise emerges in Old English battle poetry in distinctive and sometimes strikingly non-naturalistic ways. A focus on noise can afford an interesting avenue into Old English battle poetry for a number of reasons, of which I here highlight two. First, noise is a junction for the physical and psychological elements of battle. It is part of the sensory onslaught of war and can itself be regarded as a species of violence (Allen 2004:305), though it does not inflict bodily injury unless much louder than anything firstmillennium technology could produce. William Ian Miller has pointed out the role of noise, along with other factors such as bloodiness, closeness, and visibility, in influencing our perceptions of actions or events as more or less “violent” (1993:65):