Things Speaking and Speech “Thinging”: Riddlic Voices and The Seafarer

Abstract

THINGS SPEAKING AND SPEECH “THINGING” : RIDDLIC VOICES AND THE SEAFARER ANNA SMOL Mount St. Vincent University M any critics have discussed the riddle of The Seafarer's voices. Who is speaking in the poem? Is it one person, two, or even three? Are we hearing a homilist or a sailor? Is he speaking allegorically or literally? In our efforts to crack the clues to the work’s personae by examining homiletic motifs, allegorical images, or literal stories of peregrinatio, we have disregarded the significance of the actual process in which we are engaged— the answer to the riddle of The Seafarer’s voices lies in the recognition that what we are hearing are riddlic voices. The clue to the identification of the poem’s personae lies in the understanding that what we are involved in is a meaning-game of impersonation. The Seafarer's Active voices challenge the listener, both fictional and real, to recognize each speaker’s identity and significance. This challenge is central to allegory, which means “other-speaking,” or speaking other than what one seems to be saying, and it is also similar to the ways in which voices impersonating things challenge their listeners in the riddles. In order to examine the conception of poetic voices and how they speak another meaning in Old English allegories, we may begin with a look at the riddle genre. The Old English riddles demonstrate the power of words to construct our perception of the world. W.P. Ker wrote some time ago that the riddle “carries the poetic mind out over the world,” and in describing the various creatures there it “becomes a shifting vision of all the different aspects in which the creature may be found” (qtd. in Williamson 24-25). The imagina­ tive range and detailed gaze of the riddlic perspective extend to the reader or listener a challenge sometimes made explicit in the conventional phrase “saga hwaet ic hatte” [say what I am called] that concludes many of these poems. In other cases, the riddle stands as a cryptic set-piece, its challenge implicit in the words spoken out to its reading or listening audience. A good example of how the riddles allow us, as Lois Bragg puts it, “to engage the riddlic speakers and to dialogue with them” (48) is the nine-line riddle with the commonly accepted solution of beam [tree or wood], num­ bered 28 in Williamson. It begins with a first-person speaker proclaiming its identity with the typical riddlic opening phrase “ic eom” [I am], but it goes on to express various aspects of that identity, shifting from one attribute 249 to another, sometimes as often as one half-line leads into the next: “bearu blowende, byrnende gled” [blooming grove, burning ember] (line 4). We see the creature as a tree in full bloom and tossed by bad weather; we see the tree as a burning log and a piece of wood used to make a ship and possibly a cup or harp, and finally we perceive the tree as a cross that in­ creases people’s happiness when reverence is paid to it. We must recognize when the speaking voice shifts from one attribute to another so that we can identify the essential nature of the creature being described in all its mani­ festations. The process is similar to another type of meaning-game, that of allegory; in fact, one of the best-known examples of Old English allegories, The Dream of the Rood, has been discussed in relation to its use of a speech of personification possibly derived from the riddle genre (see Schlauch). Craig Williamson further describes this riddle game as a series of disguises in which a person enters imaginatively into the state of an inanimate thing such as a tree, and then that thing takes on human speech and often other human attributes in proclaiming its identity — in the beam riddle, for ex­ ample, the tree describes itself as “fus forôweges” [eager for a journey] (3), a phrase frequently applied to doomed warriors in heroic poetry. The tree, then, appears to be disguised in a human voice. Solving the riddle requires shedding the layers of disguise...