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My thesis will explore the complex interplay between oral performance and textuality in Old English poetry. I wish to re-examine how the textual nature of Old English poetry contradicts with the oral-formulaic features found in the construction of Anglo-Saxon literature and show how these texts construct a fictitious internal performative voice that is culturally distant from the oral culture from which these works originated from.

1. The Opening page of Beowulf in its original manuscript form.

As Old English poetry is strictly conservative in its style and approach, I will examine a handful of Old English texts as the primary sources for my research. The texts of Beowulf, The Wanderer, Caedmon’s Hymn and the works of Cynewulf (Juliana, Elane, Fates of the Apostles and Christ II) will form the core my essay. These texts have been digitalised in their original manuscript forms by the British Library and are available online to examine. Various editions and translations of these texts will also be used to provide context to these works as literature. These will include Robert E. Bjork, Ed. The Old English poems of Cynewulf (Harvard University Press, 2013), Hugh Magennis’s Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse (D.S. Brewer, 2011) and Elaine Treharne, Ed. Old and Middle English c.890-c.1400: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2004). These editions will also provide a survey of modern scholarly attitudes to Old English poems as textual literary works through their accompanying notes which, like the discourse in general, tend to focus on philology and historicism.

2. Influential academic Milman Parry.

To gain a firm understanding of how orality and literature interact I will draw on Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 2002). Throughout this thesis I will attempt to re-examine the oral-formulaic theory of composition put forward by Milman Parry in “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making I: Homer and Homeric Style” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1930) and “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1932). Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press, 1960) will also be referred to extensively as it continued the work Parry left unfinished by his death in 1935. Both Parry and Lord wrote in relation to Homeric epic poetry. Their work became very influential in the studies of all orally originating literature and is applied to Old English literature in Francis Magoun’s “Oral-formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry” (Speculum, 1953). I hope to show how Magoun’s use of Milman and Lord’s oral-formulaic composition theory offers an unsubstantiated view of the oral elements found in the textually surviving corpus  of Old English poetry.

Franz H. Bäuml’s “Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory” (New Literary History, 1984) and Michael Foster’s “The Myth of an Oral Style in Chaucer’s Poetry” (MES, 2010)are useful in examining early English orality from a different perspective even though they apply to a later medieval period. These texts examine a time written culture was far more prominent than the Anglo-Saxon period but provide a useful study of how medieval poets attempted to create a sense of oral performance within their definitively literary works.

2. Kathrine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song.

As this essay will deal with the interplay between oral and textual culture, the physical and psychological impact of oral performance will play a large part in grounding the realities in which textuality corrupts the true oral nature of Old English texts. Richard Bauman and Barbara A. Babcock’s Verbal Art as Performance (Waveland Press, 1984) will give me a useful foundation in oral performance and its effects from the perspective of a folklorist and linguistic anthropologist. This viewpoint can then be applied to my selected primary texts. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1990) offers an invaluable examination into how performativity is represented and altered within Old English poetic texts.

The effects of textuality on our perception of the oral nature of Old English poetry will be discussed with the aid of Seth Lerer’s Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1991). In this he argues that the orality of Old English poetry may be “a literary fiction” (4). Carol Braun Pasternack’s The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Elizabeth Tyler’s Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (University of York Press, 2006) will serve to support my understanding of the textual nature of Old English poems, their physicality, aesthetics and the identity they communicate. These texts also contain examinations of oral performance in Anglo-Saxon times and will be useful in this regard also.

IT will be used heavily throughout this project as I will be using databases such as JSTOR, Project Muse and Academic Search Complete as electronic resources for my work. Bosworth-Toller has created a searchable online Old English dictionary which will be invaluable when examining the digitised Old English manuscripts that are hosted by the British Library.

Works Cited

Bauman, Richard, and Barbara A. Babcock. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1984. Print.

Bäuml, Franz H. “Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory.” New Literary History 16 (1984): 31-49. Print.

Cynewulf. The Old English Poems of Cynewulf. Ed. Robert E. Bjork. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Print.

Foster, Michael. “The Myth of an Oral Style in Chaucer’s Poetry.” MES 18 (2010): 341-60. Print.

Lerer, Seth. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Print.

Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Print.

Magennis, Hugh. Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Print.

Magoun, Francis. “Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry.”  Speculum 28 (1953): 446–67. Print.

O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy the Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Parry, Milman. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making I: Homer and Homeric Style.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–143. Print.

Parry, Milman. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932): 1–50. Print.

Pasternack, Carol Braun. The Textuality of Old English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Treharne, Elaine. Old and Middle English c.890-c.1400: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Tyler, Elizabeth. Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England. York: University of York Press, 2006. Print.

Illustrations

  1. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV f.132r. 11th C. British Library Online. Bl.uk. JPEG. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.
  2. Milman Parry. 1925-8. Milman Parry Collection, Harvard University. Harvard.edu. JPEG. Web. 15 Mar. 2016. 
  3. O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. 1990. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Books.Google.ie. JPEG. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.