Anglo-Saxon Keywords E-Book

Allen J. Frantzen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Keywords in Literature and Culture (KILC)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 681

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Anglo-Saxon Keywords presents a series of entries that reveal the links between modern ideas and scholarship and the central concepts of Anglo-Saxon literature, language, and material culture.

• Reveals important links between central concepts of the Anglo-Saxon period and issues we think about today
• Reveals how material culture—the history of labor, medicine, technology, identity, masculinity, sex, food, land use—is as important as the history of ideas
• Offers a richly theorized approach that intersects with many disciplines inside and outside of medieval studies

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

A

Aesthetics

Agriculture

Alcohol

Anglo-Saxonism

Animals

Apocalypse

Art

Author

B

Behavior

Bible

Book

Borough

C

Charters

Children

Christianity

Coinage

Cross

D

Danelaw

Death

Diet

Drama

Dreams

E

Easter

Emotions

Environment

Exile

F

Fashion

Femininity

Fishing

Franks

Friendship

G

Gender

Genre

H

Hall

History

Hoard

Homeland

Homily

Hunting

I

Identity

Individuality

Ireland

L

Labor

Law

Literacy

Liturgy

M

Marriage

Masculinity

Medicine

Mind

Music

N

Nature

Norman Conquest

O

Orality

P

Paganism

Peace

Peace-weaver

Penance

Piety

R

Race

Recreation

Reform

Rome

S

Scandinavia

Settlement

Sex

Slavery

T

Technology

Thegn

Trade

Tradition

Translation

Trifunctional model

V

Viking

W

War

Works Cited

Index

Keywords in Literature and Culture

The books in this series present keywords for individual literary periods in an easily accessible reference format. More than a dictionary, each volume is written by a leading scholar and consists of an engaging collection of short essays, which consider the ways in which words both register and explore historical change. Indebted to the work of Raymond Williams, the series identifies and documents keywords as cultural analysis, taking the reader beyond semantic definition to uncover the uncertainties, disagreements, and confrontations evident in differing usages and conflicting connotations.

Published:

Anglo-Saxon Keywords                                 Allen J. Frantzen

Forthcoming:

Middle English Keywords                             Kellie Robertson

British Literature 1660-1789 Keywords       Robert DeMaria Jr.

Romanticism Keywords                                Frederick Burwick

Modernism Keywords                                   Melba Cuddy-Keane

This edition first published 2012© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frantzen, Allen J., 1947–Anglo-Saxon keywords / Allen J. Frantzen.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-470-65762-1 (cloth)1. English language–Old English, ca. 450-1100–Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.2. English language–Etymology. 3. Linguistic change. 4. Historical linguistics. I. Title.PE279.F73 2012429–dc232011047200

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Acknowledgments

To those who read drafts of various entries, my warm thanks. They include Robert E. Bjork, Patrick J. Conner, Gareth Davies, Scott DeGregorio, Michael D. C. Drout, Stephen J. Harris, Christina M. Heckman, Wendy Marie Hoofnagle, Christina Lee, Patrick P. O’Neill, and Barbara H. Rosenwein. I also thank John Hines, Christopher Loveluck, and Karen Høilund Nielsen for guidance on archaeological matters. Fallon Allison and Jennifer Frey provided attentive and effective editorial assistance. I owe thanks to Ben Thatcher, Sue Leigh, and especially to Emma Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell, and to Glynis Baguley.

Ours is a great age of scholarship and research tools, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Thesaurus of Old English, and the Middle English Dictionary. For Anglo-Saxonists the standard of excellence has been set by the Dictionary of Old English and the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. My thanks to Antonette di Paolo Healey and the editors for permission to quote from their magnificent work.

Abbreviations

CDOE

Dictionary of Old English Corpus

DOE

Dictionary of Old English

OE

Old English

OEC

OE Canons of Theodore (penitential)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OEH

Old English Handbook (penitential)

OEI

OE Introduction to penance (penitential)

OEP

Old English Penitential (penitential)

OES

OE Scriftboc (penitential)

s.v.

sub verbo (Latin): “under the word,” directs readers to an entry in the DOE or the OED (pl. s.vv.)

TOE

Thesaurus of Old English

Anglo-Saxon law codes are conventionally named after the king who issued them, and are numbered in sequence: hence I Æthelred, II Cnut, and so on. They are listed in Works Cited under the king’s name.

An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller, is cited throughout and should be used in conjunction with Toller’s An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Supplement, rev. Alistair Campbell.

There are many references to the online edition of the Anglo-Saxon penitentials. Please note that, to access all its functions, you must use Firefox to consult this database. The penitential texts identified above (OEC, OEH, OEI, OEP, OES) are edited and translated at http://www.Anglo-Saxon.net/penance. At that address, choose Texts from the menu at the left, where the titles abbreviated above will appear. Then choose Description and Index. At that link choose Table 2 (the canon finder). Using your operating system’s Find command (e.g. Control + F for Windows), search for the number given in the parenthetical reference in Keywords.

Example: To find OEH 55.10.01. Go to the URL. Under Texts, choose OE Handbook (for OEH). Then choose Description and Index and at that link choose Table 2. Find 55.10.01. Every manuscript version will be listed; click on any one to see the OE text, which will automatically be displayed, and, when the cursor is placed on the canon number, translated. Manuscripts are identified at the head of Table 2.

All translations from Old and Middle English and Latin are those of the author unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

“Keyword” is not yet an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, so I have to make do with “key” and “word.” There’s nothing mysterious about the role of “word” in the title of this book, but “key” requires some commentary. Far down in the OED entry for “key” – at the end of the eighteenth and last subdivision – appears “key-word,” which designates “(a) a word serving as a key to a cipher or the like; (b) a word or thing that is of great importance or significance; spec. in information-retrieval systems, any informative word in the title or text of a document, etc., chosen as indicating the main content of the document” (OED, s.v.).

The earliest written use of “key,” which is cæg in Old English (hereafter OE), pronounced through Alexander Pope’s time to rhyme with “day,” “way,” and “tea,” is dated by the OED to c. 1000. The citation is taken from Pastoral Care, a book for priests and bishops written by Gregory the Great (d. 604) and translated into OE during the reign of King Alfred (d. 899). The text asks: “To what purpose do we expound upon and enumerate the keys, unless we also reveal, in a few words, what they preserve?” (Hu nytt rehton we nu & rimdon ða cæga, buton we eac feawum wordum ætiewen hwæt hie healden? Sweet 1871, vol. 1: 178–9). The image of the key was introduced into Gregory’s text by the translator. The Latin source reads: “Sed quid utilitatis est, quod cuncta haec collecta enumeratione transcurrimus, si non etiam ammonitionis modos per singula, quanta possumus breuitate, pandamus”; Migne, 1844–56: vol. 77, col. 0050C; Gregory 1950: 92 (But what is the use of running through all these groups and cataloguing them, if we do not also explain the several methods of giving admonitions to each with what brevity we can?). Gregory then explains his reasons for admonishing men in one way, women in another, the young in one way and old people in another, and so on, through another thirty-three distinctions, such as “those who do not even begin to do good, and those who begin but do not finish” (Gregory 1950: 90–2). Gregory’s wish to “explain the several methods” that he collected seems to have suggested the operation of a key to the OE translator. Things collected as a group were keys that would lead to explanations. The keys would unlock meaning by expanding compact expressions and clarifying them. This function is not too remote from the specialized meaning of the key as that which indicates “the main content of the document” (OED, s.v.). We might think of Anglo-Saxon keywords as those that guide us to the “main content” of the culture of England from 600 to 1200.

There is more to the key, however. Pastoral Care probably does not contain the earliest use of the key figure, since cæg appears in the OE poem known as Exodus, based in part on the scriptural narrative and written, many scholars believe, a century before Alfred’s time. In that narrative Moses expounds divine mysteries to the Israelites. For the poet this act of elaboration resembles the power of the mind, which the poet calls the “interpreter of life” (lifes wealhstod). The mind is able to unlock “ample benefits with the keys of the spirit” (ginfæsten god gastes cægon) when, like Moses, it explains the mystery of God’s teaching and leads the people to wisdom (Krapp 1931: 105–6, ll. 523–6). The key was also understood in this sense by the abbot Ælfric (d. c. 1010), who wrote that “Grammar is the key that unlocks the wisdom of books” (Stæfcræft is seo cæg, ðe ðæra boca andgit unlicð; Zupitza 1966: 2). For him it was, first, a means of construing meaning with precision. In a second, figurative sense, the cæg not only clarifies but offers access to something that is valuable, worth having, crucial or fundamental. We see that, in OE, a key can be used to elaborate the significance of a topic or to unlock a mystery. All the keywords in this book serve the first purpose and more than a few the second as well (what is the “Danelaw,” anyway, or a “thegn”?).

Raymond Williams never explained his choice of “keyword” for Keywords, the book that inspired this one, and he did not use the expression until he named the volume in his introduction (1985: 15). Williams was a writer of power and sensitivity, as anyone who has read The Country and the City knows (1973). He seems to have envisioned a “keyword” as part of “a vocabulary we share with others, often imperfectly, when we wish to discuss many of the central processes of our common life.” He meant words like “culture,” which have “general and variable usage” in what he called “general discussion” (1985: 14). Williams sought to use his keywords to illustrate semantic shifts that, he at first thought, had occurred around the time of World War II. When he researched his keywords, however, he found that the meanings of some had begun to change in the early nineteenth century. His book ultimately traced semantic shifts across points much further apart than the pre- and post-war periods he originally sought to bridge.

The gap Anglo-Saxon Keywords seeks to close is greater, since the concepts included are intended to connect modern and early medieval cultures. Some keywords explicate ideas that were important centuries ago and have lost their currency but not their historical importance. These words and concepts open passageways from modern to medieval and medieval to modern. Keywords index important objects, ideas, and institutions in each culture. Sometimes the modern word – “aesthetics,” for example – has no exact lexical counterpart in the Anglo-Saxon world. Sometimes the two cultures share a word such as “labor” but define it differently. Sometimes the OE word – “burh,” meaning fortified enclosure – is obsolete and now has an entirely different meaning (in this case “borough,” a town with a municipal corporation).

A volume of Anglo-Saxon keywords is timely because Anglo-Saxon culture itself no longer seems to be. Scholarship concerning the English Middle Ages is leaving the Anglo-Saxons behind. The New Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature does not include Anglo-Saxon literature except as a memory of the twelfth century (Harris, S. J. 2003b: 2; Wallace 1999). Studies of medieval spirituality routinely begin with the twelfth century or later and regard mysticism and private devotion as late medieval phenomena (see Piety). The disassociation of early medieval culture from the later is not new, to be sure. Intellectual histories and studies of identity and individuality traditionally institutionalize the “twelfth-century renaissance” and the “discovery” of the individual as points of origin (see Identity, Individuality). Even as other self-limiting scholarly traditions – including periodization and the literary canon – have been rethought, the separation of Old from Middle and later English literatures and languages persists.

There are many causes for this gap. What matters are its consequences. Readers outside Anglo-Saxon studies need a savvy guide to the Anglo-Saxon evidence, too much of which has been cut off from later periods. Hence this volume concentrates on words and ideas that link contemporary and Anglo-Saxon cultures. As recent work has shown, new media, translations, and other forms continue to probe connections between these worlds, sometimes, in matters of film especially, with dismaying naïveté (Clark and Perkins 2010). Beowulf invariably gets the most attention, since it is frequently reincarnated in new media and translations. But adventure tales are by no means the only point of contact between the early medieval and the modern. The Anglo-Saxon textual and material archives are rich in ideas that link the Middle Ages to our age. The keywords in this book are designed to unlock them.

There is another component to this project: modularity. The premise of this book is that culture needs to be studied as a collection of modules, not only as a unitary construct. Each keyword is a module; it is an independent unit but also a component of a system, and, together with others like it, forms a larger and more complex structure. Modules are self-contained but are described in relation to other modules, which are cross-referenced to those closest to them at the end of each entry (other connections are, of course, possible). Bibliographical references connect these modules to research and writing in other disciplines and periods. Williams’s list was originally intended to serve as an appendix to Culture and Society, 1780–1950. In a sense the modularity of Anglo-Saxon Keywords inverts Williams’s original design. Williams imagined his keywords as supplements to a sweeping cultural narrative. This volume has replaced the narrative with keywords that, in various combinations, constitute larger units but do not amount to a comprehensive view of Anglo-Saxon culture. A series of dots, seen from a distance, forms a pattern. Likewise, groups of keywords intersect: gender, sex, masculinity, femininity, and identity, for example, are modules with shared interests; so too are coinage, trade, technology, and settlement.

In compiling the seventy-five terms that form this list, I have excluded many that others might consider no less key than the words I discuss. But there would be a consensus that the list should include “art,” “gender,” “labor,” “settlements,” “trade,” and others. Collected in one book, these keywords are intended to assist three audiences. Students working with OE texts in the original or in translation look for contemporary approaches to Anglo-Saxon culture; many are suggested here. These keywords will also help generalists and others who work with later periods but do comparative work that requires them to know how “gender” or “drama” might be approached in the early period. Some specialists will know more about certain keywords than I do, but I hope to have pointed out some new paths to specialists as well. In compiling this list, I have sometimes found myself, after many years in the field, in new-to-me territory, always a good place for scholars to be.

A volume of keywords seems to answer to contemporary needs, more so perhaps than an encyclopedia, with its studied neutrality, or a handbook for OE literature that can only gesture to non-literary evidence. Williams’s Keywords was first published in 1976 and revised in 1983. In 2005 Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris edited New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which not only enlarged Williams’s list but accommodated the ways in which politics, culture, and scholarship had altered the understanding of many of the entries. Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, nods to Williams’s example in its effort to cover the ground of American studies even as it acknowledges that the ground is always shifting. Like Williams, Burgett and Hendler emphasize “historical semantics,” Williams’s term for the ways in which a word’s meaning might change in response to its use by a particular group. “Historical semantics,” like genealogy, suggests that terms are not fixed in meaning. In illuminating keywords in early English culture, it is important not only to consider changes in meaning but also to be clear about what words mean in the first – in the Anglo-Saxon – place.

It is important to know when “environment” came to mean what we think it means, but it has been my task to explain what the word meant to the Anglo-Saxons, how they would have referred to it, and what their concept of environment might have to do with modern ways of seeing the subject. In a decade there will be new keywords for American cultural studies and perhaps a revision of New Keywords. Those new keywords might also become entries in a revised version of Anglo-Saxon Keywords. Perhaps there will be new keywords from the corpus of Anglo-Saxon, especially since the archaeological evidence is growing so rapidly and has the potential to reveal unanticipated contexts and hence suggest newly specific definitions for familiar words and objects. We expect keywords for American or British culture to change, for each is an expanding corpus. The corpus of OE preserves a dead language, but discoveries in the modern world will reanimate Anglo-Saxon culture so long as OE can be read.

The Anglo-Saxons’ vocabulary for their culture is not always recognizable in Modern English. Some words are very similar, e.g., OE þegn for thegn (i.e., servant or retainer); others are not, e.g., eþel for homeland; all entries are given under the Modern English term. The keywords come from three different groups. First are keywords in OE, including burh, Danelaw, and thegn, words that point to dominant motifs in the intellectual life of the period and its cultural and social institutions, keywords for the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Second are keywords in scholarship analyzing the Anglo-Saxons, including “Christianity,” “Easter,” “liturgy,” and others commonly found in the corpus of writing about early English culture. Third are keywords found on other lists, the “Williams words,” we might call them. They include “individuality,” “labor,” “reform,” and others of interest to students of culture in any period. The list seeks some balance among broad categories of personhood and private life, political history, social life, and fine arts. The entries are of uniform length, a decision that benefited the more obscure terms on the list arguably at the expense of such broad categories as “exile” or “aesthetics.” In compiling such lists, however, no one can be entirely happy, including the author.

Anglo-Saxon England, an entity greater than the parts assembled here, has often been synthesized in narratives of just the kind that Anglo-Saxon Keywords does not supply. Many books have surveyed the Anglo-Saxon world both comprehensively and microscopically: Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, Henry Mayr-Harting’s The Coming of Christianity, D. J. V. Fisher’s The Anglo-Saxon Age, and many others. Closer in spirit to Anglo-Saxon Keywords is Dorothy Whitelock’s The Beginnings of English Society, with its succinct chapters on trade, agriculture, and diet, among others, slices of culture loosely bound together by chronology. To study the OE period without the benefit of those surveys would be rash, even impossible.

But they are the old way of doing things. New contributions to early medieval scholarship from both Anglo-Saxon and Continental perspectives are wary of unitary constructions. They achieve a modularity of their own. A Social History of England 900–1200, for example, assembles accounts by over twenty experts and bridges the period divisions such histories usually reinforce: 1066 is no longer the dividing point (Crick and van Houts 2011). The Carolingian World was written by three authors, divides its periods traditionally, and uses thematic categories that have long been familiar (belief and culture, exchange and trade, etc.). But the authors also steadily undermine the unifying, generalizing force of such concepts such as “Carolingian world” and even of “religion” and “Christianity” (Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean 2011). The monumental Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology enlists numerous contributors and uses distinctly contemporary thematic headings, with “the body and life course” and “signals of power” joining more conventional headings, including trade and religion (Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford 2011). In these works we can see the tendency to synthesize resisted by a newly energized sense of difference and particularity.

No one can study early medieval culture without both broad narratives and the pieces they connect – the matter of history seen, as it were, as waves and as particles. Neither approach is satisfactory, either for specialists who delight in exceptions or for generalists who set the exceptions aside. Some of the most important ideas, objects, and institutions of the Anglo-Saxon age are gathered in Anglo-Saxon Keywords. Its entries – its keys – are intended for hands working on either side of the doors that separate medieval and modern.

A

Aesthetics

In an age of ideological criticism, aesthetics has become a code word for appreciation, for analysis that strives to be apolitical. Aesthetics, art, and ideology are among the “whole body of activities” that Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, described as “alienated” from “ordinary cultural practices.” In the modern world, this alienation has meant that “none of these things can then be grasped for what they are: as real practice, elements of a whole material social process” (1977: 94). In some respects, Anglo-Saxon studies has also isolated the aesthetic from other cultural practices. Until recently, few scholars sought to situate the aesthetic in the history of Anglo-Saxon culture or in the culture itself.

We know that the Anglo-Saxons produced and prized beautiful things, but our knowledge of their aesthetic standards is incomplete. We assume that the ideas and objects that the culture valued most highly, including books, their illustrations and gold covers, were also those thought of as beautiful (see Book). Things declared to be beautiful in OE sources are often assessed spiritually rather than visually or in terms of another sense, such as sound or touch. The noun ansyn, for example, can refer to physical beauty but can also simply mean outward appearance. Fægernes means physical, moral, or spiritual beauty (DOE). Beautiful things in OE are often shining and bright. Thus torht, meaning “bright,” is often translated as “beautiful.” The most common noun for beauty is wlite; the adjective, wlitig, beautiful, is also common. Both refer to form or appearance but can also mean beautiful in appearance (Bosworth–Toller).

More difficult to trace, given the elite sources of so much of the evidence, is the aesthetic in the sense of a shared standard that could be known as “cultural common sense” or Kantian sensus communis or standard of general taste (Kant 1987: 160–6). In this latter category we might think of simple objects such as drinking-cups that are not ordinarily included in the world of the beautiful, beautiful though such things might be. We value artistic qualities in Anglo-Saxon high-status objects and texts, but we have few means of determining how the aesthetic might reveal communal rather than individual preferences. Communal in an Anglo-Saxon context usually refers to a small group of the literate. However, palaeography, codicology, and vocabulary show that among the educated elite standards were by no means uniform. The aesthetic of a particular center might be well known. In the visual arts, for example, that of the “Winchester School,” with its explicit connections to monastic reform in the late tenth century, is well known (Gameson 1999). But how widely those aesthetics are shared is not clear.

Aesthetics has had a largely negative role in Anglo-Saxon studies up to the present, a condition only now beginning to be reversed. The collection of work On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems interrogates the processes by which quality and beauty have been and are determined in the assessment of OE poetry (Hill 2010). John M. Hill explores the larger philosophical context for aesthetics in the twentieth century, using aesthetics to pose “the question of in art.” Hill notes that “quality always entails a standard of beauty, that standard related to a standard of truth as well” (2010: 5). But aesthetics, he adds, has seldom been confined to what he calls the “truth–beauty” relation. The philosophers whose work Hill emphasizes include Stephen C. Pepper and Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s work is central to Gillian Overing’s reading of swords in in “the domain of the artistic,” which she extends to artifacts (1990: 37–43, 57–9). But, in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, Peirce and Pepper have yet to acquire the importance of Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and others who focus on the phenomenology of art, reception, and the co-creation of art by its audience (see , ). The essays in Hill’s collection explore OE poetry, but this is not to say that aesthetics does not matter for prose and its repertory of literary effects and devices. In Hill’s collection, Peggy Knapp offers a Kantian discussion of beauty, Michael D. C. Drout discusses a “meme-based approach” to aesthetic selection (see ), and Yvette Kisor explores reader-response and indeterminacy, making use of Jauss’s and Wolfgang Iser’s work.