by Mary Kate Hurley
for the first time in my graduate school career, I wasn't able to make it to Kalamazoo. My lovely co-bloggers did, and Jeffrey has posted an initial account of the fun the rest of us missed. In the spirit of the GW MEMSI panel , though, I'd like to offer my own little musing on one of the final scenes of the poem Beowulf. But go read the other posts about the conference now!
Revision is a funny thing. I’d imagine anyone who has written a dissertation has had one chapter that flummoxed her beyond all reason. I’d also imagine that often that chapter takes on a life of its own that might even be larger than the dissertation. After several false starts and a number of revisions, I recently managed to make my Beowulf chapter into something I think I might eventually be pretty happy with. I’d like to re-read the poem about ten more times before I revise the chapter into an article (which I think will be its ultimate destination) but for now, it stands as one of the most frustrating and most fulfilling things I think I’ve ever managed to write. If I ever write a book on Beowulf (a fate I truly hope to avoid), this chapter will be part of the reason.
Part of what’s so funny about revision is that there are whole swathes of the poem that I keep returning to and seeing with fresh eyes. As I made my final substantial revisions to the chapter late last semester, I found something I’d missed in my initial readings. There’s a section of the poem called the Beasts of Battle, a short little set-piece that falls right in the middle of the Messenger’s speech. Describing what will happen after the Swedes destroy the Geats on the field of battle, the Messenger tells us:
ac se wonna hrefn
fus ofer fægum fela reordian,
earne secgan, hu him æt æte speow,
þenden he wið wulf wæl reafode.
(But the black raven, the bird over the fated men, will tell, will say to the eagle, how he succeeded at the meal, when he with the wolf plundered the slaughtered ones, 3024-3027.)
One of the things I’ve been trying to do with Beowulf is to reimagine how the poem might be read. We’re all familiar with the mourning tone the end of the poem sets. Everyone, we are told, will die either soon or late, and though the poem ends with Beowulf’s personal victory over the dragon, the price of that victory for his people is all too clear. With Beowulf gone, the enemies of the Geats will destroy them. The Beasts of Battle are often read as just that—a moment that symbolizes human loss. But, I wonder, what if there’s a larger picture that allows a longer view of the world within the poem, exceeding the loss that permeates its human subject matter? And—crucially to the larger argument of the chapter—what if it’s precisely that larger picture that makes the world of the humans in the poem so endlessly painful and brutal, their achievements so short-lived?
Hence my interest in the raven and the wolf. If the raven “succeeded at the meal,” then there seems to be an intimation that humans can be considered part of a larger configuration than just the endlessly failing human communities the poem portrays. In the chapter, I borrow the Actor-Network theory term collectivity for this, but we could just as easily call it an eco-system or a network. Even the term “reafian” suggests the ways in which the animals here participate in an action that allows them a degree of agency previously granted only to the humans in the poem. The use of “reafian” provides a disjunctive echoing of two earlier uses of the same verb. At 1212, the first use of reafian describes the actions undertaken by the Frisian warriors after a failed attack by Hygelac: “worse battle-warriors plundered the slaughtered” (wyrsan wig-frecan wæl reafeden). Frisian warriors plunder Geatish ones. At line 2985, a similar usage occurs in Wulf and Eofor’s defeat of Ongenþeow: “Then the warrior plundered the other, took from Ongenþeow his iron byrnie, his hard sword hilt and also his helmet” (Þenden reafode rinc oðerne, nam on Ongenðio iren-byrnan heard swyrd hilted ond his helm somod). Human warriors take the things that matter in a human world by plundering bodies for war-gear. The wolf and the raven, on the other hand, plunder human bodies for what such creatures value: a meal of meat.
And in the end, the raven and the wolf seem to be some of the only victors we see in the poem. Heorot burns. The Geats, and their leader Wiglaf, will be annihilated. Beowulf is dead. Even the dragon met his end. But the raven and wolf disrupt the poem’s studied meditation on death and ending. Perhaps they even offer a glimpse of the world in which Beowulf and his Geatish warriors operate – where animals and metals exist on a similar plane as the humans who use and interact with them, and where sometimes these creatures and things “succeed” where humans and human institutions fail. Maybe beyond the poem, and beyond Beowulf himself – there’s a whole world.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Ravens, Wolves and a different Beowulf
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Returns: A Meditation in two or three parts
by Mary Kate Hurley
Back in April (where does the time go?), I and several of my manuscript group colleagues went to see the special exhibit on the Art of the Limbourg brothers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A page-by-page exhibit of the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry, the immensity of the exhibit was and still is overwhelming. Favorite parts: I always enjoy the illuminations of saints and their passions (possibly because I like being able to identify them by their method of death – ah, the morbid curiosities of being a Medievalist!), but one image of the Crucifixion struck me as particularly unique and even perhaps a bit bizarre: Folio 145v. The darkness of the illumination, signifying the darkening of the skies at Christ’s death, contrasts starkly with the previous illumination, Folio 145r.
Although the Belles Heures were the reason I attended the exhibition, what I did not expect was to meet an interest from my past at another exhibition, of the Mourners from tomb of John the Fearless, on loan from the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Dijon. I can’t recommend seeing these two exhibits enough.
A. Ghosts of the Past
In college, I had several long-standing interests, many of which were formed in a few classes taken in my sophomore year. In Dr. Overing’s “Old English Language and Literature” I met the Wanderer (not to mention that other guy, Beowulf). In Dr. Villagomez’s “Piety and Place” I began a project on Sasanian Persia that culminated in my senior history thesis. In Dr. Barefield’s “The Early Middle Ages,” I met the Valois Dukes, and I pursued them all the way to their Dijon resting place.
The mourners are part of the ducal tomb sculpture of Jean sans Peur, the second Valois Duke of Burgundy (the full list: Philippe le Hardi, Jean sans Peur, Philippe le Bon and Charles le Temeraire – so that’s Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold – or more precisely, the Rash). Created by Jean de Marville, Claus Sluter and their workshops as part of the characteristic style of sculpture in the ducal court in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, both the tomb sculpture of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless include the pleurants. Described by the Director Emeritus of the Metropolitan, Philippe de Montebello: “The mourners of the Dukes of Burgundy, no matter how admirably conceived sculpturally and sensitively carved, were not intended to provide aesthetic pleasure but rather to mourn indefinitely. Their posture and their faces in the shadows of their cowls are designed to convey the pathos of those who were to symbolize an enduring sense of loss at the death of the grand dukes. On the other hand, it is the quality of the execution and the artistry of the figures that ensure that these are successful in their role as mourners in unending wake, a wake that has not sunk into the maw of forgotten history precisely because of that quality.” (from The Mourners: Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy)
When I began to write about the tomb sculptures at the tender age of 19, I was primarily interested in the “modern devotion” of Gerard Groote and the emphasis it put on individuality. Then and now, it was the individuality of the pleurants that I found so striking. Each one is different – their individuality makes their mourning seem sincere: no.51 (the mourners for John are nos. 41-80, where Philip’s sculptures are 1-40), with face hidden in his cowl, raises a cloth-covered hand to wipe away tears ; no. 71, described succinctly as “mourner with cap, eyes lowered”; no. 60, with hands clasped in front of his chest, eyes raised, and face pained. I still remember seeing them in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon during my study-abroad time there in my junior year, thinking about each one individually, trying to understand the relationship between their individuality and the structures of theology and power of which they were remnants. It was a powerful moment for a junior in college, and re-encountering them, now as a graduate student finishing a dissertation on medieval literature – it was an odd point of contact with both the Burgundian past and my own former self. The pleurants stood in for the mourners on whom they might have been based, who once accompanied the Dukes to their resting place at Champmol – and I stood in for my younger self.
What it brought to mind most clearly, however, is the way a single intervention in the life of a student – as simple as Dr. Barefield’s suggestion that, rather than try to determine the historical veracity of Arthur (I was so ambitious back then!), I focus on Burgundian tomb sculpture because of my interest in France and studying abroad in Wake Forest’s Dijon program. Years later, I remember that conversation in his office hours, and the work it generated. What I know now, and could not have known then, is how important those moments with teachers are – the way the suggestion “Miss Hurley – go read Erwin Panofsky on Early Netherlandish Art” shaped my intellectual life for a good three years. I wrote on Claus Sluter’s sculpture, the Golden Age of Burgundy and Jan Van Eyck over the course of my history major, and it all began with that suggestion of a paper topic. And now – especially as I will not be teaching in 2010-2011 – it humbles me to think that one day, a student writing his or her dissertation might remember a conversation with me too.
The Limbourg brothers exihibit is on display until June – the pleurants, however, will be leaving New York on May 23rd. For our New York readers, and anyone with a chance to come by NYC even for a day – I cannot say how worthwhile both exhibits are, and how much you should go see them.
B. Coda, or Dissertationtopia
I fear to say “I’m back” – it always seems like a bad idea, a moment of hubris that comes under the historical heading of famous last words. But, despite my misgivings about the phrase, after six months of an MKH-free ITM – I’m back.
One of the things that no-one tells you about dissertations – or maybe I should say that I refused to believe about dissertations – is how isolating they are. Part of that comes from the hours spent in a library, to be sure – living in a carrel lit only by fluorescent bulbs doesn’t do anything for one’s intellectual social life (or one’s other social life, if there could be such a thing!). But the other part – the part I really didn’t expect – is how limited, and limiting it feels. Don’t get me wrong: I love my dissertation, and my current chapter, on Beowulf, quite a bit, and one of the joys of this past year has been learning how to really craft a sustained academic argument, and make that argument mine as organically as I can. But it seems like the focus born of being on a writing fellowship this year – that beautiful, intense, sustained focus – has an unintended side effect: it makes me nervous about talking to other scholars about anything not related directly to that work. But while that works for sustaining a project, it’s no way to sustain an academic as a human being. And so, by way of a first foray back into thinking about questions larger than the interpretation of that pesky half-line in the last part of Beowulf: I may share more than you, ITM Readers, want to know about that pesky half-line in Beowulf, but I take solace in the ability of the ITM community to draw me out of my shell, and remind me of the larger questions I’m only beginning to learn how to ask.
cross posted at ITM
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Drawing a Dissertation
Readers at ITM and Old English in New York may remember that the topic of my first chapter is the Old English Orosius. You may remember, way back in November, when I revising my chapter on the Orosius, I was having a bit of trouble straightening out the terms with which I spoke of the various voices in the text.
I'm working, again, on revising that same old text. You can see a small snippet of what I've been doing with it here. However, in the past few weeks or so I've been trying to tap into my formerly quite creative side, which sometimes gets sublimated by both a lack of time and a lack of interest. I don't have time to draw anymore, for example. But in the past couple weeks, I've taken to literally sketching out some of my arguments in the chapter, to help me keep straight the number of elements, levels, or names that appear in the essay.
The fruits of today's labor? The following diagram. Please note that, should it make it to the final copy of my dissertation chapter, I'll redraw it and make it a bit cleaner: 
The "legend," if you will, is the following.
cross posted to ITM
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sarah Maclachlan and the Old English Orosius
So my monster of a first chapter has been in the revision stage since sometime in August. It's on the Old English Orosius, which might have been my first mistake: the Orosius is a text that is endlessly fascinating in the abstract, but the moment one starts actually close reading all six books of Old English prose, one realizes that it's very difficult to talk about -- not only because of its size, but also because of its relationship with the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos.
I've been told a part of the problem with the first chapter of a dissertation is that there is still an immense degree of fluctuation between what's necessary to a chapter and what will eventually become a part of the introduction to the dissertation as a whole. I've found this to be overwhelmingly the case. Confronted with the whole of Orosius criticism plus a large chunk of translation theory, it rapidly becomes very difficult to decide what piece of information goes where, and what should be left until I go back to the beginning in a year or so, and write the "big I" introduction. I'm still not quite clear on what the relation is, though I've made the breakthrough that needed to happen in terms of both my thinking and my writing. More on that another time.
There is, however, one thing I'm certain of on this day of wintry-mix, sleet and snow that makes me understand the Wanderer far too well: music. I don't normally work with music on in the background, because I find it vaguely distracting (a result of too much work towards a music minor in undergraduate). Today, however, I realized that my favorite music from high school -- Sarah Maclachlan's Mirrorball album -- is apparently the key to getting into a writing groove. And there you have it. It's not just for emo teenagers anymore.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
New Year, New Me (?)
So one of my "New Year's Resolutions" is to stop making resolutions that I don't follow. I will probably never be a person who can write extensive posts on the blog every day. The very idea of saying "I will write before I eat breakfast or do anything else, and I shall do this everyday" makes me cringe. Whenever I think about that part of the Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day book I move immediately to indignation. "You can't rush writing," I think to myself "I write when I am moved to do so -- I do not write on command." I also don't do much in the morning before breakfast and at least one cup of tea. Usually two. Or coffee.
Then this morning, after a friend from college left *absurdly* early to take a test for a fellowship, I started reading some of the blog posts I've missed over the past few weeks. Lo and behold, my dear friend and colleague Marina had a post up over at Ink and Incapability that was of particular interest to me, a weary wanderer in a strange dissertation-filled land of revisions and vague fear of not "doing justice" to Beowulf, the topic of the chapter I'm currently writing. Entitled simply Write!, Marina's post is downright inspiring. It reminded me that although I love the creative aspect of writing and the thrill of getting "in the zone," I really need to set aside the time to do new writing every single day, or the dissertation really will never be finished.
So I made my tea, I sat down at my computer, I turned off my internet -- and I wrote until I had two full pages. I didn't know what I was going to write, but as it turns out, I appear to have something of an introduction to the chapter on Beowulf. Even more interestingly -- the last paragraph outlines the four aspects of the text I want to address. Meaning I have a way to go forward. Finally.
All that goes to say: Thank you, Marina!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
After Elegy: or, Thinking Old English Without Loss
[Image credit here]
by Mary Kate Hurley
This past Wednesday I gave a presentation on the beginnings of the second chapter of my dissertation. At present, this chapter appears to be the required Beowulf chapter. I’ve been re-reading the poem, and contemplating a re-translating, for a couple weeks now, and I’m still trying to make my ideas cohere.
Every once in awhile, though, an object gets launched into my orbit, usually precipitated by an event like Wednesday’s MaRGIN (Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Information Network -- run by graduate students at NYU) workshop, and I can’t quite decide if it’s a gift or a grenade, or usually both. Gifts make my arguments come together – like when one adviser told me that my interest in my MA Essay was temporality, not subjectivity, or when another told me my first chapter was about translation and temporality, and that I should really focus on that rather than writing my whole dissertation in one chapter. Grenades – well, they’re just like gifts, except they do so in a way that shifts everything I think I know, and turns it on its head.
My colleague Liza Blake, a frequent commenter here at ITM and a really impressive scholar of Renaissance literature at NYU (second year of grad school, after an MPhil at Cambridge), launched one such item – a gift-grenade, if you will—into my thought processes this past week, which I wanted to share with a wider audience as I begin to think through my second chapter.
In the last part of the poem Beowulf, our hero meets his final monster: the dragon. However, before he finds himself actually engaging the dragon in a fight, we’re given a glimpse of how the dragon comes into the story of the poem. Like many Old English stories, it’s one about loss – more specifically, the loss of kinsmen, the loss of a people. We’re treated to the lay of the last survivor, which, if memory serves, is often compared to other elegiac poems, like The Wanderer. You can see the text, and translation at this website. I’m not a fan of the translation, really, but I don’t have my own in front of me. I’ll be using my own on-the-fly translation through the rest of this post where I need it.
The dominant mood of the poem seems to be grief: “Hold you now earth, now that warriors are not allowed to, the possessions of lords!” The speaker catalogues what these objects are: the helm, the sword, the chain mail, the cup. There is no one, the speaker says, who will use these things – who will keep them from disintegrating now that “violent death” has “sent forth” many of men (ll.2265-2266).
What’s interesting, and what Liza pointed out, is that the hoard, useless, and finally, dangerous to the people of the Geats – didn’t belong to the last survivor any more than it did to the dragon, or to Beowulf. Rather, the history told by the lay of the last survivor speaks of it with these words: “Hwæt, hyt ær on ðe gode begeaton” (2248-9). Grammatically this is a bit dense. on, when used with a verb with a sense of “taking,” translates as “from”, and so the line translates roughly to “Lo, it before from you [good ones] obtained.” In short – the materials of this hoard were taken from the earth in former times (aer), and now, the last survivor returns them to the hruse from which it came.
The poem goes on to describe the actions of the last survivor: Swa giomor-mod giohðo mænde, / an æfter eallum (ll. 2265-66). Again, we can get tripped up by the grammar: “thus, sad-minded he mourned cares, / alone after/for all [of them].” Chickering’s translation (the one I tend to favor) is “Thus in his grief he mourned aloud, /alone, for them all.” æfter, as a preposition, has several meanings, and nearly always takes the dative. Given my druthers, I wouldn’t choose between the meanings – keeping, therefore, a sense of longing with the sense of temporal distancing which works so well for this final survivor of a people destroyed.
What Liza’s suggestion highlights is that – as a human being myself – I tend to sympathize, even empathize with the human loss which is voiced so eloquently by the last survivor’s words. But I do so to the exclusion of the poem’s exposition of the dragon’s function in the poem:
Hord-wynne fond / eald uht-sceaða opene standan, / se ðe byrnende biorgas seceð, / nacod nið draca, nihtes fleogeð / fyre befangan; hyne fold-buend / swiðe ondrædað. He gesecean sceall / hord on hrusan, þær he hæðen gold / warað wintrum frod; ne byð him wihte ðy sel.
He found hoard-joys, the old dawn-scather, to stand open, he who, burning, sought the hills, the naked malicious dragon, flies in the nights, encircled by fire; he the earth-dwellers widely dreaded. He shall seek hoards in the earth, there he heathen gold guards from ancient winters; it is not to him a bit of good.
What’s interesting here is what probably sounds familiar if you’ve any experience of the poem called the Old English Maxims (which essentially function as a kind of catalogue of knowledge of “the way things are”), the first line of which reads: Cyning sceal rice healdan (maxims II, l. 1). The King shall hold the kingdom. The dragon is doing, quite simply, what a dragon does. And – referring back to what has gone before in the poem – these treasures were taken out of the earth in the past, and now they simply return to the earth. Gold, taken in the form of metals (interesting role in OE for metals, if one thinks about them), is turned through human artifice into the materials that we think of as forming part of the social interactions of the Anglo-Saxon period. Rings, swords – all these things circulate in human society, and when there is no one left to keep this circulation in motion, the impulse is to mourn the loss to humans. But in essence, these things are simply returning to the earth from whence they came – no more useful to humans than it was when they first found it.
So my question, the one that’s been on my mind the past few days and will probably keep me thinking for awhile, is this: Can we think of Old English poetry and not think of “loss” as a part of what that poetry is describing? Is there a way to move beyond the idea of loss, to think an Anglo-Saxon poetry that portrays this complex interaction of human and non-human objects and materials in a way that doesn’t rely on metals – objects – or finally humans – being lost? What if they simply change form?
Could we ever be after elegy?
cross posted at ITM.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Smallish Dissertation Update
Chapter One has been sent to both Dissertation Chair and Second Reader. Appendix will be typed tomorrow, and I shall feel like a real Anglo-Saxonist.
What is this appendix? Well, it's where I sort out how the Old English Orosius uses the the proper name of the historian Paulus Orosius, and to what effects.
Why does this list make me feel like a real Anglo-Saxonist? I think it's because it feels like "real" data. Quantifiable, and therefore tangible.
There's just something so darn satisfying about achieving descriptive accuracy.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Argumentation, pt 1: Names
Apparently, when I write, I am a lot like my University Writing students. I come to the crux of my argument in the last paragraph (or in the case, the last ten pages) of my piece. What's interesting, of course, is that my dissertation requires a framework I'm not really used to thinking about. I've got 45 pages to signpost and structure: it's a very different feel from even a 20 page paper.
What's particularly challenging is the number of texts I'm talking about in the piece. It's really only two: the Latin Historiarum, by Paulus Orosius, and the Old English Orosius. But the number of references to works and authors multiplies when I attempt to nail down an argument about the texts:
Latin Text: Historiarum
Old English Text: Orosius
Latin Author: Paulus Orosius
Old English author: Orosius translator
Latin Narrator: the historian Orosius
Old English Narrator: Orosius-narrator, not to be confused with the citation of the historian Orosius in the cwaeth construction used throughout the text.
Certain problems come into view: How to keep the Orosiuses separate? How do I talk about an Old English author/translator who doesn't have a name without getting unwieldy? Who's narrating the Old English Orosius, anyway? Can I delineate these differences in a way that will keep my reader from being endlessly confused (as I suspect a reliance on italics or quotation marks might do)? I need a shorthand of some sort. There's a good reason that if I ever get back to my Anatomy of a First Chapter (I will, I will!) the second part is called "The Trial by Appendix". Because I (mostly) understand my argument. The real question is -- will any of you?
These are the things nobody warned me about when I started "dissertating." Mundane concerns, perhaps. But nothing I write matters if it isn't clear enough for my readers to understand it. Perhaps I need to learn as much from University Writing as my freshmen do.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Getting Anglo-Saxon, or, Anatomy of a First Chapter
[picture from the Vortigern Studies website. It's supposedly Orosius!]
by Mary Kate Hurley
Around the same time we finished out our group discussion of Getting Medieval, I reached a milestone of my own. I’ve recently completed work on my first dissertation chapter – and, though the chapter will no doubt be returned from my adviser with plenty of comments for my revision, I thought that I’d do a short series of posts on the process of getting this first chapter written, and what I’ve found now that I’m there. I’d wanted to do so as I was researching and writing – however, it would appear that learning to write a dissertation chapter makes it really hard to step back and write about writing that dissertation chapter. I’m hoping that, now I’ve “learned” how to write a chapter, I can share more of the second chapter as I go. The interactive part: I’d love comments and feedback, of course, but I’d also love to hear how other scholars approach the questions I’m raising here – grad students and more advanced scholars alike. Most specifically: How do you write a 45(ish)- page chapter on a text that you could easily write a book about? How did you narrow down your focus on your source(s)?
Correct me if I’m wrong: everyone who does a field in Old English literature, including prose, for their exams comes away with one translation out of the Alfredian corpus that qualifies as their favorite. And there are plenty to choose from, too: the Boethius, the Psalms, the Pastoral Care, the Dialogues, the Soliloquies -- and the subject of my first chapter, the Orosius. Although I certainly have a soft spot for the Pastoral Care and the Boethius (after all, who doesn’t love getting consoled by philosophy? And in Anglo-Saxon no less!), I suppose the Orosius is my “favorite.” I’m not quite sure what it was that attracted me to the Orosius, but I do know that unlike the majority of work done on Old English translation, it wasn’t the preface.
Why does that matter? To back up for those who haven’t slogged through the great works of Anglo-Saxon prose: The Old English Orosius is a translation (some, following the work’s editor Janet Bately, would call it a “paraphrase,” contending that it’s too close to the original to even qualify as translation!) of the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos. Written by the fifth century Spanish priest Paulus Orosius, the Latin text was meant to be a companion-piece to Saint Augustine’s City of God Against the Pagans. In the Historiarum Orosius intends to show how history may be read in light of Christianity – and moreover, that such a reading will show that the past was, in a sense, destitute: understanding and insight into historical happenings could not exist without the acknowledgement of Christ. He avers that these “pagans” do not know how to read history, that “they do not inquire into the future, and either forget or do not know the past,” and so they attribute the calamity of the sack of Rome to the “increasingly less worship of idols.”(1) In short: they assume their punishment for converting to Christianity is the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. Orosius sets out to show them how in the grand scheme of things, life is much better post-Christ than before his coming. In so doing, he interprets pretty much everything through a lens of how much worse it used to be, and how we can see God’s work explicitly bringing Rome to Christianity, after which, things were comparatively less bad.
Orosius, then, clearly saw himself in the same tradition as Augustine in terms of his
understanding of the relation of human history to Divine Providence – he’d undertaken the project at the behest of Augustine, though the results were not really what Augustine wanted. Orosius’ conception of historia differs significantly from his mentor’s, which makes it clear why Augustine was so disdainful of his work. (2) Orosius’ difference from Augustine in his historical reasoning is a function of the way in which history itself is structured. Confronted with “a universal sweep, a universal explanation of men’s basic motives, a certainty of the existence, in every age, of a single, fundamental tension,” Orosius over-generalizes, and produces what Peter Brown describes as “a neatly-patterned Christian ‘Universal History’”. (3) In Augustine, the work of God in the world is always implicit, but can rarely be seen – “we can only be confident in general that all history is in God’s hands, but we cannot watch his hand at work.” (4) Orosius, on the other hand, seems to be certain that the work of the Almighty is easily intelligible to those who know the signs by which it can be identified. Moreover, history is easily sorted, categorized and judged: Orosius’ “catalogue of worldly woe” shows explicitly how the world waxes more evil earlier before Christ one looks. Thus it is only the person who cannot see with the clearer light of the Christian faith who would aver that the present, with its knowledge of both Christ and His redemption, is worse than the ignorant – and therefore all the more wicked – past.
The translation into Anglo-Saxon of the Latin Historiarum is highly abridged – it cuts the original seven books down to six, and leaves out large sections of the text (Bately, in her introduction to the text, gives a more complete summary of the textual differences, both the abridgements and additions) . However, the OE Orosius is most often noted for its additions. First, there are additions of mythological and historical information Orosius did not include in the Latin -- these would have been familiar to 5th century Rome but not to Anglo-Saxon England. More tellingly however, critics have been overly enamored of the so-called “geographical preface.” The Latin Historiarum features a discussion of the landmasses of the world, and the various populations therein. Seeking, apparently, to do them one better, the Old English Orosius includes a much remarked on insertion, usually referred to as the “Ohthere and Wulfstan” part of the text. In it, two “norðmenn” tell King Alfred about their travels in Scandinavia and other parts of the far north, and about the people who live there (including various “magical” things they can do!). A quick survey of the critical literature reveals a huge emphasis on the preface, and these two travelers – and so, my first goal was to avoid talking about the “original” parts of the text, or at least to avoid the preface!
This didn’t really narrow things down all that much. It did, however, give me a chance to use a hard-won realization from my translation studies courses and workshops: translations, if they are true translations, must not be treated as “derivative.” That lesson, repeated to me over and over again by Michael Scammell (my workshop professor, who finally convinced me that if I am ever to translate Anglo-Saxon poetry, I must learn to love Modern English as much as Old English. That project is deferred indefinitely.) allowed me to formulate a different way of understanding the text: if I’m not concerned with what’s “original” in the translation, how do I locate Anglo-Saxon England in a text so close to the Latin from which it is translated?
Next time: What Orosius Said, or, The Trial by Appendix
1. “qui cum futura non quaerant, praeterita autem aut obliuiscantur aut nesciant praesenti a tamen tempora ueluti malis extra solitum infestatissima ob hoc solum quod creditur Christus et colitur Deus, idola autem minus coluntur, infamant.” Trans. Deferrari, 4.
2.Cf. Rohrbacker, David. The Historians of Late Antiquity, 148. Rohrbacker cites a number of scholars who identify the tone of Augustine’s second book of the City of God as arguing against Orosius’ less philosophically sophisticated version of a world history.
3. Brown, Augustine of Hippo 321
4. Bittner 355
Works Cited
Bittner, Rudiger. "Augustine's Philosophy of History" in Gareth B. Matthews (ed), The Augustinian Tradition. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999. pp. 345-360.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Deferrari, Roy (trans). Orosius: Seven Books Against the Pagans. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1964.
Rohrbacker, David. The Historians of Late Antiquity. Routledge, 2002.
Cross posted at ITM.
