Sentimental Genres: The “Old English Elegy” and the Poetics of Nostalgia

ABSTRACT This study interrogates the scholarly construct known as the “Old English elegy.” This artificially formulated genre, which combines elements from eighteenth-century Classical German Elegy and nineteenth-century English nationalist nostalgia, comprises an unstable textual canon bringing together a modern perception of shared emotional, psychological, and affective discourses. To demonstrate how the pervasive influence of Romantic poetics and ethnonationalist anxieties underlies the inception and development of the discourse of “Old English elegy,” this study traces their influence across anthologies and critical editions of Old English poetry from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Close reading of a series of thematic and syntactic parallels across Old English texts further illustrates the arbitrary nature of the genre and evidences the need for a new critical terminology that acknowledges the horizontal intertextuality of Old English poetics.


1
By "elegy," Conybeare meant a piece of funeral or commemorative poetry on the death of an important public figure.By applying the term "elegiac ballad," Conybeare relies on the influence of James Macpheron's Poems of Ossian (1760-65)  and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) as model anthologies of "ancient" poetry.Benjamin Thorpe's Codex Exoniensis (1842) did not explicitly use genre categories, although it did create certain reading expectations by appending titles such as Deor the Scald's Complaint or The Exile's Complaint.Ludwig Etmüller (1850) applied the term "elegy" to The Wife's Lament while using the broader "lament" and "complaint" for other texts (Etmüller, xiv-xv).
2 Some notable voices have questioned the validity of the term "elegy," but have not provided an alternative approach to the texts: Timmer (1942) reduced the canon to only two poems-The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer-which he considered "elegies pure and simple," 36; Pilch (1964) did not consider the Old English poems as elegies "neither in the classical Greco-Roman nor in the modern sense" and deemed the label "purely arbitrary," 210; Shippey (1972) found the term "vague enough to be inoffensive if unhelpful," though he acknowledged that "there is a reason for the modern This canon includes nine poems from the Exeter Book that do not appear in a sequence and do not show any indication-scribal, textual, or codicological-that they were ever meant to be read together, but which were considered as a group owing to their representation of a specific set of cultural motifs; namely: exile, loss of status, a feeling for nature, and a keener sense of individual emotional and psychological identity. 3These poems are, in order of appearance in the Exeter Book: The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Rhyming Poem, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, Resignation (now generally edited as two separate poems, Resignation A and B), The Husband's Message, and The Ruin.
While some scholars have expressed their reluctance to accept the category of "elegy," there remains a sense that the nine poems from the Exeter Book shared a common element of modal intimacy that amounted to a mirage of textual congeniality-ultimately, the raw foundations of a literary genre.This sense of belonging as a group is often expressed in Old English scholarship through two main ideas.The first of these involves affective response; namely, the notion that the phrase "Old English elegy" encapsulates certain psychological, emotional, and affective aspects that are representative of specific texts: we "feel" they belong together because they elicit similar responses in us, and because they portray aspects of human experience that we identify as transferrable and universal. 4The second main aspect that characterises the discourse of "Old English elegy" is definition by comparative aesthetic experience: the "Old English elegy" becomes modern, relevant, and-through association with some of Britain's most celebrated modern elegists -national.The theoretical basis for the "Old English elegy" is therefore grounded on our perception of a common emotional and psychological substratum and our comparative experience with other forms of elegy.We engage affectively with what is familiar and respond positively to that which is aesthetically coherent with our previous experience.
This study engages with the two main elements that characterise the discourse of "Old English elegy"-affective engagement and the projection of contemporary aesthetic experience-to demonstrate how, in Old English scholarship from the last two centuries, the genre of "Old English elegy" and the scholarly discourse that surrounds it grow from and support an ethnonationalist discourse of Germanic-and more specifically "Anglo-Saxon"-national character rooted in ideas of cultural identity and continuity.The influence of the Romantic discourse of elegy as the "poetry natural to the reflective mind" has shaped and limited our perception of Old English literature through the creation of artificial genre categories and textual hierarchies that privilege an artificially constructed view of the past as a legitimising source for nineteenth-century ideas of national literature and poetic genius.The Wordsworthian understanding of poetry and poetics as impression that these poems from a group, and no doubt one connected to their popularity: all seven [Sieper's canon except for Resignation A & B and The Rhyming Poem] are urgent and passionate poems," 53; Mora (1995) attributed the coinage of the genre to "an essentially Romantic concept of elegy … alien to the OE period: elegy as sentimental or personal poetry," where "the gap between the actual object and the extraordinary significance attributed to it is bridged by faith alone," 129, 139; Fulk and Cain (2003) similarly pointed out that the phrase has been kept "to justify the lavish critical attention bestowed upon [these poems] … predicated on the modern preference, inherited from the Romantics, for poetry that takes the form of lyric self-expression," 180; and, more recently, Bjork (2014)  found the term "inadequate because it describes a wide variety of poems that are not entirely alike and do not conform to standard notions of what an elegy should be," xvii-still, he applied the vaguer "Lyric and Wisdom" and "Lyric and Elegy" as counterparts of "Religious and Didactic" in the recent Dumbarton Oaks bilingual edition of the Old English poems, effectively replacing one genre taxonomy with another, further problematising the use and usefulness of these terms.
the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" and the centrality of elegy as the foremost example of British national poetry as championed by Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) result in the assimilation of Old English literature into a nativist critical discourse that constructs the Old English "elegiac" poet as the precursor of a long tradition of "great British elegists" who epitomise the aesthetic ideal of "the union of deep feeling with profound thought" while engaging in constant conversation with ideas of a misconstrued heroic Germanic past framed by British imperialist anxieties and nostalgia.
More broadly, this study evidences the limitations of a traditional genre-based approach to the study of Old English literature in the light of the vast and highly nuanced network of intertextual connections that extend across and beyond the body of Old English poetry.Comparative reading of texts traditionally considered as "elegies"-such as Deor and The Wanderer-alongside others that have never been labelled as such -including the Meters of Boethius and Christ and Satan-reveals largely neglected thematic parallels and stylistic affinities across these texts, evidencing the need for a new critical language that acknowledges the permeability of Old English poetic language and the crucial impact of sustained interaction between different literary traditions and cultural backgrounds had in the shaping and development of Old English literature.While modern scholarship has long recognised the misleading impact of artificially constructed dichotomies, such as those of Christian/Germanic, imported/native, or oral/literate in relation to early medieval English culture and society, some of these remain deeply entrenched in the scholarly construct known as the "Old English elegy."As shown by evidence derived from comparative reading, inherited nineteenthcentury preconceptions about the nature and status of the Old English "elegiac" speaker as a pathetic yet dignified poetic figure whose narrative of alienation and dispossession elicits sympathetic engagement have conditioned our affective response to certain texts and, with it, our critical evaluation of their literary merit and aesthetic quality.
Therefore, this study also invites re-assessment of the critical role that modern editors, anthologisers, and teachers of Old English have in shaping how meaning is made, transmitted, and perpetuated in current structures of teaching and learning. 5As the most widely read, taught, and studied genre in Old English literature alongside the epic/ heroic world of Beowulf, the "Old English elegy" emerges from and reinforces the stratification of the Old English poetic corpus into a fabricated hierarchical structure that privileges those texts that most closely align with post-Romantic aesthetic sensibilities and ideas of national character and identity.Ultimately, this hierarchisation of the body of Old English poetry limits our understanding of Old English poetics by compartmentalising the corpus into a series of extrinsic categories that disrupt the boundaries and relationships between texts, manuscripts, and traditions.Finally, this study advances 5 Class and critical editions and general anthologies often replicate inherited genre classifications: see, for example, in addition to Klinck (1992), Krapp and Dobbie (1931-53), Greenfield and Calder (1986), Alexander (2002), and Liuzza  (2014), all of which feature the categories of "elegy" or "elegiac;" Fulk and Cain (2003), Lees (2013), and Bjork  (2013) use the broader "lyric;" Marsden (2010) includes Deor, The Ruin, The Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Wife's Lament in "Reflection and Lament," together with the Durham proverbs and a few Riddles, whereas The Seafarer is included under "Example and Exhortation;" Delanty and Matto (catalogue The Rhyming Poem as a "Poem about Living," The Ruin as a "Poem about Dying," and all other "elegies" (except Resignation) as "Poems of Exile and Longing."Some exceptions are Treharne (2010) and Williamson (2017), who follow the original manuscript context of the poems, even as they acknowledge their usual classification as "elegies." the need for an alternative approach and methodology that prioritise the material environment of Old English texts and the internal network of intertextual echoes and allusions displayed by the poems and manuscripts themselves to preserve their original literary and cultural contexts, hence replacing a vertical, hierarchical, and anachronistic misconstruction of the Old English poetic corpus that relies on modern theories of poetics and ethnonationalist nostalgia with a horizontal, multi-layered understanding of Old English poetics that restores the texts to their original textual and cultural environments and brings us closer to a more comprehensive, cohesive, and accurate critical evaluation of Old English literature.

Sentimental Genres: Modern Elegy and Old English Literature
Towards the mid-eighteenth century, English elegy enjoyed a rather wavering popularity as a kind of poetic composition largely concerned with public and private commemorations of death and meditations on the bleakness of life. 6It would not be until the publication of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in Country Churchyard (1751) that the genre regained some artistic and literary status owing to Gray's recasting of conventional themes into an introspective exploration of the inner psychological and emotional world of the poetic speaker in juxtaposition with a meditation on the human condition.The sensational success of Gray's Elegy eventually reached Germany through Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter's 1771 translation, resulting in the rapid proliferation of a new tradition of meditative elegy after Gray's model.This tradition has received the name of Classical German Elegy since Theodore Ziolkowski's pioneering study of the genre, which he defined as: An extended poem in elegiac distichs, organized as a first-person framework embracing a meditative core and moving from thematic tension toward resolution.[…] The characteristic elegiac tension … arises from a contrast within the meditative core between two ostensible opposites: the real and the ideal, present and past, freedom and necessity, society and nature, temporality and timelessness […] The consciousness of the poetic persona is expressed by its disengagement from the exigencies of daily life and its removal to a location that symbolizes topographically the possibility of detached contemplation. 7olkowski's definition largely relies on the model provided by Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 treatise Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry).In it, Schiller established a primary distinction between naïve and sentimental poets and kinds of poetry.A poet will be naïve "if he, in his judgement of things, overlooks their artificial and contrived aspects and heeds only their simple nature."8The sentimental poet, on the other hand, "reflects [reflektier] upon the impression that objects make upon him, and only in that reflection is the emotion grounded which he himself experiences and which he excites in us." 9 Schiller then listed a series of general elements that characterise the elegy as sentimental poetry, including aspects of poetic voice, thematic range, and mode of expression: 6 For an overview of the historical development of elegy up to the eighteenth century, see the relevant chapters in Weisman.On the eighteenth-century Graveyard School and English funeral elegy, see Draper and Parisot.The elegiac poet seeks nature … in her correspondence with ideas, not just in her acquiescence in necessity.Sadness at lost joys, at the golden age now disappeared from the world, at the lost happiness of youth, love, and so forth, can … become the material of an elegiac poem […] The content of poetic lamentation … must always be only an ideal, inner [object]; even if it grieves over some loss in actuality, it must be transfigured into an ideal loss. 10hiller's treatise provided a theoretical background to a literary phenomenon that had been in development for over half a century in Germany, but which had until then lacked the support of a theoretical poetics that legitimised such process.However, Schiller's definition of elegy is important here for a different reason: its adoption by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and its introduction to the English literary scene. 11Indeed, Coleridge's definition of elegy provides a revealing example of his potential indebtedness to Schiller.According to Coleridge, elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself.As he will feel regret for the past of desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy.Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. 12e similarities between the two definitions are too striking to be the result of mere coincidence: elegy is the product of reflective contemplation of a lost or unattainable ideal, expressed in purely subjective terms, and in the form of an internal monologue.The implications of this overlap in definitions are significant and far-reaching: elegy here becomes characterised by a relative non-definiteness-it "may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself," and it "presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future"-that allows for a much greater malleability and adaptability of poetic form and subject matter.As a result, both in Germany and Britain, elegy becomes the dominant poetic form during the nineteenth century owing to its permeability when combined with other genres and modes.
Classical German elegy enjoyed an almost unbroken continuity through adaptation and imitation for almost two centuries, while elegy in Britain became almost ubiquitous, its importance epitomised in the elevation of Tennyson to the position of Poet Laureate after the publication of his celebrated elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850).Caught between the decay of heroic ideals and Romantic celebrations of pastoral simplicity on the one hand, and the rapidly evolving advances of science, industry, and society within an empire whose very history and identity seemed endangered by its ongoing expansion on the other, the Victorians felt torn "between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born." 13In such a dizzyingly disconcerting scenario, elegy supplied a means for nineteenth-century poets and audiences to both mourn and celebrate the past, to recover a significant historical moment and find solace in its affirming force.In the nineteenth century elegy became, in short, a recognisable form of national literature and an expression of national sentiment and identity. 14he popularity and dignity of elegy during the nineteenth century also found its way into the critical discourse around early medieval literature, aided in no small part by the pervasive influence that James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian (1760-65) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) had held over the popular imagination and the scholarly reception of medieval and premodern texts for over a century. 15That the category of "elegy" was among the first to take root in the early classification and study of Old English poetry is therefore hardly coincidental.Retrieved from "A land of old upheaven form the abyss / … Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt," the rediscovery of the medieval literary past assuaged imperialist anxieties over Britain's linguistic and cultural self-definition as it provided both a reflection of contemporary preoccupations and a source of historical legitimacy for their expression in the form of elegiac verse. 16However, the most striking example of the influence that Romantic poetics have in the reception of Old English poetry is to be found in the standard authoritative definition of "Old English elegy" itself, as stated by Greenfield: We may perhaps formulate a definition of the Old English elegy as a relatively short reflective or dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and consolation, ostensibly based upon a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing an attitude towards that experience.17 When compared to Schiller's, Coleridge's, and Ziolkowski's definitions of elegy, the similarities are inescapable.For Schiller, the elegiac "poet reflects upon the impression that objects make upon him, [which] must always be only an ideal, inner one;" Coleridge sees elegy as "the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind … always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself;" Ziolkowski defines Classical German Elegy as "organized as a first-person framework embracing a meditative core;" and Greenfield establishes that the "Old English elegy" must be a "short dramatic or reflective poem … ostensibly based upon a specific personal experience or observation."Again, Schiller enumerates the themes of elegy as "sadness at lost joys, at the golden age now departed … at the lost happiness of youth … if the first is treated as lost and the second as unattained;" Coleridge mentions "regret for the past or desire for the future … Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future;" Ziolkoski speaks of "a contrast within the meditative core between two ostensible opposites: the real and the ideal, present and past, freedom and necessity, society and nature, temporality and timelessness;" and, finally, Greenfield alludes to "a contrastive pattern of loss and consolation."Nineteenth-century German scholar Bernhard ten Brink employed similar terms to describe the "Old English elegy": "Painful longing for vanished happiness is its key note.It seeks to voice this mood in reflective and descriptive language … generally that of one isolated or bereft by death or exile of protectors and friends." 18Finally, Klinck sees "Old English elegy" as "a discourse arising from a powerful sense of absence, of separation from what is desired … shaping itself by echo and leitmotiv into a poem that moves from disquiet to some kind of acceptance." 19he main common features of elegy according to these definitions can be then summarised as: (a) the expression of sadness at and longing for the loss of an ideal state; (b) the external realisation of the poet's, or poetic persona's, internal state of mind and subjective experience of and response to the loss of said ideal; (c) the juxtaposition of pleasure and sorrow in the contemplation of the ideal as something unattainable and irretrievable, a vision of the past elevated to the sublime that causes psychological and emotional distress in the observer, who is located in the present and isolated from the community; and, especially in Klinck, (d) a structural principle constructed around an initial contrast of opposites that moves towards eventual resolution through mediative contemplation and negotiation of conflict expressed in the form of internal monologue.These elements do, in fact, belong to a concept of elegy as a genre, discourse, or mode rooted in sentimental poetics and eighteenth-century theories of aesthetics, of the experience of "mixed sensations" as the fundamental principles for the discovery and enjoyment of Beauty and the Sublime. 20s evidenced by the comparisons above, the projection of Romantic poetics onto Old English literature became fossilised in the scholarly discourse through quotation and repetition of the work of earlier scholars, as well as through inherited structures of teaching and learning Old English literature well into the twentieth century.In addition to the influence of sentimental poetics in the coinage and theoretical formulation of the category of "Old English elegy," its adoption and application by early scholars acquired another dimension through its incorporation into a reimagined narrative of national literature.In its close verbal echoes and thematic affinities with Beowulf, the de facto English foundational epic in the eyes of nineteenth-century scholars, the "Old English elegy" encapsulates both the martial world of the comitatus as an ideal of social cohesion and the affective force of lyric self-referentiality, thereby appealing to both nationalistic readings of the past and to historicist attempts to endow national literature with a distinct character that carries the legitimising authority of antiquity.Old English literature hence became a source of cultural identity justified on the grounds of aesthetic and artistic continuity and expressed through a hybrid discourse of ethnonationalist nostalgia and sentimental poetics.

Elegy and Epic: The Affective World of the Comitatus
In nineteenth-century German scholarship, Old English literature was represented as both part of a supra-national, pan-Germanic or Teutonic past, and as containing distinctive elements that amounted to an early expression of English national identity.Among these, ten Brink (1874) remarked, "the idea of the Comitatus reached full realisation, but also the feeling of piety, of loyalty, and of attachment," so that "the depth and intensity of feeling characteristic of the Teutonic race, seems, among the English of that early time, to have been accompanied by … a disposition to sentimental exaggeration, which … was 19 Klinck, The Old English Elegies, 246. 20See esp.chapter 3 in Ziolkowski.
wont to take on the character of melancholy."21Ten Brink raised this point again in relation to the "elegiac mood" in Beowulf, which he attributed to the "soft melancholy of the Old English temperament … which readily led to digression and reflection." 22he "epic character of the ancient lyric" was then established through the latter being "less the utterance of a momentary feeling than the portrayal of a lasting state." 23ere, ten Brink's attribution of an "epic character" to Old English "lyric" or "elegiac" poetry in terms of its narrative scope and thematic preoccupations effectively assimilates the discourse of "Old English elegy" into the narrative of national character that surrounds Beowulf.Ten Brink's remark on how "this tenderness of feeling, which … quite recently, was held to be the inheritance of the German in the narrower sense, especially distinguished the English branch in the antiquity of our history" further exemplifies this process of assimilation of Old English literature into the discourse of national identity.
It is perhaps because of this reimagining of the past through modern eyes that ten Brink concluded that "of all the Teutonic tribes … the English were in the most favourable position for the preservation of their language and nationality."24Accordingly, an "inclination to reflection, to elegiac tenderness" and not conventionally "heroic" or "epic" element is the defining features that leads ten Brink to see Beowulf as distinctly English in its representation of "character and customs," and to consider it as an English national poem. 25The central position of the comitatus in the critical imagination provides the conceptual bridge bringing these two aspects together.The discourse of Germanic character and virtue revolves around two clusters of ideas: one focused on kinship, loyalty, and community; and another built around familial ties, personal allegiance, and social affective bonds.The heroic world of Beowulf illustrates the former, while the "elegiac" element in Old English poetry endows the world of the comitatus with a sentimental dimension present not only in the epos but also outside of it in the form of expressions of individual feeling and introspection.Hroþgar's tears upon Beowulf's departure, the "Lay of the Last Survivor," and the grieving woman at Beowulf's funeral find a direct echo in The Wanderer, Deor, and The Wife's Lament, respectively, so that the "elegiac" becomes inseparable from the discourse of Germanic virtue and national character encapsulated by the comitatus.
It is precisely this empathetically overstated association between the heroic world of Beowulf and the affective world of the "elegies" that has most notably conditioned the reception and critical evaluation of other Old English texts that share similar thematic and stylistic affinities, but which either run counter to retroactively projected misconstructions of a secular, primarily pagan and culturally homogeneous Germanic past, or fall outside inherited preconceptions about the nature of "elegiac" poetic speakers.In the first case, a desire to shape meaning according to contemporary ethnocentric ideas results in the displacement of texts adopted from the Christian Latin tradition as "corruptions" of the original sociocultural value of the comitatus and the affective and psychological impact of its loss, as contained in Beowulf and the "elegies."In the second case, the figure of the poet not only as author but as poetic persona emerges most powerfully from the Romantic background of modern theories of poetics, where affective engagement arises from mutual sympathetic recognition between the poet/persona and their audience.The speakers of the "Old English elegies" are affectively engaging because they have been constructed as such by a critical discourse that upholds "original" lyric self-expression as the highest form of literature, consequently devaluating Latinate models and prose works to favour vernacular verse.
The very titles of some of these poems invoke tropes derived from the Romantic poetic imagination: for example, Deor, the exiled gifted poet whose name is lost to time and has therefore adopted a pseudonym-"beast," "wild animal"-that is suggestive both of the dehumanisation that comes with the loss of social status within the comitatus and of the symbiosis between Schiller's naïve poet and the natural world; similarly, The Wanderer echoes familiar poetic figures such as Schiller's model of strolling observer struck by the overwhelmingness of the human condition and the sublimity of nature in Der Spaziergang (1795), or Wordsworth's own homonymous poem, The Wanderer (1814).That these titles have remained virtually unchallenged and its implications unquestioned for nearly two centuries shows how deeply Old English scholarship is indebted to the legacy and influence of Romantic poetics.The limiting effect that this legacy has had in our reception and interpretation of Old English poetry is further evidenced by the exclusion of other texts displaying similar thematic preoccupations, style, imagery, and poetic diction from the canon of "Old English elegy" owing to their belonging to one of the two categories mentioned above; namely, when they overtly display Latin Christian inspiration or influence, and when they fail to meet Romantic expectations of affectively engaging lyric personae. 26eter 2 of the C-Text of the Old English Boetius provides a compelling case study where the prevalence of ethnonationalist readings of the past and the hierarchical prioritisation of "original" Old English texts-namely, those not ostensibly based on any specific textual source or sources, especially Christian Latin ones-have led to the critical estrangement of this poem form the rest of the poetic corpus.When set alongside Deor, not only are similar thematic elements present in both speakers' descriptions of their own respective situations, but the very predicaments they express are largely equivalent: two talented poets-singers who formerly enjoyed the favour of their lords and partook of the joy and revels of the hall now find themselves deprived of status, companionship, and reputation.Starting with Deor, after a sequence of allusions to a series of mythological, legendary, and historical figures, the speaker moves on to describe his own situation: Siteð sorgcearig, saelum bidaeled, on sefan sweorceð, sylfum þinceð þaet sy endeleas earfoða dael.
Ahte ic fela wintra folgað tilne, holdne hlaford, oþþaet Heorrenda nu, leoðcraeftig monn londryht geþah.þaet me eorla hleo aer gesealde.Þaes ofereode; þisses swa maeg.(lines 28-30; 35-42) 27 (The sorrowful one sits, bereft of joy, his mind darkened by grief, thinking to himself that his share of suffering is endless.[…] Let me tell this story about myself: I was once a scop for the Heodenings, dear to my lord.My name was Deor.For many years I enjoyed a good service, a gracious lord, until Heorrenda now, a man skilled in song-crafting, has received the land-right that the protector of men once gave me.That passed away-so can this.) The situation described largely corresponds to the main elements of the "Old English elegy" as first identified by nineteenth-century German scholars and later codified by Greenfield: loss of status and subsequent exile and isolation, contrast of former joy and present misery, and reference to the speaker's own state of mind (sorcearig, on sefan sweorceð).When compared to Meter 2, the similarities in mode, imagery, diction, and description are easily grasped: "Hwaet, ic lioða fela lustlice geo sanc on saelum; nu sceal siofigende; wope gewaeged, wreccea giomor; singan sarcwidas.Me þios siccetung hafað agaeled, ðes geocsa, þaet ic þa ged ne maeg gefegean swa faegre, þeah ic fela gio þa sette soðcwida þonne ic on saelum waes.
[…] Forhwann wolde ge, weoruld-frynd mine, secgan oððe singan þaet ic gesaellic mon waere on weorulde?Ne synt þa word soð nu þa gesaelða ne magon simle gewunigan."(lines 1-7; 16-19) (Listen!I once sang many songs, full of joy in prosperous times; now, mourning, weary with sorrow, I, a sad outcast, must sing sad verses.This sighing and sobbing have hindered me, so I can no longer compose songs in elegant tunes, though I formerly made many a virtuous song in prosperous times.[…] Why, my friends, would you sing or say that I was a fortunate man in the world?Those words are not true, for joys cannot last forever.) The language employed to describe the speaker's state of mind is similar to the one employed by the Deor poet (sceal siofigende, / wope gewaeged, wreccea giomor), and we find here an equivalent contrast between past joy and present sorrow, as well an allusion to the mutability of fortune.28However, despite evident similarities in phraseology, theme, and structure, only Deor has been consistently included in the canon of "Old English elegy," whereas Meter 2 was included among the "elegiac class" only by Conybeare (1826).Significantly, Deor provides a valuable insight into the pre-Christian past and its cultural legacy in early medieval England, and, implicitly, a potential link between Old English poetry and a broader pan-Germanic background that resonated with nineteenth-century British imperialist anxieties over historical, linguistic, and cultural origins.The poem is, moreover, textually ambiguous, showing influence from both a secular, pre-Christian oral tradition of myth and legend and a Christian, Latinate literate tradition of manuscript copying and circulation, where the Germanic substratum remains dominant.The Meters, on the other hand, are embedded in a Christian philosophical framework whose origins and transmission are relatively straightforward.Finally, the speaker in Deor remains unidentified and unidentifiable, a quasi-historical figure shrouded in the mystery of a poetic persona, as opposed to the Boethian speaker, whose person and circumstance are well known to the audience.
The textual obscurity, fictionalised dramatic monologue, and secular Germanic element in Deor grant it a place in the canon of "Old English elegy," as its allusion to myth and legend encapsulates the promise of a foundational supra-national past, while the speaker's lament provides an expression of human pathos that resonates with a voice that is both individual (that of the poet/persona) and collective (that of the scop/ historian).This literary/historical duality of Deor finds a close correspondence in nineteenth-century readings of Beowulf as a pseudo-historical or archaeological record through which a faithful image of Germanic culture and society could be reconstructed and extensively applied to the study of other texts and historical evidence.In this sense, Deor provided not only a witness to the origins of a national literary tradition, but also a testimony of how ancient Germanic legend remained powerfully present in early medieval England: an eloquent conversationist-in ways in which Meter 2 could never be-in the constant dialogue between past and present that characterises early Old English scholarship, and a source of legitimacy for those who sought in Old English literature evidence of national cultural and historical self-affirmation.
An illustrative example of such dialogue between literary appreciation and historical legitimisation of ethnonationalist narratives is Alois Brandl (1908), who further elaborated on the close association between "epic" and "elegiac" in Beowulf as an inherent element of national character.He saw the blooming status of "elegy" in Old English literature as a reflection of "the inborn melancholy of the Anglo-Saxons, [which] was particularly beneficial for this genre" and noted that "the elegies stemmed from lyric portrayal of a heroic situation," citing "the decline of heroic life" as "a favourite topic, [as] shown by comparison with the elegiac pieces in Beowulf." 29 Brandl ventured a tentative definition of the main thematic elements of the "Old English elegy" as "deal [ing]  with heroic motifs, either of oppressed noblewomen or suffering warriors or fallen burgs," and "mov[ing] in the tradition of the retinue [i.e. the comitatus]."30Again, the designation of the ancient Germanic martial heroic world of the comitatus as the source of the lyric mode of expression in Old English poetry establishes the indebtedness of the "Old English elegy" to both the foundational status of Beowulf and the distinct national character conferred on early medieval English culture.As foundational epic, elegiac mood, and Germanic ethnonationalism came together in nineteenth-century German scholarship, the "national character" of Old English literature became an increasingly prominent element in the description and critical discussion of individual texts or genres.
The "lyric portrayal of a heroic situation" that Brandl described as crucial not only to the flourishing of the "Old English elegy" as a genre but to the development of a national, distinctively "Anglo-Saxon" sense of an "inborn melancholy" lies at the core of The Wanderer in its combination of evocative nostalgia for the vanished world of the mead-hall through "heroic" themes and motifs (the comitatus, the beasts of battle, the joys and feast of the hall) with an affectively engaging, psychologically complex, and often polyphonic display of a "lyric" poetic persona. 31Like Deor, The Wanderer reflects the world of the comitatus through the effects of its absence; however, the speaker's intricately introspective discourse navigates different registers and modes as it shifts in attitude and perspective, from grief and lament to meditation and exhortation and, finally, contemplation of, and reconciliation with the transitory nature of the world.The textual depth and complexity of The Wanderer make it a compelling case study for the illustration of the joint influence that Romantic poetics and ethnonationalist agendas have had in the historical reception of Old English literature and in the exclusion of other texts from the canon of "Old English elegy."Two aspects are worth considering here: the permeability and instability of literary genre, and the construction of the "elegiac speaker" as a sympathetic voice that elicits a positive affective response.
Genre categories in Old English poetry are slippery at best.The hybrid nature of Old English literature, which combines oral and literate elements, translation and free adaptation, Latin learning and vernacular expression, and homogeneity and variation, renders rigid taxonomies largely ineffective.Most texts participate in more than one genre of discourse, often engaging in nuanced and multilayered intertextual connections.Only two "genres" have stayed relatively consistent in terms of continuity and scope throughout the Old English critical discourse of the past two centuries: those of "elegy" and "riddle."The boundaries between elegy and riddle have been crossed before, particularly in relation to the early critical reception of Wulf and Eadwacer, considered for some time to be a riddle on the name Cynewulf and the first in the long sequence of riddles in the Exeter Book, or the almost liminal nature of the textual relationship between Riddle 60 and The Husband's Message. 32Taking this exploration of genre interaction further, comparative close reading of The Wanderer and Riddle 5 shows that permeability across the categories of "elegy" and "riddle" go beyond the use of poetic persona, wordplay, and extended metaphor. 33Starting with the opening lines of The Wanderer and Riddle 5, the similarities in the description of the speaker's situation and use of language are striking.The opening lines of The Wanderer read: Oft him anhaga are gebideð.metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig geond lagulade longe sceolde hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sae, wadan wraeclastas.Wyrd bið ful araed.
31 For an illuminating discussion of how Old English literature can serve as a vehicle for nostalgic evocation and the construction of a specific understanding of the past rooted in contemporary cultural and political discourses, see Trilling's seminal work on the aesthetics of nostalgia in Old English literature. 32For a general sense of the scholarship on the genre of The Husband's Message and Wulf and Eadwacer, see Klinck, The Old English Elegies, 345-7 and 372-6 respectively.See also the introductions to both poems in Treharne and Williamson. 33For further discussion of verbal echoes and similarities in use of imagery between The Wanderer and Riddle 5 and the potential to read these texts through cross-referencing and beyond imposed genre boundaries, see Soper, "Emotional Anthologies: The Exeter Riddles and the Psalms" in this special edition.
[…] "Often, I, alone at every daybreak, have had to bewail my sorrows.No one is now living to whom I might dare reveal my heart openly.
[…] Then the wounds of the heart are the heavier, aching for the loved one.") Again, we find the main features of elegy exemplified by these excerpts from The Wanderer: exile and deprivation, contrast and balance of opposites, and the expression of subjective experience told through self-referential discourse.The speaker's movement is hindered by the tossing of the waves and the binding of ice as a metaphorical extension of his own psychological turmoil and stagnation.His isolation is only intensified by the lack of lord, kin, and hall, producing intense emotional distress.The speaker's selfidentification as an anhaga or "solitary one" who passively abides or awaits his fate (note the parallel use of gebidan/abidan) recurs in Riddle 5, as well as some notable parallels in diction and imagery: [may] come to me from the strife of battle, before I utterly perish among men, but in the battlements the hammered blades will beat and bite me, hard-edged and sharp, the work of smiths.I must always abide the clash of foes.Never could I find a leech on the battlefield who might heal my wounds with herbs, but the scars of edges grow greater on me by day and by night with a mortal blow.) The tossing and beating of the waves are replaced here by the biting and striking of weapons, the physical stagnation of the ice-cold sea becomes the speaker's own inability to displace as an inanimate object (a shield, according to the most widely supported interpretation of the poem), the locking of thoughts and words take a literal meaning through the speaker's inability to think or speak except through prosopopoeia.The awaiting of grace (are gebidan, 1) is similarly replaced by the abiding of conflict in Riddle 5 (abidan sceal … laþran gemotes, 9b-10a), and the image of the lacerating wounds of the heart in The Wanderer (heortan benne, 49b) acquire a physical dimension as the gaping wounds of battle (wunde, 12).Other stylistic similarities include the parallel half-lines Oft ic sceolde ana in The Wanderer (8a) and Oft ic wig seo in Riddle 5 (3b), and the negative Nis nu cwicra nan (9b) and Naefre laececynn (10b) to refer to the speakers' lack of companionship.While these similarities bring the two poems together, they are separated by their assumed textual categories.As a genre, the riddle encapsulates a series of formal elements and a specific performative function-that of providing entertainment and challenging one's intellectual skills-whereas the category of elegy refers to a mode of expression and a set of thematic features that do not adhere to the same performative rules and function as a riddle.The contemplative mode of the wanderer's internal monologue is at odds with the social performative world of the riddle; and yet, were we to encounter Riddle 5 by itself rather than within the sequence of Riddles in the Exeter Book, its genre affiliation and textual function might not be as clearly defined on the basis of its stylistic and thematic features.Moreover, the wanderer's discourse often becomes cryptically allusive in a way that is reminiscent of the language of riddles: take, for example, the obscure lines describing the various fates of men: Sume wig fornom, ferede in forð-wege.Sumne fugel oþþaer ofer heanne holm; sumne se hara wulf deaðe gedaelde; sumne dreorig-hleor in eorð-scrafe eorl gehydde.(lines 80b-84) (War took some, they departed on the way forth.A bird bore one off over the high sea; the grey wolf shared one with death; a sad-faced man hid one in the grave) Yet another example can be found in the weal wundrum heah, wyrmlicum fah ("wondrously high wall, decorated with serpentine patterns"), where the exact nature of this decoration-if it really is a decorative element rather than a metaphorical image for the destructive action of time and natural phenomena on the old building-has long puzzled scholars.
Riddle 5 is also unconventional in that it does not ask the reader for a solution, nor does it try to create a deliberately ambiguous discourse in the way other Riddles do, most notably in the case of those that rely on erotic double entendre.Instead, the text can be read literally as a dramatic monologue spoken by an unnamed warrior, a vivid and straightforward account of the hardships of battle that does not immediately require a deductive exercise to be deciphered.However, perhaps because The Wanderer is admittedly richer in emotional and psychological depth and description, more elaborate in diction and imagery, and more complex in voice and structure-in other words, closer to our own post-Romantic experience of aesthetics and poetics-we perceive it as more effective and engaging.Hence, while the similarities between these Old English texts defy our expectations and resist easy classification into specific genre categories, we assign different functions to each of them on the basis of our own subjective responses.We are guided by what the texts do (what expectations and reactions they excite in us) rather than by what they mean (their use of language, imagery, and structure) in our decision to label them as "elegiac."This affective fallacy "begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effect of the poem" and leads to an interpretive relativism in which "the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear." 34The text becomes not a reflection of its own cultural and historical moment, but a projection of our affective response to the reconstructed internal world of poetic speakers, to the degree in which they meet our previous experience with, and expectations of emotional and psychological processes.
This affective fallacy was often expressed in early scholarship in the form of a markedly hermeneutic approach to literary historicism, where Old English literature came to be seen as a source of inspiration and historical legitimacy for subsequent periods in the history of English literature, and especially the nineteenth century.Stopford Brooke (1892) described the feeling of "romantic pleasure when we first look at the earliest upwelling of the broad river of English poetry, and think of the hundred cities of the imagination that have been built beside its stream." 35The liquid metaphor here employed by Brooke suggests images of origin and resurgence ("first upwelling"), continuity, homogeneity, and progress-note the movement from the natural world to the man-made city-and invites an interpretation of English literary history as an uninterrupted continuum where the primeval waters of early vernacular verse set in motion the powerful hydraulic dynamics of British imperial cultural and industrial machinery that gave rise to a fantastical "hundred cities of the imagination."Brooke's veiled allusion to Golgonooza, William Blake's own "city of imagination" in his prophetic Jerusalem, further reinforces the implied sense of progress and continuity by aligning Old English literature, Romantic poetics, and Victorian industrial power as, respectively, the source, vehicle, and culmination of English literary and cultural national character.Brooke's own contact with some of the most prominent exponents of nineteenthcentury medieval revivalism, such as John Ruskin, William Morris, Burne Jones, and Tennyson himself doubtless underlies his assessment of the place of Old English in the history of English literature.
By bringing together aesthetic evaluation, affective criticism, and a sense of nationalistic nostalgia, Brooke effectively confirmed the privileged place of Old English poetry, and the "Old English elegies", in the history of English literature.In Brooke's enormously successful and influential work, Old English literature became both sentimental and national, both modern and historical, since "no national art is good that is not plainly that nation's own," and "in this Anglo-Saxon poetry … we grasp most clearly the dominant English essence."36However, in establishing these comparisons, Brooke also shaped a reconstructed line of poetic continuity that is both genetic insofar as based on a principle of literary lineage, and hermeneutic insofar as implying an interpretive reading of the past to fit a narrative of cultural origins and national identity.When discussing the "Old English elegies," Brooke considered The Wanderer to be "quite at home in the nineteenth century," and felt it was "almost impossible not to slip [into] blank verse of the nineteenth century" when translating the "still more modern, more distinctly English" text of The Wife's Lament.37 Brooke's hermeneutic literary historicism is most notable in his celebration of The Seafarer.In relation to its translation into modern English, he noted: "Were I to put it into blank verse, everyone would say that I was imitating Tennyson.Even in lines of mere description, without the elegiac sentiment of humanity, this Tennysonian likeness appears." 38rooke's repeated allusion to the "modern feeling" of the "Old English elegy" and its likeness to nineteenth-century verse-particularly Tennyson's-illustrates how affective criticism conditions and limits our response to certain types of poetic speaker: the solitary seafarer, the stoic wanderer, or the abandoned lover, all of which fit neatly into nineteenth-century post-Romantic standards of elegiac expression.Sympathetic engagement with the speakers of The Seafarer, The Wanderer, or The Wife's Lament is presented here as a response to a familiar aesthetic and literary experience.Elegiac speakers are typified in Old English poetry, as in nineteenth-century literature, as aristocratic men and women enduring a significant loss of status and crisis in identity, and who give voice to their predicament through evocation of a more prosperous time, or, in the case of The Seafarer, by embracing the spiritual tests and hardships of a hostile natural world while rejecting the corrupting influence of human society.These tropes of nostalgia and the quest for selfdefinition in the face of sudden change strongly resonate with both British imperialist anxieties over the loss of cultural identity and historical origins, as well as with Romantic ideals of poetic masculinity as torn between naïve feeling and sentimental expression, between "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" and the stoic endurance of "a reflective mind." Romantic poetic androcentrism-The Wife's Lament was initially titled The Exile's Lament until grammar revealed a female speaker, from which point on the poem has often been reclassified as a "love poem" or Frauenlied (woman's song) together with Wulf and Eadwacer-would see the speaker in Riddle 5 as unfitting for elegiac expression owing the projection of human pathos onto a non-sentient objects that seeks to replicate the mode of "genuinely elegiac" poems such as The Wanderer or The Seafarer.Similarly, constructions of the elegiac speaker as a model of Romantic poetic masculinity precludes the inclusion of potentially unsympathetic voices as part of the canon of "Old English elegy."A compelling example is Satan's extended lament in the first part of Christ and Satan, which despite its many similarities with The Wanderer in theme, style, and expression, has never been considered as an "elegy" or an "elegiac text."In this case, Satan's unappealing profile as an elegiac speaker conditions our sympathetic engagement with his discourse, thereby reducing its affective force.Hence, the celebrated ubi sunt passage in The Wanderer, which epitomises the discourse of the "Old English elegy" as defined by Greenfield, finds an elaborate response and companion piece in Satan's lament over the loss of heavenly privilege and the possibility of ever recovering the prosperity he once enjoyed as God's favourite angel.The passage from The Wanderer reads: Se þonne þisne wealsteal wise geþohte.ond þis deorce lif deope geondþenceð, frod in ferðe, feor oft gemon.waelsleahta worn, ond þas word acwið, "Hwaer cwom mearg?hwaer cwom mago?hwaer cwom maþþumgyfa?Hwaer cwom symbla gesetu?hwaer sindon seledreamas?Eala beorht brune!Eala byrnwiga!Eala þeodnes þrym!Hu seo þrag gewat.genap under nihthelm, swa heo no waere!"(lines 88-96) (The one who with wise thought, experienced in [his] heart, then deeply ponders this foundation and this dark life, [he] remembers from long ago the great many slaughters, and speaks these words: "Where has the horse gone, where the warrior?Where the treasures?Where are the seats at the feats, where the joys of the hall?Alas for the bright cup, alas for the mailed warrior; alas for the prince's glory!How that time has passed, obscured under the night's vault, as if it had never been.") The speaker's lament focuses on the evocation of former prosperity through a series of symbolic tokens (the horse, the warrior, the hall, the golden cup, the gear of battle) that convey an image of wealth through associative correlation between these objects and the centre of social and cultural stability, the mead-hall, with its connotations of martial victories celebrated at the feast and the spoils of battle enjoyed and displayed within it.This image is then contrasted with the ruined state of the mead-hall as a token of the vanishing nature of wealth, society, and prosperity, all of which are subject to the certainty of transience and the inevitability of change.The corresponding section of "Satan's Lament" follows a similar principle: Cleopað ðonne se alda ut of helle, wriceð wordcwedas weregan reorde, eisegan stefne: "Hwaer com engla ðrym, þe we on heofnum habban sceoldan?"[…] "Eala drihtenes þrym!Eala duguða helm!Eala meotodes miht!Eala middaneard!Eala daeg leohta!Eala dream godes!Eala engla þreat!Eala upheofen!Eala þaet ic eam ealles leas ecan dreames, þaet ic mid handum ne maeg heofon geraecan, ne mid eagum ne mot up locian, ne huru mid earum ne sceal aefre geheran.þaere byrhtestan beman stefne!" (Christ and Satan, 34-37; 163-72)  [Then the ancient one cries out from hell, utters these words with an evil voice, a dreadful noise: "Where has the glory of angels gone, that we were destined to have in the heavens?" […] Alas for the Lord's majesty, alas for the lord of hosts!Alas for the Creator's might, alas for the middle realm!Alas for the light of day, alas for God's joy! Alas for the angelic host, alas for the heavens above!Alas, that I am forever deprived of eternal joy, that never again shall I reach for heaven with my own hands, nor ever look up with my own eyes, nor ever hear with my own ears the sound of the clearest trumpet!"]In this case, the thoughts of the wise one (Se þonne þisne wealsteal wise geþohte […] þas word acwið, 88-91b) are replaced by the dreadful noise of the ancient enemy's cry (Cleopað ðonne se alda ut of helle / wriceð wordcwedas weregan reorde, 34-35), but the message remains the same: Hwaer cwom?The ubi sunt lament is divided between two passages in Christ and Satan, so that between Satan's initial complaint and his acknowledgment of the loss he must endure as a result of his failed rebellion we find an extended dramatic monologue expressing his struggle to come to terms with his new identity and position in hell.
The second half of Satan's ubi sunt lament follows a pattern of movement from the general omnipotence of God as creator (þrym, miht, daeg leohta, dream) and His command over Heaven and Earth (duguða, middaneard, engla þreat, upheofen), to an increasingly specific set of sensorial and material elements associated with joy in the hall and expressed through bodily experience (mid handum ne maeg … geraecan, mid eagum ne mot up locian, ne huru mid earum ne sceal aefre geheran).Like the hwaer cwom sequence in The Wanderer, the eala sequence in "Satan's Lament" provides a condensed overview of the main social values of the heavenly duguð presented through a series of tokens of material culture that epitomise the ideal of stability and harmony in Heaven: spiritual joy, sensorial enjoyment, divine power, and hierarchical order.Like the absence of the mead-hall in The Wanderer, it is the impossibility of enjoyment of such stability in the aftermath of Satan's rebellion that creates a sense of emotional and psychological pathos.
The ubi sunt passage in The Wanderer is often referred to as an example of the Old English poetics of nostalgia and is one of the most quoted passages of Old English poetry owing to its combined representation of heroic martial life and social and cultural values, on the one hand, and elegiac expression of emotional and psychological distress, on the other.However, the eala sequence in "Satan's Lament" has never been included in the category of "elegy" or mentioned among the "elegiac" passages from longer texts, as opposed to the "Lay of the Last Survivor" or the "Father's Lament" in Beowulf.The difference between these digressions and "Satan's Lament" is that the latter is part of a longer Christian narrative, as opposed to the collapsing secular martial world of Beowulf, which finds a direct reflection in the meditative hwaer cwom lament in The Wanderer.The fact that Satan is, moreover, a rather unsympathetic figure further distances us from any possibility of empathetic engagement, as opposed to the positive affective response elicited by the speaker in The Wanderer, which more easily resonates with modern poetic sensibilities and ideas of poetic voice.
Nonetheless, the first section of Christ and Satan consists of an extended lament in the form of a dramatic monologue with occasional intermissions by the poet/narrator and a short dialogue with the devils in hell, which, for the most part, mirrors the style, diction, and structure of The Wanderer, particularly in its deployment and exploration of Satan's complex identity as he navigates his former, present, and future selves.In short, then, the reasons for excluding "Satan's Lament" from the canon of "Old English elegy" are fundamentally external and subjective rather than textual or literary: the secular Germanic world of The Wanderer and Beowulf takes precedence over the Christian background of "Satan's Lament"-a similar example in this regard would be Adam's lament in Genesis (790-820), which has never been included in the canon of "elegy" or referred to as "elegiac," either-as a result of the desire to reconstruct an ethnocentric image of cultural cohesion built around heroic values and the lament for the loss of an idealised former state of prosperity. 39"Satan's Lament," like Riddle 5 and Meter 2, exemplifies the importance of reading Old English texts through allusive reference to other texts, manuscripts, and traditions.The various themes and images that have traditionally been considered as conventional elegiac motifs in Old English also appear in these texts, which display similar aspects of subjectivity, meditation on the speaker's position between ostensible opposites (past/present, joy/sorrow, prosperity/decay, abundance/privation), and negotiation between the speaker's individuality and identity and their place in society and Creation; all of it presented through the form of a reflective dramatic monologue.However, while Deor and The Wanderer portray an anonymous, mostly secular narrative centred on the social and cultural world of the Germanic comitatus, the "elegiac" discourse of Meter 2 and Christ and Satan is undermined by their Christian Latinate background and tradition.These texts, like Riddle 5 have been assigned with different textual categories and functions, thereby disrupting the intertextual dynamics that brings them together.
Satan's loss of the heavenly host mirrors the wanderer's lordlessness, and so they express their grief through nearly identical formulaic laments.The speaker in Riddle 5, deprived of company and prosperity, similarly echoes the discourses of The Wanderer and "Satan's Lament."The poets and speakers in Deor and Meter 2 tell a similar tale of loss of status and favour and appeal to the mutability of fate.In the face of a complex system of adaptation and incorporation of external traditions into the conventions of Old English poetics to generate new meanings through association with familiar cultural realities, early scholarship prioritised the shaping of a narrative of cultural and literary origins built around affective responses to those texts that most closely aligned with modern poetic sensibilities, as well as with ethnonationalist anxieties over the historical legitimacy of national identity.Lyric self-expression and the evocation of a reimagined pagan Germanic past are the chief constituents of this narrative, which revolves around artificially constructed binaries of Germanic/Christian, native/imported, and affectively engaging/unsympathetic rooted in the sentimental poetics of Romantic elegy combined with a pervasive nostalgia for a golden age long vanished.
Scholarly emphasis on the inherent melancholy of Old English literature and its markedly sentimental nature and the identification of the "elegiac" with the discourse of national character explains how the "Old English elegy" grew in popularity among scholars and general reading audience at the same accelerated pace that Beowulf did, as well as why poems embedded in a Latin Christian framework soon fell out of the canon or were never considered.Hence, in the first edition of the Cambridge History of English Literature (1907), H. M. Chadwick considered it "customary to classify the early national poems in two groups, epic and elegiac," where "national" stands in direct opposition to "Christian." 40 The discourse of "Old English elegy" had become, by the turn of the century, a reflection of national (namely, native secular Germanic), modern, and sentimental sensibilities.
Nonetheless, because of its interdependency with national epic, the "Old English elegy" did not acquire full autonomy as a self-contained literary genre until the publication of Ernst Sieper's Die Altenglische Elegie (1915).Throughout this work, Sieper and cultural Christian Latin background.Burn's reassessment of the motif of the "beasts of battle" and the ruined city in lines 73-87 of the poem in the light of Gregory's commentary on the Book of Ezekiel is particularly relevant for this discussion and further emphasises the value of tracing multilingual and multicultural cross-references. 40Chadwick, "Early National Poetry," 19-20, emphasis added.
frequently alluded to "the strong individual character" of the "Old English elegy." 41This individuality is often expressed in distinctly Romantic terms such as the "depth and intimacy of feeling," the "tenderness, intimacy, and purely human pathos," and the "natural tendency towards melancholy and brooding that permeates every aspect of life for the Anglo-Saxons," which are expressed as a "spontaneous expression of subjective feelings." 42The inescapable Wordsworthian echo, together with Sieper's assertion that "from the very beginning of their literary activity the English had a certain sentimentality [Sentimentalität]," relocates the "Old English elegy" within modern aesthetic parameters and reinforces Sieper's interest in building a teleological view of English literature where the past shapes and influences the present. 43any of Sieper's views about the historical development, defining elements, and distinctive poetic diction of the "Old English elegy" were echoed by later editors, including Krapp and Dobbie, Klinck, and Muir. 44However, the legacy of nineteenth-century hermeneutic literary historicism has been most clearly preserved in the reiteration of the aesthetic continuity between the "Old English elegy" and the "great English elegists."Charles Kennedy (1943) remarked how the Old English poems "have little in common with … Lycidas or Adonais;" instead, their nature "is amply illustrated in English poetry by the popularity of so characteristic an expression of the genre as Gray's Elegy."Kennedy's indebtedness to Romantic poetics is made explicit through his Coleridgean definition of elegy as "native to the thoughts of sensitive minds … clothed with the dignity of universal application" and his paraphrasing of Brooke by invoking "that first welling up of that clear lyric strain which through the centuries has continued to pour its melody and passion into the full stream of English verse." 45ennedy's nod to nineteenth-century scholarship was echoed by C. L. Wrenn (1967), who differentiated between "elegy" understood as "(a) the expression of grief in studied verse for the death of a valued personality, or (b) the general meditation in solitude of what may be called universal griefs."Michael Alexander (2002) similarly justified the use of the term, finding its application "no more inappropriate than the title of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard." 47 Finally, Klinck, in what is still the most recent study of the "Old English elegy" as a genre, perpetuatesd the idea that the term "elegy" is not used in relation to Old English poetry "in the tradition of the English pastoral elegies … such as Milton's Lycidas, Shelley's Adonais, and Arnold's Thyrsis," but as having "a kinship with later English elegies of a broader kind, for example with Gray's Elegy … and even with Tennyson's In Memoriam." 4841 Sieper,Die Altenglische Elegie,114;3. 42 Ibid.,3;10;13. 43 Ibid.,118. 44 Two relevant examples are Timmer's dismissal of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, or The Rhyming Poem as corrupted by "Christian propaganda," and Harris's nativist approach to the interrelationship between elegy and epic.Tolkien similarly echoed the connection between Beowulf and the elegiac mode in Old English poetry in his description of the former as a "heroic-elegiac poem," 34. 45 The tendency of twentieth-century Old English scholarship to replicate and perpetuate the arguments yielded by Sieper and Brooke, among others, facilitated the fossilisation of inherited terminology, classifications, and interpretations of Old English literature, of which the discourse of "Old English elegy" is but one example.This is not to say that the idea of the "Old English elegy" as a genre passed unchallenged: recent scholarship has experienced a return to the original material support of medieval texts and a revalorisation of the study of manuscript context in relation to textual interpretation, particularly through the advances of digitised editions and the possibiliof more effective exploration of intertextual connections across the corpus. 49What should be noted, though, is that, despite the existence of strong arguments questioning the validity and usefulness of the term, the currency and perdurance of the phrase "Old English elegy" and its influence in how we group, study, and interpret these intertextual links remains inescapable-hence, even as it argues against it, this very study cannot avoid resorting to its use as the only means to invoke a specific set of interpretive assumptions and cultural implications, as well as the vast critical literature that has shaped and perpetuated them.The "Old English elegy" has become a supra-textual reality, a marker and generator of meaning rooted in a body of scholarship rather than a medieval literary genre or textual tradition.

Conclusion: "Elegy," "Elegiac," and Horizontal Intertextuality
In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller warned against making too hasty a use of his descriptive approach to poetry and poetics as he stated that in "employ[ing] the terms satire, elegy, and idyll in a wider sense … I look merely at the [dominant] mode of perception [herrschende Empfindungsweise] in these poetic categories." 50Similarly, Greenfield acknowledged that "if the elegies are a genre in Old English, they are so by force of our present, rather than determinate historical, perspective; that is, by our "feel" for them as a group possessing certain features in common" 51 The inherent contradiction in applying modern genre categories while simultaneously seeking to detach ourselves from imposing an artificial horizon of expectations on to the texts has led to the replacement of the term "elegy" with the more descriptive "elegiac," which refers to the mode rather than the genre of Old English texts.Similarly, numerous alternatives have appeared in recent anthologies to navigate the dangerous waters that situate modern editorial practice between the Scylla of ambiguous non-definition and the Charybdis of limiting prescriptivism.However, these alternatives further obscure the relationships between texts by adopting a descriptive perspective that, far from resolving the issue of restrictive categorisation, create new and more arbitrary groups with little in common beyond vague thematic resemblances. 52oreover, "theme of exile" still resonates to some degree as a typically "elegiac" feature, but the acknowledged ubiquity of language and imagery associated with social alienation across texts, manuscripts, and genres, both in prose and verse, has gradually diminished its force as a distinctive element and reinforced its view as a common topos in the Old English literary imagination.Instead, "elegiac" usually refers now to a poignancy of subjective perception and a vividness of psychological or emotional expression that marks a poem or passage thereof as surpassing the type-character construction of narrative verse.The term thus largely applies to the discourses of the "life of the mind" and the emotional practice of certain Old English texts.These two aspects are, in essence, the inheritance of Wordsworthian ideas that lyric poetry should be the "spontaneous outburst of powerful feeling" expressed in "the form natural to the reflective mind." In a recent work on the Exeter Book, John Niles advises a return to the immediate manuscript contexts of Old English texts as the best means to achieve interpretive and analytical consistency: While study of [the poems'] sources and analogues is likewise crucial to their understanding, the first place to which one should look for elucidation of a poem or passage from this codex is the rest of the contents of this same book.[…] Sometimes, indeed, whole chains of interpretive nodes can be seen to run through the Exeter Anthology.An awareness of such nodes, together with an alertness to their relation to a prior tradition of thought and imagery, can strengthen one's confidence that one is reading these poems in a manner that is both philologically sound and consistent with the book's period-specific character. 53les's argument provides a promising starting point for a progressive revision of the structures of learning and research inherited from nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholarship.However, acknowledging that internal manuscript coherence should be a fundamental guiding principle in the study and interpretation of Old English is only the beginning.The "nodes" Niles identifies as running through the Exeter Book are indicative not only of self-conscious codicological design, but of a supra-textual cultural, social, and material reality reflected in a complex network of meanings extending across texts, manuscripts, and traditions.The "theme of exile," preoccupations with the "life of the mind" or affective and emotional practice are not the domain of "elegy" alone, nor is the importance of social cohesion and the preservation of historical knowledge and cultural practice limited to the world of Beowulf.None of these are exclusive to or distinctive of secular or Christian texts.These themes and motifs are ubiquitous in the corpus of Old English literature and, as such, they reflect the importance of reading Old English texts not in isolation or according to arbitrary textual categories, but as part of a cohesive, horizontal ecosystem of meanings that relies on our experience with and knowledge of the possibilities for the generation of new meanings through associative reading between and beyond individual Old English texts.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). 53Niles, God's Exiles and English Verse, 223.