3 - Reading, Misreading and the Red Sea: the Journey to Ræd in Exodus

Summary

A large ornamental letter ‘H’ announces the beginning of the Old English Exodus on page 143 of Junius 11. This illuminated ‘H’, made up of interlocked, winged dragon-beasts, is the first letter of ‘HWÆT’ (see Fig. 6). At the top of the page, above the capitalised first half line, a section number (XLII) calls attention to a new chapter in the manuscript narrative. That a new poem in the cycle is about to get underway is signalled in various ways therefore. We are relocated, too. From the time of Abraham and Isaac, whose drama at the smoking altar in the land of Beersheba brought the Genesis poetry of Junius 11 to an end at the top of page 142 (the remainder of that page is blank), the manuscript takes us to Egypt and to the time of Moses.

The Old English Exodus follows the poetic Genesis, resembling the order of the Vulgate and of the Old English Hexateuch. But what we find in Junius 11 is something so unlike any other medieval version of the Exodus that aids to reading scripture, such as commentaries by the Fathers, as well as knowledge of the Bible, soon reach their limits when it comes to navigating a way through the poem. The Junius codex shapes specific responses to its poetry that often move us away from ‘the Bible’ in any case: the poems found on these pages are impacted by achievements and failures of the manuscript's production and compilation, by interpolations and interruptions, and by blank pages and corrections. Many spaces left for illustrations are found on the pages where the text of Exodus has been inscribed, along with a spill of something red and brown in colour that has seeped through such empty sections from pages 146 to 149. These features are fitting and not insignificant attributes of a poem that can resist interpretation.

An array of otherwise unattested compounds alongside abundant wordplay and a wealth of textual eccentricities have long presented troubles for those attempting to unlock the messages embedded within Exodus: the poem, writes Roberta Frank, ‘lingers in the mind as the alien, the oddly shaped and worded stranger haunting the halls of Old English poetry’.