3 - A Bird's Worth: Mis-Representing Owls in The Owl and the Nightingale

Summary

Seie me nu, þu wrecche wiȝt,

Is in þe eni oþer note

But þu hauest schille þrote?

Þu nart noȝt to non oþer þinge,

…

Wat dostu godes among monne?

[Tell me now, you wretched creature: is there any other purpose to you, other than that you have a shrill voice? You mean nothing to any other being … What good do you do among mankind?]

Heruore hit is þat me þe shuneþ

An þe totorue & tobuneþ

[So it is that people shun you, and pelt and beat you to pieces.]

(The Owl and the Nightingale, 556–63 and 1165–6)

THE OWL's VITRIOLIC WORDS in the first epigraph above remind us of the central theme of this poem's ‘plaiding suþe stronge’ [very strong debate (12)] – an owl and a nightingale contend aggressively on the usefulness of their voices, apologists for their own, and lambasters of the other's. In one respect, this is a generic feature, a recognisable component from a number of the possible Latin or Anglo-Norman debate-poems which are likely sources for The Owl and the Nightingale: people, abstractions or creatures debate their individual merits, or those of another whom they represent. On this simple basis, Neil Cartlidge comments, the poem certainly qualifies as a debate-poem, and the adept treatment the author makes of so-called debate-poetry characteristics in itself may point out an important aim for a text whose exact purpose has famously baffled scholars: ‘it could reasonably be described both as a self-conscious summation, and a self-conscious surpassing, of received literary possibilities’. In this skilled ‘summation’, however, we are alerted to how those ‘received literary possibilities’ mesh with other medieval literary discourses in which being useful bears significance. The cut and thrust of disputatio, dealt with more simply or superficially in The Owl and the Nightingale's sources, does not exist as a frivolous display of wit, or even just as a comment on rhetoric itself, but to press debating the subject of nonhuman worth to much more provocative ends.