Introduction

Summary

IN THE OLD English poem Christ C, also known as Christ in Judgment, as Jesus Christ begins his final words to those who rejected him, something remarkable happens: the poetic lines swell from two-stress verses, which are the standard Old English poetic form, into an expanded form of three stress positions, a form known as “hypermetrics” (513a–517a):

Lo, man, I first worked you with my hands and gave you perception; of clay I set up limbs for you; I gave you a living spirit, honoured you over all creations; I made it so that you had a look, an appearance like me.

The shift to longer, hypermetric verses seems to signal that something is different about this speech, or perhaps even that something special is occurring. Three lines later, the meter returns to standard two-stress verses, but the hypermetric verses recur again and again throughout this divine speech, including in the speech's final lines. The divine judge's entire discourse is bracketed and filled by the extraordinary verse-form, as if the poet wanted us to experience the speech as something extraordinary.

Nowhere else in the poem is there such a consistent, concerted effort to sonically distinguish verses. Hypermetrics can be found elsewhere in the poem, but in dramatically decreased proportion: of the poem's twenty-six hypermetric lines, 17.5 occur in this speech of 136 lines (making the speech 13 percent hypermetric), whereas a mere seven hypermetric lines can be found in the poem's remaining 662 lines (making the rest of the poem 1 percent hypermetric). This simple statistical tally demonstrates that the Christ C-poet deliberately attempted to make Christ's words hypermetric, a sonic distinction which, in effect, performs the supernatural character of Christ's speech. The extraordinary sonic character of this supernatural speech is not an isolated occurrence, and in this book I demonstrate that hypermetrics and other poetic effects repeatedly distinguish supernatural speech in the Old English poems Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A. Furthermore, within a larger discussion of supernatural discourse, I explain what this distinction means for our interpretation of these poems and for our understanding of the social and religious functions of the Old English poetic medium.

Although the divine distinction of this speech in Christ C is relatively obvious, precious little has been said about this or other clear efforts by Old English poets to distinguish supernatural discourse by means of poetic style.