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Sylf, seasons, structure and genre in The Seafarer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Stanley B. Greenfield
Stanley B. Greenfield
Affiliation:
The University of Oregon
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Extract

In ‘Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer’, John C. Pope gracefully retracted his earlier suggestion that The Seafarer and The Wanderer contain ‘dramatic voices’ and, in the process of retraction, generously acknowledged my own challenge to his two-speaker theory. In this later essay Professor Pope makes a number of illuminating comments about problems in The Seafarer: I feel especially enlightened by his evidence and argument that the phrase gifre ond grædig (62a) is apt for the bird-soul (the hyge-anfloga) of the speaker contemplating what is spiritually good, conveying ‘precisely the overwhelming desire, comparable to the fierce greediness of a bird of prey but purified by its object, that the seafarer feels for what he is about to name as “Dryhtnes dreamas”, “the joys of the Lord”’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 9 , December 1980 , pp. 199 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 ASE 3 (1974), 75–86Google Scholar. Pope's earlier essay, ‘Dramatic Voices in The Wandtrer and The Seafarer’, appeared in FrancipUgius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr, and Robert P. Creed (New York, 1965), pp. 164–93Google Scholar. My rejoinder was ‘Min, Sylf, and “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer”’, JEGP 68 (1969), 212–20.Google Scholar

2 Pope, ‘ Second Thoughts’, p. 85. I am not sure, however, that ‘What the bird-soul has seen on its brilliantly imagined flight is…, somehow, those ultimate and eternal joys.’ Rather, the context suggests it has seen that all the reaches of the earth, eorpan sceatas, as well as the sea, bwæles epel, are in the sere and yellow leaf: hence its desire to seek the joys of the Lord. Cf. Mandel, Jerome, ‘The Seafarer’, NM 77 (1976), 547.Google Scholar

3 The text of The Seafarer is quoted from I. L. Gordon's edition (London, 1960Google Scholar). Quotations from other poems are from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols., ed. G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie (New York, 1931–1953Google Scholar). Translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.

4 ‘Second Thoughts’, pp. 77–8. I would point out that I did not suggest the concept of imposed penance; Pope seems to have conflated my views with those of P. L. Henry in The Early English and Celtic Lyric (London, 1966Google Scholar). What I consider to be the nature of The Seafarer will emerge in the discussion that follows; Pope (p. 78, n. 1) disagrees with Henry, who classified the poem as ‘penitential’. At least one critic takes the earlier voyages as voluntary: see below, n. 22.

5 ‘How I often weary had to endure on the sea.’.

6 ‘Second Thoughts’, p. 79; italics mine.

7 Ibid. p. 79, n. i: the text is the Old English gloss of Defensor's Liber Scintillarum, ed. E. W. Rhodes, EETS o.s. 93 (London, 1889Google Scholar), and the reference is to the gloss of Latin solus by self/sylf. I might observe that the last two citations Pope gives (p. 255, lines 6 and 10) are not actually from the Liber Scintillarum, as Pope indicates, but from the De Vitiiset Peccalis, also found in London, British Library, Royal 7 C. iv, and edited by Rhodes along with Defensor.

8 ‘Perceive young man, God's sublime power, the Saviour's name. He is ineffable to each of men, he whom one sylf cannot on earth discover.’

9 I consider the passage from Resignation (73a), however, below, n. 21. A passage Pope does not cite is The Pboenix 204a: ‘ond gewicað þær/sylf in þam solere’, which N. F. Blake, in his edition (Manchester, 1964), glosses ‘alone’. Since the bird is indeed unaccompanied here, this instance might better support Pope's contention than any of the references he has cited; but since the context has the Phoenix building his nest of the ‘wyrta wynsume’ etc. in the ‘heanne beam’ and surrounding himself ‘halgum stencum / ond þam æþelestum eorþan bledum’, sylf here more likely means ‘he, himself’ (in addition to what he surrounds himself with) rather than ‘unaccompanied’.

10 In the light of the foregoing, the fact that Professor Pope's younger colleague, Traugott Lawler, and the poet Ezra Pound have also thought sylf in The Seafarer 35 b means ‘alone’ (‘Second Thoughts’, p. 79) carries little weight.

11 But see below, n. 25

12 ASPR 6, 67–9.

13 ‘Unknown is it to you then as to what thy Lord intends to do with you when you can no longer enjoy life, a dwelling in this world.’ L. L. Schucking in a review of Ernst Sieper's Die altengliscbe Elegie (Englische Studien 51 (1917–18), 109). The parallel has been subsequently noted by others, including Mrs Gordon in her edition. Professor Mandel (see above, n. 2) has neglected it in his attempt (misplaced, 1 think) to make the line in The Seafarer mean ‘his (earthly) lord can only do too little for him’ (p. 541).

14 ‘And though after your death you bequeath all the goods that you on earth previously acquired, (and) wish to please God, you cannot with all that ransom your soul if it is inwardly possessed by devils, bereft of comfort, denied riches.’ Whitbread, L., ‘Notes on Two Minor Old English Poems’, SN 29 (1957), 123–4.Google Scholar

15 ‘For which you must terribly repent your sins (when you are) an old warrior; heavy will your sins seem to you.’ Dobbie, in ASPR 6, says ‘the words har biUerinc are best explained as an archaizing conceit on the part of the poet, rather than, as Brandl takes them, as a reference to a specific “gray-haired warrior” to whom the poem is addressed’ (pp. Ixxii-lxxiii). My translation, including that of the verb ðincaþ as future in meaning, suggests that the sentence makes more sense in the-context of an exhortation to a not-so-old man to refrain from sinning now, or otherwise, when he is old, his sins will seem heavy. As Dobbie observes, bar bilderinc is a formula found also in Beowulf 1307a and 3136a, The Battle of Maldon 169a and The Battle of Brunanburb 39a. However we take the formula in Exhortation, there is something of a parallel in lines 91–2a of The Seafarer, in the description of ‘monna gehwylc’ aging or having aged.

16 Dobbie comments that the ‘regular imperative singular form would be ongyt … and Holthausen, Anglia Beibl. xxiii, 88, would so emend’(p. 184). Dobbie lets ongyte stand, however, presumably taking it as a subjunctive with imperative force; cf. Mitchell, Bruce, A Guide to Old English (Oxford, 1965), p. 108.Google Scholar

17 ‘Therefore perceive sylf that you must relinquish these transitory places, dwelling and homeland.’

18 geþence is the Vercelli Book reading; Exeter has bewitige, ‘take care, observe’.

19 ‘Lo, it behoves every man that he consider for himself the journey (fate, venture) of his soul, how serious (an affair) that will be when death comes.’

20 ‘Indeed the Lord blames me for some of those sins which I do not know how to clearly (wisely) recognize for myself in me.’

21 It is true, of course, that there are a number of instances in Old English of uninflected self/sylf accompanying the dative of the personal pronoun; on the difficulty of determining the exact status of this coupling, see Mitchell, Bruce, ‘Old English Self: Four Syntactical Notes’, NM 80 (1979), 44–5Google Scholar. I should make clear that when I say self/sylf= ‘by and for the speaker's self’ in the instances under consideration, I am referring to its semantic and not its grammatical property; grammatically, of course, it is nominative. The sylf of Resignation 73a remains, I think, problematic. Pope (‘Second Thoughts’, p. 79, n. 1), in his argument for sylf as ‘alone’, cites this passage, ‘ic… wylle…fundian / sylf to )þam siþe’, which 1 had tentatively suggested might mean ‘ of my own accord’ (‘Min, Sylf’, p. 218), and says ‘the speaker certainly wishes to put to sea by himself, though he has no money to buy a boat’. True, but not in this passage, where he is preparing himself on ferðweg ‘for his soul's passage (i.e. death)’; the boat image does not appear till later in the poem (100). In connection with the boat image there is still another sylf clause, ‘nu ic me sylf ne mæg / fore mine wonæhtum willan adreogan ‘(104b–5), but the meaning here is quite clear, and otherwise: ‘now that I myself (on my own, out of my own resources) cannot carry out my desire (to purchase a boat) on account of my poverty’.

22 For the record, I feel that I should indicate that Shippey, T. A. (Old English Verse (London, 1972), p. 71)Google Scholar believes that ‘“the seafarer” actively chooses his wanderings’, in contrast to ‘the wanderer’, whom he sees as an enforced exile.

23 ‘The shadow of night darkened, it snowed from the north, frost bound the earth, hail fell on the earth, coldest of grains.’

24 On the passivity of those earlier voyages, see my essay, ‘The Old English Elegies’, Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley (London, 1966), p. 155Google Scholar. Since the present paper was written, Marijane Osborn's essay, ‘Venturing upon Deep Waters in The Seafarer’, NM 79 (1978). 1–6Google Scholar, has appeared, where a similar, though simpler, translation of syIf is suggested. But Dr Osborn's interpretation of the poem is quite different from that advanced here.

25 Modifying his previous notion of the contrast sylf must suggest by its metrical stress, Pope writes: ‘If the voyage [the seafarer] is contemplating differs from earlier voyages, as it seems to do merely by the emphasis placed upon it, the difference may be mainly in a freshly defined objective combined with a clarification and enlargement of purpose’ (‘Second Thoughts’, p. 78). My proposed reading seems to me to fit this requirement much better than Pope's ‘absence of human companions… once more…unaccompanied’, even if that interpretation were possible.

26 ‘Woods take on blossoms, the cities grow fair, the plains beautify, the world hastens on.‘Mrs Gordon, in her edition (p. 40), and many others take the verbs fægriað and wlitigað as transitive here, translating with bearwas as subject ‘adorn the dwellings’ and ‘make fair the plains’. But bearwas are ‘groves, woods’, not individual trees, so that conceptually such a reading makes little sense; further the ironic parallelism with ‘woruld onetteð’ is thereby lost.

27 Cf. Green, Brian K., ‘Spes Viva: Structure and Meaning in The Seafarer’, An English Miscellany presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Lee, Brian S. (Cape Town, 1977), pp. 38–40.Google Scholar

28 Henry, Early English andCeltic Lyric; Stanley, E. G., ‘Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer’, Anglia 73 (1955), 413–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 ‘Second Thoughts’, p. 78, n. 1, agreeing with Bloomfield, Morton W., ‘Understanding Old English Poetry’, Annuale Mediaevale 9 (1968), 25Google Scholar, n. 37. On this subject, see Rice, Robert C., ‘Soul's Need: a Critical Study of the Penitential Motif in Old English Poetry’ (unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Oregon, 1974Google Scholar), esp. p. 5 on the question of theme or genre.

30 Early English and Celtic Lyric, p. 163.

31 ‘Gold cannot be of help to the soul full of sins before the terror of God, when he hides it earlier while he lives here (in this world).‘

32 ‘He established the firm foundations, the expanse of the earth and the heavens above.’

33 Alternatively, we can read line 103 with Isaacs, Neil D., Structural Principles in Old English Poetry (Knoxville, 1968), p. 33Google Scholar, not as a reference to Apocalypse but as ‘the earth turns’, i.e., ‘the seasons change’ in fear of the Lord. Isaacs seems to read ‘because of the power of the Lord’, and if we take this interpretation perhaps the line alludes to the Fall once again and to the onset of the seasonal cycle. But the Apocalyptic allusion seems more satisfactory in the context of the poem's progression.

34 Cf. Green, Martin, ‘Man, Time, and Apocalypse in The Wanderer, Seafarer, and Beowulf, JECP 74 (1975), 502–18Google Scholar. Green does not consider, however, the passage I have discussed above.

35 A small point, but related to the concept of‘recognition’ with which this essay began: whereas the seafarer, recognizing the ‘deadness’ of this land, sees that he must take a long journey, the corresponding awareness of the wanderer, after his awakening from his ‘vision’, leads him, in his contemplation of the death of all men, to a darkened mind: ‘Forþon ic geþencan ne mæg…/ for hwan modsefa min ne gesweōrce, / þonne ic eorla lif eal geondþence’ (58–60).

36 Greenfield, Stanley B., The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London, 1972), pp. 133–59.Google Scholar

37 See Hernadi, Paul, Beyond Genre (Ithaca, 1972), p. 8Google Scholar: ‘Instead of setting up firm boundaries between different kinds of literature [the best recent generic critics] present the results of generic observations as “ideal types ”… to which literary works correspond in varying degrees. Instead of tracing sources and modifications within narrow generic traditions, they act on the premise that the study of historical change could greatly profit from a clearer view than we now have of what is changing. The better part of recent genre criticism has… tended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, tentative rather than dogmatic, and philosophical rather than historical … [leading] beyond the conceptual sphere of genre in any but the widest sense of the word.’

I should like to thank my colleagues James L. Boren and Kathleen Dubs for their helpful comments at several stages of this paper.