Signs of war in old English poetry

"Signs of War in Old English Poetry" demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon poets conceived of "war" as a distinct category of conflict with its own particular morality. As devised in Anglo-Saxon historiography, hagiography, law, and political philosophy, war was large in scale, the prerogative of a Christian king, served the interests of a "people" (þeod), and was the most dramatic earthly working of God's will by human agents. This idea of war approximates the classical Roman bellum publicum and resembles common present-day perceptions of what war is or ought to be. I argue that representing war was an issue for Anglo-Saxon poets composing vernacular poetry in the traditional "heroic" style, which idealized and aestheticized the "heroic" violence that sustained, through plunder, a migration-era lord and his personal retinue, or comitatus. This violence is small in scale, the prerogative of any ambitious warrior, and principally serves the interests of the few men comprising the comitatus. Poets not only recognized but highlighted tensions between the moral limits of Christian warfare and the idealization of "heroic violence." I argue that this discord is a hallmark of Old English heroic poetry compared to other early medieval vernacular traditions. My first two chapters focus on Beowulf and participate in a generations-long argument about the moral status of heroism in the poem. My primary intervention is to use the model outlined above to deconstruct the poem's notion of violence, which has traditionally been discussed monolithically. I argue the conceptual complexity of violence in Beowulf is obscured by lexical ambiguity—Old English has no singular word corresponding to the modern English word "war, " though Anglo-Saxons called it bellum in Latin. I explain the effect of this undiscussed semantic quirk on criticism of Beowulf while showing how the poem does differentiate between heroic violence and war, and how that difference enables a structural strategy whereby the poem devalues its own signs, not to ultimately condemn heroism, but to confine its value to an artificial space. My third chapter argues that the Exeter Book riddles whose solutions are weapons use personification to tally an account of the human cost of war that is radical among early medieval poetry for reckoning that cost according to the bodily and psychological toll exacted from its participants. This chapter engages with critical discussions of the formal possibilities of the riddle genre itself by showing how the transference of psychology between the personified weapons (the riddles' solutions) and their wielders (the "metaphorical focus") formally objectify warrior subjectivity to create vivid lyrical expressions of pain, regret, and hardship. My final chapter uses my theories about war and representation to interpret the historical sense of The Battle of Maldon. The expanded military responsibility of tenth and eleventh century "Kings of England" demanded a clarified ethic of war; growing monastic power and literary production helped define it. These poems stage contemporary events as trials of the capacity of the new ethic to accommodate both traditional images of heroic violence and an expanded religious sense.

Advisor: Treharne Elaine 
Dorin Rowan
Starkey Kathryn