Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at King's College London

Introduction

Geoffrey Hill'sMercian Hymns (1971) tell of Offa, ‘presiding genius of the West Midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eighth century until the middle of the twentieth (and possibly beyond)’. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 757 (B-Text) informs us:

The grammatical construction is such that Offa literally takes to power or the realm (‘feng Offa to rice’ in the Old English), much as a modern monarch is said synecdochically to take to the throne. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, writes Carl Schmitt in March 1922. The noun-state of the ‘Sovereign’ is constituted, to Schmitt's view, out of the act of designating another noun, deciding upon ‘the exception’. By a process of what Giorgio Agamben describes as an ‘inclusive exclusion’ it is this relation to the other which allows the assumption of the name of ‘sovereign’: ‘The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.’ As power, ‘rice’ is synonymous with Offa taking it up, so sovereignty as elaborated by Agamben, following Schmitt, constitutively constructs and maintains itself in relation to the other by denominating the exception. In this essay I will show how the Mercian Hymns work through and across the theoretical and linguistic distance that separates these two versions of sovereignty.

I will also suggest the need to revisit the multiple historical contexts of Hill's poetic sequence, and to take seriously his treatment of Anglo-Saxon sources in particular. Those quick to brand Hill's poetics difficult have been slower to pursue the hints offered to us by the author himself, in the form of the notes to the Hymns.