Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Old English Poets and their Word-Craft
- 1 Beowulf and the Art of Invention
- 2 Juliana 53a Revisited (hætsð hæþenweoh)
- 3 Wounds and Compensation in the Old English Soul and Body Poems
- II Old English Homiletic Tradition
- 4 Defining and Redefining: Ælfric's Access to Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia in the Composition of the Catholic Homilies
- 5 Lambeth Homily 4 and the Textual Tradition of the Visio Pauli
- 6 ‘A Vision of Souls’: Charity, Judgment, and the Utility of the Old English Vision of St. Paul
- 7 The Vocabulary of Sin and the Eight Cardinal Sins
- III Anglo-Saxon Institutions
- 8 The King (and Queen) and ‘I’: Self-Construction in Some Anglo-Saxon Royal Documents
- 9 Anglo-Saxon Maccabees: Political Theology in Ælfric's Lives of Saints
- 10 Nunne in Early Old English: Misogyny in its Literary Context
- IV Lexis of the Quotidian
- 11 Cingulum est custodiam: Semiotics and the Semantic Range of gyrdels
- 12 Island Time: The English Day and the Christian Hours
- 13 ‘Revising Hell’: The Voices of Teachers in Anglo-Saxon Studies and Anglo-Saxon England
- V The Task of the Lexicographer
- 14 Cryptography and the Lexicographer: Codifying the Code
- 15 Genre and the Dictionary of Old English
- Epilogue: Word-Hord
- 16 Reading Beowulf with Isidore's Etymologies
- An Old English Lexicon Dedicated to Toni Healey
- Toni Healey: A Tribute
- List of publications of Antonette diPaolo Healey
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Anglo-Saxon Studies
3 - Wounds and Compensation in the Old English Soul and Body Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Old English Poets and their Word-Craft
- 1 Beowulf and the Art of Invention
- 2 Juliana 53a Revisited (hætsð hæþenweoh)
- 3 Wounds and Compensation in the Old English Soul and Body Poems
- II Old English Homiletic Tradition
- 4 Defining and Redefining: Ælfric's Access to Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia in the Composition of the Catholic Homilies
- 5 Lambeth Homily 4 and the Textual Tradition of the Visio Pauli
- 6 ‘A Vision of Souls’: Charity, Judgment, and the Utility of the Old English Vision of St. Paul
- 7 The Vocabulary of Sin and the Eight Cardinal Sins
- III Anglo-Saxon Institutions
- 8 The King (and Queen) and ‘I’: Self-Construction in Some Anglo-Saxon Royal Documents
- 9 Anglo-Saxon Maccabees: Political Theology in Ælfric's Lives of Saints
- 10 Nunne in Early Old English: Misogyny in its Literary Context
- IV Lexis of the Quotidian
- 11 Cingulum est custodiam: Semiotics and the Semantic Range of gyrdels
- 12 Island Time: The English Day and the Christian Hours
- 13 ‘Revising Hell’: The Voices of Teachers in Anglo-Saxon Studies and Anglo-Saxon England
- V The Task of the Lexicographer
- 14 Cryptography and the Lexicographer: Codifying the Code
- 15 Genre and the Dictionary of Old English
- Epilogue: Word-Hord
- 16 Reading Beowulf with Isidore's Etymologies
- An Old English Lexicon Dedicated to Toni Healey
- Toni Healey: A Tribute
- List of publications of Antonette diPaolo Healey
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Anglo-Saxon Studies
Summary
Though now usually edited as two separate poems, the Old English Soul and Body I (SB I), preserved in the Vercelli Book, and Soul and Body II (SB II), in the Exeter Book, are variant versions of a single, earlier work. For nearly 120 lines both versions relate a damned soul's invective against the body whose life of sin incurred damnation. SB I alone then contains an additional section in which a blessed soul praises its body for having lived virtuously enough to merit salvation. Arguments over the precise relationship between the longer and shorter versions have tended to dominate the secondary literature. Yet some recent scholarship has also usefully examined the poems for the insights they afford into Anglo- Saxon models of psychology and eschatology. The present essay joins the latter efforts by revisiting some eschatological motifs in Soul and Body, particularly in one passage that has puzzled a majority of modern editors and translators.
The passage at issue forms a transition from the damned soul's reproaches of the body to its prediction of terrors at the Last Judgment. At SB I 76a / II 71a, the soul begins a long, syntactically strained warning: even if the body enjoys all earthly riches, it would be better off having never been born, or having been born a lower animal, than facing the penalties of sin at Doomsday. The next several lines then imagine that awful event (I quote the slightly shorter version of SB II):
Þonne þu for unc bu ondwyrdan scealt
on þam miclan dæge, þonne eallum monnum beoð
wunde onwrigene, þa þe in worulde ær
firenfulle menn fyrn geworhton,
ðonne wile dryhten sylf dæda gehyran,
æt ealra monna gehwam muþes reorde
wunde wiþerlean. (SB II 82–88a)
As printed here from Muir's edition, the language is not especially difficult to construe except in verse 88a (SB I 95a), which for now I leave untranslated:
Then you [scil. the body] will have to answer for the two of us on that great day, when those wounds that sinners wrought previously in the world, long ago, will be revealed to all human beings, when the Lord himself will want to hear the deeds, wunde wiþerlean [from / to / for] each and every person by speech from the mouth.
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- Old English Lexicology and LexicographyEssays in Honor of Antonette diPaolo Healey, pp. 51 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020