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The diet and digestion of allegory in Andreas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

David Hamilton
David Hamilton
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
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Extract

As a narrative poem, Andreas usually suffers from comparison with Beowulf. Stanley, for example, writes that the Andreas poet ‘can do the big bow-wow like any man going’, but also that the versified saint's legend is to Beowulf roughly as Cowley's Davideis is to Paradise Lost. Such comparisons are of long standing, and the reasons for them are apparent. Further, the common emphasis in both poems on the language of war and seafaring and the similarities in the larger patterns of their plots – both heroes cleanse foreign lands – imply a degree of dependence. Despite our knowledge, therefore, of Andreas's Greek and Latin sources and of the traditional character of Old English poetic diction, most readers would agree generally, I suppose, with Brodeur's observation that the Andreas poet was familiar with Beowulf and sometimes reproduced its phrasing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 1 , January 1972 , pp. 147 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

Page 147 note 1 Stanley, E. G., ‘Beowulf’, Continuations and Beginnings, ed. Stanley, E. G. (London, 1966), pp. 138 and 113.Google Scholar

Page 147 note 2 Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles, ed. Krapp, George Philip (Boston, 1906)Google Scholar; Krapp discusses the similarity of plot structure and lists 146 verbal parallels between Andreas and Beowulf, pp. li-lviii; see also Schaar, Claes, Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group (Lund, 1949)Google Scholar. Peters, L. J., ‘The Relationship of the Old English Andreas to Beowulf’, PMLA 66 (1951), 844–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explores Andreas's independence from Beowulf; see also Lumiansky, R. M., ‘The Contexts of the Old English Ealuscerwen and Meoduscerwen’, JEGP 48 (1949), 116–26Google Scholar. The more recent studies have been more moderate. See Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles, ed. Brooks, Kenneth R. (Oxford, 1961), p. xxviGoogle Scholar; Brooks quotes Dorothy Whitelock approvingly: ‘one can make a case for the influence of Beowulf on Andreas, … but it stops short of proof.’ Schrabram, Hans (‘Andreas und Beowulf’, Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft 34 (1965), 201–18)Google Scholar also agrees that the Andreas poet knew Beowulf well but was not dependent on it.

Page 147 note 3 Brodeur, Arthur G., ‘A Study of Diction and Style in Three Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poems’, Nordica et Anglica: Studies in Honor of Stefán Einarsson, ed. Orrick, Allan H. (The Hague, 1968), pp. 97–114, esp. 97–105.Google Scholar

Page 147 note 4 Anderson, George K., The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons, rev. ed. (Princeton, 1966), pp. 135–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 148 note 1 Matthew's lot fell so that he went to that island ‘þær ænig þa git/ellþeodigra eðles ne mihte,/blædes brucan’ (15b–17a); also 21b–3a, 279–82 and 1155–60. All quotations from Andreas are from Brooks's edition.

Page 148 note 2 In Beowulf 2516–21 the first term occurs in collocation with the last:

Gegrette ða gumena gehwylcne,

hwate helmberend hindeman siðe,

swæse gesiðas: ‘Nolde ic sweord beran,

wæpen to wyrme, gif ic wiste hu

wið ðam aglæcean elles meahte

gylpe wiðgripan, swa ic gio wið Grendle dyde.’

Helmberend occurs again (2642a), and one might compare these passages with ‘þæt ic sweord bere oþðe sidne scyld’ (437), and ‘þæt we rondas beren’ (2653b). A shift of emphasis in the metaphor occurs with the word sawlberendra (1004b). I am indebted to Donald Fry for first suggesting the direction of this comparison.

All citations from Beowulf are from F. Klaeber's 3rd ed. (Boston, 1950), but I have omitted the macrons.

Page 149 note 1 Sisam, K., ‘Cynewulf and his Poetry’, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), p. 16Google Scholar. Sisam says ‘only half weaned’.

Page 149 note 2 The relevant lines are 33–4, 53, 129–37, 153–4, 160, 175, 302, 312–13, 317–18, 365–7, 386–90 and 589–90.

Page 149 note 3 Lumiansky (‘The Contexts’) cites most of the passages referred to in this paragraph; the translation ‘deprival of mead’ is Brodeur's (‘Diction and Style’, p. 100).

Page 151 note 1 Andreas, p. xxiii.Google Scholar

Page 152 note 1 I am indebted to discussions with my colleague Robert Lucas for being able to state the possibilities of allegory this forcefully.

Page 152 note 2 See Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: the Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964), pp. 150–1Google Scholar. Fletcher argues that allegory is ‘less diverse and more simple in contour’ than are more mimetic plots. Graham Hough, similarly, distinguishes between ‘naive allegory’ and ‘realism’ according to the dominance of ‘theme’ in the former kind of narrative and ‘image’ in the latter. Hough would say, I trust, that the figure of Beowulf is an image but that the Mermedonian cannibals convey only a theme; Hough, G., An Essay on Criticism (London, 1966), pp. 123–4Google Scholar. Both critics probably take their cue from T. S. Eliot who, when writing on Dante, proclaimed him ‘easy to read’ because of the ‘lucidity of style’ that obtains in allegory; Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays (New York, 1950), pp. 201–4.Google Scholar

Page 152 note 3 Kaske, R. E., ‘Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf’, SP 55 (1958), 423–56Google Scholar; repr. An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Nicholson, Lewis E. (Notre Dame, 1963), pp. 269–310.Google Scholar

Page 153 note 1 ‘Two Notes on Patristic Allusion in Andreas’, Anglia 84 (1966), 156–62.Google Scholar

Page 153 note 2 Ibid. pp. 161–2; Hill cites Curtius, Ernst R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Trask, Willard (New York, 1953), pp. 98–101.Google Scholar

Page 153 note 3 ‘The Tropological Context of Heat and Cold Imagery in Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, NM 69 (1968), 522–32Google Scholar, esp. 531–2.

Page 153 note 4 ‘Figural Narrative in Andreas’, NM 70 (1969), 261–73, esp. 269.Google Scholar

Page 153 note 5 Ibid. pp. 270–1.

Page 155 note 1 ‘Diction and Style’, p. 98Google Scholar; Andreas, p. xxiv.Google Scholar

Page 157 note 1 Smithson, George A. remarks that the ‘author's zeal for religion was too strong, his regard for the art of narration too conditional’ (The Old English Christian Epic: a Study of the Plot Technique of the Juliana, the Elene, the Andreas and the Christ in comparison with the Beowulf and with the Latin Literature of the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1910), p. 351)Google Scholar.

Page 157 note 2 Cf. Hill (‘Two Notes’, p. 162)Google Scholar, who finds that the ‘puer senex’ topos portrays Andreas's perceptivity.

Page 157 note 3 For example, Bede, De Schematis et Tropis Sacrae Scripturae Liber: ‘Eironeia est tropus per contrarium quod conatur ostendens: ut, Clamate voce majore, Deus est enim Baal, et forsitan loquitur, aut in diversorio est, aut in itinere, aut dormit, ut excitetur. Hanc enim nisi gravitas pronunciationis adjuverit, confiteri videbitur quod negare contendit’ (Venerabilis Bedae Opera quae Supersunt, ed. Giles, J. A. (London, 1843–1844) vi, 94)Google Scholar.

Page 157 note 4 The portion of Beowulf I refer to is from about line 229 to line 610; in Andreas, lines 174–976.

Page 158 note 1 I am indebted, of course, to J. R. R. Tolkien's complaint about the belief that the important matters in Beowulf are at its ‘outer edges’; ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, Beowulf Criticism, ed. Nicholson, p. 53Google Scholar, and also to the discussion of the ‘epic synthesis’ by Kellogg, Robert and Scholes, Robert, The Nature of Narrative (New York, 1966), passim.Google Scholar