‘Deor’ and Its Refrain: Preliminaries to an Interpretation
Recent scholarship presents us with a difficult choice between two main trends: Deor as artistic transformation of a charm; and Deor as a ‘veritable Consolatio Philosophiae of minstrelsy.’ Morton Bloomfield's 1964 article compared the form of Deor to that of charms and concluded that it is ‘eit...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1987
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| In: |
Traditio
Year: 1987, Volume: 43, Pages: 23-53 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Recent scholarship presents us with a difficult choice between two main trends: Deor as artistic transformation of a charm; and Deor as a ‘veritable Consolatio Philosophiae of minstrelsy.’ Morton Bloomfield's 1964 article compared the form of Deor to that of charms and concluded that it is ‘either a sophisticated, Christianized charm … or a poem influenced by the charm form and meant to suggest its prototype.’ Although strikingly original and brilliantly documented, Bloomfield's idea has not won many followers because a few years after its publication the Boethian trend, announced in Lawrence's 1911 phrase quoted above, set in strongly; following Murray Markland (1968) a series of scholars have pursued the trail of Boethian influence in impressive, if overingenious, articles. Now even essays dedicated to the formal-critical (rather than literary-historical) consideration of the poem usually include an obligatory tip of the hat to the suffering senator, and I think it would be fair to say that the standard view of the poem now combines the older notion of a general consolation with specific Boethian influence into what we might call a mild pseudo-Boethian optimism. The Boethian reading seems to me vulnerable judged under its own principles; but rather than trying directly to refute it, the present contribution will attempt to stake out the essentials of a new position between Bloomfield and Boethius by means of new external evidence. The present effort will, however, remain at the level of a prolegomenon to interpretation; depending on the reception of the present arguments and conjectures, I would hope to offer a fuller reading of the poem and its context in Old English literary history. |
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| ISSN: | 2166-5508 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Traditio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0362152900012472 |