In 1911, under a rising fear of war and a growing espionage hysteria caused by the movement of a ... more In 1911, under a rising fear of war and a growing espionage hysteria caused by the movement of a German gunboat off the coast of Morocco, the British Government hurriedly passed a sweeping revision of the Official Secrets Act (see Hooper, Aitken, and Thomas). In that same year, nineteen year old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, an Oxford-bound student at King Edward's School in Birmingham, formed a "secret society" with fellow students. The "Tea Club and Barrovian Society" (T.C.B.S.) was mostly dedicated to the covert appreciation of tea (Carpenter, Tolkien 45-7). By 1918, war had claimed three members of the T.C.B.S. and as Tolkien himself records, "all but one of my close friends were dead" (The Lord of the Rings [LotR] Foreword xxiv). Although Tolkien disavowed the notion that his fantasy was an allegorical representation of the wars that defined his age, it is nevertheless accepted that the central thematic concern of The Lord of the Rings with power ...
This essay argues that the elephants appearing in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, beyond their rh... more This essay argues that the elephants appearing in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, beyond their rhetorical purpose in containing the credulity of his unlearned audience, function as epistemological tokens. Although actual elephants were unknown in Anglo-Saxon England, a great deal of theoretical knowledge was available to Ælfric. This essay examines the Anglo-Saxon discourse on Elephants more closely than any has done, drawing on historical, literary, and hexameral sources to suggest that Ælfric followed in a tradition of using elephants as symbols of the attempt to perceive realities beyond our physical senses. The essay thus builds on and offers a differing perspective to previous essays in this area by Emily Thornbury [in Neophilologus 92 (2008)] and J.E. Cross.
This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and... more This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and literary merit that are always to some extent opposed in describing the poem's worth. It investigates assumptions about the relationships between language, poetry, and culture that informed, and sometimes continue to inform, Beowulf criticism. On the one hand, Beowulf is taken to represent an essential Englishness, while on the other hand it is linguistically alien to modern speakers. Beowulf thus forms an ideal litmus test for foundational questions such as “what makes language literary?” and “what makes a poem an English poem?” Although Beowulf is often represented as an outlier, a poem which we must learn to understand in its own terms, this survey demonstrates that Beowulf criticism reflects predictable trends in the evolution of thought about the relationship between language, literature, and culture.
This essay examines the Anglo‐Saxon letter considered as an image. The use of high‐end digital te... more This essay examines the Anglo‐Saxon letter considered as an image. The use of high‐end digital technology to create facsimiles of manuscripts turns text into an image that can be manipulated in very useful ways. However, the status of the digital facsimile as a textual object raises questions about the relationship between image and text that appear to repeat past investments in the letter as a custodian of history. In Anglo‐Saxon writing the letter saves the past from oblivion, and in the Early Modern typographical remediation of Old English documents, the letter is represented as a material encryption of the past. The digital letter, like these predecessors, makes an impossible promise to provide unmediated access to the past.
In 1911, under a rising fear of war and a growing espionage hysteria caused by the movement of a ... more In 1911, under a rising fear of war and a growing espionage hysteria caused by the movement of a German gunboat off the coast of Morocco, the British Government hurriedly passed a sweeping revision of the Official Secrets Act (see Hooper, Aitken, and Thomas). In that same year, nineteen year old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, an Oxford-bound student at King Edward's School in Birmingham, formed a "secret society" with fellow students. The "Tea Club and Barrovian Society" (T.C.B.S.) was mostly dedicated to the covert appreciation of tea (Carpenter, Tolkien 45-7). By 1918, war had claimed three members of the T.C.B.S. and as Tolkien himself records, "all but one of my close friends were dead" (The Lord of the Rings [LotR] Foreword xxiv). Although Tolkien disavowed the notion that his fantasy was an allegorical representation of the wars that defined his age, it is nevertheless accepted that the central thematic concern of The Lord of the Rings with power ...
This essay argues that the elephants appearing in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, beyond their rh... more This essay argues that the elephants appearing in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham, beyond their rhetorical purpose in containing the credulity of his unlearned audience, function as epistemological tokens. Although actual elephants were unknown in Anglo-Saxon England, a great deal of theoretical knowledge was available to Ælfric. This essay examines the Anglo-Saxon discourse on Elephants more closely than any has done, drawing on historical, literary, and hexameral sources to suggest that Ælfric followed in a tradition of using elephants as symbols of the attempt to perceive realities beyond our physical senses. The essay thus builds on and offers a differing perspective to previous essays in this area by Emily Thornbury [in Neophilologus 92 (2008)] and J.E. Cross.
This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and... more This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and literary merit that are always to some extent opposed in describing the poem's worth. It investigates assumptions about the relationships between language, poetry, and culture that informed, and sometimes continue to inform, Beowulf criticism. On the one hand, Beowulf is taken to represent an essential Englishness, while on the other hand it is linguistically alien to modern speakers. Beowulf thus forms an ideal litmus test for foundational questions such as “what makes language literary?” and “what makes a poem an English poem?” Although Beowulf is often represented as an outlier, a poem which we must learn to understand in its own terms, this survey demonstrates that Beowulf criticism reflects predictable trends in the evolution of thought about the relationship between language, literature, and culture.
This essay examines the Anglo‐Saxon letter considered as an image. The use of high‐end digital te... more This essay examines the Anglo‐Saxon letter considered as an image. The use of high‐end digital technology to create facsimiles of manuscripts turns text into an image that can be manipulated in very useful ways. However, the status of the digital facsimile as a textual object raises questions about the relationship between image and text that appear to repeat past investments in the letter as a custodian of history. In Anglo‐Saxon writing the letter saves the past from oblivion, and in the Early Modern typographical remediation of Old English documents, the letter is represented as a material encryption of the past. The digital letter, like these predecessors, makes an impossible promise to provide unmediated access to the past.
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