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Wonders that Speak: Computing the Poetics of Wonder in the Old English Andreas

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Abstract

From religious lyrics to homilies, Old English texts evoke wonder through mystery, inexpressibility, and unknowing; wonders are declared unknowable or unspeakable. But within this tradition, individual poems have their own thematic fingerprints. This paper focuses on the poetics of wonder during two miraculous episodes in the Old English poem Andreas. Through augmented computational concordancing, I examine the wonder vocabulary of Andreas and argue that in contrast to the wider Old English tradition, the wonders of Andreas emphatically speak and are spoken. Andreas’s insistence on the expressibility of wonder fits the Vercelli Book poems’ pedagogical focus. Their wonders are mysteries, but do not remain so. Instead, wonders are teaching moments. Their poetics is that of signs, beacons, illumination—a poetics of miraculous speech.

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Notes

  1. Fulk et al. (2008). All translations from Old English are my own, unless otherwise attributed.

  2. North and Bintley (2016, pp. 8–10).

  3. North and Bintley (2016, pp. 8–10).

  4. For ruins as a landscape of fearful wonder, see Dumitrescu (2018, pp. 122–128), and Bintley (2013).

  5. For discussion of specific homilies and their use of the inexpressibility topos, see Wright (1993), and Zacher (2009). For discussions of unknowing and secrecy in Old English poetry, see Saltzman (2018), and Saltzman (2019).

  6. Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (henceforth DOEC) search: fragmentary boolean search, “unasecgendlic” OR “unasæcgendlic.”.

  7. Quantitative corpus analysis has proven valuable to the study of Old English poetry, as evident in the research of the Lexomics project: see Downey et al. (2014), Downey et al. (2012). While this project shares some methodological steps with the Lexomics project, it is focused not on dating the poems or identifying their sources, but on the thematics of poetic texts.

  8. These results were obtained by using a boolean search of the DOEC (Healey et al., 2016; Dumitrescu, 2018; Harbus, 1994; Heckman, 2009; Lorden, 2019). Treharne (2007) and Leneghan (2013) discuss, on codicological and thematic grounds, what the Vercelli manuscript’s relationship to learning suggests about the manuscript’s intended readerships.

  9. My warm thanks to David F. Johnson, who generously commented on a very early version of this paper at the New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies session in Kalamazoo, in 2016; to Mary Kate Hurley, for organizing the session; to Matthew Sullivan, for seminar conversations on Old English poetic wonder during the pandemic lockdown of 2021; to C. E. M. Henderson and Jessica J. Lockhart, whose insightful feedback substantially sharpened my argument; and to the anonymous journal reviewers, who gave this paper their time and expertise. Any remaining errors and infelicities are entirely my own.

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    Alexandra Bolintineanu

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Bolintineanu, A. Wonders that Speak: Computing the Poetics of Wonder in the Old English Andreas. Neophilologus 106, 649–667 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09731-y

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