!Genre (Elegies) in OE Literature Essay Plan

Intro points

• Grouping that has been completely created by scholars and editors - differs between different scholars and is a post-romantic term 

• Issue – applying a term from much later, post-romantic ideas of what an elegy is and applying it to OE texts

• Exclusions from the genre might be based on the emotions they are meant to make the reader feel, but it is an ongoing debate amongst scholars in how to define what constitutes an elegiac poem, and what the genre should be inclusive of 

• Tension between Christian theology and Germanic Pagan heroism is a defining feature of Old English elegies 

[CRITIC] Anne Klinck’s definition of ‘elegy’

• Anne Klinck’s definition of ‘elegy’ is ‘a convenient locus for particular themes: exile, loss of loved ones, scenes of desolation, the transience of worldly joys’

• Anne Klinck -> Klinck’s publication of the Old English elegies had nine poems, although sometimes it is only seven poems. The nature of these poems is that they sometimes shift in and out of the genre of elegies. 

P1 (The Wife’s Lament) points

• Notably, ‘The Wife’s Lament’ was previously called ‘The Exile’s Lament’ before scholars and editors widely recognised the voice as being female 

• Exile was commonly described in these poems as catalysing a narrative mourning the loss of a community – much like we see in ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’ 

• The Wife's Lament remains almost entirely anchored in the secular, tragic Pagan world of blood-feuds and exile, with virtually no explicit Christian comfort 

P1 (The Wife’s Lament) quotes proving it is a Germanic pagan poem as opposed to a Christian one

• Emphasis on the natural world, omitting any hope for salvation, or belief in a higher power -> repetition of ‘in þām eorðscræfe’ (‘in the earth’s chest’), ‘ 

• Ā scyle ġeong mon/wesan ġeōmormōd’ (‘it may be that the young man is always sad in spirit’) -> gnomic statement, used often in OE poetry to express universal truths; the subjunctive ‘scyle’ is frequent in such statements, though it should be translated as an indicative 

P2 (The Wanderer and The Seafarer) points

• Often paired together for their shared themes of journeying the sea and loneliness 

• In poems like The Seafarer, the transition is sharp. The first half details the brutal, visceral reality of Pagan seafaring, while the second half reads like a monastic sermon on the joys of God 

P2 (The Wanderer) quotes

• Exile expressed in The Wanderer through compound words – often hapax legomena – such as ‘wintercearig’ and ‘modcearig’ (winter-sad; sorrowful at heart) 

• Also expressed through the compound ‘sele dreorig’ (hall-sick), which coincides with the Wife’s Lament’s feeling of exile from a community – maintains a Pagan feeling 

P2 (The Seafarer) two quotes, one pagan, one concerning christianity

• The notion of ‘wyrd’ as a dominant, unyielding force represents an inescapable destity dictated by time and circumstance rather than God - ‘Wyrd biþ swiþre’ (‘Fate is stronger’) 

• ‘The Seafarer’ -> ‘þær is lif gelong in lufan dryhtnes’ (‘Where life is inseparable from the Lord’) 

P3 (Connections between elegies and Christian poetry) [CRITIC] Melanie Heyworth quote + point

• Melanie Heyworth tries to find a point of unificaiton in the elegiac poems in ‘Nostalgic Evocation and Social Privilege in the Old English Elegies’  

• States that ‘nostalgia: the sense of temporal distance and separation’ is ‘fundamental to the Old English elegies’ 

• To be nostalgic about something, it must be a socially accepted ideal – to write a poem about something nostalgic necessarily indicates that the past experience is something that would be yearned for by at least one other person other than the author of the poem 

• In this vein, the fact that so many of the elegiac poems are about feeling nostalgia for a lost community heralds the concept of community as a notion which people should strive to attain and maintain 

• This is conducive with a reading of the elegies as Christian didactical doctrines, where the benefits of community and being socially accepted amongst your peers is pushed. 

[CRITIC] Ronald Ganze'

Ronald Ganze’s argument in ‘The Neurological and Physiological Effects of Emotional Durress on Memory’

is that ‘we read literature to obtain a window into the minds of others: the minds of authors and their creations’ as we critique the posthumous prescription of ‘elegiac poems’ 

Conclusion

• Ultimately, while the label of ‘elegy’ is somewhat useful in a scholarly environment, it remains part of a larger issue relating to the reductive nature of labelling.  

• It is also evident that in labelling a poem, it causes the reader to become biased, and sometimes blind to other themes which they may have otherwise recognised in the poem, should they have begun reading it with no preconceptions that it belongs to a certain genre