Roberta Frank - The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

“The sense of “wonder” that is so important in Old English poetry itself, the experience of being totally involved in and caught up by what one sees, is close to the etymological meaning of “theory” as both contemplation and rapture.” - Roberta Frank, from, ”A Scandal in Toronto: “The Dating of “Beowulf” ” a Quarter Century On” Speculum, 2007.

Wikipedia – Roberta Frank:

Roberta Frank (born 1941) is an American philologist specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.

Frank’s research draws upon archaeological as well as literary and linguistic evidence to analyze aspects of early English and Scandinavian texts. Her work has focused on the poetry of England and Scandinavia, including numerous publications on skaldic verse, the early North, and Beowulf. Two festschriften in her honor have been published: Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies, ed. Antonina Harbus and Russell Poole (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) and The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History, ed. Eric Weiskott and Irina Dumitrescu (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). Her latest book, The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, appeared in early 2022.

University of Notre Dame Press:

In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets.

This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literary scholars in later periods take for granted, but the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old English and Old Norse courses.

An excerpt from, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist” by Roberta Frank, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, October 1997, pg. 495-6:

The indirection of Old English alliteration, its ability to signify more than it says, means we miss much—our ears untrained to catch its muscular melody, our minds unwilling to link logos and cosmos, word and world. One of its subtler uses is as typological punctuation or translation, its presence pinpointing moments in which pre-Christian Biblical history was a figure of events to come. The introductory section (lines 1-111) of the Old English Genesis, for example, begins and ends with multiple plays on word ‘word’, weard ‘God’, and wered ‘host’, plus woruld ‘world’ and wuldor ‘glory’, two alliterating groups containing the same consonants and no others. It is not unusual for an early Christian author to open a work by ringing changes on the several senses of logos. But in two subsequent sections of the paraphrase that tell of covenants granted by God to Noah and to Abraham, the same w-r-(l)-d clusters reappear, hinting that the incidents so highlighted have other than a strictly literal significance. No firmer theological equation had to be forged for listeners responsive to oral clues.

Meaning in a dead language is elusive, unstable, and slippery. Sometimes the actual referent of a word is uncertain; frequently its overtones, figurative senses, register, even gender, will be obscure. As Eric Stanley, that deconstructor avant la lettre, has reminded us: “Exact understanding of words in their context is a prerequisite of literary criticism; and often we lack that understanding for Old English.” For the lexicographer of Old English or Old Norse, metaphor remains the chief way of distinguishing the various senses of a word. Apples “fall,” so do Adam and Eve, buildings, mountains, children, rain, and dew, but under different subheadings. Old English dryhten, occurring some 15,500 times in the corpus, is shared between two main categories: dryhten ‘lord, ruler, chief’ the literal meaning, found twenty-eight times but only in poetry and laws; and dryhten ‘God’, the metaphorical sense, found many thousands of times and everywhere. The “native Germanic” meaning is the unusual, “marked” one in the texts that have come down to us. But what, if any, originary, sacral, or ethnic overtones the secular sense had for contemporary speakers escapes us. Words, old and new, are imprecise counters. Without local guides, the stalker of a subtle overtone, of lexical fission and fusion, of the newly expressive, disappears into a night in which all cats are grey.