A Brief Summary of Scholarship

Building on the foundations erected by Lord, Magoun, and Greenfield, later scholars have uncovered numerous themes in the narrative poetry of the Old English canon. In lieu of extended discussions of these contributions, I present below a digest of the twenty-four themes or type-scenes reported to date, together with references to the articles devoted to each. A general overview of the most frequent or most often cited themes follows.

Far the best-documented thematic unit (fifteen citations), the "Hero on the Beach" was firs reported by David Crowne in 1960 and has since been shown m recur not only throughout the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus but also in Middle English and Old High German.^[5] Crowne (p. 368) defined this compositional pattern as "a stereotyped way of describing (1) a hero on the beach (2) with his retainers (3) in the presence of a flashing light (4) as a journey is completed (or begun)." This account of the content approaches Lot's concept of the theme more closely than does Magoun's "Beasts of Battle" or Greenfield's "Exile," since the repeated action is more clearly delineate. But if narrative sequence is part of Crowne's idea of the unit, verbal correspondence among instances most certainly is not. In fact, he goes m some length to demonstrate that the theme in Homer as well as in Old English amounts to a grouping of ideas rather than a critical mass of phraseological items, concluding (p. 364) that the theme "does not depend upon a fixed content of specific formulas for its mnemonic usefulness m the singer." This concentration on narrative fabric as the stuff of which the compositional theme is made—and the abandoning of verbal correspondence among instances as a criterion for identification of the unit—marked a point of departure for studies of the theme or typical scene in Old English poetry. No longer did investigators search for repeated verses as the telltale sign of the recurrent scene; in practical terms, they assumed an unlimited variety of situation-specific instance, with a variety of diction m match. The theme in Old English became purely a sequence of ideas for those following Crowne's lead, and scholars were virtually unanimous in doing so.

Magoun's "Beasts of Battle" has also proved important in the development of thematics in Anglo-Saxon verse. Assuming that the Beowulf poet was lettered but composed formulaically, Adrien Bonjour contended in 1957 that this poet,

[5] For a complete survey of oral-formulaic scholarship in Middle English, see Parks 1986. For Old High German, see Renoir's analysis of the Hildebrandslied (e.g., 1979b).

unlike his lesser contemporaries, shows artistic originality in the handling of the "Beasts" pattern. This general notion of the theme as a structural entity that could be shaped according to individual aesthetic design found apparent support in, for example, Robert P. Creed's 1961 article on oral poetics, in which he argued that a given theme should be understood not simply in relation to other instances within a given poem, but also against the larger traditional background.^[6] Thus arose the concept of aesthetic manipulation of traditional themes, just as it had for the formula some years earlier. As time went on, specialists in Old English, it is fair to say, were quite willing to accept a narrative unit such as the theme as long as the theory allowed for the poet's conscious artistic control of his traditional medium.

A third significant step in the study of Old English themes is that taken by Alain Renoir in his contextual analyses of various medieval texts.^[7] Although one cannot tie his method uniquely to one particular multiform, his efforts have concentrated on elucidating the expressive content (and this means audience expectation as well as textual structure) of the "Hero on the Beach," "Beasts of Battle," and "Speaking Wood" patterns. Renoir's method entails establishing an inter-textual and often cross-traditional directory for a given oral-formulaic theme, even if it occurs in a written text (e.g., 1976b), and interpreting each instance in the context of what is collectively known about the thematic pattern. In the case of poems whose authorship or provenance is uncertain—and this is often the case with medieval works—this approach provides otherwise unavailable insights into a great range of critical issues as various as manuscript authority and rhetorical structure.