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Oral Traditional Approaches to Old English Verse

Since the publication of Francis P. Magoun’s (1953) seminal article on the formula in Anglo-Saxon narrative verse, oral traditional approaches in the field of Old English have undergone a number of transitions, in the process growing more sophisticated and varied in technique and application. Early excitement over the aptness of Parry-Lord “formulas” and “themes” has evolved in definition and purpose: not being content with spotting a formula or theme for its own sake, scholars now interpret and evaluate the highly nuanced oral-aesthetic strategies embodied in the “traditional phraseology” and “type-scenes” of Old English verse (see Renoir 1988; Foley 1991). Early misguided attempts to pour Old English poetry into a mold generated by the study of Homeric and South Slavic poetics have given way to oral-formulaic technique rooted in the specifics of a Germanic language and its idiosyncratic prosody (see Foley 1990). Furthermore, heated debate over oral versus literate provenance has subsided in favor of a more modulated conception of an oral-literate continuum or, to use a slightly different image, of genre- and poem-specific meshings of oral Germanic and literate Latin-Christian rhetorical devices and subject matter (see Renoir 1988; O’Keeffe 1990). From the contemporary reader’s viewpoint one result of these studies is that passages of poems that once seemed either confusing or pleasantly mysterious have grown in coherence and power: optimally, with the filter of oral traditional interpretation these texts seem to flip from a slightly warped 2-D image to a high-tech 3-D surround-sound