The oral-formulaic theory in Middle English studies

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1996

Weathered Words: Formulaic Language and Verbal Art, 2022

Although Oral Formulaic Theory (OFT) was first introduced in Homeric scholarship, its development has been fundamentally shaped by application to the field of Old English literature. This chapter traces the development of OFT in Old English studies from its early appearance in the work of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. onwards, highlighting the major advances fostered by the poetry’s structure and unique manuscript situation. Furthermore, given the romanticizing nationalism that shaped early Germanic literary scholarship, it becomes evident that these fixations have quietly shaped the concerns and work of OFT analysts over the years. Drawing upon OFT, scholars have excavated the complexity of oral epic across linguistic boundaries, as well as the cultural and mental shifts demanded by the introduction of literacy to previously oral cultures. Yet previous scholarship has often favored a handful of older texts, hampering inquiries into varieties of synchronic oral cultures or even of the possible persistence of oral culture diachronically, making Old English oral poetic practice appear more insular and static than it may have been.

Oral Tradition, 2004

William of Malmesbury, writing more than four centuries later, tells a tale of the Anglo-Saxon Aldhelm standing on a bridge in seventh-century Malmesbury, charming passers-by with his Old English verse. William also tells us that no less an afficianado of vernacular poetry than King Alfred the Great himself valued Aldhelm's Old English verse more highly than that of anyone else, even though two hundred years and more had passed since it was first performed. But not a scrap of Aldhelm's Old English verse can be identified of the roughly 30,000 lines that survive. Instead, we have more than 4,000 lines of Aldhelm's Latin poetry, composed in an idiosyncratically formulaic and alliterative style that appears to derive at least in part from the same native and ultimately oral tradition that produced Beowulf. The tale of Aldhelm's near-contemporary Caedmon is often cited as an example of oral poetry, but for all the scholarly wrangling over its significance, it is as well to remember that if vernacular verse was remembered and recited in monasteries (something Alcuin also complained about) then it largely survives through that connection: without Bede, we would know nothing of Caedmon, just as Beowulf only survives through its manuscript-association with four texts translated from Latin sources. With Bede, Aldhelm, Alfred, and Caedmon, we have all but exhausted the list of all the Old English poets whose names we know. And Cynewulf too, the most prolific named poet of all, actively sought to combine aspects of the vernacular oral and literate Latin traditions he inherited. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first application of what was termed "oral-formulaic" theory to Old English verse. Since then, the scholarly debate has thankfully moved beyond a rather sterile stand-off between those arguing that the formulaic phrasing of Old English poems such as Beowulf necessarily implied oral composition, and those noting similar levels of formulaic phrasing in other poems that unquestionably derived from literate, which is to say Latinate, models. Two articles by

This article uses a brief survey of current work on Old English poetry as the point of departure for arguing that although useful, the concepts of orality and literacy have, in medieval studies, been extended further beyond their literal referents of spoken and written communication than is heuristically useful. Recent emphasis on literate methods and contexts for the writing of our surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry, in contradistinction to the previous emphasis on oral ones, provides the basis for this criticism. Despite a significant amount of revisionist work, the concept of orality remains something of a vortex into which a range of only party related issues have been sucked: authorial originality/communal property; impromptu composition/meditated composition; authorial and audience alienation/immediacy. The relevance of orality to these issues is not in dispute; the problem is that they do not vary along specifically oral/literate axes. The article suggests that this is symptomatic of a wider modernist discourse in medieval studies whereby modern, literate society is (implicitly) contrasted with medieval, oral society: the extension of the orality/literacy axis beyond its literal reference has to some extent facilitated the perpetuation of an earlier contrast between primitivity and modernity which deserves still to be questioned and disputed. Pruning back our conceptions of the oral and the literate to their stricter denotations, we might hope to see more clearly what areas of medieval studies would benefit from alternative interpretations.

2004

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2009

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2002

Speculum, 2014

Renaissance Studies, 2007