1. This paper is an expansion of a study begun in a 1996 Newberry
Library Anglo-Saxon Seminar on the Vercelli Book with Dr. Thomas Hall of the University of
Illinois at Chicago. It was later presented at a session of the 1997 annual meeting of the Illinois
Medieval Association as "Songs of the Damned: Music as Metaphor in the Vercelli Book." I
would like to thank Allen J. Frantzen of Loyola University Chicago for his continual assistance
and for his advice on this paper as it has moved through its various stages.
2. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural
Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1997). The authors ground their study in a search for an
alternative to semiotic, psychoanalytic, and other structuralist and poststructuralist notions of
music that relegate it to a dependence on language and to secondary status in relation to linguistic
systems. Shepherd and Wicke engage in extended and thorough discussions of the work of
Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, and a number of musicological
theorists such as Leonard B. Meyer.
3. All citations from the Vercelli poetic texts are taken from George
Philip Krapp's ASPR edition of The Vercelli Book (New York, 1932).
page 68
4. Citations from the Vercelli homilies are taken from D. G. Scragg,
ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS OS 300 (London, 1992).
5. The Germanic motif of carrion beasts, which John M. Hill
associates with Woden, the "terrifying presence on the field of slaughter" in Germanic
mythology and legend, also appears in the battlefield scenes in Judith (see lines 200-12),
The Battle of Brunanburh (lines 56-65), and The Battle of Maldon (lines 103-8).
For Hill's discussion of the motif in Germanic mythology, see The Cultural World in
Beowulf (Toronto, 1995), p. 64.
6. T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary based on the
manuscript collection of the late Joseph Bosworth (London, 1898), p. 359. Bosworth-Toller
defines "galan" as "to sing, enchant, call." It generally refers to martial or
mourning songs, but Elene 248 contains an exception, using "galan" to refer
to a song of triumph. Bosworth-Toller relates the Old English word to several cognates,
including the Scottish "gale" ("to cry"), the Danish "gale"
("to crow"), the Swedish "gala" ("to crow"), and the
Icelandic "gala" ("to crow, sing"). Given these associations, the use of
"galan" in Anglo-Saxon texts may imply the action of keening or wailing in grief.
7. Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory, p. 197.
In "The Photographic Message" (Image--Music--Text 15-31), Roland Barthes describes
the difference between denotation and connotation as follows. While denotation seems to be
limited to perception, connotation involves an act of reading, associating, and interpreting.
Denotation involves what Barthes calls a "first-order message ... a message which totally exhausts
its mode of existence" (p. 18). He locates this type of message, one limited by its relation to
material reality, in the photograph alone. Within Barthes's configuration, language seems to
proceed according to the joining of denotation and connotation. "[T]o describe," he
claims, "consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or second-order
message derived from a code which is ... a connotation: to describe is thus not simply to be
imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to signify something different to what is
shown" (pp. 18-19). Connotation, Barthes continues, "is not necessarily immediately graspable at
the level of the message itself ... but it can ... be inferred" (p. 19).
8. Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory, p. 15;
here they refer particularly to the work of Leonard B. Meyer.
9. Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory, p. 10.
10. Shepherd and Wicke address music in terms of Althusser's
theory of ideology, in which he argues for the materiality of the ideas of the subject's beliefs
because "his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by
material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which
derive the ideas of that subject" (p. 51; emphasis in original). Shepherd and Wicke also
place music in a parallel to Lévi-Strauss's concept of myth, or the "systems of
cultural knowledge through which societies make sense of the worlds in which they exist"
(p. 42). Lévi-Strauss claims that myth, while it depends on language and its parts, exists
on a
page 69
higher plane than language. He conceives of music as a "myth coded in sounds instead
of words," noting that music can transcend articulate expression and make time stand still
(p. 45).
11. Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory, pp.
126, 127, 147.
12. Shepherd and Wicke distinguish this idea from many
poststructuralist models of subjectivity, in which "discourses unilaterally speak
subjects" (Music and Cultural Theory, p. 177).
13. Shepherd and Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory, p.
212.
14. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of
Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, 1989), Book I, Part 1.
For Carolingian treatises that might have influenced Anglo-Saxon ideas about music during the
Benedictine Reform, see Palisca's edition of Musica Enchiriadis and Scolica Enchiriadis,
trans. Raymond Erickson (New Haven, 1995).
15. On the joining of song and word as a link to the divine, see John
Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama,
1050-1350 (Cambridge, Eng., 1986). For studies of the use of music in liturgy, particularly
in Advent and Christmas celebrations, see Susan Rankin, "The Liturgical Background of the Old
English Advent Lyrics: A Reappraisal," in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England:
Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge,
Eng., 1985), pp. 317-40. See also Jackson J. Campbell, ed., The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter
Book (Princeton, 1959).
16. See Dom Thomas Symons's edition and modern English facing
translation of the Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum
Sanctimonialiumque (London, 1953). The Anglo-Saxon interlinear text is available in Lucia
Kornexl's Die Regularis Concordia und ihre altenglische Interlinearversion, ed. Helmut
Gneuss and Wolfgang Weiss (München, 1993). For a more specific study of psalmic
performance in the Office, see Joseph Dyer, "The Singing of Psalms in the Early-Medieval
Office," Speculum 64 (1989), 535-78. For a broader study of worship in monasteries, see
Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic
Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1982).
17. Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old
English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, N. J., 1990), p. 142. My approach
owes a great deal to Frantzen's deconstructive reading of the story of Cædmon; see
especially pp. 141-44.
18. Citations are taken from R .A. B. Mynors's Latin text of
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R .A. B.
Mynors (Oxford, 1969); see pp. 414-16. I would like to thank Mark Farmer of Loyola University
Chicago for his help in translating the Latin text.
19. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, p. 416.
20. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, p. 414.
21. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 143.
22. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, pp. 416-18.
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23. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, "Birthing Bishops
and Fathering Poets: Bede, Hild, and the Relations of Cultural Production,"
Exemplaria 6 (1994), 35-65: here, p. 43. Lees and Overing offer a feminist reading of
cultural production in the story of Cædmon, noting that Bede institutes a paradigm in which
men produce and women reproduce and insisting that "Hild deserves to be rescued from
Bede and afforded her own place in history" (p. 47).
24. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, p. 418.
25. The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1968) offers a
number of definitions for "convertere," including "to turn upside down ...
invert; convulse, shake"; "to turn backwards, reverse the natural direction of";
"to reconcile to oneself, win over"; "to change ... alter, transform ... to
convert"; "to render from one language to another, translate"; and "to
bring into a specified (new or altered) state of mind." The resonances of conversion,
inversion, and reversal that the word carries highlight the overturning of the typical relation
between learned and unlearned men, here authorized by divine intervention.
26. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, p. 414.
27. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, p. 418.
28. The OLD defines "studium" as
"earnest application of one's attention or energies to some specified or implied object, zeal,
ardour"; "enthusiasm, eagerness"; "an activity to which one devotes one's
attention, a pursuit, pastime, etc."; "devotion to a particular person, party,
cause"; "intellectual activity, esp. of a literary kind, or an instance of it, study."
It carries the implication of learning, and is often used to denote the zeal or enthusiasm of
scholarly men, a group in which Cædmon is certainly not included.
29. According to the OLD, "feruor" often
refers to physical heat, such as that of the weather or the body, a "burning sensation,
fever." It can also be used to denote a "disturbance, unrest (of the mind)";
"exuberance, hot blood, ardour, enthusiasm; vehemence, heat, passion; an intense stage of
any passion, paroxysm." The noun "zelus" in turn signifies an ardent love or a
"spirit of rivalry or emulation; jealousy." The description of Cædmon's zeal
associates it with physicality, bodiliness, and a passion approaching instability and excessiveness.
30. Frantzen emphasizes the haste of Cædmon's
incorporation, stating that he is "whisked into the monastery by the abbess"
(Desire for Origins, p. 142).
