The Origins, Lives, and Afterlives of Early English and Welsh Gnomic Poetry

Abstract

This study traces the history of the verse gnome, a unique form of poetic expression, in two disparate but conversant literary cultures. Gnomes are short ontological statements concerning the natural world or the social structures and values pertaining to the community from which it emerges, such as cyning sceal rice healdan (“a king must hold a kingdom”) and bit vuan redeint yn ardal mynyd (“let the stags be swift in the mountain’s region”). The primary subject of this work is a genre of poetry attested in Old English and Middle Welsh consisting entirely of statements like these. Such lists instill a sense of encyclopedic comprehensiveness, such that they create a literary microcosm of the world at large. Yet even as it generates this world, gnomic poetry invites its audience to interrogate its underlying structures by means of features such as a multivalent core lexicon and disjunctive gaps between verses. This study insists upon the necessity of these often-overlooked texts as a means of understanding how literature compels its audiences to consider and constantly re-examine what passes for eternal, socially accepted truths. The first chapter investigates the formal structures of the verse gnome with special attention to poetic forms, syntactical arrangements, and verbal semantics, while also using the evidence of contact linguistics to reconstruct a speculative image of cross-cultural communication. Chapter two considers the antiquity of the verse gnome, investigating the earliest recorded examples in the small body of surviving Old Welsh verse and in the more conservative Old English poems such as Beowulf. Verse gnomes in a variety of poetic genres beyond purely gnomic poetry, and I introduce the concept of a “gnomic mode” to describe a method of gnomic composition that any poet conversant with the tradition could assume. After establishing what a gnome is and how a gnome works, the core of the dissertation, chapter three, turns to those poems composed entirely of verse gnomes: the gnomic catalog poems in Old English such as the Exeter Maxims, the Cotton Maxims, and the Rune Poem and gnomic englynion in Middle Welsh including Eiry Mynyd, the Bidiau, and Llym Awel. Receptionalist theories of reading provide a framework for understanding how this micro-genre of verse fosters a generative hermeneutic that invites its audiences to navigate its straightforward presentation and its interpretive gaps to make meaning. In the fourth chapter, focus shifts from considering possible readings of gnomic poetry to discerning how medieval readers inscribed their own understanding of the form into the extant material. The final chapter presents a case study of the mid-eleventh century manuscript Cotton Tiberius B. i, to examine how a later compiler adapted gnomic poetry for use in the service of the larger theoretical concerns of the manuscript, which explores the linear and cyclical temporalities of Christianity. I conclude with a brief examination of some later forms—the Durham Proverbs, Proverbs of Hendyng and Alfred, and ‘Englynion’ y Misoedd—that replaced gnomic poetry and considers why the form lost its power of expression. Ultimately, this study interrogates how this simplistic-seeming genre of poetry engaged people in the medieval period and, in turn, how those people appropriated such poetry to their own ends. Examining these corpora in the present connects us in an essential way to the medieval continuum of thought; we can see and understand the world, however briefly, as they did.