Old English Poetic Superlatives
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E. G. Stanley
Abstract
This paper is designed to show how difficult it is for us in the twenty-first century to establish a valid response to the superlative of adjectives as used in Old English verse. In contradistinction to the monochromatically excessive use of superlatives in modern advertising, the distribution of superlatives is very varied in the English verse of more than a thousand years ago. The first part of the paper consists of a general survey of Old English superlatives, chiefly in the vernacular verse of the Anglo-Saxons, but their prose has not been wholly neglected. The study is evaluative, more so than is usual in sober Linguistics; to this purpose the superlative degree and its statistics contribute to an understanding of the triumphant ending of Beowulf, and grammar is to be seen as the handmaiden of literature.
The second part of the paper is more literary, and is based on the incidence of superlatives as presented in the first part. The density of superlatives in the opening of the minor poem Maxims II is observed, without any reasoning for that density. The density of rare superlatives in the last lines of Beowulf is admired for its aesthetic quality, brought out in Edwin Morgan’s poetic rendering of the poem. It is not forgotten that the rarity of a superlative in the extant verse may be because we cannot know if it would have been less rare had more verse survived. The reading of poetry must, if worthwhile, involve an aesthetic response. The paper, at the same time as exercising that response, stresses our insecurity when we respond to Old English poetry.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Old English Poetic Superlatives
- Dublin, Trinity College, MS 492: A New Witness to the Old English Bede and its Twelfth-Century Context
- The Influence of Verse Form on the Relative Order of the Name and the Title King within an Appositive Phrase in Laȝamon’s Brut
- Norse Loans in Middle English and their Influence on Late Medieval London English
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- Johanna Hartmann. Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives. text & theorie 16. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016, 320 pp., € 49.80.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Old English Poetic Superlatives
- Dublin, Trinity College, MS 492: A New Witness to the Old English Bede and its Twelfth-Century Context
- The Influence of Verse Form on the Relative Order of the Name and the Title King within an Appositive Phrase in Laȝamon’s Brut
- Norse Loans in Middle English and their Influence on Late Medieval London English
- Reviews
- Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl (eds.). Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2015, xv + 254 pp., € 99.00/$ 149.00.
- Haruko Momma. From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Studies in English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 224 pp., £ 25.99 (pb) [hb 2013].
- Rebecca Stephenson. The Politics of Language: Byrhtferth, Ælfric, and the Multilingual Identity of the Benedictine Reform. Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, x + 218 pp., $ 55.00.
- A. J. Ford. Marvel and Artefact: The “Wonders of the East” in its Manuscript Contexts. Library of the Written Word – The Manuscript World 45. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2016, xvi + 178 pp., 38 figures, 1 table, € 109.00/$ 141.00.
- Karl Reichl (ed.). Medieval Oral Literature. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016, 743 pp., 27 illustr., € 34.95/$ 40.99/£ 28.99 (pb) [hb 2011].
- Natasha Moore. Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: The Unpoetical Age. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, vi + 239 pp., £ 58.00.
- Beatrix Hesse. The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century. Crime Files. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, vi + 290 pp., 1 illustr., $ 69.99.
- Jean-Michel Ganteau. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. New York/London: Routledge, 2015, 179 pp., £ 95.00.
- Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 255 pp., € 24.96.
- J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. New York: Viking, 2015, 198 pp., $ 27.95. David Attwell. J. M. Coetzee and The Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 272 pp., numerous illustr., £ 19.99.
- Maria Löschnigg. The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. CAT 7. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 381 pp., 5 figures, € 42.50.
- Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt (eds.). The Cambridge History of American Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, xx + 1306 pp., $ 170.00.
- Reingard M. Nischik (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 417 pp., $ 195.00 (hb)/$ 54.99 (pb [2016]).
- Johanna Hartmann. Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives. text & theorie 16. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016, 320 pp., € 49.80.
- Books Received
