Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker

Description

In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience. Cover Endorsement Page Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Permissions Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: Beyond Germanic Heroic Poetry: Poets, Historians, and the Gods of Our Fathers ‘And the Words That Are Used/ for to Get the Ship Confused’: Academic Terminology and Underlying Assumptions Past Approaches and the Division of Academic Labour Bridging the Sundering Seas: Carolingian and Early English Vernacular Verse The ‘Germanic Heroic’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Paradigms: A Critique What Is ‘History’, Anyway? Alternative Modes of History and Vernacular Theories of Narrative Representation The Bard, the Rag-Picker, and the Nostalgic Scribe The Bard and the Rag-Picker at Work Notes Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 2: What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The Old English Vocabulary of Narrative and Historical Representation Notes Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 3: ‘Truth Is the Trickiest’: Vernacular Theories of Truth in Early Medieval Culture Notes Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 4: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: The Social Logic of Frankish Verse Histories Introduction Carolingian Germanic Poetry – A Marginal Constellation ‘The Savage Words of an Uncultivated Language’: Linguistic Community and Alienation Residual Orality and the Politics of Poetic Form Carolingian Ethnicities (I): Teutoni, Theodisci, or Germani? Carolingian Ethnicities (II): ‘True Franks’ in the East and West The Interplay of Ethnicities in the Waltharius How to Be a Man, a Noble, and a Son in Carolingian Society Tying the Threads Together: The Background to the Figure in the Carpet Notes Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 5: Beowulf in Times of Anxiety: The Archaeology of Emotions in Old English Verse History Angling for Anxieties: A Method Nervous Laughter: Wrestling with Monsters Beowulf the Wrecca : The Monster Within Ellorgæstas : Guests in Their Homeland Crushing the Laðan Cynnes : On ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Race, Again Giant Women and Haunting Danes: Race and Gender around Beowulf Notes Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index