On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems

Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, __On the Aesthetics of__ Beowulf __and Other Old English Poems__ significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction 9 1. Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith 32 2. Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle 51 3. Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style 72 4. Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty 89 5. ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry 109 6. Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection 122 7. Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest 143 8. Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation 169 9. Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth 184 10. The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry 217 11. The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire 235 12. ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote 255 Contributors 275 Works Cited 277 Index 299

What makes one Anglo-Saxon poem better than another? Why does Beowulf still have the power to move us after so many centuries? What might have been aesthetically pleasing to Old English readers and writers of poetry?

While there is an apparent consensus by scholars on a core of poems considered to be exceptional literary achievements - Beowulf, Judith, the Vercelli book - there has been little systematic investigation of the basis for these appraisals. With new essays on rhetoric, wordplay, meter, structure, irony, form, psychology, ethos, and reader response, the contributors to this collection aim to find objective aesthetic qualities in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form.