The Dating of Widsið and the Study of Germanic Antiquity

Leonard Neidorf

doi:10.1007/S11061-012-9308-2

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The Dating of Widsið and the Study of Germanic Antiquity

Leonard Neidorf

https://doi.org/10.1007/S11061-012-9308-2

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21 pages

Abstract

A consensus once existed in support of the claim that Widsið is the oldest extant poem in English and one of the earliest substantial documents written in any Germanic language. This consensus came to an end in the 1980s, when scholars became more skeptical about the dating of Old English poetry. Recent work on Widsið contends that there is little evidence supporting the presumed early date of composition. This essay argues, however, that four categories of evidence can be brought to bear on the dating of Widsið-orthographic, lexical, onomastic, and cultural-and that all four of these categories agree in support of an early date of composition. It also argues that, as an early poem, Widsið has much to contribute to the lively discussions of early medieval historians concerned with Germanic identity and the ethnogenesis of early medieval gentes.

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Widsið's dating relies on orthographic, lexical, onomastic, and cultural evidence supporting an early composition date.
Recent scholarship challenges the notion of Widsið as a late seventh-century poem, suggesting earlier origins.
Evidence from names in Widsið aligns with cultural memory of Germanic identities before the Anglo-Saxon migrations.
The poem reflects an Anglian perspective, not a unified Anglo-Saxon identity, emphasizing regional origins.
Widsið contributes to discussions on Germanic identity and ethnogenesis in early medieval historiography.

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References (73)

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FAQs

What evidence supports an early date for the poem Widsið?add

The study argues that orthographic, lexical, onomastic, and cultural evidence collectively corroborate an early composition date for Widsið, possibly predating the seventh century.

How do orthographic forms in Widsið suggest its early composition?add

The presence of archaic spellings such as Mearchealf indicates that Widsið was likely written during the earliest period of English orthography, not during the late West Saxon period.

What implications does Widsið have for understanding Germanic identity?add

Widsið provides insights into the maintenance of distinct continental Germanic identities prior to the emergence of a unified Anglo-Saxon identity in England, reflecting cultural continuity.

How does the use of lexical items in Widsið indicate its dating?add

An example is the word 'suhtor(ge)faedran', a copulative compound, which likely reflects seventh-century usage, as such formations became obsolete early in Old English.

What role do onomastic elements in Widsið play in its historical context?add

The occurrence of heroic-legendary names in Widsið aligns with naming conventions of the seventh century, suggesting an audience familiar with these traditions and confirming earlier comprehensive cultural histories.

About the author

Leonard Neidorf

Shenzhen University, Faculty Member

Leonard Neidorf is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Shenzhen University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A., summa cum laude, from New York University. Before coming to Shenzhen University, Neidorf taught at Nanjing University, and he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Neidorf is the author of two monographs: The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet (Cornell University Press, 2022) and The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2017). He is the editor of The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Boydell & Brewer, 2014), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE. He is the co-editor (with Rafael J. Pascual and Tom Shippey) of Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk (Boydell & Brewer, 2016) and the co-editor (with Yang Liu) of Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature (Nanjing University Press, 2021). In collaboration with Tom Shippey, Neidorf recently edited Beowulf: Translation and Commentary: Revised and Expanded (Uppsala Books, 2024). Neidorf is the author of more than 100 papers published in A&HCI journals. His articles have appeared in a wide range of prominent journals, including ELH, Folklore, Traditio, Review of English Studies, Tolkien Studies, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics. His work in the digital humanities, published in Nature Human Behaviour, was profiled in The Guardian, The Times, and other news outlets. Neidorf has delivered invited lectures at numerous universities and has served as a keynote speaker at conferences in Australia, China, Germany, Korea, Norway, Poland, and Spain. Neidorf received a Jiangsu Province Excellent Course Award in 2018 for his course on medieval English literature. In recognition of his research on Beowulf, Neidorf received the Beatrice White Prize from the English Association for best publication in pre-modern literature. Since 2020, Neidorf has been an Associate Editor of English Studies (Taylor & Francis). Since 2024, Neidorf has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Explicator (Taylor & Francis).

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Investigation into the innere Geschicte ("internal history") of Beowulf, to borrow a phrase from the title of Karl Victor Müllenhoff's epochal article, was the central preoccupation of nineteenth-century scholarship on Beowulf. 1 Proponents of Liedertheorie ("ballad-theory") carved the transmitted text into discrete compositions of varying antiquity and authority that were purportedly sewn together by monkish editors and interpolators. Other early scholars, holding that Beowulf was more or less the work of one author, erected theories that sought to explain how the poem's content evolved out of diverse legendary, mythological, and historical sources. 2 The gradual recognition of the improbability of Liedertheorie, combined with J. R. R. Tolkien's eloquent exhortation to read the poem as a poem, discredited this entire research tradition in the eyes of many scholars. 3 Under the influence of New Criticism, twentieth-century critics were readily persuaded by Tolkien to study Beowulf as a unitary work of art, a well-wrought urn, without much interest in the antecedent traditions constituting it. Many critics have consequently come to regard Beowulf as the work of a solitary genius, who might well have created ex nihilo any character or episode in the poem for which there is no separate attestation. Beowulf Unlocked is thus a rather iconoclastic work at the present moment. In addition to its fundamental methodological innovation-the application of lexomic methods to the text of Beowulfits governing interest in the "structure, ontogeny, and evolution" (2) of the poem runs refreshingly counter to dominant trends in mainstream Old English scholarship, at least in the Anglophone world. Michael D. C. Drout and his team of collaborators use computer-assisted statistical analysis to discern lexical and orthographical patterns (inter alia) in Beowulf that might not be apparent to the naked eye and might offer valuable insights into the poem's oral or textual history. Lexomic methods enable the authors to generate new evidence, in the form of subtle distinctions and similarities between segments of Beowulf, for the testing of longstanding hypotheses and the generation of some interesting new hypotheses. The authors do not resurrect the Liedertheorie or argue that Beowulf is the work of multiple authors; to the contrary, their discovery of close similarities in the distribution of vocabulary between segments near the poem's beginning and ending tells against composite authorship (56-57). The authors do find that some segments of the poem differ markedly from others in terms of vocabulary distribution, but they prudently interpret these differences as indications of the poet's use of sources, that is, his reliance on oral or written poems that existed in relatively fixed form prior to the composition of Beowulf. 4 "The simplest hypothesis that accounts for all of the data," write the authors, "is that some sections of Beowulf have different sources than others" (60). Perhaps the most interesting discovery to emerge from the authors' lexomic analyses is that "segment C, the Unferth/Breca episode, is substantially different in vocabulary from every other segment of Beowulf" (55). Other segments marked by distinct distributions of vocabulary tend to pair in the authors' tests with at least one other segment that is similarly distinct, but this portion of the poem is a consistent outlier. The authors interpret the data to be "consistent with the Unferth and Breca material having a different source than the rest of Beowulf" (61). The significance of this claim derives in part from its relevance to a longstanding debate in Beowulf scholarship over the status of the poem's protagonist in Germanic legendary tradition. Did the Beowulf poet invent the eponymous hero, or did he focus on a character that was already familiar to his audience? Beowulf, unlike Hrothgar and Hygelac and others, appears in no other extant work. Some critics have interpreted this absence of evidence as evidence of absence, while others have maintained that the Unferth/Breca episode constitutes evidence for the protagonist's presence in antecedent tradition. 5 In

The Dating of Widsið and the Study of Germanic Antiquity

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