The ninth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at individual poets working in alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal (mostly inserting links).
Check back for the next post in the series soon!
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ℑn my introduction to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, my first section is called “The Story of the Modern Revival.” Every story needs a hero, though, and our story’s unsung hero is undeniably contemporary fandom. Many years ago, I once read an essay by Harlan Ellison praising SF for having so many big-name authors emerge from the ranks of SF fandom. He considered this situation distinct from mainstream, non-genre literature, and while I won’t agree with Ellison completely – as one of my students once told me, she has an older brother named Geoffrey because of how much their mother loves The Canterbury Tales – but still, genre fandom seems special.
Such fandom has been a guiding light for the Modern Revival, too. We’ve already touched upon several revivalists with impeccable fan roots: Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Paul Edwin Zimmer. Nonetheless, most people tend to think of fandom as a modern 20th-century thing, strongly linked in its earliest days to conventions and printed fanzines, but some aspects of fandom go a long, long way back – and, here, I’m thinking specifically of “fan fiction.”
Take, for instance, Paradise Lost. If contemporary “fanfic” is essentially what happens when someone takes material from a favorite franchise and produces their own creative, non-official artwork, well then…John Milton is basically writing Biblical fan fiction. And this is precisely how I explain Paradise Lost to my students, too. In fact, most medieval literature can be considered fanfic under this broad conception. Arthurian literature is the ultimate example, since it’s nothing but a history of authors borrowing, modifying, and expanding the same core set of content – the lack of copyright laws during the Middle Ages was a wonderful thing.
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| The poet herself Image provided by Wise |
Next to Arthurian literature, though, the most popular medieval “franchise” was the Trojan War, and reviving this old tradition for the Modern Revival is a contemporary fan writer and professional medievalist: M. Wendy Hennequin.
As a young author, Hennequin cut her teeth working on Star Wars and Star Trek fanfic before, in college, graduating to the Dargon Project – a shared-universe setting inspired by Robert Aspirin’s Thieves’ World anthology series. Now she’s a professor at Tennessee State University where she’s been teaching for several years. Even as a medievalist, though, her fandom has continued. One of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s most delightful mini-traditions involves tales from the “Boreal Master,” a fictional medieval Icelandic poet whose compositions are all terrible. Hennequin wrote one such “Boreal” poem herself, complete with a pseudo-scholarly gloss, and presented both at the major conference for medievalists held annually in Kalamazoo, Michigan; the poem also appears in my anthology.
For today, however, I’m after juicier fruit than faux tales by the Boreal Master – in fact, Hennequin’s unexpectedly powerful revivalist text: “Guðrinc’s Lament.”
Within Old English poetry, elegies are a common genre. The most relevant example is probably “The Wife’s Lament,” an anonymous poem preserved in the Exeter Book, and this is the tradition followed by “Guðrinc’s Lament.” For Hennequin, her eponymous speaker is actually Andromache, the wife of the Trojan hero Hector. In contrast to revivalists with a less-than-firm grasp of medieval history or poetics (as recounted in my last few posts), Hennequin distinguishes herself by her strong sense of historicity. In one sense, “Guðrinc’s Lament” is a literary forgery, a text presented as if it were composed by an Old English scop, yet one that nevertheless skillfully reflects the style, epithets, misunderstandings, and assumptions that might have marked a genuine Old English poet writing about ancient Greek history.
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| Andromache and Astyanax Image provided by Wise |
For instance, the wife of Hector in The Iliad is no warrior woman…yet, in Greek, Andromache literally means “fighter of men.” This etymology evidently misleads (or inspires) the Old English author of “Guðrinc’s Lament” to transform his female speaker – whose name “Guðrinc” means “fighter of men” in Old English as well – into a battle-hardened warrior queen. In addition, medieval poets usually lacked a strong historical sense, so they’re prone to anachronism, often projecting their contemporary social institutions and practices onto the distant past. Accordingly, in Hennequin’s text, King Priam of Troy is framed as a “ring-giver,” an epithet more appropriate to Beowulf than to Homeric Greece, and Guðrinc describes the Greeks as “the heathen foe” (l.74), a phrase that obviously meant nothing twelve-hundred years before the birth of Christ. Moreover, Guðrinc laments Troy’s destruction by saying
Gone is the mead-hall, gleaming with gold,
Where the high-lord sat, longing for war,
The noble youths yearning for battle.
Mead-halls, of course, are famously Germanic a type of building…and the Greeks, in any event, would have drunk wine.
All these little details create an impressive historically authentic aura for “Guðrinc’s Lament.” What’s even more impressive, too, is how Hennequin shapes her narrative events according to early medieval (mis)understandings of the Trojan War. In most classical accounts, the son of Andromache and Hector, Astyanax, is thrown to his death off Troy’s walls, and many Trojan women – Queen Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache herself – are all enslaved. In “Guðrinc’s Lament,” however, Astyanax survives, and Hennequin has her Trojan women survive as exiles, not slaves. What gives?
Technically, we’re not completely sure if medieval poets had direct access to Homer’s Iliad, but one text that did circulate widely among the early English people was De excidio Troiae historia (The History of the Destruction of Troy) by Dares Phrygius. This “history” is one of the most famous forgeries of the entire Middle Ages, and its multiple layers of attributed authorship would make any postmodernist proud. It is allegedly an eye-witness account to the Trojan War by a Trojan priest, Dares Phyrgius, whom Homer briefly mentions in The Iliad’s fifth book. Yet such an eye-witness account would obviously have been written in Greek, not Latin. Accordingly, the introductory epistle declares its translator to be Cornelius Nepos, a famous Roman biographer contemporary with Cicero. However, although it’s theoretically possible that whoever wrote Dare’s short book in Latin was working from some kind of Greek original, Cornelius Nepos was definitely not that person. Instead, scholars agree that De excidio Troiae historia was probably written in the 5th century AD…but medieval authors didn’t know that. Instead, although they sometimes questioned the alleged role of Nepos due to the manuscript’s simplistic Latin, the original authorship of Dares continued to be taken at face value.
For anyone interested in the fascinating story of this famous medieval forgery, I’d highly recommend Frederick Clark’s book, The First Pagan Historian (2020). Whoever the real author may have been, however, “Dares” enjoyed wide circulation during the Middle Ages partly because of how he directly challenged two ancient authorities: Homer himself, who did not witness the events at Troy himself, and the great Virgil, who praised the piety of Aeneas, Rome’s founder. In contrast, Dares claims that Aeneas only survived the destruction of Troy because he betrayed his city to the Greeks.
Neither of these unique challenges to ancient authority appears in Hennequin’s poem, but she does borrow several incidents directly from De excidio Troiae historia – or, rather, the purported Old English author of her text does. This is why Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache all survive the war as exiles, not slaves, and although Dares does not specify the fate of Astyanax specifically, we can reasonably infer his survival from Andromache’s own.
Of course, Dares cannot have been the sole “source” for the Old English poet who purportedly composes “Guðrinc’s Lament.” Dares never mentions the defilement of Hector’s body, for instance, and he famously rationalizes the Trojan War to exclude any reference to gods or the Trojan horse ruse – in contrast, Hennequin has Guðrinc say, “The city-dwellers, seeing no harm, / Opened the gates” (l.84). Still, medieval authors often had multiple sources themselves, so that checks out. Ultimately, the combination of Old English meter – a slow and solemn measure that tends naturally toward elegy – and one of Homer’s most tragic tales is quite powerful, and “Guðrinc’s Lament” works as a revivalist text on several levels. As my last few posts have indicated, revivalists need not necessarily be medievalists in order to produce work meaningful to the Modern Alliterative Revival…but when they are, like Hennequin, good things can happen.
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