Q UESTIONS OF DWELLING IN ANGLO-SAXON POETRY AND MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM: INHABITING LANDSCAPE, BODY, AND MIND

QUESTIONS OF DWELLING IN ANGLO-SAXON POETRY AND MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM:

INHABITING LANDSCAPE, BODY, AND MIND

Patricia Dailey

But had they no witness? I omit God […] but had they not themselves and thetestimony of Conscience?

— J. Norris, Hierocles, 37They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars — on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.

—Robert Frost, ‘Desert Places’

I. Dwelling and Poetry

How does medieval poetry provide a space for posing the question ofdwelling? How does it relate to the question of how one inhabits aworld? Who or what of a subject remains in a poem? While much

criticism or commentary on medieval poetry seems to answer these questions,directly or indirectly, through a chosen methodology or interpretation, thequestion of who or what of a subject remains in a poem continues to haunt ourunderstanding of medieval texts. After the disappearance of an authorial voice,scholars have turned towards questions of self-representation, performativity,gender, or embodiment as a way to indirectly mark the gap between text and thequestion of subjectivity, yet this very move silently assumes a subject constitutedthrough its representational capacities and identifications. Rather than seekout constellations of identity, I will look at points of resistance to, or thelimits of subjectivity in several poems, and demonstrate how these limits become

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Hadewijch’s works, written in Middle Dutch in the early thirteenth century (c. 1230), are1

comprised of fourteen visions (Visionen) written in prose, thirty-one letters (Brieven) writtenin prose with some passages in rhyming couplets, twenty-nine poems in couplets(Mengeldichten), forty-five poems in stanzas (Strofische Gedichten), and a ‘list of the perfect’written in prose. The only English editions of her work are The Complete Works, trans. byColumba Hart, OSB (New York, 1980), which omits the list of the perfect and poems 17–29of the Mengeldichten, and the poems in stanzas in the dual language edition Poetry ofHadewijch, trans. by Marieke van Baest (Leuven, 1998). Letters 1–20 have been translated byE. Colledge in Medieval Netherlands Religious Literature (Leiden, 1965). For translated sectionsof her work see the bibliography in The Complete Works. The standard Middle Dutch editionsof her works were first ‘rediscovered’ and edited by Joseph Van Mierlo but have subsequentlybeen re-edited, with the exception of the Mengeldichten. While Van Mierlo’s editions are stillwidely used, the following publications may be considered the standard editions: StrofischeGedichten, ed. by E. Rombauts and N. De Paepe (Zwolle, 1961); Visionen, ed. by F. Willaert(Amsterdam, 1996); De Visionen van Hadewijch, 2 vols, ed. by P. Mommaers (Nijmengen,1979); De brieven van Hadewijch, ed. by P. Mommaers (Averbode and Kampen, 1990); andHadewijch: Mengeldichten, ed. by J. Van Mierlo (Antwerp, 1952). For an extensive bibliographyon Hadewijch up to 1986, see G. J. Lewis, F. Willaert, and M.-J. Govers, Bibliographie zurdeutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1989). The most thorough study on Hadewijch’swork is Frank Willaert, De poëtica van Hadewijch in de Strofische gedichten (Utrecht, 1984) andPaul Mommaers with Elizabeth Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer — Beguine — Love Mystic(Leuven, 2004). Although one may assume that Hadewijch addresses her community ofwomen in her letters and elsewhere, all biographical information about her and her communityremains speculative. All translations throughout are mine unless noted otherwise.

While this approach harbours Heideggerian overtones in coupling the question of dwelling2

with that of poetry, I do not share Heidegger’s distinction between dwelling and inhabitation, theformer a human trait, and the latter reserved for the realm of the animals, whom he deems‘deprived of world’ (and thus not included in ontology). What is of chief interest to me, asopposed to Heidegger, is thus not primarily the sense of place accompanied by a Weltanschauung,

articulated in what I would like to call ‘the figural body’ of the poem itself. I willexamine the question of dwelling and subjectivity with regard to two Anglo-Saxon poems, Beowulf and The Ruin, and will compare them with two latermedieval texts by Beguines: Hadewijch II’s Mengeldichten and, to a lesser extent,Marguerite Porete’s Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties. Although this would1

appear to be an odd grouping of texts, the consistent use of landscape as ameasure of an internal limit invites comparative analysis in a manner that is notmerely thematic: for each of these texts the landscape becomes a figure forstaging the contingency of time, world, and body in relation to poetic language.Landscape and the body are intimately related and bring to the fore thedetachable, contingent, hospitable, or divisible nature of dwelling from earth orworld. The underlying contexts, thematically, historically, and theologically2

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but the possibility of a space that would prefigure this differentiation and harbour an indifferenceto a ‘world’. I am not arguing for a unity of Being in poetry, nor for an overcoming of divisions,cuts, or ruptures within the domain of poetry; rather, I am arguing for the way in which poetryattests to or bears witness to a disruption that would prevent this kind of grounding and generatesa space and time that resists appropriation by, yet is intrinsic to, its subjects.

As Anita Riedinger points out, ‘This omnipresent tension between what is — a separation3

from home — and what is desired — a return to home — enhances the subliminal drama ofmuch Old English poetry. It is a relatively rare poem, in fact, that does not make some allusionto home’ (‘“Home” in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 96 (1995), 51–59).

The complexity involved in the comparison between the two is the subject of my current4

book, Promised Bodies, and is beyond the scope of this paper. For study on the negative relationbetween the female body and the Anglo-Saxon book see Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Broken Bodiesand Singing Tongues: Gender and Voice in the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 23Psychomachia’, Anglo-Saxon England, 30 (2001), 137–44.

speaking, differ with regard to each other. For the Anglo-Saxon texts, separation,transience, and hospitality are central if not defining motifs in how dwellingrelates to home and exile, Christian and pre-Christian senses of life and afterlife.3

For the mystical texts, detachment (from the will, body, or proper name) clearlyharbours a theological overtone in relation to the desire to become one withChrist and the longed-for afterlife once the flesh is left behind. The role ofcommunal memory and the absorption into it through the medium of language(as lof, poetry, or sacred text) is significant for both. The mystic leaves what isproper to the self in a general movement of expropriation via imitatio and thedesire to become the exempla of a text (albeit Scripture, the Word made flesh,that is Christ, or the text which the divine has written through her and must beperformed). The relation between works and deeds, and the desire to become text,as in the sense of lof or imitatio is critical for both and merits lengthy analysis,which can only be addressed here in part.4

These texts are separated from each other in historical time, language, andgenre. The two Old English poems have no identifiable author, are speculativelydated to the second half of the tenth century, and partake in oral formulaic verse,a linguistic form which often hosted its speakers, transiting from mouth tomouth. The two mystical texts, the first written in Middle Dutch, the second inOld French by an identifiable Beguine, were written in the mid-thirteenth andearly fourteenth centuries respectively and also partake in a kind of detachabilityfrom their speakers, for they claim to articulate another voice within the mystic,the voice of the divine, which often inhabits and haunts the mystic, divesting her

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For studies on the ties between personification and landscape, see Thomas Raff, ‘Die5

Ikonographie der mittelalterlichen Windpersonifikationen’, Aachener Kunstblätter, 48(1978–79), 71–218. On landscape as a representation of social structure see Matthias Ebberle,Individuum und Landschaft. Zur Enstehung und Entwicklung der Landschaftsmalerei (Geissen,1980) and Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry(Cambridge, 1999). Unlike Neville, my argument does not intend to identify the social or thecultural in landscape; rather, I seek to highlight a hiatus that emerges in mystical and Anglo-Saxon texts between self and landscape in order to show how something nonsubjective hauntsboth as spatialization or as the possibility of space. For Hadewijch, the theme of personificationis important not only in the sense of the incarnation of Christ, but it is also important to thesense of becoming a person, that is, imitating the Passion (in an active way) and becomingunited with Minne in the unity of the Trinity. This sense of becoming a person is also tied toa separation from God and to the substitute dwelling of this experience in language.

of her proper name. Despite the seeming disparity in this grouping of poems andtexts, they provide the context for a behind the scenes discourse on the notionof subjectivity and selfhood, of sylf and self, through their respective treatmentof landscape and the way landscape is intertwined with the body. By landscape,I intend both what one designates as a ‘natural background’ and the structuresor buildings that provide a backdrop or setting for dwelling. Like their pictorialcounterparts, landscape in medieval poetry often depicts a kind of threshold ordividing line between two differing spaces. In this essay, I will show how certainpoetic devices that are implicated in landscape, namely personification and, toa lesser extent, metaphor, serve to highlight the interrelation between landscapeand the body.

Personification usually serves to attribute a human personality or quality toan impersonal thing, investing an object with subjective attributes; however, inthese poems, I argue that the use of personification serves an opposite end,exposing the inhuman in the human and the nonsubjective in the subjective. In5

other words, these instances of personification highlight what in the subject isnot properly of the subject, what impersonal thing or spacing remains in whatis thought of as the subject. I will not focus on a self presented as such, a selfwhich is properly manifest in its representation (and constituted as representation),for this self, I argue, better represents our expectations as modern readers ofmedieval texts. Rather than focusing on constructions of person and voice, I willturn to a landscape that bears witness to the intimacy of solitude in three poetictexts.


As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, the problem with S.A. J. Bradley’s translation is6

that the reflexive pronoun ‘sylf’ is turned into a substantive, equipping ‘the Seafarer with aconfessional personality and illustrat[ing] how current interpretation in the field assumes anidentity between modern and medieval self-consciousness’. This is expanded by Pope andGreenfield’s discussions on the Seafarer, where, as O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, ‘In Greenfield’ssecond argument, “for myself” skates back and forth over the slippery border of grammar andsemantics. That is, while Greenfield acknowledges that sylf is grammatically a reflexivepronoun, he begs the question by claiming that his translation uses the word’s “semantic andnot its grammatical property”, that is, that in the name of semantics he can read self/sylf as “byand for the speaker’s self” (emphasis added), producing a substantive self’ (‘Body and Law inAnglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 27 (1998), 209–232 (p. 210)). A literal translationof the first line would read, ‘I myself can sing a true song’.

Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Body and Law’; Michael Matto, ‘True Confessions: The7

Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 103(2004), 156–179. In a very compelling argument, Matto examines the tension between innerand outer in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon sylf. He writes that in The Seafarer, ‘thenarrator’s concept of sylf is informed by an inner/outer schema that relates the mind, body, andsoul in terms of a container and contained’ (pp. 159–160). Matto concludes, ‘The Seafarer

II. The Subject of Medieval Literature / The Subject of Modernity

Redefining the ‘subject’ of a medieval poem resonates in the way the ‘subject’ ofthe Middle Ages is conceived. That the fine seams that bind a subject together ina medieval context share a thread with our modern ego or cogito, is a commonplacepresupposition. While a connection would seem to necessarily bind and holdelements of a voice, body, and mind together with a social or experiential contextin order for any coherent contextualization of the history of a self or a subject inor of a text, it is not at all clear that this seeming connection holds in Anglo-Saxon texts or in medieval women’s mystical poetry. Interpreters and translatorsof Anglo-Saxon texts often proceed as if the speaker in a given text (as well as thepresupposed author behind such a text) shared in our contemporary sense ofpossessing a self and personhood. The widely used translation of The Seafarerillustrates this common praxis, using the reflexive pronoun sylf as a mold uponwhich a substantive self is constructed. S. A. J. Bradley’s misleading translationof The Seafarer’s ‘mæg ic be me sylfum’ (Seafarer 1), as ‘I can tell the true riddle ofmy own self’, heralds the arrival of this unmediated transhistorical consciousnessupon the scene of Old English literature. As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and6

Michael Matto have noted, the appearance of the sylf or self as a substantive selffalsely traces a familiar figure upon a strange body of prose, through the corpus ofthe Old English language, from The Seafarer to King Alfred, and onwards.7

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cannot be read in ways that prefigure a modern sense of the individual. The problem of thesylf cannot be understood directly in terms of the modern self, but instead must be read interms of late-ninth-century and early-tenth-century tensions among mechanisms for theproduction of wisdom, confessional technologies of personal salvation, the heroic and elegiacethic of constraining the impulses of the inner mind, and public rituals of communalreintegration’ (p. 178). What I am attempting to highlight here is what must precede the selfin order to enable even the possibility of its representation, and thus makes an analysis ofmodern and medieval subjects possible.

Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, ‘Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor,8

and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 11 (1998), 315–334 (p. 315). Leesand Overing’s study is similar in aim to mine here, in that they want to reconsider the paradigmsthat structure periodization and, through this, reconsider the construction of the medieval subjectin its relation to a presupposed modern self-consciousness, yet their focus is the historicalconstruction of belief, through a reading of Aldhelm’s De Virginitate. They argue, ‘A religiouscritical paradigm that leaves Christianity unhistoricized, like a modernist secular orientationthat ignores belief, elides the importance of the self as a product of both belief and history’, andthus take as their aim the historical-religious character of the self, and what they call ‘the femalebody’s symbolism and materiality’ in relation to female sanctity (p. 330). Their study aims fora subject that predominately is marked by historical time.

Clare Lees, ‘Analytical Survey 7: Actually Existing Anglo-Saxon Studies’, New Medieval9

Literatures, 7 (2005), 226–27; The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. byDavid Wallace (Cambridge, 1999).

The strangeness of Anglo-Saxon texts is also subject to the opposite reaction.For many readers, the mark of the medieval as such is grounded in its exclusionfrom the light of the modern or later medieval periods. As Overing and Leesnote, ‘From the more conventional standpoint of a developmental model ofhistory, Anglo-Saxon England is originary — inescapably different from andoften irrelevant to subsequent medieval periods’. Even in attempts to include8

Anglo-Saxon texts in the history of a period, such as in The Cambridge History ofMedieval English Literature, Clare Lees notes ‘medieval English literature beginsafter the Anglo-Saxon period’ and is ‘framed by a grand récit: medieval Englishliterature begins with 1066 and terminates in 1547’. The darkness, or worse, the9

mysteriousness of the Middle Ages may often be rendered subjectless andinconsequent with the definition of modern self-consciousness, negated in itssimplicity by a Hegelian teleology. If medieval narratives do indeed stage thequestion of subjectivity, the way in which this question is framed poses aproblem when it is done in a purely teleological fashion, as though it were themark of a long product of historical development, only definable from theperspective of modern self-consciousness. Lee Patterson notes of these critics who


Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies’,10

Speculum, 65 (1990), 87–108 (p. 99). Recent work in medieval studies attempts to address this. In her survey of recent work,11

Clare Lees offers a sharp critique of these divisions (in all their forms and institutionalincarnations) in the interest of expanding beyond traditional and discipline-oriented modes ofanalysis. At the heart of this debate, and in order to promote synchronic and diachronic modesof analysis, Lees identifies the constructedness of world-making as a central issue inconsideration of ‘the nature of knowledge, the beliefs that knowledge of the world mediates,and the power of language to construct, represent, and enact those beliefs’. She writes, ‘As TheRuin suggests, worlds are reckoned with — measured against — as well as described andreconstructed, and thereby make the object of poetic and clerical knowledge, as the genre ofthe riddle of the enigma also testifies’ (Lees, ‘Analytical Survey 7’, pp. 250, 245). RitaCopeland’s work in rhetoric from late antiquity to the Middle Ages likewise explicitly worksagainst or across the divide of periodicity. See, for example, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics andTranslation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991).

are subject to this desire for a well-defined break between modernity and theMiddle Ages:

These critics are not interested in historical change at all. What they want to establishis the modernity of their enterprise, the claim that in their chosen texts they descry thepresent condition in its initial, essential form. And to that end the Middle Ages servesas premodernity, the other that must be rejected for the modern self to be and knowitself. [. . .] The Middle Ages is not a subject for discussion but the rejected object, nota prehistory whose shape can be described but the history — historicity itself — thatmodernity must reject in order to be itself.10

Yet while Patterson argues that ‘to write the history of the medieval subject is ineffect to write the history of medieval culture’, in his attempt to efface thefabricated hiatus between the Renaissance man and the history of medievalselfhood, the modernity of his enterprise does not venture earlier than thetwelfth century, leaving Anglo-Saxon texts lurking behind the scenes of revision.11

Given this unfortunate gesture, which often reproduces an already well formedresistance within the academy to the crossing between Anglo-Saxon and latermedieval periods, why this drive for a necessary homogeneity of selfhood andsubjectivity, throughout history, and as it is manifest in literature? Why shouldthe appearance of a connection between the subject in and of a literary text andthe subject of history hold? And, finally, why should historical time be theprivileged background against which traits of subjectivity become legible in a textor the favoured strategy for listening to how these texts speak? What context doesmedieval literature provide for the staging of subjectivity and selfhood and how

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The Ruin is considered by most Anglo-Saxon scholars to be an elegiac poem and survives12

in a ruined form as a result of damage to the later pages of the Exeter Book. While the firsttwelve lines are legible, out of forty-nine lines only thirty-seven are legible in entirety, makingthe end of the poem a guessing game. Most interpretations of the poem read The Ruin as ameditation on ‘the transience of earthly things’ (Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson, A Guideto Old English, 4th edn (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 237) or as a ‘didactic rather than purelydescriptive poem’ that reflects Augustinian concerns for the ‘ineffable city of God’ and ‘dwellson the details of the world’s decline in order to move its audience to seek the point-for-pointreciprocal majesty, security, and stability of the heavenly Jerusalem where earthly yearnings fornoble fellowship and matching dignity of environment are fulfilled, free from the world’smutability’ (S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Rutland, 1995), p. 201). However, noexplicitly Christian references in the poem point to the urgency of this reading. On the otherhand, another main branch of scholarship has meticulously tried to pin this poem to a specificplace. A widely accepted hypothesis is that of R. F. Leslie, who suggests that the city is mostlikely tied to the Roman city of Bath, once called Bathum, and is cited in an eleventh-century

does it refigure historical time? I would like to attempt to provide one possibleanswer to this question by taking into account a hiatus between historical timeand the time of a poem, the subject in a poem and the subject of history.

III.Temporality and the Subject of ‘The Ruin’

While a poem bears witness to history, inasmuch as it offers itself as a historicaldocument and inasmuch as its language (and its idiom or dialect) literally speaksits place and time (allowing us to attempt to date a text or localize its dialect),and speaks for what we may call its culture, it bears witness to history and to amanner of dwelling in time which does not dwell in the same way as would, forexample, a monument. A poem, or a narrative, does not solely dwell as a formof pure exteriority, that is, as an object which is subjected to the unfolding ofhistorical time, for in itself, a poem also bears witness, it generates an other time,even if it is in the form of a fiction or a desired history, like Bede’s, into whicha nation will write itself. Narrative bears witness for someone or something thatis no longer present. In this sense, something of the subject dwells in the poem,generating another time, something remains of a subject though its form orfigure may not resemble us. But how does a poem bear witness? How does apoem dwell in time and space? What happens to the specificity of place in thework of a poetic text?

The Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin circles around these questions, in the figureof a wall. While The Ruin appears to have the innocent appearance of a nostalgic12


biography of St Dunstan. R. F. Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, rev. edn (Exeter, 1988).However, topographical poems are not common in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Rodrigues does notdisqualify this possibility, but also suggests, according to Wrenn, that ‘The Ruin may have beensuggested by Latin topographical verses such as those of the sixth century Christian poetVenantius Fortunatus on the devastation of Thuringia. It is in a sense the first example oftopographical verse in English and, in its tradition, probably related to the classical Latinpoems in praise of particular places such as Alcuin made for York in the early ninth century(though The Ruin is rather the obverse of the conventional encomium urbis). The only otherAnglo-Saxon topographical poem is the very late fragmentary piece on Durham. That TheRuin seems to have been written originally in the Mercian dialect does not necessarily diminishthe importance of Leslie’s view, for Bath was in Mercian territory in the eighth century, whenthe poem is thought to have first taken shape’ (Louis Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English VerseRenderings of The Ruin’, NoSpine.com (2001), pp. 1–16 (p. 4) <http://www.louisrodrigues.co.uk/books.htm>; C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London, 1970),153–54. What Ifind problematic in these readings are the assumption of the value of ‘verisimilitude’ for Anglo-Saxons, and — given the lack of Anglo-Saxon precedents for topographical poems — thepresumption of a Christian relation to mourning and time, and the privilege of a certain formof historical time. My reading seeks to work through these assumptions and provide analternative reading. In this sense, I would align my reading with Nicholas Howe’s in placingan emphasis on the presence of the past, while noting the constant negotiation of Anglo-Saxonswith previously inhabited landscapes. He writes: ‘The Ruin finds its subject in the need tointerpret a visible feature of the landscape that does nothing, yet troubles the eye because itcannot be evaded. And from this fact, that the site must be observed, comes an acutelyrendered description of the world here and now that should make one all the more hesitantto offer an allegorical reading of the poem’ (‘The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England:Inherited, Invented, Imagined’, in Inventing Medieval Landscapes. Senses of Place in WesternEurope, ed. by John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Tallahassee, 2002), pp. 91–112 (pp. 96–97).

One possible, although questionable, dating of The Ruin is the middle of the eighth13

century; the more widely accepted hypothesis follows the dating of the Exeter Book to the latetenth century. The Ruin follows The Husband’s Message and is surrounded in the manuscriptby Old English riddles. These riddles are short poems, often personifications of objects oranimals, often in a first-person voice, and usually end with a question asking the reader to ‘saywhat (or who) I am’ or to ‘interpret what I mean’, that is, to solve the riddle by naming theobject whose use or physical property is described poetically. It has been speculated that TheRuin could also be a riddle; see Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 401, and William Johnson, Jr,‘The Ruin as Body-City Riddle’, Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 397–411. All references to the

description of a Roman ruin and witness to a manner of dwelling in the past, agreat deal of temporal and verbal agitation betrays something more than just theportrait of a once lively skeleton of a town and its inhabitants. Although thedescriptive narrative of this poem appears to be a subject’s meditation on a past,no subject appears as an authorial voice. The poem is haunted by the remains ofa subject in a way that resembles the riddles before it in the Exeter Book. The13

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Exeter Book are to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record: A Collective Edition (New York, 1931–53),III: The Exeter Book (1936), ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie; The Ruinappears on pp. 227–29 in this text.

The Hamer translation reads, ‘Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it’14

(Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981), pp. 26–29); theAlexander translation reads, ‘Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it’ (Michael Alexander, TheEarliest English Poems (New York, 1997), pp. 2–3); Crossley-Holland’s reads, ‘Wonderful is thiswall of stone, wrecked by fate’ (The Battle of Maldon and other Old English Poems, trans. byKevin Crossley-Holland, ed. by Bruce Mitchell (New York, 1967), pp. 69–70); Bradley’s reads,‘Wondrously ornate is the stone of this wall, shattered by fate’ (A. J. Bradley, Anglo-SaxonPoetry, p. 402); Treharne’s reads, ‘Wondrous is this stone wall, smashed by fate’ (ElaineTreharne, Old and Middle English c. 890–1400: An Anthology (Oxford, 2004), pp. 84–88);Neville’s reads, ‘This wall stone is ornamented, broken down by fate’ (Neville, Representationsof the Natural World, p. 48); and Mackie’s reads, ‘Splendid is this masonry, the fates havedestroyed it’) W. S. Mackie, The Exeter Book, pt 2, Early English Text Society, o.s. 194(London, 1934), 199–201.

Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English Verse Renderings’, p. 17; D. G. Calder, ‘Perspective15

and Movement in The Ruin’, Neophilologische Mitteilungen, 72 (1971), 442–45. In her readingof The Ruin, Sarah Lynn Higley also notes that ‘this dramatic shifting between here and thereand between now and then illustrates the Anglo-Saxon preoccupation not only with dynamiccontrasts but with relationships among those contrasts’ (Between Languages: The UncooperativeText in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry (University Park, 1993)).

stone wall or wealstan that figures at the meditative centre of the poem and islater echoed in the wall at the bosom or centre of the hot water of the baths, iscontinually personified as a witness to the mutability of time through verbs likegebidan (to endure, experience, or live) and wunian (to dwell, subsist, or occupy),yet the way in which this wall dwells is not purely of the past. Verb tenses whichwithin the first sentence alternate between past and present tenses interpolate thepastness of the past into the present of the narrative. In the first line we areintroduced into the milieu of a moment that bridges several times: ‘Wrætlic isþes wealstan; wyrde gebræcon’ (Wondrous is this wallstone, fates captured it).14

The first line’s use of the demonstrative pronoun þes combined with the presenttense is, followed by a preterite gebræcon — which can also mean shattered,injured, subdued, or tamed — evokes a physical and temporal immediacy thatbelabours the past throughout the text. The past is constantly interpolated intothe present as a coupling that ultimately cannot be disengaged. The patterningof present and preterite tenses within phrases (noted by critics such as Rodriguesand Calder), followed in line three and elsewhere, does not merely signal whatsome critics see as a linearity of temporal events (moving from past to present).15


Howe, ‘The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England’, p. 97.16

In her astute study of the natural world as it is represented in Anglo-Saxon poetry,17

Jennifer Neville highlights the interrelation between the natural world and humans. She arguesthat the general sense of ‘nature’ is not independent from human constructedness. She notes,‘Although “the natural world” in Old English poetry does contain elements that are includedin a modern definition of the natural world — winds, seas and animals, for example — it isnot a category in contrast with the supernatural. It is not really a self-sufficient, externallydefined entity at all. It is instead a reflection of human constructions’ (Neville, Representationsof the Natural World, p. 16). Neville highlights the crucial difference in Anglo-Saxon andmodern sensibilities towards nature, and emphasizes its nonmimetic and nonmoralcharacterization in texts.

It mirrors and even performs a work of mourning, marking the present of thepast, as presence of past. As Nicholas Howe notes, ‘enough remains for us toknow that its use of setting is meant to distance the universal of the elsewhere bydepicting the sheer fact of what endures in the here and now […]. The ruinedbuilding’s “movement beyond movement” becomes the Old English poem’s“time behind time” in the landscape’. 16

The question of remaining is thus posed through the multiple tenses: thequestion of what remains in time, what remains of life, and of the subjects whoonce inhabited this space. It is important to remember the significance of17

mourning in Anglo-Saxon England, in texts like Beowulf that stress the necessityof mourning even the most coveted objects and beloved of people. Lack of greed,generosity in giving, courage in facing death, and the desire for praise werequalities to be celebrated in life and death. The works of giants (enta geweorc) —which, in Beowulf, are swords, and in The Ruin (and The Wanderer), are edifices(l. 2) — are signs of a material history that must be absorbed back from theimagined time from which they came, as charmed material for the generationsto come. One does not hold fast onto material objects; one lets them escapeone’s grasp and allows them to pass on to others, just as this wall may beabsorbed and passed down by the narrative. Interpretations of this poem whichdesire to attribute a uniquely Christian meaning to this theme of transitoriness(and to ignore the Germanic overtones) therefore read the poem’s temporalityaccordingly — objects and people perish, life is transitory, and all ends badly onearth. Yet this kind of reading (which presupposes a teleology as well as atheology) fails to hear the strangely uplifting tone that persists throughout thepoem and dominates the second half. The tone literally revives the past into acelebratory moment of praise. This praise falls in line with the spirit of lof, which

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The conflict between lof and wyrd is a common theme in Anglo-Saxon literature and is18

a site for the intertwining of Christian and non-Christian motifs in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. On the one hand, ‘The Germanic warrior was a member of a comitatus, awarrior-band. Life was a struggle against insuperable odds, against the inevitable doom decreedby a meaningless fate — Wyrd, which originally meant “what happens”. There is no evidencein their literature that the pagan Anglo-Saxons believed in a life after death like that ofValhalla.[…] It is, however, a different kind of immortality which is stressed in their literature[…] lof, which was won by bravery in battle and consisted of glory among men, the praise ofthose still living.[…] This is the spirit which inspired the code of the comitatus’ (Mitchell andRobinson, A Guide to Old English, pp. 135–136). While the use of wyrd in the poem does notshow any overt Christian references, it may also be a comingling or hybridization of both.Leslie notes, in line 24, the expression wyrd seo swiþe occurs in Solomon and Saturn where ‘itis a deliberate pre-Christian use’ (Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, p. 72, n. 24). I would sidewith Neville, who argues against a formalized incorporation of Christian ideology into paganattitudes, ‘One could […] expect there to be a gradual incorporation of Christian ideology intooriginally pagan forms of expression (oral-formulaic, heroic poetry, for example).[…]Unfortunately, no trace of any progression can be found. The Anglo-Saxons appear not to havebeen concerned to develop a consistent cosmological scheme or approach to the “naturalworld”, and they used isolated elements from all of their sources without any apparentawareness of inconsistency’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 17).

Rodrigues, ‘Some Modern English Verse Renderings’, p. 6.19

as we know, often battles with wyrd (or fate), as does the wall. The first line sets18

the staging for a drama between lof and wyrd:

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon

(Wondrous is this wallstone, wasted by fate)

If we read gebræcon with a bit of irony, not only reflecting the way wyrd workson a wall, but reflecting a struggle and meaning injured, captured, subdued, ortamed (as the Old English suggests) — then the personified conflict between lofand wyrd becomes traceable throughout the poem in the upwards inclinationsof words that are highlighted in the landscape like the hrofas (roofs), torras(towers), scurbeorge (buildings which protect from storms), heah horngestreon(high gables), hrostbeages (ceiling vaults), and the steap geap [wag] (high, loftywall). Rodrigues even notes that the upward buildings comprising the landscapeare all artefacts that share the height of man’s aspiration as their chief trait To19

counter these upwards inclinations are the downwards motions of destructionhighlighted by the repetitive rhyming past participles scorene, gedrorene, forweorone,geleorene, undereotone (respectively meaning cut or gashed; weakened orcollapsed; decayed; departed or passed away; and undereaten or undermined).


In tackling the odd tense of gewitan here, Bruce Mitchell supports this view, since ‘the20

indicative was always good enough to express the idea of futurity present in oþ (þæt)clauses.[…] For what is wrong with the hitherto-accepted view that gewitan is a preteriteindicative used as a perfect tense, as often happens in the absence of a regular perfect in OldEnglish, e.g. Deor 39–40?’ (Bruce Mitchell, ‘Some Problems of Mood and Tense in OldEnglish’, Neophilologus, 49 (1965), 44–45).

The repetition of time’s destructive actions becomes transformed into therepetitive temporality of sound. While the earth’s grasp may irreparably clutchthe city, the poem’s grasp of the matter counters and transforms therepetitiveness of fate’s corrosive actions into the work of poetry. It is the livingcity that predominates in the second half of the poem, literally giving the workof wyrd little room for celebration and generating an other time that is notsuccessive, but performative, since it manifests the present time of the poem’spraise. While fate is continually operating on the city and the grasp of the earth,refashioning the material of stone and flesh, the poem is continually operatingon fate’s grasp and on its consuming of this material, refashioning the materialof time and of matter through the bonds of language. A circularity and cyclicaltemporality — that could even be described as a recycling — is discernable in thepoem. This is present in images such as the circularity of walls, the circular pool(the hringmere), the reference to the enta geweorc (the work of giants that istransmitted from one generation to the next), and in the strange tense of ‘oþhund cnea werþeoda gewitan’ (ll. 8–9). This phrase is not restricted to meaning‘while a hundred generations of (people or nations) have passed away’, but,because in this instance gewitan taken as a preterite indicative may — given theoþ (þæt) clause — also serve to indicate the implied futurity of a perfect tense, itmore correctly means ‘until a hundred generations [shall] have passed away’.20

The narrative’s unearthing of the past and dwelling in history therefore doesnot only signal a lost past and the parcelling out of the body of the city, it alsomarks the promise of their present unity in the poem’s ability to provide a newfashioning of the sense of history.

IV. Underlying Space: The Westen

The poem The Ruin attributes a sense of purpose to what no longer bears thespecificity of place, but hovers on the vacuousness of space embodied by thewesten (the wasteland, desert, wilderness). In line 27 we read: ‘wurdon hyrawigsteal westen staþolas’, meaning ‘the martial halls became waste places’. The

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Mitchell and Robinson use the westen as a locus for a uniquely Christian reading of the21

poem, suggesting that wigsteal mean ‘sanctuaries’ or ‘place of idols’. They trace it to Amos 6.9 (‘and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste’) (Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to OldEnglish, p. 239, n. 27). R. F. Leslie, however, notes that the compound wig (war) and steal(place) is used twice in other Anglo-Saxon texts and that the use of wig in all the many othercompounds in Old English are used in the context of war (Leslie, Three Old English Elegies, p.73, n. 27). Neville’s reading of the westen in Genesis would, however, nuance this considerably.She argues, ‘An originally idel ond unnyt [empty and useless] natural world can becomevaluable only by divine or human effort; it is meaningless, even horrible, without reference toor contact with humanity. Thus the land or a horse is valuable because it can be cultivated oradorned, and receives full attention from a poet only once it has been so transformed once theempty weste “wasteland” (Genesis 110a) has been transformed into Paradise (Genesis 206–34),and once the horse has been decorated with gold and exalted with an ornamented saddle(Beowulf 1035–41a)’ (Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 30). In this sense, theempty space of the westen prefigures divine or human intervention.

westen signals a becoming-uninhabitable of the inhabitable, it introduces anindifference, like that of wyrd, to a space for the living, and marks anencroaching emptiness that seems, however, to have already penetrated the wall.21

Despite its seeming vacuousness, like wyrd, the westen is not excluded from thequestion of dwelling. To the contrary, the westen borders questions of dwellingand solitude in many Anglo-Saxon texts (for example in Alfred’s Orosius, the OldEnglish Daniel, Genesis, Exodus, Mary of Egypt, and Beowulf, to name a few), andis incorporated into the way an inhabited place is defined. While it may seem tobe outside the confines of civilization, like wyrd, the westen is a limit that definesan inside and prefigures the space of what is thought of as being within. Itimplies a time before time, or behind time, to use Howe’s words, in itsimplications of a prehistory that conditions the constitution of the living. In latermedieval women’s mystical literature, the westen figures precisely at thisthreshold; it embodies a liminal space that is both outside and inside the mystic.Even in Anglo-Saxon texts in which Christian and pre-Christian overtones arenot so easily distinguishable from one another and function in syncreticcohabitation, the penetrating quality of the westen makes for the possibility ofreligious conversion in the background of a text, providing the means to evokea Christian hermeneutic by impregnating the background with a biblicalheritage. In traditional Christian texts, the desert (wilderness or wasteland) is astrange and destabilizing space, allowing for temptation, crises of faith, andisolation without the bonds of a community. It is a space that is not inhabitable,and does not allow one to dwell, but for the mystics, the desert becomes themost poignant figure for how one dwells in God or in Minne. The figural desert


In Ælfric’s Grammar, we find: ‘solus, sola, solum ana and heora ealra solius anes; soli22

anum’ or ‘Her synd ða naman: quis hwa, unus an, ullus ænig, nullus nan, solus ana, totus eall’(p. 112, l. 5). In the Lindisfarne Gospels, me solum is translated as me ane (16. 32), and in theRushworth Gospels Mark 8. 15 translates ipusum solum as him anum, and so on. Generally,when solum refers to the adverb or adjective ‘alone’ (as opposed to non solum, i.e., not only),the Old English ana is used, even tu es deus solus is translated as þu eart god ana in theBosworth Psalter (85. 10).

The majority of Old English Psalters translate Psalm 101, line 7, Similis factus sum23

pellicano solitudinis, ‘I am become like to a pelican in the desert’, as ‘Gelic geworden ic eomþam fugele westene’ or ‘Gelic geworden ic eom stangillan westenne’. Aldhelm’s De laudevirginitatis translates solitudinis in a more literal manner, that is as ænettes, and secretae solitudinisas digles ænetes, secret solitude. But Psalm 54. 8, mansi in solitudine is translated as ic wunode onwestene in Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter, the Arundel and Tiberius Psalters. Likewise, Psalm106. 4, Erraverunt in solitudine is often translated as Hi dweledon on westenne, and Mark 8. 4’sin solitudine is often translated as on westene. Ælfric’s glossary notes that either desertum orheremus can be glossed as westen, which also conforms with the usage of westen to signify desert(cf. Mary of Egypt, Exodus).

borders the relation of thought to the space of otherness in the poems ofHadewijch II, and of the body to God in the work of Marguerite Porete, as Ishall show in a moment.

In the mystical texts, The Ruin, and Anglo-Saxon texts that explicitly takeChristian themes or images as their subject, the westen marks a space of solitude,marking an exterior that becomes one of the most intimate of interior spacesof subjectivity. In examining translations of the Latin solus into Old English,it is usually translated by ana. The Latin noun solitudo, or solitudinis, is oncetranslated as anisse in the Canticles of the Arundel and Stowe Psalters (7. 10), yetthe translation immediately slips beyond the sylf to a landscape. One only needs22

to look at a word wheel search of the Old English Corpus to see that the OldEnglish Psalters translate solitudinis into westen (meaning wilderness or desert)in the majority of Old English texts. In a similar vein, if we turn to the word23

anad, which stems from an, ‘a single one’, we see the slippage of aloneness intothe hues of a landscape, for anad signifies waste, desert, and solitude, like theGerman einöde. It is perhaps less surprising that Old English translations ofdeserto are also westen. John the Baptist’s ‘Vox clamantis in deserto’ (Mark 1. 3–6)is understandably translated most often as ‘Clypiende stemn on westene’; however,the landscape of the desert changes in a way that is quite unpredictable in oneparticular translation of the Vulgate. In Ælfric’s ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’we note a change: Ælfric’s text transforms the deserto into wudu (woods): ‘he on

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Ælfric, ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’, in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series24

Text, ed. by Malcolm Godden, EETS, s.s. 5 (London, 1979), p. 18. Corinne J. Saunders, Notes and Queries, 39 (1992), 19.25

Even if a historical continuity is desired, and a historicity evoked, it does not always26

dominate, nor does it bear the same sense of chronological time. See, for example ErichAuerbach’s well-known essay ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans.by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1959), pp. 11–76.

wuda findan mihte’. The desert need not be a sandy dry space, but simply a24

wild, uncivilized place, apart from civilization. (The words desert and wildernessare inseparable in their Hebrew counterparts, but the Hebrew was certainly notfamiliar to Ælfric.) Rather than search for pragmatic reasons for this translation,looking into Ælfric’s travels as does Saunders, we may understand this slippagethough the way in which even the most outcast of landscapes hosts a degree offamiliarity in Anglo-Saxon texts (however hostile, fearful, or threatening thatlandscape may be). The landscape in the ‘Sermo in Aepiphania Domini’ is25

rendered familiar by the use of the word wudu, for woods were part of atopography that Ælfric undoubtedly knew and was familiar to his readers. Thewudu of Anglo-Saxon England is a landscape that may host solitude as does thebiblical desert, but can also be used to mark the inscription into biblical history(as the history of Anglo-Saxon England).26

Wudu is used in Beowulf to describe the transitional territory associated withsolitude and death (and thus bears a relation to wyrd). It is the space betweenGrendel’s mere and the mead-house, a space that bears witness to the death ofthe Danes, making it a joyless wood, a wynleasne wudu (l. 1416), and to the deathof the body, as the funeral pyre is a baelwudu. The woods are also referred to asholtwudu, meaning thickets or groves of woods (ll. 1366, 2337), and a ship (asolitary vessel made of wood) is referred to as a sæwudu. But the word westen isalso used in Beowulf twice; while only found twice here, the westen figures as aprivileged background against which the whole story of Beowulf takes place. Itis the space and time of Grendel’s origination and of the monsters thatdescended from Cain. Once again, biblical history filters into the history of theDanes, through the mythic space of the landscape. We read,

Grendles modor,ides, aglæcwif yrmþe gemunde,se þe wæteregesan wunian scolde, cealde streamas, siþðan Cain wearðto ecgbanan angan breþer,


Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. by Friedrich Klaeber, 3rd edn (Boston, 1950).27

The parallels between Beowulf, the character, and the monsters or dragons have been28

noted by many scholars. In addition to the parallels generated by the language of the text, theirshared solitary status as last survivors, their marginal relation to the Danes, their heroic courage,and their unfailing adherence to a Germanic code of kinship begs for an identification ofsimilarity over difference. In this uncanny rapprochement of seeming opposites, the inhumanor monstrous aspect of the human, and the human aspect of the monstrous, come to the fore.

fæderenmæge; he þa fag gewat,morþre gemearcod mandream fleon,westen warode. Þanon woc felageosceaftgasta; was þæra Grendel sum.

(ll. 1258–66)27

(Grendel’s mother, a [super human] woman, monster-wife, kept war grief in mind, shewho in terrible waters had to dwell, cold streams, since Cain became sword-slayer,against his brother, his father’s son; he departed, stained in outlawry, gore marked bymurder, he fled man’s joys, lived in wastelands. Out of that woke many spirits fromold. Grendel was one.)

The westen is a space cast out of civilization and its laws, it is a space that guardsthe memory of a time that makes monsters (‘Out of that woke many spirits fromold’), in turn providing the material for the story of Beowulf itself. The secondpassage in which westen is used reflects the dragon’s solitude. The draca looksoutside the mound to find ‘ne ðær ænig mon | on þære westenne’ (ll. 2298–99;not a single man in that wilderness). Because the westen is associated with ablank, empty, vacuous space, its vacuousness allows for it to host the historicityof the landscape, the making of a desired historicity itself. The westen hosts theoriginary time through which the story finds its measure, yet it does notnecessarily give it its futural force. The past represented by this space is notentirely lost or insignificant; rather, it allows for a backdrop against which apresent may define itself. In this sense, the westen is a living past, it is whatremains of the past in the present, like a living referent. Once again, the marginaloutside hosts an intimate originary space at the heart of the question of dwelling.The westen is therefore not only the watery mere, or the cealde streamas intowhich Beowulf descends, it is a liminal space marked by solitude, lawlessness,and separation that borders on the monstrous. It is constitutive of the sense ofwhat we could call an individual, or a solitary being, most notably Beowulfhimself. The westen is both inside and outside. As an exterior that returns as the28

most interior of spaces, it marks limits in space and limits within a subject. Thewesten marks the space of a hiatus at the heart of the subject, and like the space

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While Roman ruins were undoubtedly familiar to Anglo-Saxons and often reused for29

Anglo-Saxon purposes, what interests me is that they preserve a trace of an unknown origin,a strangeness that is not completely effaced (like the strangeness of giants) and is used for otherends.

Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive’, Theory and the Premodern Text30

(Minneapolis, 2000), 95.

of the poem, it interrupts what one may think of as everyday time and space, forit suspends the time of realities and the space associated with it, allowing for atransitional space, through which Beowulf may pass.

To return to The Ruin, the blank space of the ruin, its loss of specificity ofplace (loss of purposiveness and utility), and its becoming-space like that of thewesten, allow for it to become a reflective surface which is not anchored, properlyspeaking, in the immediacy of a living town nor in the immediacy of self-reflection. Whether or not mirrors ever existed in Anglo-Saxon England, thisdoes not mean that there are no surfaces that offer other forms of reflection inwhich something other than the self may be reflected. In The Ruin, it is preciselythis mirroring that is at work. It generates another time into which thestrangeness of Roman ruins is incorporated. The specificity of place (and29

whether this particular ruin be Bath or not, as many scholars would insist) isprecisely what this poem mourns (and what we as contemporary readers fail tomourn in the passion for historical time). In other words, the distance andestrangement which this embodiment of the past offers, its illegibility as ruin orriddle to the immediacy of perception, and its exposure as a surface forinscription, allow for the promise of unity in the time of the text. By thinkingof the ruin no longer as a stable reality — like Bath — but as the figure oftemporal loss and erosion, the reality lost in the everyday world of unreflectivesurfaces is recovered. The city manifests itself as bound together by ties that areas stable (or unstable) as those of poetry.

The Ruin offers itself as an allegory for the relatedness of poem to its ownpresent and to its own interpretive act, drawing upon fragmented pastsreassembled for other ends. As Paul Strohm argues, ‘literary works’ purchase ontheir moment must also be read as inherently unstable.’ And if ‘Allegories are30

in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things’, as WalterBenjamin writes, then this poem could be read as an allegory about reading,about the mind that witnesses and bears witness, and about what, as I shall show,dwells as ghedachte (as thought) in Hadewijch’s text. To purely allegorize TheRuin and to wrestle it from its historical time and place, or to read it apart from


William C. Johnson, Jr, ‘The Ruin as Body-City Riddle’, Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980),31

397–411. While most readings of this poem do not stress the elements of personification atwork, the ones that do quickly subsume any particular instance to the theme of abstractdestruction and transitoriness on earth in the hope of religious redemption.

the materiality which it points to (as critics do) would also be misleading. Eventhough a poem may arrest historical time in order to refigure and suspend it, thisdoes not allow a reading to sever the poem from its historical context, from itsliterary and cultural traditions, or from the context of its language. One mustunderstand the particularity of a context in order to understand how the poemmakes use of it. While the poem speaks of its time, that is, while it is a productof its historical conditioning and speaks of its history, it is able to free itself fromthis temporal anchoring only because of an economy that works both ways.Whether or not a poem is dated, a poem is anchored in its time, but outside ofit, part of a temporality that conditions its production, and host to another timethat it generates.

V. The Ruins of Embodiment

In my reading of The Ruin, I have stressed the personification of the wall, thedesert, and the city in relation to these historical forces at work in the poem andto the question of dwelling in time, yet the force of personification could be eventaken further. As William Johnson, Jr, cleverly notes in his article ‘The Ruin asBody-City Riddle’, like the Riddles of the Exeter Book (in which The Ruin isfound), the poem’s language permits wordplay between body parts andbuildings, coming together in the final lines in the description of the hot bath.31

In the final part, the wall, which encloses the wellspring, is spoken of as a bosme(bosom) that encloses the hot-water source as would a living body its lifeblood.While I do not mean to simply fuse the body-city analogy together in acemented fashion, I would note that this wall borders the question of the subjectand of dwelling precisely at the point where inside-outside distinctions, andcontact between an interior and exterior seem to break down. As a boundarybetween inside and outside, the wall forces the question to be posed of whatremains and what perishes, what of the body (like the lichama) continues todwell once the flesh has gone, and what of the ruin remains in the poem, oncethe ruin and its inhabitants are gone. The Ruin alludes to this question as itspredicament, leading the reader to participate in the ruin’s survival in meditating

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Riddle 26, Exeter Book, ll. 13–14.32

Neville, Representations of the Natural World, p. 114.33

For an analysis of the significance of binding, linking, and interlacing, especially with regard34

to the word bindan, see Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale, IL,1990). While it is not entirely clear to me how the walls themselves are reinforced through thelinkage of wire or chain, the connotation is that of human artifice or craft working defensively orcreatively against destructive forces.

its praise (lof ) in the language of the poem. The language in lines 19 and 20describes the binding of rings around the structure of the wall and those whoforged the wallstones together by encircling them with wire: ‘hwætred in hringas,hygerof gebond | weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre’ (firm in links, masonsmarvellously bound | the edges of the wall together with wire). While difficultto conceptualize , the image of wrapping wire is nevertheless suggestive on manylevels. In Riddle 26 of the Exeter Book, the wrapping of wires connotes atransformative force that turns an untamed element of nature (a hide) into aGospel book (endowing it with various afterlives). The speaker of the riddleexplains that someone ‘gierede mec mid golde; forþon me gliwedon | wrætlicweorc smiþa, wire bifongen’ (covered me with gold; thus the wondrous work32

of the smith adorned me, wound with wire). Again, in Riddle 26, Neville notes,‘The reed pen […] though not a treasure like the Gospel book, is transformedfrom a lonely inhabitant of a wasteland (anæd) by the sea into somethingmarvellous though human ingenuity and force.’ The act of wrapping or binding33

between bespeak human energies that engage in countering a destructive force.In Old English the body is often referred to as a composite of lichama (likelichame in Middle Dutch) and as flæsc, the latter referring to the outer materialitythat erodes in time. For example, in Beowulf the word flæsc is used in way whichconnotes a kind of objective outer material (the materiality of bodily matter),wrapped around life, in the phrase that uses the same verb bindan (to wrap,bind) in ‘no þon lange wæs | feorh æþelinges flæsce bewunden’ (l. 2423–24; Notmuch longer would [Beowulf’s] life be wrapped in his flesh). The flæsce iswrapped around the body of Beowulf, like the wires around the wall. In Anglo-34

Saxon poetry, it is also common for poetic language to be referred to as a bindingof words together, with the thought the poetry will survive death there where theflesh will not. The boundedness of the walls, that is, the forged ties betweenspaces and people may survive in the space of the poem. The masons who areimagined to have forged the chain wire around the stone walls are also forgingties against a meaningless fate. Given the widespread use of the word bindan


Bernard McGinn’s noteworthy work The Growth of Mysticism, Gregory the Great through35

the 12th Century (New York, 1999), sadly does not even nod to themes of mysticism (inmonastic contexts or other) in Anglo-Saxon England despite his acknowledgement thatmysticism is ‘best seen not as a discrete entity, a special kind of religion, but as a part orelement within broader concrete religious traditions’ (p. 119). Aelred of Rievaulx and Gregorythe Great do receive significant attention. McGinn’s astute article “Ocean and Desert asSymbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition” makes the connection betweendesert and ocean explicit, moving from the desert fathers, to Eurigena, then jumping to theCistercians and the later mystical tradition. Again, Anglo-Saxons are not present in terms oftheir use of related images and themes (Journal of Religion, 74 (1994), 155–81).

See, for example Clare Lees, ‘Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian36

Ideology in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 17–45.

to refer to the way poets join words together in Anglo-Saxon texts, in thistransference of the space of the city to the spacing of words in the poem, thepoem becomes the resting place or destination of the ruin. Like the wires thatremain, the forged links of the poem bear witness to the space that remains andto the life that remains of the past. The life that remains becomes hosted in thefigural body of the poem.

VI. The Remains of the Body in Hadewijch II’s Poetry

One of the most intimate of landscapes at the heart of the question of the self inmystical and spiritual texts is that of the wilderness or desert, in the Bible andearly Church Fathers (Augustine’s interior eremus, for example) to Eckhart andTauler (‘So inward it is, so infinitely remote, and so untouched by time andspace’) and onwards. While Anglo-Saxon uses of the figure of desert are usuallyignored in accounts of the ‘growth’ of Western mysticism, the westen figures inthe Anglo-Saxon topographies of spiritual battles (a kind of psychomachia inGuthlac), that can harbour negative connotations (the dwelling place of enemies,the devil, and evil spirits), as well as positive ones (detachment and solitude).35

Similar themes of spiritual endurance and the testing of faith in the domain ofstrange, foreign, or hostile territory are also present in Anglo-Saxon visionarytexts, for example in the Dream of the Rood or in the Visio Pauli. The test ofspiritual marriage or union may also be staged in the foreignness of the genderedbody (as in Ælfric’s lives of Agatha, Agnes, and Lucy). Each one of these texts36

clearly shares in what one could call a mystical element or theme without beinga mystical text per se. The exposure to negative external forces and the cultivating

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The relation between Hadewijch and Hadewijch II is subject of a longstanding debate and37

revolves around the poems in couplets, that is, the Mengeldichten. The dividing line betweenHadewijch I and II is made between poems 1–16 and poems 17–29. The first are ascribed toHadewijch I, and the second are ascribed to a poet who is similar to Hadewijch, but who,according to some, uses a far more ‘abstract’ and ‘Platonic’ language as well as ‘perhaps a moresophisticated understanding of mystical union’, according to Paul Dietrich; see Dietrich’s ‘TheWilderness of God in Hadewijch II and Meister Eckhart’, in Meister Eckhart and the BeguineMystics, ed. by Bernard McGinn (New York, 1994), pp. 32–36. Mary Suydam has argued for acommon identity for the authors of these poems, based on recurring language and motifs. MarySuydam, ‘Hadewijch of Antwerp and the Mengeldichten’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universityof California, Santa Barbara, 1993). However, Saskia Murk Jansen has argued for yet anotherdivide between poems 17–24 and 25–29. Jansen, The Measure of Mystic Thought: A Study ofHadewijch’s Mengeldichten (Göppingen, 1991). While the Mengeldichten of Hadewijch II areclearly different from the earlier ones, emphasizing ghedachte (thought) in a way that Hadewijch’spoetic work only suggests, and are more economic in expression and in length, the similaritiesin language, theme, and expression are such that it is impossible to make a definitive distinction.The complexity of mystical union is by no means a reason for separating the two Hadewijchs.Because each of Hadewijch’s forms of writing corresponds to a response to different custom,translating Minne according to each genre — visions to dream-visions, emphasizing experience;letters to epistolary practices, emphasizing didactic modes of acting; and the poems in stanzas tocourtly love poetry, emphasizing the play and modes of Minne — one could argue that thesecond half of the Mengeldicten responds to different formal constraints. Since so little is knownabout Hadewijch’s life, these could be poems that were written at a different moment from herfirst poems; or they could indeed be written by another hand, that is, by another author, whoseworks were simply copied with those of Hadewijch I.

In Hadewijch’s Mengeldichten, we find the expressions ‘Jn dat eweghe wide’ in line 13,38

and ‘Jn stille wijt’ in line 106 of poem 17; ‘Daer te sine wustinen Jnden aert’ in lines 92–93 ofpoem 19. Poem 21 is a meditation on this spatialization in the experience of Minne, usingexpressions such as ‘Widere dan wijt’ (l. 21), ‘Jn dat wide wij’ (l. 36), ‘want in dat wide’ (l. 37),

and eventual embodying of internal virtues is closely intertwined. For many ofthese Anglo-Saxon texts, the desert (or domain of the foreign) is the site of anexternal force against which man must struggle, yet for mystical texts the desertis a positive locus of mystery and divinity. The desert figures discretely in theworks of Hadewijch II in a way that does not harbour negative overtones.37

While the word desert (in Middle Dutch woest, wuestine, wild, wide wild) appearsinfrequently, it occupies a privileged place that may be described as being bothinside and outside the subject. It is a place that is not a place; it is a figure thatcannot be reduced to its figural (that is, purely rhetorical) dimension. ForHadewijch, rather than denoting a place, the desert denotes a space, or abecoming spatial of ghedachte (thought) in the experience of Minne. The term38


and the unusual ‘Jc ben so wijt’ (l. 15). Poem 26 uses the expression ‘Jn dese weelde wide’ (l. 25).See Hadewijch, Mengeldichten, ed. by Joseph Van Mierlo, Jr (Brussels, 1912).

Given the influence of St. Benedict on women’s spirituality of the low countries, this39

could be a further extension of his expansion of the heart: ‘Processu vero conversationis et fidei,dilatato corde inerrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei’ (But makingprogress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run along the path of God’s commandments,our hearts expanded [dilatato] by an indescribable sweetness of love); St Benedict, The Rule ofSt. Benedict in Latin and English, ed. Timothy Fry and others (Collegeville, MN, 1980),164–66. In Old English, the heart, not the head, was most often the locus of thought andwisdom. St Benedict occupied an important role in Anglo-Saxon England. The life of StBenedict was quoted and imitated in the lives of Guthlac and Cuthbert. One of the earliestmanuscripts of the Dialogues, copied in the seventh century, is of Anglo-Saxon provenance.The ninth-century Old English Martyrology pays tribute to Benedict via Gregory’s Dialogues,and his rule was often copied and translated in the tenth century.

Stanzaic poem 31. Hadewijch, Complete Works, p. 216, ll. 1–4.40

In Old English, ‘thought’ as ge-þoht is linked to a coming into appearance, a coming into41

being as appearing, not phenomenally, but to one’s ‘self’, that is, to what one would call ‘themind’s eye’. Barney’s Word Hoard notes, ‘The notion “to think” develops from a notion of “tocause to appear (to oneself )”, presumably implying an idea of imagining or fancy, that is, makingimages or phantasms appear before the mind’s eye. The verb þyncan was lost when thesimilarly pronounced Middle English reflex. of þencan approached too close in meaning, as “itseems to me” = “I think”’ (Stephen Barney, Word Hoard: An Introduction to Old EnglishVocabulary (New Haven, 1985), p. 23). For a discussion on the notion of mind and its relationto faculties and the body, see the classic essay by Malcolm. R. Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on theMind’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Present to Peter Clemoes, ed. byMichael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 271–98.

wijt (wide, expansive, capacious, and by extension all-encompassing) is alsoused in her texts to signal this becoming spatial of ghedachte. In the twenty-firstMengeldichten, is even taken to the hyperbolic extreme of consuming itssubject in the formulation ‘Jc ben so wijt’ (I am so wide). Hadewijch I, the first39

Hadewijch, Brabant mystic of the thirteenth century, uses this expression in herStrofische Gedichten, showing how Minne, when infused with her, acts on hernature: ‘Om grote minne in hoghe ghedachte | Willic wesen al minen tijt | Wantsi mi met harer groter crachte | Mine natuere is so wijt’ (‘I want to spend all mytime | In high thought on great Minne, | For she, with her great power | Makesmy nature so wide’). Ghedachte has a wide range of meanings: it is thought,40

mind, intelligence, reflection, psyche, perhaps, or soul. The word ghedachte, likethe modern Dutch ghedachte and the German denken, as well as the Old Englishgeþoht, is linked to thinking, or what we would identify as being an act of acogito. Given the etymological link between Minne and the Latin mens (what41

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Ghedachte prefigures the ‘I’, for like Augustine’s mens (soul, mind), it prefigures the42

historical time in which it finds itself and seems to find its source in the atemporal time (theeternal heavenliness) of God.

Augustine in De trinitate translates as mind or soul), this effect of Minne onghedachte does not seem out of place. In what could be called a meditatio onMinne, Hadewijch’s ‘high thought’ (hoghe ghedachte) on Minne causes her thought(or mind) to be expanded. Despite this inner effect, ghedachte is not immediatelylinked to an ic in Hadewijch’s text, as was the case with her lichame. Thisbecoming-spatial of ghedachte in Hadewijch’s text is linked to a di, a ‘you’ — a‘you’ who is not named. It is not a particular ‘you’, but a ‘you’ who precedes the‘I’ and whom the ‘I’ experiences as an event. Similar to the way the desertprefigures space, ghedachte prefigures the ‘I’, for it prefigures the space in whichthe ‘I’ will sense and represent itself, as though it were closer to its unknownorigin. In Hadewijch’s poetry this event is an event of Minne. In an apostrophe42

in the twenty-fourth Mengeldichten, we read:

Ic hebbe di gheproeuetDat mi gheuoeghetJn die heymelicjchheitDiere ghedachten.

(Mengeldichten 24, ll. 1–4)

(I have endured [experienced, tasted, or proven] you | There where it is my custom [ordwelling] | In the heavenliness | Of thought.)

The unnamed di is clearly not the same addressee as that of Hadewijch I’sletters, but rather is closer to being an apostrophe to Minne herself, despite thefact that Minne has no clearly distinguishable face nor does she meld into apersonified addressee. Ghedachte is exposed as a kind of experience ofinhabitation, dwelling, or hospitality of this di. It expresses the way in whichthought is inhabited by the alterity of Minne, how it hosts or is hostage tootherness (as divine otherness), how it seeks or is possessed by somethingother to itself. The desert becomes the most poignant figure for this mannerof dwelling, for one does not dwell, properly speaking, in alterity, just as onedoes not dwell in a desert. The desert is, above all, inhospitable; one onlytraverses it, one passes through it, or works through it (in the Freudian senseof Durcharbeitung). One is in transit in the desert, and as a result of thistransitional quality, one is also traversed, tested, altered, and sometimes purified


When Meister Eckhart, Dominican preacher, was a lecturer at the Université de Paris at the43

beginning of the fourteenth century, he was called upon to pronounce judgement on the work

by it. But this contingency on the inhospitable in hospitality is precisely whatis put to the test. It is what makes an event.

Ghi sijt salc ende goedertieren;Saecht alse een lam, ende onghehiereAlse onghetemde welde diereJn die woustine, sonder maniere.

(Mengeldichten 28, ll. 21–24)

(You are malicious and full of clemency, | Sweet as a lamb, and without pity | Like awild and untamed animal | In the desert, without a way.)

The untamed, inhospitable, wild, and duplicitous quality of Minne is coupledwith a paradoxical ‘softness’ and ‘grace’. These contradictions are constitutive ofthe desert’s double nature. One must learn how to read or discern the signs ofMinne in order to persevere. The duplicity of appearances is to be taken as justthat: semblance and appearances are all that the desert offers. There is noexternal referent or reality on which one may rely. Discerning is essential in thedesert, even for the most discriminate of readers (including Christ), hence thedanger of temptation. The desert is, in this way, a stage for thought’s coming-to-be, the provocation that Minne elicits as the movement of thinking. Thinkingfinds its trait in a secret which inhabits representation and which it is called uponto discern. As we noted in The Ruin, the desert is a liminal space that is bothinside and outside and secretly haunts the space of representation. If Minne’sinhabitation of ghedachte also signals its becoming spatial, and if the desert is aspace for a discerning reading, then the space of the poem could also be said tobe like that of the desert. Thought (or mind) dwells in the space of desert, as itwould in the space of a poem, meaning, in an elusive, transitory, and liminalway. Hadewijch’s poem thus highlights a form of how something not properlysubjective transitionally dwells, there where it is inhabited by something otherto itself. Since Ghedachte precedes the ‘I’, the space or spacing that is effectuatedby it precedes the ‘I’ and allows it to come to be.

VII. Porete’s Desert

In Marguerite Porete’s Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties, the desert is also thespace of the body. It is the ‘wretched body in which I dwell’, the body belaboured43

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of Marguerite Porete. The book in question, entitled Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties, wascondemned in 1305 by the Bishop of Cambrai and Parisian clergy, and its pages burnt on the placede Valenciennes, for the reason that it celebrated the ‘freedom’ of the soul in a way which wasmuch too close to the sects of the libres esprits. Porete, from Hainaut (now Belgium), did notbelong to a religious order, for she was a Beguine. In 1310, she was condemned as having relapsedinto heresy by the new tribunal of the Inquisition and was executed by fire, the first of June onthe Place de Grève in Paris. Porete’s book was translated and circulated widely throughout Europeup into the Renaissance but copies were afterwards lost from sight until 1946, when a Frenchmanuscript was found and recognized by Romana Guarnieri to be the work of Porete (and notthe work of Marguerite of Hungary). The definitive edition of Porete’s work is the bilingualedition: Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples âmes, ed. by Romana Guarnieri / MargaretePorete, Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. by Paul Verdeyen, Corpus Christianorum: ContiuoMediaevalis, 69 (Turnhout, 1986). For the modern English, unless I provide the translation, I referto Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls: Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. by EllenBabinsky (New York, 1993). Porete’s book is a discourse between personified qualities, such aslove, reason, the soul, the Church, and truth, on the seven stages of love, and the ascent of thesoul to its noble and simple state in God. While Porete is almost divesting the body of anyqualities proper to the soul (in opposition to the Council of Vienna’s decree for a theologicallyembodied form of the soul), the body is nevertheless invested with a trace of its annihilation inthe figure of the desert.

The Middle English translation reads ‘O Lord ye wole suffre more gladli and mekeli þan44

eny creature may seie it, notwiþstandinge my desertis þat ben wiþoute nombre and wiþouterecoueringe of þis losse, for mercy þat is in you, for it bihoeþ you to kepe youre riytwisnesse’;referred to in Le mirouer des simples âmes, p. 120, n. 38, ll. 5–8.

I have slightly modified the translation of Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 118. I do not45

read this as ‘I remain in what I deserve’ as does Babinsky, but as ‘while I remain in my desert’. Myreading is supported by Colledge, Marler, and Grant’s translation, who use ‘desert’, while notingthat ‘The readings in all three Latin manuscripts seem to be corrupt, deriving from an ancestorwhich took desert to mean ‘recompense’, not ‘wilderness’ (The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. anded. by Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant (Notre Dame, 1999), p. 57, n. 1.

by desire and exposed to alterity. In the soul’s discourse with Amour, the soulpleads, ‘Souffrir, sire? mais encore souffrir voulez vous plus voulentiers que nulne peut dire que je demoure en mon desert, c’est assavoir en ce meschant corpssans nombre de temps’ (‘To suffer, Lord? Indeed you will to suffer [me], more44

willingly than anyone could say, while I remain in my desert, that is, in thiswretched body, without limiting the time’). The desert is not to be understood45

as a place, nor as a site, but as a space that, in Porete’s work, also hosts theexemplary work of Mary Magdalene’s desire. In desiring God and giving her selfover to God, that is, in becoming selfless when God makes a work of Perfectionin Mary — this is where Mary is host to God’s work in her, without ‘her’:


I have slightly modified the translation of Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 205.46

The labour or work of the book is intertwined with the question of its addressee. The47

book is addressed to an ‘auditeur’, not to the personified reader, but to what in the reader isother to the proper name: ‘Entendez las glose, auditeurs de ce livre, car le grain y est, quil’espouse nourrist. C’est tant comme elle est en l’estre, dont Dieu la fait estre; la, ou elle adonné sa voulonté, et pource ne peut vouloi fors la voulenté de celluy qui l’a de luy pour elleen sa bonté muee. Et se elle est ainsi franche des tous costez, elle pert son nom, car elle monteen souveraineté. Et pource pert elle son nom en celluy, en quoy elle est de luy en luy fondueet remise de luy en luy pour elle mesmes. Ainsi comme feroit un eaue qui vient de la mer, quia aucun nom, comme l’en pourroit dire Aise, ou Sene, ou une aultre riviere’ (Le mirouer dessimples âmes, p. 234, ll. 32–42); ‘Grasp the gloss, hearers of this book, for the kernel is therewhich nourishes the bride. This is so long as she is in the Being by which God makes her tobe, there where she has given her will, and thus cannot will except the will of the One who hastransformed her of Himself for her sake into His goodness. And if she is thus unencumberedin all aspects, she loses her name, for she rises in sovereignty. And therefore she loses her namein the One in whom she is melted and dissolved through Himself and in Himself. Thus shewould be like a body which flows from the sea, which has no name, as one would be able tosay Aisne or lose their names and their courses when they join the sea’ (Mirror of Simple Souls,p. 158). The book asks the reader to lose his or her name in the seven stages of love, becominglike a river that joins the ocean, so that the soul will become sovereign and find its source inGod. The book, which figures as a house, is open to all readers, but only those who possess the

Or a Marie sa terre ahannee et semee; ly ahan est les fortes oeuvres de parfection et lasemence est la pure entencion. Ces deux oeuvres devons nous par nostre coulpe, maisplus avant ne se peut nostre ahan embatre, et pource convient il que Dieu face leseurplus […]. Et pource convint il que Dieu fit le surplus d’elle, sans elle, pour elle, enelle […]. Tel ouvrage fist il a Marie ou desert de Marie, quant Marie se repousa de luy,non mie quant Marie courut aprés luy d’elle, mais quant la divine bonté se repousa enMarie; et celle bonté repousa de luy Marie, sans Marie, pour Marie. (Porete, Le miroirdes simples âmes anéanties, p. 358, ll. 107–11; p. 360, ll. 113–14, ll. 120–04)

(Mary has tilled and sown her earth: the labour is the difficult works of perfection andthe sowing is the pure intention. These two works we must do because of our sin ofdeficiency, but our labour may not extend beyond this, for the rest is God’s work.[…]And thus it is necessary that God do the rest without her, for her, in her.[…] Suchworking he accomplished in Mary, in Mary’s desert, when Mary took her rest in him--not when she went searching for him, but when the divine goodness reposed in Mary;and this goodness reposes Mary from herself, without Mary, for Mary.)46

This act of rest, of being without the self and without the proper name does notmean that there is nothing left ‘of’ Mary. Something remains without the self,something signs for the ‘I’ without the ‘I’, whether it be ghedachte, the pre-ontological echo of an ‘I’ (a spacing, like ghedachte, that renders the ‘I’ possible)or something else. In Porete’s text, the aporetic nature of the desert parallels an47

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key of understanding will gain access. The house is not where the reader dwells, rather, it is thefigure of an atemporal threshold. Dwelling is not a form of staying put but, as I suggestedearlier, of a kind of transitory and indeterminate manner of ‘taking place’.

Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 156.48

Porete did not have visions. Her book makes the claim for a return to a divine simplicity49

of the soul in life. One may therefore understand that visions were not necessary for union,since union for Porete could already happen in the time of perfectability.

aporetic nature of hospitality, in hosting that which cannot be hosted (as alteritywithin that excludes the self ), and in traversing that which resists passage. Whileit may show itself in the body, the body is not a place, properly speaking; it is thespace in which this cupola of hospitality articulates itself, for ‘the earth whichMary cultivated was her body, which she tormented with unrestrained andamazing works of ardent longing, which made it range up and down her land,which was herself’. The landscape of the desert becomes the space in which48

divine fruition may be received; this space is that of the work of the body thatwill eventually be transformed into a work of love signed by God.

Even though medieval visions are not explicitly linked to the space of thedesert, the same issues surrounding hospitality and embodiment surface. The49

vision is the space in which the body hosts a vision of something otherworldlyor divine. Appearance and semblance are the only signs of the real of God’svisitation. Distinctions between inside and outside become problematized, forthe vision is an inner vision that is the most external. The mystic hosts a wordthat claims to be a divine word, and despite the physically tortuous nature of thishospitality, bears witness to a message which traverses her body and seeks torender it legible. The mystic does not interpret (nor does her understanding ofthe content of the message become articulate), she witnesses and transmits. Shedoes not reflect on an appearance; she allows a sight unseen to pass intolanguage. This space of the vision, which is a space inhabited by language, alsomarks the distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. It is what traverses ipseity, forit marks the distance between there where one can say ‘I’ and there where onecan articulate what has happened to or transpired in ‘me’, without ‘me’. Porete’sbook is an exemplary figure of this space, and again, like the desert, it asks thereader to traverse it and be transformed. For Porete, as for Hadewijch, Hildegard,and Julian, the body of the mystic is suspended in this space that promises tobecome a work signed by God.


Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (San Francisco, 1993), p. 327.50

VIII. Dwelling in ‘Beowulf’: Remains and Remaining in Beowulf’s Body

The question of dwelling in Beowulf the poem, and, as I will show, also forBeowulf the character, may also be approached through the relationship betweendwelling and landscape, especially in terms of landscape understood as buildingand as setting. In his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Heidegger makes aclaim as to how to understand the question of dwelling. He asks that rather thandeduce something from the shell of architectural form (or from a hollowtranscendental structure) that we listen to what language has to say about thequestion of dwelling. For Heidegger, it is not from architecture that one mayform an answer to the question of dwelling; rather, it is from understanding theessence of dwelling that we will comprehend any interrelation between building,dwelling, and thought. Heidegger’s means to answering the question of thenature of dwelling and, consequently, the nature of thought or mind is, like anyAnglo-Saxonist looking at Beowulf, to turn to listen to what language has to say.He writes:

We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell,that is, because we are dwellers. But in what does the essence of dwelling consist? Letus listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothicwunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. But the Gothicwunian, says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to beat peace, to be brought to peace, das Frye, and fry means preserved from harm anddanger, preserved from something, safeguarded. 50

The association between building, dwelling, remaining, and preserving, orguarding would seem to fall in easily with Anglo-Saxon renderings of howdwelling (Old English wunian) is experienced in Beowulf. Guarding home,property, and propriety is a recurring figure associated with dwelling and witha peaceful ideal of kingship: Beowulf battles Grendel to establish peace in themead hall. Hrothgar’s exceptional act, that is, to allow Beowulf to guard (healdan)and control (gewealdan) Heorot, enables Beowulf to perform as if he were king,that is, to act as an eald eþelweard (ll. 1702, 2210) an old guard of the homeland,who will establish peace. (The H in ‘Heorot’ links it by alliteration to Hrothgar’sproper name thus marking it as the home proper to Hrothgar’s kin, theirpatrimonial dwelling par excellence.) Beowulf in turn assumes the role of ealdeþelweard for fifty winters (a sign of peaceful and successful leadership) when he

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is made King of the Geats. As a way of preserving kinship and belonging, ofbeing with others and being with the past, with treasures from the past (andtherefore also with a future, with an afterlife) dwelling performs what Heideggercalls the gathering of the fourfold; it is linked to a way in which the earth,heaven, divinities, and mortals are gathered and connected together. The termweard (protector guardian, ruler) is used over fifty times in Beowulf, in compoundsthat further the connection between earth, heritage, origin, or patrimony anddwelling. Aside from eþelweard, we find the compounds seleweard (hall-guard), eorðweard (earth-protector or fortress), landweard (land guardian),hyðweard (harbour-guard), and the very specific Heorowearde, on the onehand, but also hordweard (hoard-guardian), yrfeweard (inheritance-guardian),and beorgesweard (barrow-keeper). The bond between treasure and genealogicalstrain is highlighted here. The figure of continuity, the preserver, assumes therole of the inheritance guardian (yrfeweard), giving out treasures or heirloomsof the past to bind and guard kinship and kingship. Beowulf’s barrow is builtwith the funerary remains of his body (brondes laf) and is lined with powerfultreasures that live there, dormant, until summoned for future use, in anafterlife, or by those who, like Wiglaf, will be associated with its latent powers.The link between dwelling, remaining, and guarding is commonplace inAnglo-Saxon texts, in Beowulf especially. I need not overemphasize this,except to add three points.

One, that to ground the nature of dwelling in ‘the land’ or the earth, and toconsequently associate it with the identity of a nation, is as complex and oftenas problematic as was German interest in Anglo-Saxon studies in the thirties, oras was the past French presidential candidate Le Pen’s grounding the nature ofbeing French in patrilinear descent from those born on French soil. Even thoughBeowulf the text is clearly concerned with dwelling and the maintaining ofkingship and lands, it does not allow itself to be articulated in a Christianparadigm as it is in Bede or in Ælfric; rather, the very precarious nature ofownership, the anxiety over boundaries, loss, and transferable inheritance, andthe constant focus on spaces between dwellings, or the borderline of dwelling,seem to suggest that the land does not ground dwelling, but that dwelling isconstantly reappropriating its tie to land. If less of an emphasis is placed onownership and propriety, and dwelling in Beowulf is reconsidered in terms ofhosting power and shifting relationships of guardianship, this would make for aninterchangeability and power of substitution in Beowulf that would be, like thefigure of the earth itself, a figure for an ever-changing grasp on things. Figuresremain constant, but their material or appropriation of material changes. This


Paul Taylor, Sharing Story: Medieval Norse-English Literary Relationships (New York,51

1998), p. 56.

shifting would also allow us to look at the powers associated with earth, land,treasure, and genealogy, in a way that would be filiated to natural or supernatural,human or inhuman processes, to powers of generation, birth, and to sacralpower, as well as to the power of language — especially figural language, whichI will develop in a moment. This displacement — which has only been sketchedout here — from land and kingdom to the generative power latent or nascentwithin would fall in line with Paul Taylor’s persuasive analysis that ‘the king’sbody is not only a body politic but a treasure and a fertile force’ and that‘kingship is more important to a people’s welfare than kingdom’.51

My second point concerns another problem that arises when Heorot, themead hall, is reified as being an exclusive centre around which the question ofdwelling circles. The reflection on the nature of dwelling and propriety may becomplicated when one takes into account that guardianship and dwelling are notexclusive to man in Beowulf: Grendel and his mother dwell, preserve, and guardtheir treasures as well. Grendel is described as ‘hall thane’ (which may or may notbe ironic), and the dragon (or wyrm) is a hordweard (a treasure guardian) whodwells in a beorg (a barrow) that is also described as a dryhtsele (a noble hall). Thistreasure guardian is referred to as a gæst (a guest, or visitor as well as theinhospitable guest, that is, fiend) when he justifiably seeks retribution atBeowulf’s hall, after having experienced three hundred years of relativelyundisturbed longevity until his dwelling was transgressed by theft. Treasure isguarded both by men and by monsters, raising the question, for whom is itproper to guard, to live in peace, to defend and protect kin and belongings? Isit truly a mark of what is proper to man? The language of Beowulf suggests thatproper figure of dwelling — its relation to land and property and propriety ingeneral — be kept in suspense, in a way that renders its transitory and figurativeessence similar to that of the westen.

My third point concerns the relation of dwelling to the body. While it seemsto be clear that dwelling concerns the body, and that bodies are bound, so tospeak, to the articulation of how one dwells with others or with what one wantsto call a self or a subject in Beowulf, the plurality of figures of embodiment andthe multiplicity of terms to speak of the body present a double-edged sword interms of presenting any unified way of conceiving it. The conflation between thelanguage of building and embodiment begs for thinking through the questions

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For the etymological link between lic (the noun) and -lic (the suffix) see F. Holthausen’s52

Altenglisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelburg, 1934). A kenning is a poetic compound (a word or phrase) that becomes a metaphorical53

substitute for another word. For example, the banhus, or bone house, is a kenning for the bodyin Old English. As Gardner notes, ‘The distinctive aspect of a kenning is its context. It is atwo-part figure, consisting in a metaphorical base and an ablenkenden [associative] determinant.The base expresses the thing with which the referent is being compared, and the determinant(the first element, in the case of compounds) serves to bridge the disparity of meaning between

in a parallel fashion, as many scholars have noted. In Beowulf the word flæsc isused in way which connotes a kind of objective outer material, that is wrappedaround life, as noted earlier in the phrase ‘no þon lange wæs | feorh æþelingesflæsce bewunden’ (l. 2423–24; Not much longer would [Beowulf’s] life bewrapped in his flesh). The flæsc is wrapped around the body of Beowulf, likewires around a wall, or like gold around an heirloom sword (which often carriesan inscription). The word banhus, ‘bone house’ (ll. 2508, 3147), is also used tospeak of the body, and bancofa of the bodily enclosure, but the most commonlyused word to refer to the body is the lichama, which is composed of lic (body)and ham (home), making its pertinence to the question of dwelling all the moreapparent. The word lic refers to both body and a corpse; in suffix form, it referssimilitude. It forms the basis of our word like — the underlying support ofmetaphor. This strange filiation of the lichama to a body that may be dead or52

alive, to a figure of language (that is, metaphor or kenning) that may survivebeyond it, while being like it, suggests that the body may be thought of ashosting life — as being just as separable and divisible from life as perhaps islanguage. The association and disassociation of the body with life is common:the phrases lif wið lice (life with/from the body), lif of lice (life within/against thebody), or lif ond lice (life and the body) are used over five times in the text,making the body like Benjamin’s Leib in its being more like a form that is notidentical to its material. The permeability of the flesh, and its separation fromthe subject of an utterance, makes one think that while the flesh may perish orbe consumed and reduced to ashes, a trace of the body or of the subject maycontinue to dwell once the flesh has gone. If the body is thought of as acompound — as a linguistic, material compound, or even of a generationalcompound with sexual and procreative powers — then it may also be thoughtof in relation to couplings and likenesses in language, that is to kennings and tothe generative power of metaphor. It is of interest to note that approximately53


the base and the referent. The associative determinant is always taken from the universe ofdiscourse (Bedeutungssphäre) of the referent, or from one having some close discernablerelationship to that of the referent’ (Thomas Gardner, ‘The Old English Kenning: ACharacteristic Form of Germanic Poetical Diction?’, Modern Philology, 67 (1969), 109–117 (p. 113).For a recent and fuller evaluation of what constitutes a kenning, see Susanne Kries ‘Fela Irúnum eða í skáldskap: Anglo-Saxon and Scandianvian Approaches to Riddles and PoeticDisguises’, in Riddles, Knights, and Cross-dressing Saints, ed. by Thomas Honeger (Bern, 2004),pp. 139–64.

The Old English cennes can mean what is produced, but can also mean birthday and54

childbirth. A cennestre is a mother, a cennend a parent, and a cenningstow is a birthplace.Cennendlic is defined as genital, and gecennes is a summons.

one-third of kennings in Old English refer to the human body or the breast, i.e.,the interior part of man. Metaphor is commonly referred to in the Middle Agesas the birthing of language, and in Old English cenning is semantically associatedwith birth, procreation, and verbal declaration. As a noun, cenning literally meansprocreation, parturition, and birth, and in its verbal form (gecennan) it spans thesemantic range of to conceive, bring forth, produce, beget, create, produce,nominate, declare, assign, show oneself, and make a declaration in court.54

Language, as we know from Germanic attitudes towards charms and ritualformulation, hosts an inaugural power for Anglo-Saxons that can do things tobodies. What relationship is there between the body and metaphor? What of thebody’s likeness in poetic language? Or, put otherwise, although differently, howdoes the subject dwell in poetic language — and in this Old English poem, tobe specific?

Poetic language and rhetoric are not foreign to this question in the study of OldEnglish. Poetic form is even traditionally positioned as a means of addressing thequestion of the remaining and that of an afterlife. In Fred Robinson’s analysis ofappositional style, he makes a connection between the appositional structure ofpoetic language in Old English and its ability to host a kind of remaining ofpagan ancestors. He writes, ‘from the smallest element of microstructure — thecompounds, the grammatical appositions, the metrical line with its apposedhemistiches — to the comprehensive arc of macrostructure, the poem seemsbuilt on apposed segments’. While this allows for an ambiguity and ambivalenceto be articulated in terms of pagan and Christian subject matter, thejuxtapositional form offers a kind of purgatorial ‘dwelling’ for heathen subjectsthat would otherwise have no place. He notes, ‘the temporary irresolution of

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Fred Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, 1985), p. 7.55

Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), p. 18.56

apposition is one means by which the poet creates a niche, “a place in hispeople’s mind and language where their ancestors can remain, not withouttheological security, but with dignity”’. Robinson’s privileging of the Christian55

viewpoint is well preserved in this too; however, the urgency of ‘choosing’ ameaning, of posing a teleology for poetic language (whether it be semiotic orChristian) may, I think, remain in suspense. I would emphasize this with regardto Beowulf, for the reasons previously discussed, mainly that the past is notdeterminately past, nor is the poem a stable place in which one dwells. The pastis passed down as a living past, as I have argued; it is transmitted as a livinginheritance.

In The Textuality of Old English Poetry, Pasternack relates poetic language toinheritance; however, she formulates the relation between poetic language andsubjectivity by opposing formulaic language to what she calls the ‘developmentof a subject’. In her analysis, Pasternack links formulaic language to tradition andthe subject to the presence of a first-person narrator. In trying to locate thesubject in a poem she seeks the subject in an ‘I’. She writes:

A few texts propose a first person speaker and a couple of them even sustain the ‘I’ —The Wife’s Lament, The Dream of the Rood — but they follow convention in that theydo not develop and sustain a subjectivity through their language. First of all, thelanguage is formulaic and therefore by its nature open to any voice; but moreimportant, the convention of structuring verse sequences in discrete movementsinhibits any such development.56

Pasternack claims that the presence of formulaic language and the absence of an‘I’ make for the lack of a developed and sustained subjectivity. While this first-person subjectivity (as character) may indeed be absent, contrary to Pasternack’sview, I have argued that the subject in and of a poem is not represented by the‘I’ but by a nonsubjective element, like landscape, both within and without thesubject. This opposition between formulaic language and subjectivity may bevalid, to the extent of a developed character, but does not exclude something elsethat is, as I have argued, of the subject, although not precisely subjective.Pasternack continues by opposing author to tradition in a way that would seemto imply nothing of the subject in formulaic verse:

Instead of implying an author, Old English verse implies tradition. Formulaic echoesand patterns that are frequently used to express an idea function as a code that readers


Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, p. 19.57

Biowulfes biorh, Beowulf’s barrow, that is, the mound that marks his tomb, is how58

Beowulf wishes to be remembered by those that see the mound in the landscape of the seacliffs. Before he dies, Beowulf requests ‘Order a bright mound made by the brave, | after thepyre, at the sea’s edge; | let it rise high in Whale’s Cliff, | a memorial to my people, that everafter | sailors will call it ‘Beowulf’s barrow | when the steep ships drive out on the sea | on thedarkness of waters, from lands far away’ (ll. 2802–808).

The relationship between metaphor and its referent is part of a longstanding debate. For59

one of the most powerful statements on metaphor see Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythologies’,Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1981), pp. 207–71. Another strong readingof metaphor that merits reconsideration is Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’,Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 13–30.

can interpret as ‘tradition.’[…] Tradition is coded through intertextual relationshipsthat are characterized by the formulaic nature of the poetry’s language.57

Pasternack makes an important claim for the formulaic patterning of verse. Shelinks formulaic patterning to a textual tradition, to an intertextual form ofreference, but why must the question of the subject be opposed to code or toformulation? Might not the question of the subject in Old English verse, as Ihave argued, be articulated precisely in this detachable, substitutable, memorable,and deserted poetic form? Couldn’t the remains of a subject, after life has left thebody, be as indifferent, formulaic, and as referential as Biowulfes biorh (Beowulf’sbarrow)? Even though formulaic language refers to a past tradition, why should58

this exclude the possibility of it being generative of new meanings or power witheach repetition?

Poetic language is also subject to the opposite kind of use, mainly, to showproof of something innately structured and formulaic within a subject. Inphenomenology and cognitive theory, metaphor is used as a way to demonstratehow language hosts certain structures that are innate to cognition and thus, todwelling. In his essay ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and59

Feeling’, Paul Ricoeur proposes that a dual structure of reference is discernable inmetaphor. Rather than summarize his argument in depth, what I would highlightin his formulation is how again, the question of poetic language is formulatedwith regard to dwelling, structure, and remains. Metaphor and ‘poetic language’,Ricoeur argues, are

no less about reality than any other use [of language] implies but it refers to it by themeans of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspensionand seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.

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Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, in On60

Metaphor, ed. by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1978), pp. 141–58 (p. 151). I am referring to the work on metaphor and the ‘structure’ of the mind in Old English,61

by scholars such as Michael Matto, ‘Containing Minds: Mind, Metaphor, and Cognition inOld English Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1998); RuthWehlau, The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry (New York, 1997),Soon Ai Low, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common Sense Psychology in OldEnglish Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2000); and, to a lesserextent Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (see n. 34, above). With theexception of Overing, none of these authors takes into account the referential nature oflanguage and the impossibility of discerning a ‘reality’ without linguistic means. To explore thequestion of metaphor in depth, in relation to what is thought as ‘the mind’ in Old English is

This suspension is built on the ruins of the direct reference.[…] It is called secondorder reference only with respect to the primacy of the reference of ordinary language.For, in another respect, it constitutes the primordial reference to the extent that itsuggests, reveals, unconceals […] the deep structures of reality to which we are relatedas mortals who are born into this world and who dwell in it for a while.60

For Ricoeur, metaphor reveals the ‘primordial reference’ of deep structures ofreality, structures that establish relation to dwelling. Although I find this claimto a reality outside of language that is ‘built on the ruins’ of a first order referenceproblematic, to say the least, the idea that poetic language, specifically metaphor,reflects a figure of dwelling and the mind is not entirely incompatible with myown view. A certain nonsubjective element of the mind (or of ghedachte) maypromise to reveal itself in the desert of poetic language, in its space. Recent studiesof metaphor in Old English are concerned with metaphor in order to establishan immediacy with the structures of reality that are innate to experience;however, they fail to take into account the unstable nature of language and theproblem of a pure or self-evident external referent that could ever claim to beproper to reality. My argument has furthered the claim that poetic language has,in the instances presented here, an intimate tie to what Hadewijch calls thought(ghedachte), or to a nonsubjective element in and of the subject; however, giventhe transitory nature of dwelling, if one is to tie the question of dwelling inBeowulf to structures that establish and confirm social order and community, topatterning and interconnective interlace (to echo Overing), to containment andcontaining (of the organic body and of the social body), and to structures of themind and to what is proper to man, then it is only to the extent that the inverseof this synthesizing also holds true. There is no container and no structure61


part of a project that is beyond the scope of this article. A study with a different aim in theexamination of metaphor is, as I noted earlier, Lees and Overing, ‘Before History, BeforeDifference’, pp. 315–34.

without an accompanying dissolution and rupture. Dehiscence, splitting, tearing,the liquidation of social ties, the ruptures of history, and the abolition of structurego hand in hand with dwelling. Containment is, one could say, a fiction or a storyone tells oneself, or, better yet, a story one tells others. The mind is only asfictively contained, determined, stable, and structured, as is a poem.

Beowulf’s final living moments provide a commentary on this fiction ofcontainment. In Beowulf’s death scene, after his being wounded by the dragon,and his fissured and vulnerable body lies open on the border between water andland, his words are described in a poignant way. We read, ‘[Wiglaf] came out tofind his lord, the great king, bleeding still, at the end of his life. Again he beganto sprinkle him with water, until the point of a word broke through his breast-hoard’ (l. 2788–92). The final segment reads: ‘oð þæt wordes ord | breosthordþurhbræc’. The word bursts through Beowulf’s breast-hoard, it follows the samemovement of rupture as does the body’s splitting away from life. If a word’spoint can þurhbræc, that is, if it can cut through the flesh with its point, it issimilar to the edge of sword. The edge of a sword, an image which recalls thename of Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow (servant of the edge), is, like language,something that one must know how to manipulate, use, and handle. If wordshave points and edges, that may be sharp or dull, then a care in bonding wordstogether is asked for, just as it would be if one were to handle a sword, especiallysince it concerns more than just cutting oneself, but also how one faces wyrd anddetermines one’s afterlife in lof, in the praise of others, or in a poem. Parcellingout, insignificance, discontinuity, the fracturing of community and of the body,are all a stroke too close for comfort.

At the end of Beowulf, this filiation between the body, language, transmission,and heritage is made all the more evident. The word lic is used in a specific waywhich distinguishes lic from the other terms that refer to the body such as banhus(bone house), bancofa (bone enclosure) or flæsc, marking its filiation not to afinite temporality, but to a temporality which is transmitted as history andgeneration. Towards the end of Beowulf, we read:

Biowulf maþelode- he ofer benne spræc,wunde wælbleate; wisse he gearwe,þæt he dæghwila gedrogen hæfde,eorðan wynn(e); ða wæs eall sceacen

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The Donaldson translation reads: ‘Beowulf spoke — despite his wounds spoke, his62

mortal hurts. He knew well he had lived out his days’ time, joy on earth; all passed was thenumber of his days, death very near. “Now I would wish to give my son my war-clothing, ifany heir after me, part of my flesh, were granted”’ (Beowulf: A Prose Translation, trans. by E.Talbot Donaldson, ed. by Nicholas Howe (New York, 2002), p. 46). The phrase æfter wurdehas also been glossed as ‘after words’ or ‘after fate’.

dogorgerimes, deað ungemete neah — :‘Nu ic suna minum syllan woldeguðgewædu, þær me gifeðe swaænig yrfeweard æfter wurdelice gelenge’.

(ll. 2724–32)

(Beowulf spoke, despite the gash, the gaping wound — he knew for certain that he hadfinished his days, his joys in the world, that his time was over, death very near: ‘NowI would wish to give to my son war garments, where there was so granted to me aninheritance-guardian afterwards related to the body’.) 62

The space of the body is also related to the historicity of inheritance andbelonging. It transmits belonging in a fashion similar to the narrative itself, as itpasses down as sense of kinship and history. This filiation between the body asguardian and host to history reappears in the final lines of Beowulf, when thetwelve nobles mourn Beowulf’s leaving his lichama (his body-home). The finalpassage sets up a parallel between the mourning of the body, and the mourningin words. We read:

Þa ymbe hlæw riodan hildedeore,æþelinga bearn, ealra twelfe,woldon (care) cwiðan [ond] kyning mænan,wordgyd wrecan ond ymb w(er) sprecan;eahtodan eorlscipe ond his ellenweorcduguðum demdon, — swa hit gede(fe) bið, þæt mon his winedryhten wordum herge,ferhðum freoge, þonne he forð scileof lichaman (læded) weorðan.Swa begnornodon Geata leodehlafordes (hry)re, heorðgeneatas;cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyning(a)manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust,leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.

(ll. 3169–82)


(Then around the barrow rode the war-brave, born of princes, twelve nobles. Theywanted to mourn their king in their grief, to weave a lay and speak about the man:they praised his noble deeds and acts of courage, his mind’s great prowess. So it isfitting that a man praise his beloved lord with words, love him in heart, when he mustbe led forth from his life, the body’s home. Thus did the Weders, his hearth-companions, mourn in words the fall of their lord. They said that he had been of theworld-kings, the mildest to his men, the most courteous man, the kindest to hispeople, and most eager for praise.)

In this passage, the narrative becomes a host body (a lichama) that also preservesguardianship and belonging, yet does so in a way that is neither completely of thesubject nor of the time of its life. Both the body, the westen, and the narrativebecome transitory hosts of material inscription which elude clear demarcations,and are for that reason filiated to a monstrous, untame, or wild kind ofsubjectivity, if one may even call it that. Narrative figures an inheritance to bepassed down, transmitted (through the body, if it is done orally), in turn shapinghow we belong to a landscape and how landscape belongs to and disfigures thereflection of an ‘us’ in medieval narratives.

IX. Conclusion

In the four different texts analysed here, I have outlined a figure of dwelling thatis both of a poem and of subject (while nonsubjective) and is manifest inlandscape. It is what I would call in-subjective, an insignificance within thesubject that partakes in its life and in its death. As the personification at work inthe landscape of the poem The Ruin, as the force of Minne, and as the desert thatbelabours Mary Magdalene and Porete’s body, these false incarnations can neverfully show their face. As an in-subjective space, it exposes; it is the exposure of theinhuman in the human; it is what in the wall, is relentlessly exposed to wyrd, orwhat in a word, exposes a relation to death. The manner of dwelling cut by eachfigure is not represented by an ‘I’ who speaks, but by a transitory space thatprecedes the ‘I’ — whether it is that of ghedachte, the desert, or the body (aslichama) — that transmits a history without being identical to it. This figure ofthe desert, which is both in and outside of discourse, inside and outside thesubject, hosts discourse as though it were the very echo of its own dehiscence.This figure of dwelling, like that of the poem, is not determined by historicaltime, rather, it traverses historical time, refiguring it, generating new histories,allowing the past to be used for purposes that may even run counter to historicaltime. Like the spacing of metaphor, it allows for passage and transmission from

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In finishing this article, I read a recently published text by Derrida of direct relevance.63

Jacques Derrida, ‘Rams. Uninterrupted Dialogue — Between Two Infinities, the Poem’, inSovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen(New York, 2005), pp. 135–63. In this short but dense text, Derrida comments on Gadamer’ssituating of poetry in relation to subjectivity. Derrida finds a strain throughout Gadamer’swork, especially in the reading of Paul Celan’s poetry, that attests to something in a poem thateludes all intentionality (conscious or unconscious) on the part of an author, yet calls for itselfto find a destination in a reader, an encrypted addressee, or a ‘you’, in the form of what he callsan uninterrupted dialogue, that is, a dialogue that keeps active an internal limit of legibility ofthe poem, and resists appropriation by the subject. This reader must carry, or bear withinhimself, the mourning of the world attested to in the poem, hence the filiation of the poemto processes of mourning and especially to failed mourning, what Freud designates asmelancholia. Melancholia keeps alive the other ‘in me’ but while preserving the difference fromthe subject, that is, it keeps the other alive in me, but without ‘me’, meaning withoutappropriation. For Gadamer, as for Derrida, the poem keeps a trace of something encryptedwithin the subject, something with a transformative power, alive. Derrida writes, ‘Concerningthis horizon of subjectivity, the work of art never stands there like an object facing a subject.What constitutes its being a work is that it affects and transforms the subject, beginning withits signatory. In a paradoxical formula, Gadamer proposes reversing the presumed order [of awork of art and its subject]: “The subject [subjectum] of the experience of art, that whichremains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who made it, but the work of artitself”’ (Derrida, p. 138 (slightly modified)).

one time to another, from one space to another, from one likeness to a promisedone. Who inhabits the poem is not answered by an ‘I’, but by ghedachte, by thedesert, by the lichama, or by the event of di, you. If, in this turn to language, ‘weare being changed from form to form and are passing from a blurred form to aclear one’, as Augustine hoped in De trinitate, then this new form is as discernableas a mirage.63

Columbia University

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Q UESTIONS OF DWELLING IN ANGLO-SAXON POETRY AND MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM: INHABITING LANDSCAPE, BODY, AND MIND