**Preface to "Old English Poetry and Its Legacy"**

This collection of essays was originally assembled in honor of John D. Niles, who has long been a major voice in Old English studies. As a member of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1976 to 2004 (and is now Professor Emeritus of English), and subsequently at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he taught from 2001 to 2011 (and is Professor Emeritus of Humanities), he has gained recognition as one of the premier scholars in the world in that field, and his work has had and continues to have a transforming impact on the profession. This book celebrates his numerous and varied achievements, ones that range across specialties from orality and literacy studies, to textual and manuscript studies, to anthropological approaches to literature, to comparative folklore and mythology, to material culture and archaeology.

Niles's interest in oral narrative, for example, led him to conduct extensive fieldwork in Scotland, where he has studied the storytelling and singing practices of Scottish traveling people (or tinkers) in particular. Just published in September 2022 from the University of Mississippi Press is one result of that study, *Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller*, a book based on over a hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews with Williamson that Professor Niles undertook in the 1980s. Niles arranges selections from those interviews into a cohesive self-portrait of a single gifted tradition-bearer, incorporating songs and stories alongside a commentary and other scholarly aids, including photographs, to contextualize Williamson's words. The result is fascinating look inside an ancient and vanishing culture in which oral narrative plays a central role.

Before *Webspinner*, Professor Niles published a study that draws his fieldwork on the oral culture of the Scottish travelling people into a book of wide horizons. *Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature* (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; paperback edition 2010) bristles with often brilliant insight, bringing together as it does seemingly disparate and unrelated disciplines while shifting its focus from the poetry of ancient Greece, to that of early medieval England, to modern Scotland with its ballad traditions. This intersection of times and regions underscores the cohesive social power of language in all three cultures, in each of which storytelling is at the center of the culture itself. What distinguishes humans from other creatures, Niles argues, is the narrative impulse: the need and the ability to tell stories, with their infinite contrary-to-fact capabilities. The phrase *homo narrans* is therefore perhaps a better descriptor of our species than is *homo sapiens*.

As captivated as Professor Niles is by the Scottish Travellers and oral poetics, he has anchored his scholarly career on study of the Old English epic poem *Beowulf*, which has long been a centerpiece of Old English literary studies, and he has written, edited, or co-edited five books relating to that poem. The first of these, *Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition* (Harvard University Press, 1983), is a comprehensive study of the poem's context, structure and style, and interpretation. The poem's context includes (1) the dimension of the marvelous, the importance of which Professor Niles highlights, regarding Grendel as a liminal being between human and spirit or demon; (2) Germanic poetics, which informs the whole of the poem through traditional formulaic language and alliterative meter, thus fostering the art of apposition and the use of poetic compounds; (3) the world of Latin Christian literature, which, he argues, influenced the poem chiefly through Christian vernacular writings rather than directly through Latin; and (4) the temporal, with Niles arguing that the poem can most probably be dated to the second quarter of the tenth century, when Danish incomers and native Anglo-Saxons were relatively at peace, integrated into a hybrid Anglo-Scandinavian society that could have comprised a mixed audience for a poem of this character, composed in the English language but set in ancient Scandinavia. Professor Niles's discussion of style and structure illuminates the poet's oral-formulaic system of composition; the poet's creative use of compound diction within that formulaic system; and the equally adept manipulation of ring structure in the poem, with the fight with Grendel's mother functioning as the poem's mythic center. The style and structure of the poem are thus barbaric, Niles maintains, in the sense that art historians have used that term to refer to the abstract, non-naturalistic character of Germanic and Celtic art. Finally, for Niles, the interpretation of *Beowulf* involves consideration of how temporal interdependencies (whether mythic, legendary, or historical) function in the poem, mediated by the narrator's impersonal voice and the presence of listening audiences, whether we think of the imagined audience inside the poem or a real audience hearing the narrative unfold. The poem's interpretation likewise relies on the concept of reciprocity, crucial to the gift-giving economy that is put on frequent display. Ultimately, Niles argues, it is the failure of the Geats in the poem to reciprocate Beowulf's resolute, heroic conduct – they act with cowardice instead – that leads to their projected demise, not the hero's purported pride.

Fourteen years after publishing the acclaimed *Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition*, Professor Niles joined with me in producing *A Beowulf Handbook* (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), which I invited him to co-edit. Designed to serve the needs of any reader of the poem, from those with only a casual interest to seasoned scholars, this collection of eighteen essays by various hands addresses virtually all areas of critical concern. These include the poem's possible date, provenance, author, and audiences; textual criticism; prosody; diction, variation, and the formula; rhetoric and style; sources and analogues; structure and unity; Christian and pagan elements; digressions and episodes; symbolism and allegory; social milieu; the hero and the theme; the relevance of archaeology; gender roles; theoretical approaches; and the poem's translations, new versions, and illustrations. Each chapter begins with a chronology of scholarly work on that topic, then explores the history of the topic and the current state (in 1995 or so) of that discussion. Professor Niles contributed a brief introduction to the volume and a substantial chapter on myth and history.

Another decade passed before Professor Niles's next major contributions to *Beowulf* studies appeared, and there were two of them: *Beowulf and Lejre* (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Brepols, 2007) and *Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition* (Norton, 2007). The first of these books gives substance to an inference that scholars had long made on the basis of the poem's sources and analogues: namely, that the action of the first part of the poem can be associated with the village of Lejre on the island of Zealand, Denmark, the reputed site of the ancient court of the Skjoldung dynasty of Danish kings. Commissioned for this publication was an English ¨ translation of a book written by the archaeologist Tom Christensen of Roskilde Museum concerning excavations that he had directed at Lejre in the years 1986–1988 and 2004–2005. The first round of these excavations yielded evidence for two massive timber halls, one built on the foundations of the other, amidst smaller outlying buildings, all of them dating from the period circa 680–990 CE. In the second round of excavations, the foundations of a third, somewhat smaller, hall were unearthed a short distance away. This one was found to date from roughly 550 CE, or very close to the time to which, on other grounds, scholars have ascribed the quasi-historical setting of *Beowulf*. Niles's chief contribution to this substantial book, which he prepared in collaboration with Professor Marijane Osborn of the University of California, Davis, was to develop the implications of these discoveries for the interpretation of *Beowulf*, probing how an English poem of this character could have had its origins in legends originating at these Danish halls.

Professor Niles's related 2007 publication, *Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition*, puts some of this newly acquired archaeological evidence to use while helping readers visualize the material world of the poem. Working with Seamus Heaney's best-selling translation of *Beowulf*, which was first published a few years previously, Professor Niles accompanies Heaney's translation with more than a hundred full-page images illustrating the Iron Age world depicted in the poem, a world of mead-halls, Viking-style warships, armor, swords, spearheads, goblets, gold jewelry, and serpentine imagery. His substantial Afterword, "Visualizing *Beowulf*," reviews a range of archaeological discoveries that illuminate how an early medieval audience may have conceived of the scenes and artifacts that the poet calls to mind.

While producing his two books from 2007, Professor Niles was also busy working on another large *Beowulf* project, one that had its beginnings in the year 2000. Professor R. D. Fulk, who had contributed the chapter on "Textual Criticism" for *A Beowulf Handbook*, had acquired the rights from D. C. Heath and Company to revise and reissue Friedrich Klaeber's magnificent scholarly edition *Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg*, the third edition of which was published in 1950, almost three decades after the first edition of 1922. Five decades had passed since the third edition had appeared, and it was clear that a revision was long overdue. Professor Fulk then invited Professor Niles and myself to join him in the daunting undertaking of revising such a venerated work and incorporating into it the fifty-some years of scholarship that had accrued since Klaeber had last revised it. We agreed with alacrity. After much discussion and planning, the three of us settled on our individual tasks and estimated that we could complete the revision in about three years. It took eight. The end result of our labors, *Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg*, fourth edition, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008, bringing the third edition into alignment with current scholarship while at the same time preserving those features of Klaeber's work that had made it the standard edition of the poem, essential for students of literature as well as for linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.

While deeply occupied with *Beowulf* as the central text in Old English literary studies, Professor Niles at the same time immersed himself in the study of other Old English poems, producing a number of articles that were then published, in revised form and with supplements, in two books issued by Brepols press in Belgium in its series Studies in the Early Middle Ages. The first of these volumes, *Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts* (2006), focuses on Old English texts that have proven resistant to interpretation, most of which come from the Exeter Book anthology of Old English verse. These include riddles; poems that are riddle-like such as *The Wife's Lament* and other elegies; and poems that contain runic letters or passages of unclear relationship to the rest of the text, such as *The Husband's Message*, *Juliana*, and *Guthlac B*. The result is a deeper understanding of how the original audience for these texts engaged with them as puzzles that require the active participation of the listener – or reader – in a contest of wits. To demonstrate how this interaction may have taken place, Professor Niles provides detailed analysis of several specific Exeter Book riddles while also offering answers to the whole set of approximately ninety-five riddles. Significantly, he presents those answers in Old English, the language of the riddler, in order to emphasize that the proper solutions to these examples of complex linguistic word-play are often words, not just things.

Complementing this volume examining the enigmatic dimension of the earliest English literature is Niles's essay collection *Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts* (2007). This book focuses on the role that heroic poems such as *Widsith*, *The Battle of Maldon*, and *Beowulf* may have played in Anglo-Saxon society, particularly during the tenth-century period of nation building. The people of early medieval England adapted to their changing environment partially by means of their tradition of heroic poetry, he argues, maintaining that the makers of this verse encouraged their audiences to regard themselves in terms of the tightly knit *comitatus* of the past, even though the reality of their social situation had become something quite different and more complex. In this same book Niles develops an argument as to how a poem of the character of *Beowulf* could have evolved from its origins in oral tradition, first being recorded through an act of dictation, then being transmuted into a hybrid written form that was neither wholly oral nor wholly literary in character, but rather a fusion of both.

Professor Niles's interest in the poems of the Exeter Book culminated in 2019 with the publication by the University of Exeter Press of his monograph *God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry*. As surprising as this is to say, this was the first book-length critical treatment of the most important collection of English poetry to have been made before the late Middle Ages. Professor Niles examines the structure and design of the Exeter Book, the relationship of its constituent parts to one another, its major and minor themes, its leading stylistic features, and its possible uses in the society that produced it. The anthology was deliberately shaped, he concludes, during the tenth-century Benedictine Reform, possibly in Glastonbury or in one of that monastery's dependencies, to promote the adoration of God while fostering the composition of poetry in the vernacular, both for its own sake and for its educational value in the cosmopolitan monastic culture from which the book emerged. He reinforces the latter point by appending a list of Latin genre terms corresponding to specific poems in the *Exeter Book*, thereby implying basic continuity between Latinate and vernacular poetics in a bilingual milieu.

The last aspect of Professor Niles's extensive array of intellectual interests that I will touch on here is the history of scholarship on Old English literature and early medieval England. One manifestation of that interest is his book *Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity* (University Press of Florida, 1997), which he co-edited with Allen J. Frantzen following a conference on the subject that Professor Niles and the Old English Colloquium of the University of California, Berkeley, hosted in March 1994. The first eight essays in the volume address aspects of medieval, Renaissance, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonism, which the editors define as "the process through which a self-conscious national and racial identity first came into being among the early peoples of the region that we now call England and how, over time, through both scholarly and popular promptings, that identity was transformed into an originary myth available to a wide variety of political and social interests" (p. 1). Beginning with the writings of Bede and Gregory the Great, the myth extends into the early English laws, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and King Alfred's Preface to the Old English translation of Gregory's *Pastoral Care*, including the reception of that text well into the Renaissance. The popularity of the myth of Anglo-Saxon origins carried over into nineteenth-century Scandinavia and North America and the postbellum South, likewise influencing the historical fiction of that period. Concluding the volume is Professor Niles's essay "Appropriations: A Concept of Culture," which advances the idea that "culture is chiefly produced through a complex series of purposeful appropriations either of the past or of someone's present property (whether material, linguistic, or intellectual in nature)" (p. 205). This is an idea that underlies the next book of his to be discussed.

In *The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past* (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Professor Niles constructs a meticulously detailed and illuminating history of the complex notion of Anglo-Saxon identity from the ninth century to the year 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death. Though often amusing, the book is as authoritative and compelling as his many other contributions to the field, offering a thorough account of the history both of Old English linguistic and literary studies and of the study of early medieval England generally. It is replete with over fifty illustrations including images of manuscripts, artifacts, paintings, and a cartoon from *Punch* on the occasion of the 1901 King Alfred Millenary. It also incorporates fifteen vignettes, or short essays, that pertain sometimes tangentially to the chapters in which they occur, dealing for example with the Tremulous Hand of Worcester and his manuscript annotations, with Milton's possible knowledge of the Old English poem *Genesis B* when composing his portrait of the rebellious Satan of *Paradise Lost*, and with Thomas Jefferson and his program of instruction in Old English as part of the education of responsible citizens. The book is thus an engaging one that appeals to a broad audience, from lay readers who simply want to know something about the cultural phenomenon known as "Anglo-Saxonism," to novices in the study of early medieval and modern England, to established scholars in the field of Old English and cultural historians interested in modern uses of the past.

Published one year after that book was a sequel, *Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism* (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), which traces the evolution of Old English literary studies through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Niles first points out some of the biases that distorted early twentieth-century critical assessments of Old English verse, then highlights leading examples of more recent criticism from J. R. R. Tolkien to the present, tracing dominant themes in that criticism while calling attention to evolving trends. This book too is meant for both novices and seasoned scholars. While calling attention to the enduring importance of Old English verse and prose in modern literary studies, it analyzes shifts in its critical reception over the past hundred years and more.

Professor John D. Niles's contributions to Old English studies and the study of early medieval England have thus been prolific, multifaceted, and of enduring value. While the foregoing survey mentions a number of his books, it does not tell the whole story of his scholarship. Notably, a book forthcoming in early 2023 is expressive of the unusual range of his interests: this is *Medical Texts from Early Medieval England, Volume 1: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts*, co-edited with Maria A. D'Aronco, to appear in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library as the first of a two-volume set. This will be the first comprehensive edition and translation of Old English medical texts in more than 150 years. Also worth note is a web site that he launched in the fall of 2022, "Scottish Voices," featuring audio recordings, video recordings, and still photos derived from his extensive program of field research with traditional singers and storytellers in Scotland. This can be consulted at https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AScottishVoicesColl. Left outside the present discussion are Niles's scholarly articles or chapters, over sixty in number; seven additional collections of scholarly essays that he has edited or co-edited; two books of verse or prose that he has translated from other languages; some three dozen book reviews, scholarly notes, and encyclopedia articles; and a chapbook of original poems. An up-to-date list of those publications can be found on his website at https://dept.english.wisc.edu/jdniles/.

What follows in this book are eight essays, each one of which refers to at least one of Professor Niles's works and each one of which significantly advances the field to which Niles has chiefly dedicated his remarkable career. Each is also prefaced by an abstract of its content, which is why I don't rehearse that information here. I hope you enjoy them.

Below is the list of contributors:

Tiffany Beechy is a formalist working in early medieval poetics and a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work of late has focused on comparative historical poetics and the poetics of compilations, notably the intertextuality of the manuscripts of *Solomon and Saturn*. Her most recent book, *Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word*, is forthcoming from Notre Dame.

Francis Leneghan is Professor of Old English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He is the author of *The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf* (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020) and co-editor of *The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation* (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017) and *Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature* (Turnhout; Brepols, 2022). He has published widely on Old English prose and verse and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on writing associated with King Alfred.

Hugh Magennis is professor emeritus at Queen's University Belfast, where he had previously been head of the School of English and director of the Institute of Theology, among other positions held. He has published widely on Old English and related literature, specializing particularly in saints' lives, translation, and poetic tradition. Among his publications are the Cambridge University Press volume *The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature*, the D. S. Brewer monograph *Translating Beowulf* (both 2011), and, most recently, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition and translation *Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints* (2020) (with Johanna Kramer and Robin Norris). Hugh Magennis is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the English Association.

Patrick J. Murphy is Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, with a dissertation directed by John D. Niles. He is the author of *Unriddling the Exeter Riddles* (2011) and *Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James* (2017), both published by Penn State University Press. His current project is a work of graphic nonfiction, *A Comics History of the English Language*, which he is in the process of both writing and illustrating.

Marijane Osborn is an emeritus professor in the English Department at UC Davis. She has been writing for many years about place in Old English poetry and other literary works (by R.L. Stevenson, Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis, etc.), but she is particularly interested in interdisciplinary co-writing, as in *Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Northern World* with Gillian Overing (Minnesota 1994), and *Beowulf and Leire*, edited by J. D. Niles (ACMRS Press, 2007). She has published more recently on places referred or alluded to in *Deor* (JEGP 2019), in an inscription on the Franks Casket (PQ, 2019), and in *The Wife's Lament* (in the essay in this volume).

Jacob W. Runner is an Assistant Professor at Kanazawa University where he teaches English, Latin, and Comparative Literature. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English/Japanese) from the University of Nottingham and an M.Litt. in Mediaeval English from the University of St Andrews. His research interests include: the literatures and language histories of English, Japanese, and Latin; scripts and orthographies; narratology; and multilingualism.

Lisa M. C. Weston is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno. She has written and presented on topics including Old English magical texts to the textual culture of early medieval monastic women. Her current research focuses on intersections of literacy, gender and sexuality in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Publications include *Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England (2004;* co-edited with Carol Braun Pasternack*)* and a chapter on "Saintly Lives: Friendship, Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality" in *The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (2013)*. "Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins: Sexuality, Temporality, and Bede's Aethelthryth" will appear in the forthcoming *Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies*.

Jonathan Wilcox is Professor of English and Collegiate Fellow at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in medieval literature and culture. Since *Ælfric's Prefaces* (Durham, 1994), he has published widely on Old English homilies and manuscript studies, including, most recently, "The Wolf at Work: Understanding Wulfstan's Compositional Method," in *Manuscripts in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Cultures and Connections*, ed. Claire Breay and Joanna Story (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2021), 141–53. He also publishes on early medieval English culture more broadly and is currently completing a book on Old English humor.

> **Robert E. Bjork** *Editor*
