In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.
Author(s): Catalin Taranu
Series: Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Permissions
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Beyond Germanic Heroic Poetry: Poets, Historians, and the Gods of Our Fathers
‘And the Words That Are Used/ for to Get the Ship Confused’: Academic Terminology and Underlying Assumptions
Past Approaches and the Division of Academic Labour
Bridging the Sundering Seas: Carolingian and Early English Vernacular Verse
The ‘Germanic Heroic’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Paradigms: A Critique
What Is ‘History’, Anyway?
Alternative Modes of History and Vernacular Theories of Narrative Representation
The Bard, the Rag-Picker, and the Nostalgic Scribe
The Bard and the Rag-Picker at Work
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 2: What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The Old English Vocabulary of Narrative and Historical Representation
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 3: ‘Truth Is the Trickiest’: Vernacular Theories of Truth in Early Medieval Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 4: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: The Social Logic of Frankish Verse Histories
Introduction
Carolingian Germanic Poetry – A Marginal Constellation
‘The Savage Words of an Uncultivated Language’: Linguistic Community and Alienation
Residual Orality and the Politics of Poetic Form
Carolingian Ethnicities (I): Teutoni, Theodisci, or Germani?
Carolingian Ethnicities (II): ‘True Franks’ in the East and West
The Interplay of Ethnicities in the Waltharius
How to Be a Man, a Noble, and a Son in Carolingian Society
Tying the Threads Together: The Background to the Figure in the Carpet
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Chapter 5: Beowulf in Times of Anxiety: The Archaeology of Emotions in Old English Verse History
Angling for Anxieties: A Method
Nervous Laughter: Wrestling with Monsters
Beowulf the Wrecca : The Monster Within
Ellorgæstas : Guests in Their Homeland
Crushing the Laðan Cynnes : On ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Race, Again
Giant Women and Haunting Danes: Race and Gender around Beowulf
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
