The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Few translations of the Old English elegies take the painstaking care to
count the number of capitals and periods in each poem, and then list the
lines in which they appear—and therein lies both the strength and the
weakness of Anne Klinck’s new edition. Rather than treating the
literary implications of the Old English elegy, Klinck limits herself to
linguistic subtleties. Her study of previous translations and empirical
work on punctuation is exhaustive, yet too detailed and often
unnecessarily pedantic for novice and intermediate students. Both the
introductions to the poems and the textual notes are variations on the
same theme of language study. Consequently, Klinck neglects other
important aspects. Rather than discuss the literary and theological
implications of the loaded term wyrd (traditionally translated as fate),
for example, she instead offers various translations and concludes,
rather facilely, that “whether a force or an event, wyrd is associated
with death and disaster.”

Klinck’s greater contribution to the student and literary expert
alike is the section entitled “The Nature of Elegy in Old English,”
which offers some keen insights into the genre. However, even here
Klinck is unable to refrain from inserting ruminations on “gnomic
pronouncements” and the “hypermetric line.” Moreover, her coverage
of essential aspects for understanding Old English elegies is often
hurried and scant. For example, the notion of consolation as formulated
by Boethius is granted only one page.

The author also begins the worthwhile effort of analyzing the
relationship between the Old English elegy and its Latin, Norse, and
Celtic counterparts. Although she provides examples from all three
traditions, her critical commentary is again underdeveloped, and the
book would have benefited from shifting its focus from being a grammar
reader to offering a fuller treatment of the transcultural and
translinguistic qualities of the ancient elegy.

Klinck’s contribution to the field of Anglo-Saxon literature,
therefore, is quite minimal. Inversely, her contribution to the field of
Anglo-Saxon language is substantial, though analyzed to a rarefied
degree.