The Old English Verse Saints' Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Bjork’s study of the five poems that comprise the Old English verse saints’ lives (Guthlac A, Juliana, Elene, Guthlac B, and Andreas) involves a thorough and rigorous analysis of the common feature of these poems — the high proportion of direct discourse in each. Previous studies have either grouped these poems together as a minor part of a much larger subject or have focused quite specifically on the essential differences among these vernacular verse lives, markedly different from the more conventional saints’ lives, and have treated them as being related only in the broadest hagiographic sense. By concentrating as he does upon the convention of direct discourse common to these poems, Bjork demonstrates quite convincingly their thematic and rhetorical similarities.

In his introduction, Bjork notes the prevalence of the “words-deeds theme” in Old English poetry and its special applicability to the five poems of his study: “The words-deeds theme naturally belongs to a people who viewed words as acts and the poets of saints’ lives accord the theme an importance equalling and even exceeding the importance that the Beowulf and Maldon poets give it.” This theme is most prominent in the passages of direct discourse that Bjork studies and is consequently given extended consideration throughout his analysis of the poetry, as is the close relationship he, acknowledging James W. Earl’s work on the subject, finds between hagiography and iconography. While the poems may seem highly didactic and lacking in realism to modern readers, they are nevertheless worthy of study on the very basis of their repetitive typobogy. Bjork remarks that “in Old English poetic hagiography the best features of heroic discourse became stabilized as symbols for involvement in the body of Christ: for-mal, rhetorical, balanced, or systematical discourse comes to signify the essence of the saints’ faith.” Indeed, Bjork’s own rigorous analyses of rhetoric, syntax, and theme in these discourses should serve to make this an often referred to study.