Wilderness In Anglo-Saxon Literature

The spatial turn of humanities in 1960s greatly sparked the critical inquires of space that cut across many disciplines such as geography, philosophy and literary criticism. In this academic context, the issue of space comes to the critical focus of the Anglo-Saxon studies. The interdisciplinary approach exerts a significant influence on the Anglo-Saxon studies and the spatial research tends to separate into two camps. The scholars in the first camp investigate physical landscapes with the aid of archeological methods, attempting to access the social-economic information. Della Hooke, the renowned specialist in historical geography, probes the relationship between Anglo-Saxon settlements and landscapes. His investigation effectively discloses the Anglo-Saxon social spectrum. The Anglo-Saxonists in the second camp seek to explore how different landscapes reflect and preserve the local culture. For instance, the influential cultural geographer Nicholas Howe points out that the Anglo-Saxons’views of home and land were greatly decided by their migratory history. It should be noted that the previous spatial studies mainly concentrate on Anglo-Saxon historical documents and archeological evidence. Nevertheless, the research into the area of how space operates in Anglo-Saxon literature has just begun in a general way. Most of the critical discussions simply consider places and landscapes as settings of different narratives, without fully exploring how particular spatial images and motifs convey certain Anglo-Saxon historical-social information.This dissertation narrows down the broad spatial inquiries to a specific issue of wilderness that is generally overlooked in the previous Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Wilderness deserves more notice in view of the historical context. On the one hand, wilderness landscape is integral to the Anglo-Saxons’history of migration and conquest, and the Anglo-Saxons’feeling of wilderness explicitly engages with their ideas of the pagan past. On the other hand, the diffusion of Christianity endows wilderness with profound symbolic and religious meanings. Hence, wilderness is an apt site to investigate how Germanic and Christian traditions came into play in Anglo-Saxon England. The present dissertation aims to investigate the images, motifs, and themes pertaining to wilderness in the selected Anglo-Saxon writings and reveal the cultural and social significance of these literary representations of wilderness. Furthermore, with an examination of the complex interplay between wild landscapes and the occupants, my dissertation intends to elaborate on the Anglo-Saxons’ relationships with nature, community and God, so as to show their perceptions of self-location and the surroundings.Wilderness in this dissertation is treated from multidisciplinary perspectives: contemporary spatial theory, ecocriticism, cultural studies, etc. There are two theoretical foundations that merit special attention. First and foremost, the decisive theoretical inspiration comes from Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite model of space. On the basis of this model, wilderness can be interpreted from three dimensions:physical, mental and social. Second, the term "’liminality" plays a vital role in the disseration. It not only refers to the intermediary phase for the individual development, but gains a broader meaning and becomes a spatial metaphor. It can be identified with the space of continuous transference, an infinite process formed by transgressions across the porous borderline. Viewed in this light, liminality can be related to the spatial feature of wilderness and it offers a new perspective to examine the development of marginal characters in wilderness as well.With the theoretical support, the dissertation places particular emphasis on the layers of wilderness and the interactions between wilderness and its exilic inhabitants. It contains six parts, namely the Introduction, four body chapters and the Conclusion. The Introduction begins with an elaboration on the connotation of wilderness, then recapitulates the accomplishments as well as the limitations of the research on wilderness in the foregoing Anglo-Saxon scholarship, and finally explicates the research objects and theoretical approaches.Chapter One elaborates wilderness as alterity of the human world by delving into the wisdom poems(Maxim Ⅰ and Maxim Ⅱ) and the epic poem Beowulf. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how wilderness, though in contradistinction to the human society, helps to delimit the civilised area and define humanity. The first part shows that the images of wilderness appear frequently in Anglo-Saxon literature in the form of stormy seascapes, treacherous moors, dark crags and ominous waters. These wild locations are often related to the monstrous inhabitants. The delimitation of wilderness as an area of demonic antagonism is in essence rooted in the Anglo-Saxons’ origin stories that are full of monstrosity and hybridity. The Anglo-Saxons’ concept of wild nature has close associations with their pagan Germanic culture. The succeeding parts all focus on the epic Beowulf. In this poem, the spatial juxtaposition of the monstrous dwellings and the hall attests to the contrast and interdependence between the civilised space and the chaotic wilderness. We scrutinise spatial meanings of wilderness and the hall at the horizontal-vertical axes to reveal that the boundary of the wild and the civilised is not clear-cut and the two contrary places are independent. Moreover, the division between the "man" and "monster" is not fixed in three fights. Beowulf and his monstrous foes share the similarity as the marginal figures at the very start of the epic. Wilderness plays a key part in the narration because it is not only the battlefield but also the special space to define heroism. The hero Beowulf undertakes a journey into wilderness to kill the monsters and then returns to the home of civilisation with a boon to bestow on his own kingdom. In a sense, Beowulf’s journey is both physical and spiritual coming-of-age. It is the conflict between the society and monstrous nature that highlights human sociality and the hero’s ability to protect the community.Chapter Two deals with four Old English elegies (namely, The Wanderer, The Seafarer. The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwace) to shed light on how the marginal characters’ emotions are externalised through wild landscapes. Wilderness in The Wanderer and The Seafarer is depicted through seascapes, harsh weather, and bleak landscapes. All these take on the character of an inner landscape so as to reflect those exiles’views of mutability in the earthly life. The extension of wilderness from the outside world to characters’inner feelings further illuminates the close bonds between the Anglo-Saxon individuals and the community. The inner wilderness of the exiles originates from their spatial isolation from the community. These exiles stay at an in-between position, hoping to get out of liminality and reach the eternal home. The hardships and loneliness they experience in wilderness are the tests to purify their soul. Both endings of The Wanderer and The Seafarer imply the possibility of the transition from wilderness to the permanence of heaven. The comparative study between two elegies with male speakers(The Wanderer, The Seafarer) and two with female speakers(The Wife’s Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer) further reveals that the Old English elegiac lyrics help us find out the connections between gendered roles and their identity construction in Anglo-Saxon society. Although the male exiles inhabit the borders both geographically and socially, their struggle with isolation and the arduous search for the eternal home lead them to traverse the liminal phase to the heavenly home. Nevertheless, the female exiles are trapped in wilderness and doomed in the marginal state with the shackles of social norms.Chapter Three examines the spiritual functions of wilderness in the Anglo-Saxon hagiographies. By treating Guthlac and Cuthbert narratives (namely, Felix’s Vita Guthlaci and Old English Guthlac A, Bede’s prose Vita sancti Cuthberti), 1 elaborate on the fundamental assumption for the discussion:wilderness in religious texts is distinct from the normal space of the daily life because it bears the features of "the qualitative space". Its location is the periphery far from the cultural centre. whereas it is of sacred power to fuel the saints’transformation. The qualitative wilderness foregrounds the fights for the territorial control between the saints and the devils. Their territorial conflicts show the convergence of heroic warrior culture and Christian eremitism. The traditional religious motif of miles Christi is amalgamated with the elements of a Germanic warrior. Most importantly, wilderness, a site of conflict and temptation, can be figured as a generative space for the saints to construct their sainthood by discriminating themselves from the evil otherness. The abstract idea of salvation and sanctity finds concrete spatial expressions in the saints’ transforming wild landscapes and taming wild animals. The allegorical poem The Phoenix deepens the understanding of wilderness as a transitional locus for an individual’s spiritual ascent. This poem, in a sense, is a story of the quintessential saint’s life as the bird’s resurrection is the archetypical soul’s quest for the eternal life. Both geographically and symbolically, the phoenix’s earthly paradise stands midway between the paradise of heaven above and the wasteland of the fallen middle-earth below. The phoenix’s pilgrimage can be interpreted through the spatial movement-the blessed could ascend from the earthly delightful place to the radiant heavenly home.Chapter Four shifts the focus from the search for personal identity to national identity. Based on a close reading of the select Anglo-Saxon histories, this chapter attaches importance to symbolic functions of wilderness in terms of the idea of emerging nationality. Greatly influenced by brought-home classical texts, Gildas and Bede, two representative Anglo-Saxon historians, demonstrate in their works that the British Isles were peripheral wilderness compared with the religious centres of Rome and Jerusalem. The main part of this chapter gives weight to interpreting landscapes in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum with the striking juxtaposition of the locus amoenus and the wild landscape. Bede interprets normal historical events in the context of salvation history. The Anglo-Saxons were the elect and the marginal Britannia was a pleasant garden in the opening chapter of Historia Ecclesiastica. The pleasant state was not perpetual and the island turned into desolation. The wild landscape was related to the destructive power of paganism as well as political invasion and wars. Accompanying the Christianisation the British Isles as a whole underwent the transformation from wilderness to Eden. The investigation of the monastic landscapes further shows that the cultivation of the hostile wild landscapes into some pleasant places is indeed a metaphor for spiritual conversion and cultivation. The miracles of water and earth in this history book display an early conflation of spiritual effects and spatial existence. The significance of the natural world is brought out spiritually by the presence of the saints and the divine favor shown to the common people. The miracle narratives of the specific individuals and places can be seen as microcosmic performances of forming national identity. In this sense. Bede reinforces Christianity’s spiritual power imposing on the myth of forming national identity though the spatial rationalisation of Britannia as a new Garden of Eden.The dissertation ends with a conclusion and summarises that wilderness is multifaceted in Anglo-Saxon literary representations and cultural imagination. Its multiplicity is mainly reflected in four aspects. In the first place, Anglo-Saxon writers employ the images of wild landscapes variously and pervasively in their works with different types. In the second place, wilderness plays diversified roles in these narratives:marking the boundary, reflecting the internal landscape and functioning as a place of salvation. In the third place, wilderness is crucial in defining individuals’ ability and confining the "otherness". It is argued that wilderness belongs to the in-between space of the Anglo-Saxon period where the human and the monster, the normal and the qualitative are in frequent interactions. It becomes the space across which differences meet, intermingle, and reproduce themselves. Furthermore, this dissertation reveals that the study on wilderness gives insight into some relevant spatial themes, including home, exile, pilgrimage and sacred buildings. It should be noted that these multifarious representations testify that wilderness is a representational space that reflects the tension and assimilation of two major cultural traditions in Anglo-Saxon England. Overall, all these discussions provide a better understanding of the way Anglo-Saxon society functions physically and spiritually from the perspective of space.