| Anglo-Saxon battle poetry, with its strong objective voice and heroic, warrior ethic, may not reveal the sort of explicit psychological vulnerability to the chaos, horror, and trauma of war that we see, for instance, in Virgil's Aeneid. Yet, with a closer look, we can see the poet grappling with these issues. The singularly chaotic and horrific nature of battle and the author's attempt to order this into a poetic narrative inevitably leave traces of this essentially human experience of war, even on a seemingly objective, patently Germanic heroic, narrative. My project examines ways that early medieval Germanic authors deal with the task of narrating battle. This study offers close readings of the Old English Battle of Maldon and Battle of Brunanburh that focus especially on the larger structures of these poetic narratives; of key interest is the representation of time in these poems. A reading of Maldon explores the ideological work the poem performs, focusing on how the poet dramatizes the battle in a way that emphasizes the moral aspects of heroic action. The chapter on Brunanburh argues that although this poem celebrates a defensive victory against the Vikings and Scots, it is a less one-sided, heroic, superficial, and controlled record of the battle than it is frequently regarded. In a chapter on common motifs, images, and devices in early medieval Germanic battle poetry, I explore how poetic battle narratives record the essence of war and of man's psychological and ideological relationship to it. Man's attempts to deal with the topic of war and to shape it into a narrative result in a profound expression of paradox, ambivalence, and contradiction because the idea of war is incompatible with a logical, linear awareness. The inevitable subtext of all poetic battle narratives, I argue, is that battle is inexorably chaotic and inexpressibly horrific, perhaps even therefore sublime. |
