Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse

Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England #4

by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

For many years there has been lively debate about the 'orality' or 'literacy' of Old English verse: about whether the Old English verse which has come down to us is primarily the product of oral composition or primarily written, insofar as it is transmitted only in manuscript. The present book throws light on this question by drawing our attention to a largely unexplored body of evidence, namely the graphic realization of Old English verse in the surviving manuscripts - how it is set out spatially, how it is marked up for reading with punctuation of various kinds. Professor O'Keeffe shows that by the late tenth century scribes had apparently ceased to alter the poems which they were transcribing by recourse to residual orality, and had begun to copy verbatim the poetic text before them. The entire orality-literacy debate has been lifted on to a new plane; the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the way Old English verse has come down to us.

Genres: Medieval

228 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 1990

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visible Song lives up to it's reputation as one of the more important OE studies in recent history. O'Brien O'Keeffe works from a theory of "transitional literacy," by which she means a point in the history of English-speaking people when they read (i.e., were technically literate) but read using oral conventions and techniques, in order to illuminate what we see in various manuscript records. The gist of it is that scribes, when copying a manuscript, were apt to provide variant readings, consciously or unconsciously, because of their understanding of the workings of oral literature. She traces what she identifies as examples of this happening in various OE texts for which multiple copies exist. In so doing she pushes us to reevaluate the notion of authorship and the poem as a physical object, in good postmodern lit-crit fashion. If she is correct, and I'm inclined to think she's onto something, the editing of OE texts will need to change significantly, although it might not be easy to figure out just how. Perhaps surprisingly, she uses minimal reference to theory; I can remember only a couple Derrida references, mostly in footnotes and only to Of Grammatology. Her main resource is Walter Ong, who is refereshingly "real-world," that is, less abstract. Overall, her close use of actual manuscripts in her studies is compelling and exciting--if you're into that sort of thing!

[Bree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for class. I understand its importance to the field and appreciate it for that, but it's not as well-composed or engaging as some of the more contemporary pieces on the differences between Old English and Latin texts. Some chapters stray a little too far from the main point and there are points where there's either too much contextualization or not enough, but overall the argument was interesting, fairly compelling, and (from my limited knowledge of this sub-field of medieval studies) important for this particular sub-field.