JONATHAN DAVIS-SECORD. Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature

Old English compounds have been widely studied as linguistic entities, in terms of their function in metrical and formulaic composition, and in relation to style. Davis-Secord’s book embraces this scholarship intelligently, but goes beyond it by assimilating recent work in both literary and linguistic disciplines. He applies translation theory, linguistic neuropsychology, speech genres, and stylistic analysis to compounds and their use in both prose and poetry in useful detail. Generally the focus on specifics (Juliana’s speeches contain more ‘prosaic’ compounds than those of other speakers in that poem, e.g. pp. 106–9) does not diminish the interest of broader issues (e.g. why Ælfric tends to avoid compounds, Chapter 7).

Chapter 1 ‘Connecting Grammar, Style and Culture’ is perhaps the least satisfactory. It attempts to relate Old English ideas of grammar and rhetoric with Greek and Latin, Old Norse, and oral poetics. It is not quite clear why or how it is important that Old Norse tradition was known to the Anglo-Saxons, or that the Anglo-Saxons could have produced ‘independent Old English treatises on vernacular linguistic art matching those of the Icelanders’ (p. 21). The ideas in this chapter are interesting, and lead into the later chapters, but the writing sometimes gives the impression of trying too hard to make connections that may or may not be valid.

Data from experiments in linguistic processing using eye tracking are applied to compounds in Chapter 2. Davis-Secord is aware of the potential problems here. Reading printed text today may be rather different from reading manuscript in Anglo-Saxon England; and oral discourse might make such data irrelevant. Nevertheless, he argues with some subtlety that compounds (with a few reasonable exceptions) are never fully lexicalized (p. 42), and that the Anglo-Saxons ‘processed and recognized compounds as fundamentally distinct from simplices’ (p. 46), with all the rhetorical possibilities that that opens up. He applies these ideas to the Boethius translations and Elene and shows the different preoccupations of the writers in using compounds to make sense of translated texts in a new context.

Chapter 3 examines the processing of compound words. Again, research in modern psycholinguistics is brought to bear on how quickly compounds are processed by the brain, and then how the brain can be ‘primed’ for processing compounds by use of repeated compounding patterns, elements of compounds used as simplices, and so on. Poets use apparent semantic redundancy in compounds like guðbill ‘battle-blade’ because they are cognitively (as well as metrically) different from simplices like bill, requiring different processing and acquiring different connotations. Rare or unique compounds make demands on the attention of the audience, and clusters of compounds gain ‘emphatic rhetorical force’ (p. 91), whether in Beowulf or in late Wulfstan homilies.

Another fascinating chapter examines speech genres using Bakhtin’s discourse analysis. Davis-Secord points out the lack of visual cues in manuscripts to help a reader distinguish between poetry and prose and shows how compounds do this in the Boethius translations. He then develops the ideas to show how in Juliana, the heroine’s speeches echo religious prose while the demon’s echo heroic verse. Juliana’s speeches have didactic force and an emphasis on confession and penitence which would have fitted well into the discourse and preoccupations of the Benedictine Revival, he suggests.

Wulfstan’s prose is the subject of Chapter 5 and Beowulf of Chapter 6, picking up ideas mentioned earlier and giving greater analytical detail. These chapters show how compounds control the pace of the discourse and force the audience to weigh, assess, or pause. A particularly interesting notion explored in Chapter 5 is that Wulfstan was not trying to persuade his audience, but to create and perform identity: not telling people what to do, but inviting them to identify themselves in terms of certain characteristics, which the compounds in particular (but other rhetorical devices also) iterate.

The chapter on Beowulf is perhaps a little more speculative, though the statistical analysis comparing the number of compounds in different phases of the poem is striking. The focus here is on weapons and what they mean in a heroic context. Davis-Secord suggests that compounds sometimes are used to create the literary equivalent of slow-motion movie sequences of fighting which prevent ‘any savouring of violence’ (p. 186), and thus undercut the celebration of heroism argued for by Peter Baker in Honour, Exchange and Violence (Brewer, 2013). I am not convinced that ‘slow motion’ is incompatible with celebration delayed artfully, but Davis-Secord shows how it introduces a reflective, questioning quality to the narrative. He concludes that this feature of the style of the poem illustrates a ‘concern over the changing meaning of violence’ in the eleventh-century context of the poem’s manuscript and reception (p. 191).

A byproduct, perhaps, of the work’s focus on patterns, might be that one notices the frequency of errors in grammatical concord in the writing: ‘[t]hese differences … demonstrates’ (p. 75); ‘[t]he changes … shows’ (p. 77); ‘the degree of overlap … are’ (p. 80); ‘[t]he frequent digressions … lays’ (p. 92); and this even appears in a (mis)quotation, ‘[e]ach words’ (p. 122). The translation of Wulfstan’s sentence on laboratores (p. 106) is odd. A note relating to Juliana 116 (fn. 86, p. 133) is odd in a different way: the idea that Juliana might suggest Heliseus should marry another virgin (ides in non-poetic texts, and a sense certainly possible here) for conjugal love is hardly ‘unlikely’.

The book is well written and produced. It adds a good deal to scholarship on the literary impact of compounds in Old English. It introduces critical approaches from a wide range of sources, and uses them to good effect in the analysis without ignoring potential problems in their application. The ideas are stimulating and are grounded in thorough research. It offers new ways of thinking about how compounds are used and it will inform future study. It is a welcome addition to the field.