Deor
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"Deor" (or "The Lament of Deor") is an Old English poem, perhaps from the 10th century AD, preserved in the Exeter Book. The poem consists of the lament of a scop, self-identified as Deor, who his lord has replaced. In the poem, Deor mentions various figures from Germanic mythology and reconciles his own troubles with the troubles these figures faced, ending each section with the refrain "that passed away, so may this." The poem consists of 42 alliterative lines. The original poem is untitled. Subsequently, the name of the poet, Deor, is used to refer to it.
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[edit] Genre
All attempts at placing this poem within a genre are difficult. Some commentators attempting to characterise the work have called it an ubi sunt ("where are they?") poem because of its meditations on transience. It can also be considered a traditional lament and poem of consolation. Christian consolation poems, however, usually attempt to subsume personal miseries in a historical or explicitly metaphysical context (e.g., Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), and such perspectives are somewhat remote from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Medievalist scholars who have viewed the poem within the Anglo-Saxon tradition have therefore seen it primarily as a begging poem—a poem written by a travelling and begging poet who is without a place at a noble court—although because few other begging poems survive, assigning it to such a genre is somewhat speculative. Others have related "Deor" to other melancholy poems in the Exeter Book, such as "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer".
John Miles Foley has hypothesized that the apparent murkiness of "Deor" is also in no small part attributable to the obscurity of the poet's references. As he puts it, "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense".[1]
[edit] Language
The language in the poetry is highly nuanced, and it is difficult for any translation into Modern English to capture the tensions present in the highly dense and parsimonious wording. The poem runs through a list of legendary figures, asks what happened to them, and then responds with a refrain of "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!" ("that was overcome [with respect to it], this may also be [with respect to it]").
Grammatical difficulties are easily glossed over in most translations: it should be noted that the Anglo-Saxon 'þæs' and 'þisses' of the refrain are both genitive, not nominative. A more correct and literal translation would read "of that went away, and so may of this"--which is difficult to make sense of in Modern English. Reinserting an elided 'it' might render "It (sorrow) went away from that (situation), (and) so it (sorrow) may from this (situation)."
[edit] Story
Among the miseries and dismal fates that Deor runs through are those of Theodoric the Great, Ermanaric of the Goths, the mythological smith Wayland, and Wayland's victim Beadohilde (the daughter of Wayland's captor; he raped her and she finds herself with child). Each suffered an undeserved fate, and in each case "that passed away with respect to it, and so may this." But this refrain can point at two very different statements: first, that remedy came about, one way or another, in each situation, or, alternatively, that the continuous flow of time (a favorite Anglo-Saxon topic) erases all pain (though not necessarily healing all wounds).
Only in the last stanza do we learn what the "this" is: the poet's own sorrow at having lost his position of privilege. At the poem's conclusion, Deor reveals that he was once a great poet among the Heodenings, until he was displaced and sent wandering by Heorrenda, a more skillful poet. According to Norse mythology, the Heodenings (Hjaðningar) were involved in the never-ending "battle of the Heodenings", the Hjaðningavíg.[2] Heorrenda (Hjarrandi) was one of the names of Odin, the god of war and poetic inspiration.
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