Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Aldo Ricci. "The Chronology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Review of English Studies, 5:259-69.

Asserts that, substantial external evidence for the dates of most Anglo-Saxon poems being insufficient, "it has been found indispensible to turn to internal evidence, and see whether a study of the language, meter, style, etc., can lead to any useful conclusion, especially by comparison with the usage of such datable material_characters, glosses, certain inscriptions, the form of the names in Bede, etc._as we possess" (259) in order to establish an Anglo-Saxon poetic chronology. Offers three caveats in the application of the chronological tests of Morbach (1906) and Richter (1910): 1. "that the language of poetry is more archaic than that of prose" 2. that it is doubtful that "all the complicated rules elaborated by modern scholarship were strictly adhered to by all poets of all times" and 3. that with respect to short poems, meter is "not decisive" since "short poems furnish too few data to go upon" (259). Concludes that charms, gnomes, elegies, and epics are "pre-Christian types" and that "in varying degrees, we may actually reconstruct, or at least infer the forms of the originals. This will then give us a first group of poems, that we may conveniently call heroic. It comes first logically and ultimately chronologically, but it is independent of the difficultuies raised by the dating of the actual MS forms of the poems" (265-66).
Area: OE