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• W340892433 abstract "Whether it is an effect of what was once called the somber cast of the Teutonic mind or of St. Benedict's dictum to death always before our eyes, the Old English poetic seems unusually given to depictions of the indignities suffered by dead bodies. (1) A handful of verse texts nearly make this theme their exclusive subject. Aside from Soul and Body, with its lengthy and hideous account of worms ravaging a corpse, few yield to this distasteful tendency more than poem preserved in the late tenth-century Exeter Book known variously as The Fortunes of Men, The Fates of Men, and The Fates of Mortals. Where its assemblage of tortured and abused bodies comes from is a matter that seems to have evaded much systematic investigation. Only a handful of articles and chapters have tried to make sense of the poem, and many of these, however meritorious, seem locked in old ways of thinking about early English verse, reliant as they often are on somewhat hazy notions of pan-Germanic prehistory. The present article questions the widely assumed disunity of Fortunes (itself an unfortunate outcome of the Germanist approach) and traces the poem's gruesome preoccupations to pastoral texts known to English audiences. Though it is customarily discussed in isolation from the so-called soul-and-body tradition and the intellectual climate from which it emerged, I hope to show why questions concerning the rise of this genre in England are probably not separable from those that have come to surround this fascinating (albeit very strange) poem. (2) First, however, it will be necessary to consider somewhat closely the poem's peculiar structure. Fortunes begins with a lengthy catalog of usually fatal calamities, all of which are arranged in an order that seems likely to have been deliberate, but whose underlying logic is disputed by commentators? The poet first mentions the case of someone--presumably a child--who is eaten by wolves. (4) Next come references, in the following order, to starvation (Sumne sceal hungor ahipan, translated by Bernard Muir as hunger shall devour another [5a]), death in a storm at sea (sumne sceal hreoh fordrifan [15b]), the lethal injury of a spear (sumne sceal gar agetan [16a]), and death by unspecified means in warfare (sumne gud abreotan [16b]). At line 17 the character of these misfortunes appears to change. Now employing a more expansive mode of narration, the poet mentions a case of blindness, then the misery of one who has been lamed by crippling injuries to his sinews. (5) Next comes a grim narration of a person falling from a tree and meeting his death at the roots, followed by that of a friendless (wineleas) man, presumably condemned to outlawry, who is unwelcome everywhere and obliged to live among alien peoples. (6) The poet goes on to describe one obviously punitive death by hanging (sum sceal on geapum / galgan ridan [33]), and by burning, perhaps in a fire set deliberately. (7) The circumstances behind these deaths are left obscure as the poet dwells instead on descriptions of the body being consumed by birds or metaphorically consumed by fire. In the case of the hanging, the poet's language makes clear that the misery of this death, perhaps contrary to what we might expect, resides largely in the victim's inability to protect his corpse from hungry birds: Finally, before the poet shifts to narrating a series of happier fates, we arrive at a curious pair of episodes concerned with the consequences of drinking: Sumum meces ecg on meodubence yrrum ealowosan ealdor oppringed were winsadum bid aer his worda to hraed. Sum sceal on beore purh byreles hond meodugal maecga; ponne he gemet ne con gemearcian his mupe mode sine, ac sceal ful earmlice ealdre linnan dreogan dryhtenbealo dreamum biscyred ond hine to sylfcwale secgas nemnad maenad mid mupe meodugales gedrinc. (48-57) [From one, an angry drunkard, the sword's edge will take away life on the mead-bench, while the man sits drinking: he was too hasty with his words. …" @default.
• W340892433 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W340892433 date "2007-09-22" @default.
• W340892433 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W340892433 title "Caring for the Dead in the Fortunes of Men" @default.
• W340892433 hasPublicationYear "2007" @default.
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