AMAZEMENT and FEAR in Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Emotional Communities, Polysemy and Models of Sainthood

Abstract

This article explores the role of fear and awe in Guthlac A and that of wonder in Guthlac B. Based on recent emotion theories, scholarship on the adaptation of Latin sources into Old English verse, and studies on emotional communities in the Middle Ages, the purpose of this paper is to examine how these two Old English authors interpret emotional experience in these poems and how they construct an effective emotional dimension in their texts that is linked to doctrinal ideas. This research reveals how each of these authors prefers some emotional response over others and how they also employ figurative language to transmit a series of doctrinal messages that are constructed around an appreciation of saintly virtue and secular and religious knowledge, and a fear of moral contamination that is triggered by the demonic.