Christine Elsweiler. Laȝamon’s Brut Between Old English Heroic Poetry and Middle English Romance: A Study of the Lexical Fields ‘Hero’, ‘Warrior’ and ‘Knight’

Abstract

sever Christian persons from their ‘beautiful’ lives, and the seven spiritual heroes of this tale are not so much martyrs or confessors as they are the griefand memory-bearers of a way of spiritual life under attack” (85). This is shrewd, but Joy’s final interpretation of the sleepers’ dual relationship to the city of Ephesus, which changed appreciably throughout their slumber, is more difficult to follow and accept: “But the only thing that can knit the two Ephesuses together is Malchus himself, and his six companions, who, in their reawakened persons – in both body and soul – and also in their textual figuration, mark the place of an historical excess that opens the dimension of the more, of the unincorporable infinite enclosed within the singular self who has touched reality and become real, and whose understanding of the world is indispensable to that world’s completeness” (91). Robin Norris, who edited Anonymous Interpolations and wrote its thoughtful introduction (1–12), is the author of the final essay, “Reversal of Fortune, Response, and Reward in the Old English Passion of St. Eustace” (97–117). Before the martyrdom that takes place in the last seventy-five lines of the story, the events of the Passion of St. Eustace resemble those of a secular romance, and this has led scholars to question its generic integrity. Norris argues persuasively that the Passion is a coherently constructed saint’s life, and that the theme holding it together is tristitia, the sin of excessive sorrow in response to worldly suffering. After demonstrating the prevalent place of this sin in Old English homiletic literature, she provides considerable evidence that the translator altered the Latin exemplar to deemphasize the sorrow of Eustace and his family: “Such alterations in the midst of an otherwise faithful translation indicate that the Old English translator shares the Anglo-Saxon homilists’ concern with the capital sin of excessive sorrow [...]. These homiletic themes, including humility as an appropriate response to adversity and the heavenly reward such an attitude can earn, also permeate the passion’s conclusion, unifying the text as a whole” (111). Norris’s article is praiseworthy for its lucidity and substance. Before moving on, please look again at the price of this anthology and understand that it is not a typographical error. Since 1978, thirty-five useful books have been published as “Subsidia” to the Old English Newsletter, and most of them are still available for less than the cost of a modest lunch. The series has been a welcome anomaly throughout an era of increasingly expensive scholarly materials, and the slim book under review is certainly worth what is asked for it.