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Eorðscræf, eglond and iscealdne sæ: Landscape, Literalism and Metaphor in Some Old English Elegies

Paper · 2012 · Margaret Tedford

Summary

This literary-critical article by Margaret Tedford (Queen's University Belfast) looks at a long-running split in Old English scholarship. One camp reads the landscapes of the Exeter Book "elegies" as purely mental or allegorical. The other treats them as real places that archaeology and history can explain. Each of the four poems Tedford chooses to analyse (The Seafarer, The Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Wife's Lament) is voiced by a solitary, isolated speaker. Her method is close reading of specific landscape terms, set against how those words are used elsewhere in the Old English corpus. The features she studies are:

  • the earth-cave and oak tree in The Wife's Lament
  • the fenland island in Wulf and Eadwacer
  • the seascapes of the two male-voiced poems

Her main claim is that these settings are both concrete and symbolic. The figurative meaning grows out of the literal details and their associations, so the two levels do not compete. Influence also runs in both directions: the surroundings shape the speakers' emotions instead of merely mirroring them. This challenges Stanley's 1955 view that the mood produces the scene. It also gives a richer model of how setting conveys inner life.

Key points

  • Corpus: four Exeter Book poems, two with male and two with female speakers. This allows a comparison of how gendered interiority is expressed.
  • Exclusions: The Husband's Message is left out because it has several speakers. The Ruin is left out because it centres on man-made structures.
  • Isolation, not exile: the study centres on isolation because it is spatial, meaning removal from one place to another. Exile is tied to heroic social codes.
  • Evidence for "eorðscræf": the Paris Psalter renders Latin inferiora terre (Psalm 62:9) as eorðscræfu, a place for the wicked. Citing Johnson 1983, the paper notes that six of the word's ten other attestations clearly mean "grave".
  • Posture contrast: the women in WL and WE sit in forced, dejected inactivity. The Wanderer's gesæt … æt rune marks voluntary Christian contemplation. The Seafarer likewise ends in hope of a heavenly home.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The sense of a disputed word is pinned down by counting how it behaves across all other attestations in the corpus, not by intuition.
  • I2. The wife's location is given as a nested chain of spatial markers: grove of the wood, then under the oak, then in the cave. The paper treats this precision as evidence of a real, mappable setting.
  • I3. Setting is treated as a cause that changes a character's mental state, not just a reflection of it.
  • I4. The same posture verb ("sit") carries opposite pragmatic weight depending on context: helplessness for the women, chosen contemplation for the Wanderer.
  • I5. The paper rejects the either-literal-or-metaphorical choice and argues both readings hold at once, with the figurative one built on the literal.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): ontology entries for rare or ambiguous lemmas could store attestation-based sense distributions, so sense choice is traceable to counted evidence.
  • I2 (world): parse prepositional location chains into an explicit containment hierarchy of entities, instead of collapsing them into a single "location" slot.
  • I3 (world): let location and environment entities feed state transitions, so "trapped in a cave" can explain later sadness or longing in the event order.
  • I4 (frames): frame interpretation of stance or posture verbs should depend on agentivity and context cues, such as forced versus voluntary placement.
  • I5 (frames): represent figurative passages with a grounded literal frame plus a linked metaphorical layer, rather than forcing a single reading.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Queen's University BelfastBelfast · United Kingdom4 works · 232 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works History · 66 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 3 English · 1,373 works Idioms & multiword expressions · 155 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Margaret Tedford. 2012. Eorðscræf, eglond and iscealdne sæ: Landscape, Literalism and Metaphor in Some Old English Elegies. SELIM 19.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.19.2012.111-141

@inproceedings{tedford2012eordscraef,
  title = {{Eorðscræf, eglond and iscealdne sæ: Landscape, Literalism and Metaphor in Some Old English Elegies}},
  author = {Margaret Tedford},
  booktitle = {SELIM 19},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.19.2012.111-141},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.19.2012.111-141}
}

References

52 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  52. Received 24 Feb 2014; accepted 09 May 2014 • SELIM 19 (2012) find

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