📄 Wilcox, Jonathan. 2023. Humour in Old English Literature: Communities of Laughter in Early Medieval England. Pp. vii + 343. ISBN 9781487545307.

Summary

This is Samantha Zacher's review of Jonathan Wilcox's monograph on humour in Old English texts. The book challenges the common view that this literature is uniformly solemn, elegiac and moralizing. Wilcox draws mainly on incongruity theory, in which humour comes from a gap between what is expected and what happens. He supplements it with superiority theory (Bergson) and release theory (Freud). Across eight chapters he reads a wide range of genres:

• the Exeter Book riddles, including the runic ones, and The Rune Poem
• rhyme-driven poems
• heroic verse such as Maldon and Beowulf
• the mock-heroic Judith and Andreas
• homilies, saints' lives, and Apollonius of Tyre

A recurring thread is the audience. Wilcox keeps asking who would laugh, and suggests that marginal listeners such as women, servants and slaves might enjoy jokes at the expense of the warrior elite. Zacher praises the book's organization and learning. Her one reservation is that Wilcox may give too little weight to unresolved ambiguity as a source of humour. She expects the book to change how scholars describe the Old English canon.

Key points

• The book was published in 2023 by University of Toronto Press, ISBN 9781487545307, vii + 343 pages. The review appeared in SELIM 30 (2025), pp. 280–84.
• Wilcox names three sources of literary incongruity:
  • register shifts between high and low (Bakhtin)
  • playful breaking of taboos (Douglas)
  • comic timing (Hurley et al.)
• Several riddles allow more than one solution:
  • Riddle 44: key or penis.
  • Riddle 28: parchment book or grain-based drink.
  • Riddle 51: what first looks like swift living creatures turns out to be a quill pen.
• Beowulf offers wordplay and understatement:
  • The hero puns on byrgan, which can mean either "taste" or "bury".
  • Sea-monsters he has just slain are called sundes þe sænre, literally "slower at swimming".
• Other examples of humour:
  • Andreas: dramatic irony, as the apostle preaches to Christ, who is disguised as his ship's captain.
  • Seasons for Fasting: satire of drunken clergy.
  • Lives of cross-dressing saints: Eugenia and Euphrosyne.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Wilcox treats humour as a clash between the script a reader expects and the one actually delivered, so a joke can be located by spotting the gap between prediction and outcome.
• I2. In Andreas the comedy depends on the reader knowing something the character does not, namely the captain's true identity.
• I3. Understatement works by describing something extreme in very mild terms, as when slain monsters are merely "slower at swimming".
• I4. Zacher argues that some humour lives in refusing to settle on one meaning. Her examples are riddles with two answers and a pronoun that could point to either Heremod or Beowulf.
• I5. Wilcox separates a riddle's misleading "false focus" from its real answer and treats being led astray as part of the pleasure.

For Mova

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

• I1 (frames): The irony module could flag a passage when the frame predicted from context conflicts with the frame the clause actually fills, and that conflict would be its explicit reason for the flag.
• I2 (world): Mova could store separate knowledge states for each character and for the reader, so that dramatic irony shows up as a fact present in one state but missing from another.
• I3 (frames): If the world state records an extreme event while the predicate is weak or neutral, that mismatch could be raised as a cue for implicature or sarcasm.
• I4 (frames): Coreference could keep several antecedents alive with explicit evidence for each, rather than forcing an early choice when a text may be deliberately ambiguous.
• I5 (answer): A riddle or fable QA reader could record both the misleading reading and the final solution, and explain which clues caused the switch between them.