Thursday, December 15, 2005
The poetic appositive in Old English
From Beowulf and the Appositive Style:
Etymologically The Harbrace College Handbook is correct in saying that an appositive is “set beside” another noun, for the Latin appositus means “placed (next) to.” But in practice appositives can sometimes be separated from the word to which they refer, as in “Beowulf was there, the king of the Geatas.” Also, some grammarians extend the meaning of “appositive” to include parts of speech other than the noun and to include even phrases and clauses. ...
“Appositive” in this broad sense describes fairly accurately what Anglo-Saxon scholars term “variation” in Old English poetry. “Variation” has been defined as “syntactically parallel words or word-groups which share a common referent and which occur within a single clause.” A ubiquitous feature in Old Germanic poetry, variation is, according to Frederick Klaeber, “the very soul of the Old English poetical style.” ...
In Old English poetry, where apposition is used so heavily, the construction often seems especially rich in implicit meaning, as the following examples from Beowulf may suggest.
nealles him on heape handgesteallan
aethelinga bearn ymbe gestodon [2596-97]
“The comrades, the sons of noblemen,
did not stand by him together at all.”Only so much is overtly stated about the cowardly retainers who abandoned Beowulf in his time of need. But implicit are the logical relationships among the apposed elements: “Although sons of nobelemen, and thus especially obligated to stand firm at the hand of the leader, they did not stand by him together at all.”