ABSTRACT
Anglo-Saxonists have wrestled anew with the dating of Old English poetry for a decade now. Although several scholars have noted that the linguistic methods we once used to date these texts are in many cases outdated, 1 that there is but ambiguous evidence for the writing of vernacular poetry before the time of Alfred, 2 and that we do not have any unambiguous contemporary references to written poetry before the mid-ninth century, we nevertheless seem to be incapable of dismantling a body of preconceptions about the historical context of the extant Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus. 3 Beowulf has been the object of most of the dating studies which have taken place recently, and it may be relevant to note that those scholars who use methodologies restricted to Beowulf alone arrive at a significantly later date for the poem than those who employ the traditional datings of other Old English poems. 4 We must, however, reexamine the datings of those poems and the logic used to determine dates before we are free to exploit the poems as comparanda in dating Beowulf or any other poetic work. The Cynewulf corpus is especially in need of reconsideration of this sort, because these poems have been used to represent an early ninth-century Mercian textuality, capping what might be called a great Anglian poetic period which begins with Beowulf Genesis A, Daniel, and Exodus. In his monumental study of the history of Old English metrics, which almost amounts to a representation of Old English philology, R. D. Fulk has most recently supported the Anglian hypothesis, and ventured to suggest that all of these poems, plus Cynewulf's oeuvre, Andreas, and the Guthlac poems as well are Mercian creations antedating the mid-ninth century. 5 As historicism—with or without “new” prepended—gains a stronger foothold in contemporary criticism of Old English poetry, the proposed dates for our texts will have to be continually scrutinized to make sure that we are not reading texts against one another in ways which are diachronically impossible. Similarly, we have to make sure that we are not, by mis-dating poems, making it impossible to read them within such contexts as have, indeed, been preserved for them. We know a great deal more about the culture of tenth-century England than we do of eighth- or ninth-century England. A text which has been copied in that period (and all of the poems which Fulk identifies as Mercian were copied during or just after the tenth century) should not be appropriated for another time and place, unless the arguments for doing so are very strong. To do so robs them of a large number of potential textual associations, and it robs the tenth century of its best evidence for what may have been a fascinating vernacular intellectual hegemony whose dimensions we have not yet begun to appreciate.
