Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts by Elizabeth Marshall;

Author:Elizabeth Marshall; [Marshall;, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843846406
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

4

Abbo, Ælfric, and the Wolf in Edmund’s Story

‘As a boot was shaped to accept a foot, a dog was shaped to accept a collar’, but though ‘a man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, […] no man could truly tame a wolf’; so George R. R. Martin writes in his A Dance with Dragons.1 While this may be true in Westeros, it was not the case in East Anglia where, in the ninth century, a remarkable miracle occurred. Edmund, the king of East Anglia, had been brutally tortured and decapitated by a rapacious, wolfish Dane named Hinguar,2 who unceremoniously dumped the king’s head in a patch of woodland. Once Hinguar’s army had disembarked and Edmund’s people emerged from hiding, they went searching for their lord’s head. As they trudged through the brambles, they heard something: ‘Here! Here! Here!’. The king’s head had come back to life. Following its voice, Edmund’s people soon found the holy object clasped between the paws of a wolf. Tamed in the presence of Edmund by God, in a reversal of its traditional roles as rapacious corpse-scavenger and speech-stealer, this creature protected the king’s head from the depredations of other animals even as it slavered over the free meal sitting under its nose.

This is the story of Edmund’s martyrdom according to the Passio Sancti Eadmundi, first recorded in writing by Abbo of Fleury at the request of the monks of Ramsey Abbey,3 where he taught Latin between 985 and 987.4 Just feawum gearum ‘a few years’ after Abbo put the Passio to parchment, seo boc ‘that book’ fell into the hands of Ælfric of Eynsham, who subsequently added an abridged, vernacular version of Abbo’s text to his collection of saints’ lives.5 This text ‘is well known to and has delighted generations of undergraduates through Ælfric’s version’,6 the intriguing animal and its supernatural charge providing motivation for even the most reluctant student of the Old English language. Yet Edmund’s wolf and talking head have failed to become as influential a part of the canon of Old English literary research as they are of the canon of pedagogy. Instead, since ‘virtually nothing is known of the historical “king” Edmund’,7 research into both Abbo’s and Ælfric’s passiones is generally dominated by assessments of their historicity, with some treating them as ‘basically historical and reliable’.8 For obvious reasons, those clearly fictional elements of Edmund’s passion – the wolf, the talking head, and other posthumous miracles – have largely been ignored in such research; in her well-known article ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St. Edmund’, for example, historian Dorothy Whitelock simply states that ‘it is not [her] concern to deal with the miracles claimed for Edmund’.9 As a result, ‘Edmund’s passion is thus shorn of its fantastic elements although they are integral to the story’.10

Some have attempted to correct this bias by locating literary sources for the various narrative elements of which these texts are comprised,11 or by ascribing their existence to oral tradition.12 In general, however,

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