Beyond the Sun’s Setting: Webs of Unknowing in Old English

Abstract

In Old English poetry and prose, declarations of unknowing and inexpressibility appear as quasi-formulaic assertions that no human being exists who could know or express the declarations’ subject—even when the text surrounding the declaration of unknowing contains evidence to the contrary. Consistently, in homilies and poetry alike, declarations of unknowing mark out the supernatural, functioning as traditional poetic markers of wonder and awe. With declarations of unknowing as a case study, this paper proposes a network model for visualizing the relationship between motifs, texts, and traditional associations within the larger expressive economy of oral-traditional Old English poetics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.