Genre(s) in the Making: Diction, Audience and Text in the Old English Seafarer

Abstract

recorded on folios 81b--83a of the Old English Exeter Book manuscript, conventionally and perhaps unfortunately called The Seafarer,' have generated as much critical disagreement per verse as any work in the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon. And yet almost all editors and commentators involved in its study have heaped one enthusiastic evaluation after another on this their bugbear, professing to sense, however individualistically, something of enduring quality, something of deep and familiar resonance even for our very modern and very un-Anglo-Saxon sensibility. Responses to the poem's problematic structure have ranged from Rieger's (1869) initial hypothesis of a dialogue between two speakers, through Pope's (1965, 1974) and Greenfield's (1966, 1969, 1972, 1974) instructive flyting over the dramatic voices versus the single narrator theories, through Stevick's (1965) opinion that our manuscript's apparent lack of unity identifies it as a draft needing a final polishing, and on to Mandel's (1976) recent claim that the poem has a defined, apprehendable structure after all.2 On the closely related question of genre, many scholars have termed the poem an elegy, though often without much of a consensus on what that label should mean; in

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