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THE CHARACTERISTIC MOMENT AS A MOTIF IN THE FINNSBURG FRAGMENT AND DEOR ROBIN WAUGH Memorial University I O r a l poets, poems, and heroes are particularly competitive (Ong, Orality 43-45; Parks 72, 76 and passim; Opland 176). Occasionally, heroes in Old English poetry betray an awareness of this competition, attempt to mark their own spots in time, and engage in self-conscious dialogues with the past. I call these occasions characteristic moments. I shall analyse two of them — one in The Finnsburg Fragment, the other in Deor; but first I wish to ground my concept of the characteristic moment within the thought-patterns of oral culture, so far as is possible.1 I must also explain why I do not want to call this point-of-time motif a “theme.” In the preliterate culture of northern Europe, life and biography were preoccupied with the competition and violence of physical acts. Correspond ingly, oral compositions conveyed their information in combative formats, in “proverbs, ... riddles,” and heroic lives. These genres are “essential to oral cultures as means of storing and retrieving and advancing knowledge,” and such works “find some of their commonest uses in verbal combat” (Ong, Fighting 35). Also, life and biography reflected and supported the existing forms of social organization such as kinship; consequently, people thought of human lives, of the stories of these lives, and (perhaps) of time itself as aggregates: as bodies of memories within a person’s mind. Although the past, for oral people, is a collection of legendary and nearly legendary events, places, and persons, it always resides within the body of oneself or of another. The other’s past, then, exists as a challenge to oneself because it cannot be separated from the other’s physical, competitive form (Bloom 80). To silence this challenge, poets and warriors must compete with and sur pass all prior accomplishments, no matter how long ago the competing deeds actually occurred. The active hero defeats his rivals by gathering them, their actions, and their histories into his own reputation. In a new biography he may absorb older deeds by performing them under his own name; or he may invite comparison between himself and other performers. Even if the new hero only equals earlier feats, he surpasses anything or anybody in the past English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 3, Sept. 1997 by being the subject of the current oral work. As an Irish poem puts it, “Cid as ingantu didiu / in seel direcra dimor?” (What more wonderful therefore / [than] the great, incomparable [literally, “that which cannot be answered”] story?; “The Tempest,” lines 9-10).2 Poets and heroes vie for the most ancient events and genealogies in a contest for priority. Antiquity represents power, and words are an evocation of the past. In medieval works the past is “a language ... that appropriates and consumes all other languages” and it is “the site where books are all recaptured and consumed: a site that is nowhere since it gathers all the books of the past in this impossible ‘volume’ whose murmuring will be shelved among so many others” (Foucault 66-67). In spite of the literary bias of Foucault’s image, an oral poem is such a “volume.” Poems compete with and absorb one another. The competition is personal. A challenge (a criticism) appears every time a new work does, because the new poet must work from the tradition, the past — and that past is other poets. Oral works are always comparative, always combative. An Old English riddle shows this inherent aggression and metaphorically conveys the absorption of a rival: Mo55e word fraet. Me )>set fiuhte wraetlieu wyrd, fia ¡c b » t wundor gefraegn, fiaet se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes, peof in pystro, prymfaestne ewide ond pass strangan stapol. (Riddle 47, Exeter Book 205, lines l-5a) [A moth ate words. That appeared to me to be a marvellous event, when I learned of that wonderful happening, that the caterpillar, a thief in darkness, consumed the poem, the secure-in-glory speech, of some man, and [consumed] the foundation of that strong thing.] Absorption relates to the act of speaking, because a hero...
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