NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: Three Impressionists (part 1)

So, last week, I described my purist-impressionist scale as a 1–10 spectrum of historical metrical fidelity. See my entry for "Purists vs. Impressionists" here. Yet I know some people will naturally (and automatically) discount certain impressionists solely on the suspicion that they don’t know much, if anything, about genuine medieval alliterative poetics. And, granted, some revivalists do not, but even if true, I suggested this doesn’t necessarily impact a text’s literary merit one way or another.

Proof is always in the pudding, though, so let’s prepare to be slathered in pudding. We’ll be turning to three exciting revivalists whose deviations from the historical meters are, bluntly, less than fully intentional, yet their texts are both fascinating and critically interesting. Without further ado, our first poet is …..

PATRICK ROTHFUSS

Call me biased (and I probably am), but the honor of most metrically bonkers revivalist goes to Patrick Rothfuss. He included two poems in The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), and from a purist’s perspective it would be hard for anyone to flout the traditional restrictions of Old English prosody any more egregiously. Given issues of copyright, I’ll quote just one line, but that’ll be plenty:

Hot comes the huntress     Fela, flushed with finding

By itself, maybe this line doesn’t seem all that bonkers. The first half-line, at least, can be read as Sievers type A, but that’s likely a pure accident. Tellingly, the character who recites this poem – a young student-scholar by name of Simmon – specifically disavows any claim to knowledge about the meter. This random remark, though, which Rothfuss didn’t have to include for character or plot reasons, reads to me like an authorial insert. Rothfuss knows he isn’t a medievalist. He probably suspects his metrics stink, but if any pedants or college professors out there don’t like what he’s doing, well, there’s several places where they can stick those complaints … and none will be particularly well-lighted.

In fact, Rothfuss breaks quite a few metrical restrictions in an impressively brief span of time. His second half-line has three lifts, all of which alliterate, including the last, and this half-line accordingly turns up its nose up to every Sievers type to known to man. Likewise, Rothfuss’s line apparently considers verse-linking alliteration optional. So the only thing known for certain about Rothfuss’s grasp of Old English meter is that it includes

• (1)  caesuras;
• (2)  compounded words like “fast-found” (found in a later line); and
• (3)  alliteration … lots and lots of alliteration.

Nor is there anything wrong with that. As the writer of a fantasy novel, Rothfuss has a specific rhetorical purpose in mind: to suggest an archaic medieval meter for the non-academic readers reading his book, who maybe need hitting over the head with the meter’s most blatantly obvious features. Rothfuss’s metrical excess does exactly what he needs it to do – and who cares, anyway, he seems to suggest, about the real Old English rules?

(By the way, for a slightly different take on Rothfuss’s two poems, check out Lancelot Schaubert’s brief review on Forgotten Ground Regained.)

PAUL EDWIN ZIMMER

As this series continues, I’ll talk more about Zimmer, a deeply underappreciated author of heroic fantasy whose impact on the Modern Revival runs wide. Like C. S. Lewis, he began as a poet, but unlike that Oxford Inkling, Zimmer was neither Christian nor a scholar. In fact, he never even attended college. He learned about medieval poetic forms largely on his own as part of his antiquarian leanings and Neo-Pagan spirituality, but one result is that what Zimmer knows about the Middle Ages bears several noticeable gaps. For instance, let’s sneak a peek at one of the Modern Revival’s more intriguing texts, his twelve-line poem, “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost.”

For some context, back in the late 1970s, a university professor of Scandinavian and German Studies, Jere Fleck, began publishing several long alliterative poems in the Society of Creative Anachronism’s official magazine, Tournaments Illuminated. Most of these long poems, called drápur (sing. drápa), use an exceedingly complex skaldic meter, and I personally consider them the most exciting amateur productions of the Modern Alliterative Revival.

Paul Edwin Zimmer

Yet, thanks to their difficulty, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Fleck’s drápur to first-timers. Zimmer evidently had similar objections. In 1976, he penned a playful poetic response whose title, “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost,” alludes to the name of Fleck’s medieval persona, Geirr Bassi Haraldsson. We can glean the general gist of Zimmer’s grumbles from the following:

The runes he [Fleck] writes, with     rime all a-glitter,

Are Icelandic to excess,    and over-ornate:

Poor Kvasir is cold in     such Celtic adornment (l. 3-5)

Metrically, this text leans well onto the impressionist side: a seven or eight on my 1–10 scale. We can forego the specifics, but several factors lead to me to suspect Zimmer’s deviations from the historical Old English meter are less than fully self-aware. One major hint is that none of Zimmer’s other alliterative poems demonstrate a purist sensibility. That’s always a major clue. Another major clue is that “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost” is filled with niggling historical inaccuracies sure to raise the eyebrows of any trained medievalist.

And raise Fleck’s eyebrows they surely did. In a friendly open letter published a few months afterward, Fleck defends himself against Zimmer’s “wrathful ribbing” (as he calls it) by observing that, if the two men differ in their poetic tastes, it’s probably because their respective SCA persons hail from different historical periods. As “Geirr Bassi Haraldsson,” Fleck hails from 10^th-century Iceland, and he guesses that Zimmer’s persona, “Master Edwin Bersark,” belongs to the pre-Christian Saxon era. As evidence, he cites Zimmer’s usage of “Harold” (the English spelling of Fleck’s patronymic) and “Woden” in line 6. A Norseman would have said Óðinn, and a Christian Saxon would not have mentioned this Germanic god at all.

Moreover, any 10^th-century Saxon would have clearly recognized Fleck’s long poems as skaldic. At that time, northern England was dominated by Scandinavian York and the Danelaw, and the skalds enjoyed a wide renown. As Fleck remarks, there is nothing “excessive” about their poetry. Drápur are an historically appropriate way to praise kings. Any simpler meter would cause offense, so skaldic poetry is exactly as “ornate” as it needs to be. Nonetheless, if Zimmer’s medieval persona belongs to the early Saxon period, the 6^th or 7^th century, Fleck magnanimously concedes that there’s no reason for him to know such things …. even if Fleck still can’t explain why any early Saxon bard would mention “Kvasir” (a Norse name) or describe Norse poetry as “Celtic.”

Of course, the real reason for such discrepancies is that Zimmer – an amateur enthusiast, not a Professor of Scandinavian and Germanic Studies – just got his medieval details mixed up. But Fleck is too polite to say so, and, anyway, nobody in the SCA wants to break the customary ludic framework that surrounds their discourse. Despite the historical confusions behind “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost,” however, which also explain Zimmer’s loose impressionist metrics, what makes this text so useful for the Modern Revival? Mainly this: although Zimmer’s poem isn’t the first modern alliterative poem written in direct response to another revivalist text – that mystery I’ll save for later – “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost” offers a rare glimpse at revivalist reception history: how a reader contemporary with Fleck viewed his scholarly drápur. In other words, Zimmer provides a direct and pointed response from one self-aware, ambitious revivalist to another.

[This concludes my discussion of Zimmer. To find out who my third impressionist is, the “most perfect” example of my argument, tune in next week ….]