Bishop Æthelwold and the Shaping of the Old EnglishExeter Maxims

Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature

“…115 Brian O'Camb accepts the notion of a "textual community" for a number of Exeter Book poems and links this community to the Benedictine Reform . 116 These critics have intuited that the poems in question have something to do with the Benedictine Reform, so that rather than being generically monastic, they represent the interests and concerns of the certain type of reformed cenobitic monasticism that was far more prevalent and powerful in England between 926 and the reign of Athelred than it was before or after. 117 The invocation of a "textual community" is a way of avoiding the problem that in order to interpret Guthlac A as a tenthcentury creation, we to this point have had to shift our interpretation from being focused around the composition of a text to the copying of the poem or the assembly of a manuscript.…”

“…For example, the "heroic decasyllable" or juna č ki deseterac marks Serbo-Croation oral epic; likewise the "Homeric hexameter." 116 When someone begins to sing in the meter of Beowulf or in Kalevala meter, expectations and preexisting knowledge are invoked in the audience (what is being sung is an epic and therefore these sorts of things are likely to happen) in the same way that "Beowulf ma þ elode, bearn Ecg þ eowes" or "Vaka vanha V ä in ä m ö inen" invoke, pars pro toto , the epic personae of these characters. The part is the traditional, metrical pattern, abstracted from the metrical patterns of allowable words.…”