Burh and Beam, Burning Bright: A Study in the Poetic Imagination of the Old English Exodus

Abstract

The Old English Exodus, a vigorous poetic retelling of the most exciting parts of the eponymous book, stands out from its immediate context, Junius 11, a manuscript of Biblical verse, and, indeed, from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon literature. One of the distinct features of its poetics is its self-conscious handling of two unexpected evocative objects to explore the larger themes of connection and disruption, tradition and innovation. The first, surprising for a poem taking place in and around the desert and the sea, is the burh, ''city, fortification, enclosure,'' that emerges, on a horizontal axis, in various permutations throughout the epic voyage of the Israelites, and shows continuity within discontinuity. The second crucial artifact, the shape-shifting pillar separates Moses' troop from their surroundings while connecting them vertically to the biblical past and the Christian and eschatological future. Through my investigation of these two evocative objects I hope not only to illuminate a new aspect of an Old English poetics, but also to make an earlymedievalist contribution to recent discussions of fusions between the human and the artifactual in ''thing theory.''Keywords The Old English Exodus Á Poetics Á Evocative objects Á Thing theory Scholars ranging from anthropologists to psychologists have always looked to the role that things play in human lives to reveal deeper interactions at heart of the structures that interest them, be they societies or psyches. The relatively recent trend called ''thing theory'' draws on and extends these critical endeavors. Thing theory argues that we use objects for many purposes, among them to ''help us make our