Jones, Chris. 2018. Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198824527. ix + 312 pages.

§1. Chris Jones’ second monograph, Fossil Poetry, expands and continues his examination of the study, reception, framing, use, and imitation of Anglo-Saxon poetry that began in his 2006 study Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry. That earlier work provided a scholarly detailing of the importance of Old English to twentieth-century major poets who explored and used the tradition (in particular, Pound, Auden, Morgan and Heaney). While noting that Pound was the first significant poet to have formally studied Old English at university, Jones wrote that in the nineteenth century, the influence tended to be more philological than technical or stylistic, and that “the assimilation of Old English into material unrelated to Anglo-Saxon subject matter is, on the whole, a twentieth-century development” (Jones 2006, 8).

§2. While Fossil Poetry does not explicitly set out to disprove that claim, it presents a much richer and more complex legacy of nineteenth-century engagement with Anglo-Saxon poetics. As with its predecessor, Fossil Poetry conducts detailed examinations of selected important authors and their relationship to Anglo-Saxonism, including Scott, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Barnes, Carroll, Whitman, Emerson, Morris, Hopkins, and Tennyson. The rise of poetic Anglo-Saxonism is contextualized amidst the developing new philology, evolutionary theories, and scientific approaches to research, as Jones identifies two major consecutive phases in nineteenth-century recreations of Anglo-Saxonism as a native cultural heritage and poetic inspiration. The first imagines an essential permanent quality, a poetic tradition unbroken even by the Norman Conquest, directly connecting Victorian and Anglo-Saxon literature. After the initial discoveries and decades of dialogue between writers, poets, scholars, and antiquarians (problematically divisive categories that Jones rightly questions as modern anachronisms imposed on the period), a new phase emerges, influenced by Darwin, the rise of the imperial nation-state, and the unprecedented rate of industrialization.

§3. This second phase of Anglo-Saxonism, Jones argues, saw it as “fossilized and in need of revivification” (22), because (as with so many other aspects of Victorian art), the acute sense of widening separation from England’s past provoked the nostalgic desire to solidify a myth of lost Ur-British identity, and to claim the ancient poets and warriors as a tradition that could legitimize and contextualize the linguistic nativism and assimilation of later English poetic traditions. “With disconnectivity also came the possibility of revival” (136). So, situating Fossil Poetry in its appropriate place as prequel to Strange Likeness, Jones traces a three-stage evolution of the reception and use of Anglo-Saxon by poets: ‘constant roots’ (early to mid-nineteenth century, from Scott to Carroll); ‘fossil poetry’ (mid to late-nineteenth century, from Emerson to Hardy); and ‘strange likeness’ (twentieth century, Pound to Heaney).

§4. The breadth of Jones’ scholarship here is difficult to summarize, as he weaves together over a century of England’s examination of its earliest literary past, outlines the changing informal and formal forms of Anglo-Saxon studies, linguistic studies, translation and publication histories, conducts specific and detailed prosody examinations of illustrative poems, and occasionally draws in geology, paleontology, and politics to play meaningful supporting roles. The Romantic reimagining of Anglo-Saxon odes and “wild strophes” facilitated their assimilation into English poetry by Scott, Thomas Warton, and Sharon Turner, who asserted the ballad as an evolved genre of Saxon poetry. These misrepresentations of continuity led to some startling claims, such as John Conybeare’s assertion that Coleridge’s “Christabel” made conscious use of Anglo-Saxon metrical form, or that ‘odes and epitaphs’ were originally a discrete genre within Saxon poetry—tracing roots from the“Battle of Brunanburh” all the way to Dryden and Thomas Gray, aided by translations presented in contemporary rhyming stanzas. Conybeare’s Beowulf and Genesis (translated from the Junius manuscript) were presented in formal blank verse, to better align them with later epics like Milton’s Paradise Lost (which Turner considered to be directly influenced by “Cædmon's Hymn”).

§5. Of course, this kind of nativist cultural translation and updating is itself a defining characteristic of literary creation, as a glance at Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Pope’s Iliad, or even William Morris’s Æneid confirms, and Jones articulates the evolution of Anglo-Saxon poetry reception and framing, and use by Victorian writers and scholars with expertise and precision. In the process he reveals unexpected treasures, not least through documenting the levels of knowledge and engagement these Victorian authors had with Anglo-Saxon material, but through elucidating the idiosyncratic forms their responses took, such as Wordsworth’s use of Bede in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Lewis Carroll’s 1855 poem “Jabberwocky” is revealed as a parody of the ‘constant roots’ narrative joining Anglo-Saxon to Romanticism, and Jones uses it to mark the end of his first reception phase. Carroll’s nonsense philology introduces Jones’ second reception phase: the latter half of the 19^th century, characterized by increasingly archeological approaches that more readily admitted and accommodated discontinuity. The historicism of philology that sought to recover ‘native’ English words and champion their use as a more honest and plain vocabulary, energetic and monosyllabic (contrasted, of course, with polysyllabic Greco-Latin loan words) is hardly new territory for Victorian scholars, and Jones’ argument of a fundamental shift in Anglo-Saxonism can feel itself like an imposition, especially when authors like Tennyson are examined, but the reframing is well-defended and useful. This linguistic nativism not only gave currency to imperialist rhetoric, but aligned itself with Victorian medievalism as an ideological recovery of Britain’s proper heritage. While Whitman and Emerson, on the other side of the Atlantic, used primitivism to assert “moral equivalences between linguistic and ethnic character” (176), William Morris sought to bring a naturalized ‘word-hoard’ back into common use for artistic reasons. Morris’s eccentric Beowulf translation, despite its many etymological sins, is seen in this light as the virtual nadir of “Saxonizing English” experiments (Morris’s late prose romances, which bear more restrained marks of this enthusiasm, would significantly influence Tolkien and Lewis in their later inventions of prelapsarian Old English fantasy).

§6. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tennyson receive the most independent chapters, and these offer important corrective arguments to popular scholarship. Hopkins’ supposed indebtedness to Anglo-Saxon verse (argued by McLuhan, Bloom, and others, though less by Hopkins specialists) is revisited as Jones explores his deep engagement with philology and the science of language, as manifested in his complex use of word roots and meanings. In a manner that presages Pound and Joyce, Hopkins excavates the layered lexical nuances through coining of his own poetic Saxonesque compounds, striving for a more concrete and vivid relationship between word and referent. Tennyson’s long career, spanning both of Jones’ proposed phases of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism, makes his placement in the book’s final full chapter a fitting one. His university notebooks from the 1830s include serious independent linguistic research and calligraphic exercises such as transcribing in an insular miniscule script. Tennyson’s interest in the subject resurfaced later in his 1876 drama Harold, and the 1880 collection Ballads and Other Poems, which featured his full-length “Battle of Brunanburh” translation, which Jones describes as “a performance of Anglo-Saxon as it was constructed by early nineteenth-century antiquarians, as a form of irregular, strophic ode” (257). Bringing together evidence from several stages of Tennyson’s career, Jones claims him as the first major canon poet to have a deep and sustained engagement with Anglo-Saxon linguistics and etymology in his own work.

§7. A final conclusion and coda tie the introduction’s fossil anecdote back into the unfinished story of Anglo-Saxon poetry and its ongoing provisional and contingent reconstruction and interpretation. Taken with Strange Likeness, Jones has completed the first full-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry in English, and it is an admirable work, balanced between detailed prosody and lexical analysis of selected authors, and the larger historical recounting of the subject. Many of Jones’ secondary arguments have been made before, and specialized scholars of Scott, Hopkins, etc., could easily expand the examples and analysis provided, but the scope of the overview excuses necessary brevity, and there are new readings and research throughout. Fossil Poetry raises fascinating questions about the origins and nativist roles of Anglo-Saxon studies, translation, the tradition of prosody, philology, and the nature of the profound debt that the later English canon owes to Anglo-Saxon.

Miles Tittle
University of Ottawa

Published 23-Aug-2023