Humanities (Mar 2022)
<i>Wyrd</i> Poetics: Collapsing Timescapes and Untimely Desires in <i>The Ruin</i>
Abstract
John Niles suggests that Old English poems often “demand […] attention not only to the possible nuances of meaning of every word, but also to the spaces where no words are written and no story told”. Such spaces, he argues, invite readers into a kind of intellectual “play” that constitutes, in fact, participation, even collaboration, in the creation of meaning. However, what of more literal spaces in texts, not perceptual gaps composed by a poet, but rather material gaps “crafted” by manuscript damage? What more radical, “veered” reading follows if we pay attention to the physical damage, neither to lament the loss nor to restore what might have been there once, but rather to collaborate with its void? The damage to the final folios of the Exeter Book manuscript means that we read a different poem from any “intact” or “original” text we may try to (re)create; we read something that not only responds to, but also reifies the material effects of time and wyrd, the powerful other-than-human force that plays so prominent a role in the poem. This essay seeks to unsettle the text by engaging with both the poem’s extant words and the silent spaces of wyrd’s traces “inscribed” upon the material manuscript.
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