Caring for the dead in The Fortunes of Men.

Whether it is an effect of what was once called the "somber cast of the Teutonic mind" or of St. Benedict's dictum to "have death always before our eyes," the Old English poetic tradition seems unusually given to depictions of the indignities suffered by dead bodies. (1) A handful of verse texts nearly make this theme their exclusive subject. Aside from Soul and Body, with its lengthy and hideous account of worms ravaging a corpse, few yield to this distasteful tendency more than another poem preserved in the late tenth-century Exeter Book known variously as The Fortunes of Men, The Fates of Men, and The Fates of Mortals. Where its assemblage of tortured and abused bodies comes from is a matter that seems to have evaded much systematic investigation. Only a handful of articles and chapters have tried to make sense of the poem, and many of these, however meritorious, seem locked in old ways of thinking about early English verse, reliant as they often are on somewhat hazy notions of pan-Germanic prehistory. The present article questions the widely assumed disunity of Fortunes (itself an unfortunate outcome of the Germanist approach) and traces the poem's gruesome preoccupations to pastoral texts known to English audiences. Though it is customarily discussed in isolation from the so-called "soul-and-body tradition" and the intellectual climate from which it emerged, I hope to show why questions concerning the rise of this genre in England are probably not separable from those that have come to surround this fascinating (albeit very strange) poem. (2)

First, however, it will be necessary to consider somewhat closely the poem's peculiar structure. Fortunes begins with a lengthy catalog of usually fatal calamities, all of which are arranged in an order that seems likely to have been deliberate, but whose underlying logic is disputed by commentators? The poet first mentions the case of someone--presumably a child--who is eaten by wolves. (4) Next come references, in the following order, to starvation ("Sumne sceal hungor ahipan," translated by Bernard Muir as "hunger shall devour another" [5a]), death in a storm at sea ("sumne sceal hreoh fordrifan" [15b]), the lethal injury of a spear ("sumne sceal gar agetan" [16a]), and death by unspecified means in warfare ("sumne gud abreotan" [16b]).

At line 17 the character of these misfortunes appears to change. Now employing a more expansive mode of narration, the poet mentions a case of blindness, then the misery of one who has been lamed by crippling injuries to his sinews. (5) Next comes a grim narration of a person falling from a tree and meeting his death at the roots, followed by that of a "friendless" ("wineleas") man, presumably condemned to outlawry, who is unwelcome everywhere and obliged to live among alien peoples. (6) The poet goes on to describe one obviously punitive death by hanging ("sum sceal on geapum / galgan ridan" [33]), and another by burning, perhaps in a fire set deliberately. (7) The circumstances behind these deaths are left obscure as the poet dwells instead on descriptions of the body being consumed by birds or metaphorically consumed by fire. In the case of the hanging, the poet's language makes clear that the misery of this death, perhaps contrary to what we might expect, resides largely in the victim's inability to protect his corpse from hungry birds: Finally, before the poet shifts to narrating a series of happier fates, we arrive at a curious pair of episodes concerned with the consequences of drinking:

 
   Sumum meces ecg on meodubence 
   yrrum ealowosan ealdor oppringed 
   were winsadum bid aer his worda to hraed. 
   Sum sceal on beore purh byreles hond 
   meodugal maecga; ponne he gemet ne con 
   gemearcian his mupe mode sine, 
   ac sceal ful earmlice ealdre linnan 
   dreogan dryhtenbealo dreamum biscyred 
   ond hine to sylfcwale secgas nemnad 
   maenad mid mupe meodugales gedrinc. 
   (48-57) 

[From one, an angry drunkard, the sword's edge will take away life on the mead-bench, while the man sits drinking: he was too hasty with his words. One man will, at beer-drinking, (become) drunk through the hand (instigation?) of a cup-bearer. Then he does not know how to govern his mouth with his mind in due measure, but shall quite miserably give up his life, (shall) suffer the worst evil deprived of joys, and men will name him a suicide, (will) lament with mouth the drinking of the drunk (one).]

It is plain that this catalog reflects a taste for gloomy subjects not shared by subsequent eras and perhaps peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon period. Nor is it impossible that this poem preserves to some extent some of the more harrowing sights that were known to early medieval people. Given material evidence that references to heafod-stoccas [head-stakes] in charter bounds indicate their use for the end implied by their name, it has recently been suggested that "executed and displayed corpses could be part of the landscape of ecclesiastical estates as well as lay ones" in late Anglo-Saxon England? That the poem offers an inventory of the real fates one might encounter at this time, perhaps based in relatively direct experience, is at least the most convenient way to account for its origins.

If this is not the solution preferred by the relatively few scholars who have discussed the poem, it is probably because the traditionalism of Old English verse appears to have made it an unwieldy instrument with which to record the realities of the time. Formulaic language and frozen phraseology seem often to have constrained poets to talk about the present in the idiom of the remote past. Even explicitly devotional poetry sometimes relies on units of discourse that predate the era of conversion and confront modern readers with what seem to be jarringly unorthodox depictions of Christ as a young warlord or descendant of Odin. (10) It is because of such formal constraints that scholarship has long been occupied with establishing the cultural provenance of various stock phrases and themes. However disagreeable the nationalist origins of this critical subfield may be, and however misguided some may find the reified notions of culture upon which it relies, the effort to establish a cultural taxonomy of Old English poetic texts and their component parts justly remains a significant area of scholarly interest--and, perhaps, an inevitable one, since the conservatism of Anglo-Saxon verse has allowed for little agreement on dating and thus stifled most attempts to consider poems in light of a specific historical context. (11)