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I.G. Matyushina

The Earliest European Lyrical Poetry

Summary

The origin of lyrical poetry (analysed in Chapter 1) is connected with ritual folk cycles determined by the calendar or rîtes de passage - birth, initiation, marriage, death. Its primitive syncretic stage goes back to the emotional verbal responses of ritual choirs to the narrative solo part of the coryphaeus - exclamations of joy, grief, excitement in rituals (or in spring cults). Typologically the most archaic are ritual calendar incantations, whose universal motifs, the desire for love, requests for marriage etc., are inherited by the earliest literary lyrical poetry and condition some of its genres (e.g. chanson de malmariée). Rituals independent of seasonal cults give rise to marriage songs, funereal lamentations and eulogies, where descriptive elements gradually appear. These become more complicated in structure and develop ritual symbolism and parallelism, anticipating the psychological parallelism of literary lyrics. Folk songs, based on parallels between natural phenomena and human feelings, may be typologically the earliest love lyrics, leading to the poetry of the troubadours and the minnesingers with its Natüreingang. In contrast to folk song, which relies on common forms and where the individual coincides with the public, literary lyrics are born when the act of artistic creation is aimed not at approaching reproduction of a prior work of art, but at revealing the individuality of the author.

The first lyrical poets of Europe, the skalds, reveal individuality primarily at the level of form, in demonstrating their skill in the artistic use of formal canons. Skaldic love poetry (mansöngr, analysed in Chapter 4) begins from statement of facts, rather than description of feelings, and defamation of the rival is almost as important as praise of the beloved. Thus mansöngr is originally closer to love magic than to love lyric. In typologically later poems, facts are related primarily in order to express emotions, and this conditions the representation of women and of aesthetic landscapes (rarely present in Old Norse culture). Alongside the pragmatic and informative function an aesthetic aim appears. This aim is achieved through a transformation of folklore devices (parallelisms, metaphors, similes) and of all modes of organisation in the vísa (phraseology, syntax and versification), into means of lyrical self-expression. When the creative act, which was previously directed only at the form, involves also the content, authorship becomes fully individual, and at this point lyric in the proper sense of the word is born.

In contrast to Romance lyric (analysed in Chapter 8) with its conventional and fictional content (giving rise to a poetics of rhetorical loci communes which was carried into the new universal "reality" of courtoisie), skaldic love verses are based on actual situations, which they are designed to affect by various means, including use of the proper names of the participants. Romance songs are universally appropriate and so can be performed at any time, whereas skaldic love verses are closely tied to the specific moment of their performance and are traditionally viewed as ex tempore improvisation, implying an archaic view of authorship. The joyful tone of amour courtois lyric, with its tendency to harmonisation, its ease of personification (Joi, Juvens, Mesure), its chivalric cult d’object idéal, and its masculinisation of the lady and feminisation of the troubadour (who is presented as humilis, tremblans), differs from the tragic hopelessness in skaldic mansöngr, where the cult of masculinity is maintained, almost aggressively directed against the rival, and sometimes even turned against the beloved herself. In contrast to the Romance poets, the skalds have not yet discovered the notion of high feeling: Old Norse lexis expresses physical desire but not spiritual love. The emotions are relatively simple: even such topics as the ambiguity of love which existed in ancient times (as in Catullus, odi et amo) are unknown in mansöngr.

Unlike skaldic poetry, the Eddic heroic lays (analysed in Chapter 3) concern feelings expressed only by women. It is commonly believed that in the so-called Eddic heroic elegies (Guðrúnarkviðá fyrsta, Guðrúnarkviðá önnor, Guðrúnarkviða in þriрia, Oddrúnargrótr, Guðrúnarhvöt, Helreið Brynhildar) the heroine possesses both strength of mind and depth of feeling. However, although the Eddic monologues of heroines enumerating their misfortunes are deeply personal, the object of description is not individual feeling, but the realisation of heroic personality in an objective dramatic situation. If we contrast the Eddic elegies with Galicean-Portuguese cantigas de amigo (Chapter 8, Section 6) or corresponding Provençal (Section 4) and Old French genres (Section 5), there is in the former a conspicuous absence of interest in the inner world of the person and a rather detached, objective tone of narration which is characteristic of early stages in the development of "women’s songs". Linguistic evidence in poems belonging to the genre of Eddic heroic elegy shows that subjective feeling was not distinct from notions of social activity and its results.

The Anglo-Saxon lyrics analysed in Chapter 2 include lyrical fragments in epic and heroic poetry, as well as the beginnings of meditative lyric and the first instances of love lyric. In this typologically late lyric, the elements in the "plane of content" are hierarchically connected with each other and governed by the poetics of the text as a whole. Any deviation from a single local-temporal sequence of episodes is charged with special semantic overtones and used as a means of expressing unusually intense feelings in the persona.

Like Anglo-Saxon meditative and love poetry, the Welsh and Irish lyrics analysed in Chapters 5 and 6 belong to the culminating stage of the lyrical form, where what was formerly presented as a monologue from the author is attributed to a persona. The lyrical voice is projected onto an imaginary character, who utters a monologue about his own feelings.

In Chapter 7, an attempt is made to reconstruct the native lyrical traditions of medieval Germany, and an analysis is offered of the different ways, in German and in Romance poetry, of modifying the monologue form and disguising the role of the author.

In Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and the few extant native German lyrics, emotions are far more important than actions, which are included only in so far as they contribute to the expression of feeling. Unlike archaic poetry (e.g., Eddic), where feelings are public and common, the dominant feelings in these lyrics are the personal and inner ones of solitude, exile and wandering. The individuality of the feeling is conveyed primarily through use of the first person and through reference to a present situation. At the same time, however, the lyric ‘I’ is represented in a typical role, so that the feeling also assumes a universal dimension. In love lyric the situation is most often one of present suffering contrasted with memories of past joy, and the suffering is represented as more acute because of the contrast. In meditative lyric the persona is normally in a situation of isolation from society, which prompts reflection on the inevitability of his own death or on the destruction of social structures, which in effect amounts to the loss of the heroic epic past. Thus one source of lyric could paradoxically be said to lie in nostalgia for epic.

The expressiveness of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Eddic elegies is achieved partly through the use of extreme hyperbole in describing emotions and partly through the use of recurrent key words. Componential analysis shows that words expressing emotions are dominant in all medieval lyrics. The range of tense forms is limited, and the present tense is most common. The location and time of day or season are also strictly limited, and closely connected with the feelings expressed.

The influence of folklore remains especially strong in Romance lyric (Mozarabic-Spanish, Latin, Provençal, Old French, Galician-Portuguese and Italian, analysed in Chapter 8, Sections 2-7), for example in the use of an abstract ‘I’, anonymity, connections with ritual and with music, and various characteristic features of oral poetry. Folk dance songs give birth to the Provençal canso and the Italian canzone, to Romance ballads, sonnets, rondeaux. However, the genres of medieval lyric do not become fixed but remain in a process of continuing development.

Various traditions combined to influence the origin and development of European literary lyric. Classical ancient poetry played an important role in the genesis of medieval lyric, and some poetic systems, especially the Latin, were probably integrated with it, through Carolingian culture, into a single literary tradition. Biblical imagery and motifs had a degree of influence which it is impossible to overestimate. At the birth of the medieval European lyric, virtually every poem is filled with reminiscences of the Song of Songs. The main contribution of Christianity to the development of lyric lies in the importance it attributes to individual spiritual life. The tradition of written confession going back to St. Augustine introduced into European literature a more searching analysis of the internal development of personality. The "discovery of the individual" in the Middle Ages, and the consequent attempt to understand the inner world, encouraged a search for means of expressing the feelings of a person, which are the subject of lyrical poetry. Secular lyric is also greatly indebted to religious poetry in its quest for perfection of the means of poetic expression and for the highest qualities of structural artistry. The development of courtois lyric reflects the secularisation of motifs connected with the cult of the Virgin Mary, as well as the complex of factors deriving from its feudal social milieu.

The main aim of the book is not only to analyse the beginnings of all early Medieval lyrical systems, but also to show the polygenetical nature of lyric: the development of magical folk incantations into skaldic lyrics, the connection of the earliest Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon elegies with funereal lamentations and eulogies, the reflection of love and marriage folklore in German and Romance poetry (Mozarabic-Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Latin, Provençal, and Italian), as well as the roots of all medieval lyric in the Bible and classical literature. For most of these poetic systems it is possible to identify the remains of an earlier form, containing the germs of lyrical poetry. This typologically earlier form which precedes lyric is intertwined with epic. Viewed as initial stages in the typological development of lyric, the lyrical fragments incorporated into the epic poetry of the Elder Edda and Beowulf, and into the prose epic of the Old Icelandic and Celtic sagas, indicate an original syncretism of lyrical and epic poetry .