Author: Jean Abbott

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

Personal names, particularly historical ones, have long been subject to the unconscious biases of the modern scholars who study them. As a result, existing studies of Old English names have focused primarily on onomastic functions that are readily legible for modern readers, treating names as inter- and extratextual links, purveyors of etymological resonances, and, above all, referential labels for characters. In contrast, this dissertation investigates the ways in which the early medieval English experience of naming might diverge from modern expectations, using case studies and close textual analysis to explore what it means to read an Old English name--or any name--on its own terms. In the process, these case studies reveal a persistent anxiety about names that fail to perform their functions, a failure that leads to an utter onomastic negation discussed here as "un-naming." Chapters 1 and 2 are dedicated to Beowulf, the most well-studied Old English text and also one of the most onomastically dense. Chapter 1 challenges the assumption that names function primarily in a referential way, arguing that each instance of naming in this poem also becomes a means of signaling connection in its own right. Shifting to examine connectedness at the level of character, Chapter 2 recasts Beowulf's network of names as a means of controlling and containing anonymity, a measure that fails spectacularly when the anonymous, unconnected--and therefore un-named--dragon endangers not only the named social network within the poem, but also the audience outside of it. Chapter 3 explores the grammar of "being" and "calling" names in the Old English language, investigating the literary consequences of these naming strategies in a number of poems in the Exeter Book. While the "called" solutions of the Exeter Book Riddles help to construct the sense that an object inhabits its own proper place in the world, the prospect of "being" the names and pseudo-names in Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, Widsith, and The Wanderer can lead to a horrifically indefinite, un-named existence. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that the names of the eponymous interlocutors of the Solomon and Saturn dialogue tradition act as a way of framing, authorizing, and otherwise containing the texts' "transgressive" qualities--a containment that ultimately shatters in Solomon and Saturn II when the monumental "Solomon" and "Saturn" who frame and authorize this dialogue split from the "Solomon" and "Saturn" who address each other as individuals. Together, these case studies demonstrate the stakes and consequences of naming in Old English literature, while also providing a model for more self-conscious and more deeply-contextualized inquiry into the meaning and function of literary personal names.