Great points! Although I have to admit I clicked this post with some dread: my own substack was largely begun in order to set out my own thoughts on Andreas, and there's always the fear that those thoughts have been anticipated and rendered redundant by better thinkers. I'll offer them here in brief, in case you're interested:
Primarily I've been focusing on the use of 'enta geweorc' (and 'ent' more broadly) through Old English poetry & prose.
The thing I'm exploring right now, in a series of 3 posts, is that the expression 'ealdsweord eotonisc' sets up a nice opposition to 'enta geweorc'. The 'eotonish' weapons (which only appear 3 times, and only in Beowulf) are consistently used to turn the tide of some difficult battle in favor of the (young) hero: the sword Beowulf finds in Grendel's lair; the sword Wiglaf brandishes as he rushes to Beowulf's aid against the dragon; and the sword Eofor uses to kill Ongentheow.
'Entish' objects are, in contrast, usually associated with ruins or ruined gear, and are often somehow 'defensive' in nature. They are contemplated by exiles or old men. (Aelfric's version of Maccabees upends this somewhat, but I think there's a reason why.)
The paradigm is expressed succinctly in Beowulf 2979: 'ealdsweord eotonisc entiscne helm' - where (young) Eofor's eotonish sword crashes into (old) Ongentheow's entish helmet and kills the king.
One way this paradigm appears to be violated is in the use of 'enta aergeweorc' to refer to the lair-sword - but I argue that this is in fact not a difficulty, since the lair-sword is 'eotonisc' when it is wielded by the heroic Beowulf, but 'entisc' when it is 'broken' (as a hilt) and held by the old Hrothgar.
What this has to do with Andreas is that I see the poet - long recognized as somehow commenting on Beowulf - to be disturbing this paradigm. Only in Andreas do the 'enta geweorc' (the city streets and the pillar that unleashes the flood) act like 'eotonisc' things. The streets wound the saint; the pillar slays the Mermedonians. Of course, both of these woundings/slayings are themselves, in a typical Christian paradox, (re)vivifying and also self-concealing: the stones draw Andreas's blood, which sprouts blossoming groves that themselves cover the streets. The pillar floods the city and is itself never seen or mentioned again - yet it is the instrument through which a transformative conversion is worked. Entish stuff serves, in Andreas, like the eotonish swords in Beowulf: as instruments through which a victorious reversal of fortune is accomplished.
This sort of reading - in which Mermedonia is actually changed in the end, for the better - has been disputed recently by Hostetter (Political Appetites), in which he argues that Andreas sails off and leaves the Mermedonians 'starving' because the saint has deprived them of their human cattle. It's an audaciously materialist & reductive (mis)reading of a poem in which, yes, blossoming groves really did just spring up from saint's blood and the city has turned to gold. Anything to shoehorn in anti-colonialism, I guess?
Anyway, I do hope you'll continue to post your thoughts on the poem - there are so few people saying interesting things about it.
And I hope you'll keep translating it, too - even though I had recently considered trying my own version. (I need more practice, anyway, as is probably obvious from any of my posts.)
That's a great observation on the connotations of 'ettinish' swords, and certainly something I missed despite having looked at Beowulf quite closely.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Parry-Lord school, i.e. oral-formulaic theory, but one writer in that tradition (John Miles Foley) was very interested in the 'traditional referentiality' built up in poetic phrases as a result of their repeated use in specific contexts. Some of the examples he found in Homer and South Slavic oral epic were quite contextually restricted (for example, South Slavic "you've dreamed a dream so you're frightened" is always used to patronize a woman or other noncombatant who predicts a military disaster and that person always turns out to be right), so in this case one would imagine something more along the lines of "ettinish swords always betoken a reversal of fortune in a physical battle" than a less specific "ettinish objects always betoken a reversal of fortune". Provided we are willing to entertain the possibility that something found only in one part of the corpus could have been a traditional phrase that happened to go otherwise unrecorded, this *might* explain both its consistent use in Beowulf and its absence from Andreas.
I've got a few things in the pipeline at the moment but definitely planning to continue work on this poem. Looking forward to your post(s) on it too.
I'm aware of oral-formulaic theory, but not very familiar with it. Your substack has me eyeing those books again, though. Foley is somewhere in my notes; he had something to say about 'enta geweorc'.
It's strange that 'eoten' survived far longer than 'ent', and yet the latter appears far more frequently across the poetry (Beowulf, Andreas, Wanderer, Ruin, Maxims II; we can also count Elene with 'burg enta'). 'Ent' is also met pretty regularly in prose, while 'eoten' is never found there as far as I know.
So 'eoten' may not have been widely seen a 'poetic/literary' word - and yet I don't think it shows up in place-names, either (while 'ent' does).
Taking another look at Watkins' How to Kill a Dragon, I'm struck both by how specific and persistent formulas seem to be, and how they are very much out of current fashion (from what I can tell) in literature studies. More work for those who want it, I guess!
Great points! Although I have to admit I clicked this post with some dread: my own substack was largely begun in order to set out my own thoughts on Andreas, and there's always the fear that those thoughts have been anticipated and rendered redundant by better thinkers. I'll offer them here in brief, in case you're interested:
Primarily I've been focusing on the use of 'enta geweorc' (and 'ent' more broadly) through Old English poetry & prose.
The thing I'm exploring right now, in a series of 3 posts, is that the expression 'ealdsweord eotonisc' sets up a nice opposition to 'enta geweorc'. The 'eotonish' weapons (which only appear 3 times, and only in Beowulf) are consistently used to turn the tide of some difficult battle in favor of the (young) hero: the sword Beowulf finds in Grendel's lair; the sword Wiglaf brandishes as he rushes to Beowulf's aid against the dragon; and the sword Eofor uses to kill Ongentheow.
'Entish' objects are, in contrast, usually associated with ruins or ruined gear, and are often somehow 'defensive' in nature. They are contemplated by exiles or old men. (Aelfric's version of Maccabees upends this somewhat, but I think there's a reason why.)
The paradigm is expressed succinctly in Beowulf 2979: 'ealdsweord eotonisc entiscne helm' - where (young) Eofor's eotonish sword crashes into (old) Ongentheow's entish helmet and kills the king.
One way this paradigm appears to be violated is in the use of 'enta aergeweorc' to refer to the lair-sword - but I argue that this is in fact not a difficulty, since the lair-sword is 'eotonisc' when it is wielded by the heroic Beowulf, but 'entisc' when it is 'broken' (as a hilt) and held by the old Hrothgar.
What this has to do with Andreas is that I see the poet - long recognized as somehow commenting on Beowulf - to be disturbing this paradigm. Only in Andreas do the 'enta geweorc' (the city streets and the pillar that unleashes the flood) act like 'eotonisc' things. The streets wound the saint; the pillar slays the Mermedonians. Of course, both of these woundings/slayings are themselves, in a typical Christian paradox, (re)vivifying and also self-concealing: the stones draw Andreas's blood, which sprouts blossoming groves that themselves cover the streets. The pillar floods the city and is itself never seen or mentioned again - yet it is the instrument through which a transformative conversion is worked. Entish stuff serves, in Andreas, like the eotonish swords in Beowulf: as instruments through which a victorious reversal of fortune is accomplished.
This sort of reading - in which Mermedonia is actually changed in the end, for the better - has been disputed recently by Hostetter (Political Appetites), in which he argues that Andreas sails off and leaves the Mermedonians 'starving' because the saint has deprived them of their human cattle. It's an audaciously materialist & reductive (mis)reading of a poem in which, yes, blossoming groves really did just spring up from saint's blood and the city has turned to gold. Anything to shoehorn in anti-colonialism, I guess?
Anyway, I do hope you'll continue to post your thoughts on the poem - there are so few people saying interesting things about it.
And I hope you'll keep translating it, too - even though I had recently considered trying my own version. (I need more practice, anyway, as is probably obvious from any of my posts.)
That's a great observation on the connotations of 'ettinish' swords, and certainly something I missed despite having looked at Beowulf quite closely.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Parry-Lord school, i.e. oral-formulaic theory, but one writer in that tradition (John Miles Foley) was very interested in the 'traditional referentiality' built up in poetic phrases as a result of their repeated use in specific contexts. Some of the examples he found in Homer and South Slavic oral epic were quite contextually restricted (for example, South Slavic "you've dreamed a dream so you're frightened" is always used to patronize a woman or other noncombatant who predicts a military disaster and that person always turns out to be right), so in this case one would imagine something more along the lines of "ettinish swords always betoken a reversal of fortune in a physical battle" than a less specific "ettinish objects always betoken a reversal of fortune". Provided we are willing to entertain the possibility that something found only in one part of the corpus could have been a traditional phrase that happened to go otherwise unrecorded, this *might* explain both its consistent use in Beowulf and its absence from Andreas.
I've got a few things in the pipeline at the moment but definitely planning to continue work on this poem. Looking forward to your post(s) on it too.
I'm aware of oral-formulaic theory, but not very familiar with it. Your substack has me eyeing those books again, though. Foley is somewhere in my notes; he had something to say about 'enta geweorc'.
It's strange that 'eoten' survived far longer than 'ent', and yet the latter appears far more frequently across the poetry (Beowulf, Andreas, Wanderer, Ruin, Maxims II; we can also count Elene with 'burg enta'). 'Ent' is also met pretty regularly in prose, while 'eoten' is never found there as far as I know.
So 'eoten' may not have been widely seen a 'poetic/literary' word - and yet I don't think it shows up in place-names, either (while 'ent' does).
Taking another look at Watkins' How to Kill a Dragon, I'm struck both by how specific and persistent formulas seem to be, and how they are very much out of current fashion (from what I can tell) in literature studies. More work for those who want it, I guess!