Defining the Elegiac Genre in the Anglo-Saxon World: an Analysis of Expressive Speech Acts

Abstract

Defining the genre 'elegy' in the Anglo-Saxon cultural horizon and at the same time delimiting the boundaries within which some Old English lyrical compositions might be grouped is a far from trivial operation. Indeed, contrary to the classical tradition where the elegiac meter – a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter- represents the distinctive element of the genre, the Anglo-Saxon poetry lacks a characterising meter for the elegies. Since the early nineteenth century scholars have been applying the word “elegy” to nine Old English poems found in the Exeter Book manuscript that have traditionally been treated as genre for their general sense of lament. The current study is part of this field of research and proposes a new attempt to delimit the elegy genre through a pragmatic analysis. In details, the “speech act theory" will be applied since it provides an interesting and productive new way of looking at the elegiac discourse. The analysis of speech acts will be conducted on two levels: at a micro-structural level, namely by focussing on individual illocutionary acts expressed in single sentences, and at a macro-structural level, by focussing on the so-called macro-speech acts, where it seems possible to recognise a global discourse illocutionary point together with a discourse illocutionary force. The identification of an expressive illocutionary force, in particular that of lamenting, at the macro level of speech will represent a possible demonstration of the elegiac nature of these compositions.