Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry

This book examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems, and Beowulf in an effort to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of fictional recycled artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. The resistance of horns, swords, pillars, sculptures, and hoards to submersion in these texts is essential and productive. The appeal of such spolia lies in their partially preserved Otherness, which enables them to gesture towards a story or history outside the new framework. Through the paradox of elusive materiality, spolia communicate awareness that artworks have a weight and an impact that allows them to break through frameworks, crossing temporal and geographical boundaries. Old English poetry famously - and for a corpus rather interested in the enigmatic and the oblique, appropriately - lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts, especially those concerned with translation, transformation, and the layering of various pasts, yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of recent work in materiality and poetics, balancing insights of thing theory and related approaches with close readings of specific passages from Old English texts.