Medieval Literature I Didn't Know III.a: Within Again

Over two months ago now I wrote about a great little poem by Letaldus about an English fisherman who gets swallowed by a whale, who escapes by burning his boat in the belly of the beast, but once ashore needs the aid of the townspeople to finally be set free. In his delightful little tale, Letaldus overlays his narration with references to Vergil and comments frequently on Jonah and the typological significance of Jonah and takes Within in the same vein.

Jan M. Ziolkowski has written the most in English on the poem. There are some recent Italian works that I've not seen but will include in the bibliography. But Ziolkowski takes on the typical dismissal of the poem as a delightful, and beautifully done, fable and otherwise little to no attention paid to it. Ziolkowski argues that Letaldus and his audience would have thought this "historical" in some sense: 1) plenty of whale stories around 2) Letaldus treats this story just as he does his other "historical" works 3) Letaldus says at the beginning of the poem that a worthy elder told him this story. Among other reasons, Ziolkowski then believes that Letaldus and his audience would have accepted this as a "true story" and took opportunity to treat it as an "exemplum."

Ziolkowski however considers a possibility that I don't believe anyone else has previously, and then sets it aside. That possibility is that the story Letaldus received might be an oral poem, since he says that an elder reported the tale to him. Ziolkowski dismisses the idea eventually, after noting that other than the possibility that the leonine rhymes that sometimes occur may be an attempted reflection of alliteration but may just as plausibly be rhetorical flourish learned in school. So he thinks that the story itself might be historical or at least reported as historical, is in origin a "fisherman's tale" and Letaldus took it and make a lesson of it, himself also considering itself historical.

I happen to disagree. What I wonder and am thinking about and have done so for some time, is whether we have a Norman Latinization of an Old English literary work. Quite apart from tales with whales, etc, here's the case as I currently think.

1) Letaldus tells us that he got this story from someone else, an elder of great age. Since Letaldus is writing this c. 1000, such an elder would likely have been a young man in the beginning of the English Benedictine Reform. And since part of the story depends on a punning in Old English that a non-speaker of English likely will not get, it isn't a stretch to say that Letaldus' source is an Englishman.

2) The relationship between oral and written traditions is more fluid than I think Ziolkowski allows. Much of the poetry and other types of literature we have in Old English and Anglo-Latin comes to us in written form, but was likely oral in origin. The most famous example well-known to all is Beowulf, but that is not the only example.

3) We also know of some translations of works from Old English to Latin. Two are poetic in nature, Caedmon's Hymn and the Waltharius (recognizing that this may come not from the Old English Waldere but from another Germanic form of the story, nonetheless, as the plethora of works in the Fulk-Gade Bibliography of Alliterative Germanic Verse (think I have that title right) shows that Germanic poetry shared many common elements). Neither truly reflects the Old English or Germanic penchant for alliteration and the latter in fact has been utterly recast into Vergilian hexameters and diction, yet remains at heart a Germanic, originally vernacular poem. So we need not see in Letaldus' treatment of the story evidence of alliteration or other Old English poetic features.

4) We do know as well that the late tenth century in England was producing a number of contacts between England and the continent. In terms of "Frankia", there is linguistic borrowing and influence, translations, and of course the borrowing of Letaldus' sometime opponent, Abbo of Fleury, and of course the influence of the Benedictine Reform on the reform movement spawned in England itself.

5) There is also a growing body of literature obviously composed to teach while entertaining. Some of it was composed early and was pressed back into service such as poems like Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel, and the like. Others were somewhat newly composed in the tenth century such as Soul and Body, etc. But there is certainly a growing body of literature, poetry and prose, designed to teach Christian catechism to the faithful. The "Within" story of Letaldus fits into that pattern very, very well.

6) The story's hero is Within. Especially when the fisherman Within answers the question of who is within the whale (Within is within), we see an obvious Old English pun (not the only place where such occurs in the Latin poem, but one of the prominent ones). It is unlikely that Letaldus, not known to have known English, introduced this element, and if this were simply a reporting of a "true" tale it is a feature not known to me from prose.

7) Further along the path of the name, we have several examples of "pun" names in Old English (and other Germanic) literature that are not attested in the historical record. Hondscio from Beowulf, hand-shoe, or glove ends up in Grendel's glove; Widsith, wide-farer, is the narrator of a poem about how he's traveled far and wide....and yet these are not attested as names of real people. And even where we have names of this nature that also appear in the historical record, such as Deor or even Wiglaf, in the poetic literature the name has significance for the theme and development of the story. Within is not recorded so far as I've been able to ascertain as a name of anyone historical, but the name very obviously has importance for the poem, especially for the climax. This fits the pattern of Old English poetry, and there are no such traces of such knowledge in Letaldus' other works.

8) Jonah was well known as a type of Christ and the sermonic elements introduced into the poem drawing attention to Jonah and his sojourn in the whale would also likely be from the source, though Letaldus was more than capable of introducing them. But such lessons in Old English poetry are also known and for those materials composed in the tenth century made rather explicit.

That is the current state of my thinking. I need to spend some time with the poem again, looking at a number of details. But at the moment, it is my belief, and belief it is rather than any thing more substantial, that Letaldus has retold a previously unknown Old English poem.