Cover not available
Article published In:
Historical (socio)pragmatics at present
Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk and Irma Taavitsainen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2] 2017
► pp. 175–194

wine min Unferð

Courtly speech and a reconsideration of (supposed) sarcasm in Beowulf

| University of Sheffield

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the pragmatics of Beowulf, specifically in relation to speech in what is known as the “Unferð Episode”, and more generally in terms of the poem’s placement in the ethnopragmatic history of English. Previous critics have almost unanimously read sarcasm into Beowulf’s treatment of the initially hostile Unferð (e.g., in his address to the latter as wine min, ‘my friend’), and in turn historical pragmaticists have discussed the poem in relation to Germanic insult-boasts, or flyting. By discussing the relevant contextual and co-textual frames, I show that previous interpretations along these lines have failed to recognize the import of Beowulf’s courtly speech.

Keywords: Beowulf, Christianity, courtliness, sarcasm, Unferð
Article outline
  • 1.Illocution in Beowulf
  • 2.Macro-discursive context: irony and damning?
  • 3.Macro-cultural context: early English courtesy
  • 4.Co-text: the wine-lexeme
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00001.wil
References
Arnovick, Leslie K.
1995 “Sounding and Flyting the English Agnostic Insult: Writing Pragmatic History in a Cross-Cultural Context”. In Mava Jo Powell (ed.), The Twenty-First LACUS Forum 1994, 600–19. Chapell Hill: The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.Google Scholar
Baker, Peter S.
1988 “Beowulf the Orator”. Journal of English Linguistics 21 (3): 3–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Bjork, Robert E.
(ed.) 2013 The Old English Poems of Cynewulf. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bjork, Robert E. and Anita Obermeier
1996 “Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences”. In Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook, 13–34. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Morton W.
1949–51 “ ‘Beowulf’ and Christian Allegory: An Interpretation of Unferth”. Traditio 71: 410–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonnard, Émile
(ed.) 1979 Saint Jérôme, Commentaire sur S. Matthieu, Tome II. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.Google Scholar
Bosworth, Joseph
2010 An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, edited by Thomas Northcote Toller et al. Compiled by Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichý (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague 21 Mar. 2010) Accessed 5 November 2013 at: [URL].
Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist
1959 The Art of Beowulf. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Burnley, David
1998 Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Campbell, James
1986 Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. London: Hambledon Press.Google Scholar
Cheang, Henry S. and Marc D. Pell
2011 “Recognizing Sarcasm without Language: A Cross-Linguistic Study of English and Cantonese”. Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (2): 203–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, George
(trans.) 1997 The Tale of Sarcastic Halli. In Örnólfur Thorsson (ed.), The Sagas of Icelanders, 694–712. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Clark, Tom
2003 A Case for Irony in Beowulf, with Particular Reference to its Epithets. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Clark Hall, J. R.
1960 A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. (Fourth edition.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Clover, Carol
1980 “The Germanic Context of the Unferþ Episode”. Speculum 55 (3): 444–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2011 Impoliteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, W. D. and Dale C. Allison Jr.
1997 A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.Google Scholar
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC)
2009 Compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project.Google Scholar
Friedman, Hershey H.
2000 “Humor in the Hebrew Bible”. Humor 13 (3): 257–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fulk, R. D.
(ed.) 2010 The Beowulf Manuscript. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff
2006 “ ‘Lift Your Game, Martina! Deadpan Jocular Irony and the Ethnopragmatics of ‘Aussie’ English”. In Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, 1–30. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Gwara, Scott
2008 Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf. Leiden and Boston: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hill, John M.
1996 “Social Milieu”. In Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook, 255–69. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Thomas D.
2014 “ Beowulf and Conversion History”. In Leonard Neidorf (ed.), The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, 191–201. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Hughes, Geoffrey
1977 “Beowulf, Unferth and Hrunting: An Interpretation”. English Studies 58 (5): 385–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Irving, Edward B.
1968 A Reading of Beowulf. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Lesley
2011 Kinship, Violence and Inheritance in Early Germanic and Celtic Heroic Narratives. Unpublished PhD thesis. Indiana University.Google Scholar
Jaeger, C. Stephen
1985 The Origins of Courtliness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Christopher A.
(ed.) 2012 Old English Shorter Poems: Religious and Didactic. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas
2012 “Changes in Politeness Cultures”. In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, 422–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas and Irma Taavitsainen
2000 “Diachronic Speech Act Analysis: Insults from Flyting to Flaming”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 67–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel and Michael Haugh
2013 Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
King, Judy
2010 “Transforming the Hero: Beowulf and the Conversion of Hunferth”. In Robin Waugh and James Weldon (eds), The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark, 47–64. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.Google Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas
2008 “Linguistic Politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A Study of Old English Address Terms”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9 (1): 140–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Understanding Anglo-Saxon ‘Politeness’: Directive Constructions with ic wille/ic wolde ”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12 (1–2): 230–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Knox, Dilwyn
1989 Ironia. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Liuzza, Roy
2011 “Iron and Irony in Beowulf”. In Jana K. Schulman and Paul E. Szarmach (eds), Beowulf at Kalamazoo: Essays in Translation and Performance, 50–68. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press.Google Scholar
Orchard, Andy
2004 A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Parks, Ward
1990 Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pigg, Daniel F.
2010 “Laughter in Beowulf: Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Group Identity Formation”. In Albrecht Classen (ed.), Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, 201–13. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Romano, Manuela
1996 “Revising Old English Definitions of friend: A Cognitive Account”. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 340–51. Linguistic Society of America.Google Scholar
Scaglione, Aldo
1991 Knights at Court. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shippey, T. A.
1993 “Principles of Conversation in Beowulfian Speech”. In John M. Sinclair, Michael Hoey and Gwyneth Fox (eds), Techniques of Description: Spoken and Written Discourse, 109–26. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silber, Patricia
1981 “Rhetoric as Prowess in the Unferð Episode”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (4): 471–83.Google Scholar
Simpkins, Linda M.
1994 From Secular to Sacred Flyting: The Anglo-Saxon Re-analysis of the Christian War of Words in Old English Religious Prose and Verse. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of British Columbia.Google Scholar
Stanley, Eric G.
1998 “Courtliness and Courtesy in Beowulf and Elsewhere in English Medieval Literature”. In Peter Baker and Nicholas Howe (eds), Words and Works, 67–103. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker
2010 “Trends and Developments in Historical Pragmatics”. In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Pragmatics, 3–30. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tannenhaus, Gussie H.
1962 “Bede’s De Schematibus et Tropis – A Translation”. The Quarterly Journal of Speech 48 (3): 237–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna
2004 “Jewish Cultural Scripts and the Interpretation of the Bible”. Journal of Pragmatics 36 (3): 575–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Graham
2012 “Searching for Verbal Irony in Historical Corpora: A Pilot Study of mock and scorn in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse ”. In Carla Suhr and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Volume 11: Developing Corpus Methodology for Historical Pragmatics. Available online at: [URL].
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Williams, Graham
2018. Sincerity in Contrition: From Confessions to Apologies. In Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature, ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo
Williams, Graham
2018. Before Sincerity: Pagan Beliefs of Language and Emotion. In Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature, ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo
Williams, Graham
2018. Introduction: Sincerity, Language Change and Medieval Literature. In Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.