Aesthetic Beauty of Old English Poetry: A Critique
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58213/ell.v2i1.22Keywords:
Old English poetry, Old English beauty, aesthetics, historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, history of emotions, aesthetic emotionsAbstract
An examination of 23 Old English expressions of good aesthetic feelings is the subject of this essay. These expressions have to do with looks, character traits, and pleasant memories. In order to have a better understanding of how Anglo-Saxon English people saw aesthetics, this research is being undertaken. Here's how I went about creating one: The database was built using a variety of software and lexical tools, as well as a variety of corpora. I used a variety of sociolinguistic criteria to annotate the evidence in the corpus. After analysing these pieces in detail, it became clear that the Old English poets used two distinct approaches to describing beauty: one focused on the object's objective aesthetic features, while the other emphasised the subject's subjective experience of it. In religious writings, these two alternatives were often combined.
References
• Atkins, B. T. S. 1987. “Semantic ID tags: corpus evidence for dictionary senses”. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary: 17-36.
• Berlyne, D. E., ed. 1974. Studies in the new experimental aesthetics: Steps towards an objective psychology of aesthetic appreciation. Oxford: Hemisphere.
• Bitterli, D. 2016. “Strange Perceptions: Sensory Experience in the Old English ‘Marvels of the East”. The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England. Eds. A. Kern-Stähler, B. Busse and W. de Boer. Leiden: Brill. 137-162.
• Blake, N. f. 1964. The Phoenix. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bosanquet, B. 1894. “On the Nature of Æsthetic Emotion”. Mind 3 (10): 153-166. Bosworth, J. and T. N. Toller with S. Crist, O. Tichy, M. Hejná, H. filipová and L.
• Gillova. 2013. Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: faculty of Arts, CharlesUniversity in Prague. <http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz>.
• Cameron, A., Crandell Amos, A. and A. di Paolo Healey et al. (eds.). 2018. Dictionary of Old English: A to I online. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project. <https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/>. (Accessed July 2019).
• Cupchik, G. C. 2016. The Aesthetic of Emotion: Up the Down Staircase of the Mind- Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Damasio, A. R. 1999. The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt.
• Díaz-Vera, J. E. 2011. “Reconstructing the Old English cultural model for fear”. Atlantis.Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 33 (1): 85-103.
• Díaz-Vera, J. E. 2014. “from cognitive linguistics to historical sociolinguistics: The evolution of Old English expressions of shame and guilt”. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 1 (1): 55-83.
• Díaz-Vera, J. E. 2015. “Exploring the relationships between emotions, language and space: Construals of AWE in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience”. StudiaNeophilologica 88: 165-189.
• Díaz-Vera, J. E. and T. Manrique-Antón. 2015. “‘Better shamed before one than shamed before all’: Shaping shame in Old English and Old Norse texts”. Metaphor and Metonymy across Time and Cultures. Ed. J. E. Díaz-Vera. Berlin: Walter de Gruyer. 225-264.
• diPaolo Healey, A., with J. Price Wilkin and x. xiang (Compilers). 2009. Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project.
• Eco, U. 2004. On Beauty: A History of a Western Ideal. London: Secker & Warburg.Trans. Alastair McEwen.
• Frijda, N. H. 1988. “The laws of emotion”. American Psychologist 43 (5): 349-358.
• Frijda, N. H., Kuipers, P. and E. terSchure. 1989. “Relations Among Emotion, Appraisal, and Emotional Action Readiness”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (2): 212-228.
• Gevaert, C. 2007. The history of ANGER: The lexical field of ANGER from Old English to Early Modern English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: Leuven. <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/34435415.pdf>. (Accessed 28 Aug. 19)
• Gladkova, A. and J. Romero-Trillo. 2014. “Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective”. Journal of Pragmatics 60: 140-159.
• Gries, S. T. 2010. “Behavioral Profiles: A fine-grained and quantitative approach in corpus-based lexical semantics”. The Mental Lexicon 5 (3): 323-346.
• Gries, S. T. and N. Otani. 2010. “Behavioral Profiles: A corpus-based perspective on synonymy and antonymy”. ICAME Journal 34: 121-150.
• Hagman, G. 2005. Aesthetic Experience: Beauty, Creativity, and the Search for the Ideal. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.
• Hill, J. M., ed. 2010. On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. 2013. “The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture”. Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (2): 315-339.
• Izard, C. E. 1977. Human emotions. New York: Plenum Press.
• Juslin, P. N. 2013. “from everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Toward a unified theory of musical emotions”. Physics of Life Reviews 10 (3): 235-266.
• Juzi, G. 1939. Die Ausdrücke des Schönen in der ae. Dichtung: Untersuchungübereinsprachliches Feld. zurich: Aschmann&Scheller.
• Kim, S. M. and A. S. Mittman. 2010. “Ungefrægelicudeor: Truth and the Wonders of the East”. Different Visions. A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 2: 1-22.
• Kytö, M. 1996. Manual to the Diachronic Part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Coding Conventions and List of Source Texts. Helsinki: Helsinki University Printing House.
• Lazarus, R. S. 1991. “Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion”. American Psychologist 46 (8): 819-834.
• Lockett, L. 2011. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Tradition.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Marković, S. 2012. “Components of aesthetic experience: aesthetic fascination, aesthetic appraisal, and aesthetic emotion”. i-Perception 3: 1-17.
• Marwick, A. 2004. It: A History of Human Beauty. London and New York: Hambeldon and London.
• Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Wassiliwizky, E., Schindler, I., Hanich, J., Jacobsen,T. and S. Koelsch. 2019. “What Are Aesthetic Emotions”. Psychological Review126 (2): 171-195.
• Miller, G. A. and W. G. Charles. 1991. “Contextual correlates of semantic similarity”.Language and Cognitive Processes 6 (1): 1-28.
• Minaya, f. J. 2019. “As beautiful inside, as it is outside: On the connection between beauty and morality in the Old English corpus”. Complutense Journal of English Studies 27: 205-221.
• Möhlig-falke, R. 2016. “Using the ‘Dictionary of Old English Corpus’ for linguistic analyses: a basic classification of the textual sources”. NeuphilologischeMitteilungen 15 (1): 395-420.
• Munteanu, D. L. 2009. “‘Qualis tandem misericordia in rebus fictis?’ Aesthetic and ordinary emotion”. Helios 36 (2): 117-147.
• Ramey, P. 2017. “The Riddle of Beauty: The Aesthetics of Wrætlic in Old English Verse”. Modern Philology 113 (3): 457-481.
• Rissanen, M., Kytö, M., Kahlas-Tarkka, L., Kilpiö, M., Nevanlinna, S., Taavitsainen, I., Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg (Compilers). 1991. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. Helsinki: Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.
• Roberts, J. and C. Kay, with L. Grundy. 2017. A Thesaurus of Old English: University of Glasgow. <http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/>.
• Rosch, E., Thompson, E. and f. Vaerla. 1991. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Roseman, I. J. and C. A. Smith. 2001. “Appraisal theory: Overview, Assumptions, Varieties, Controversies”. Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Eds. K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr and T. Johnstone. New York: Oxford University Press. 3-19.
• Scherer, K. R. 1982. “Emotion as a Process: function, Origin and Regulation”. Social Science Information 21: 550-570.
• Scherer, K. R. 2005. “What are emotions? And how can they be measured”. Social Science Information 44 (4): 695-729.
• Shibles, W. 1995. Emotion in Aesthetics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Taylor, A., Warner, A., Pintzuk, S. and f. Beths (Compilers). 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and Poetry. York: Department ofLanguage and Linguistic Science, University of York.
• Thornton, J. W. 1940. “Aesthetic Emotion”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (2): 199-207.
• Tyler, E. M. 2006. Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England. York: York Medieval Press.
• Trilling, R. R. 2009. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representations in Old English Verse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Williamson, C. and T. Shippey. 2017. The Complete Old English Poems. Pennsylvania, Phi: University of Pennsylvania Press.
