It’s actually been a little while since I’ve done one of my “Update on Degree Things I’m Thinking About” threads and I’m procrastinating an essay so hey kids it’s time to learn about QUEERNESS AND THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY: a of my thoughts

Disclaimer: these aren’t particularly organised. I just think given the enormous thread to LGBTQ+ rights in the U.K. right now it’s worth think about/pointing out that there’s a long history of queerness and questioning of gender and sexuality in England.

So, what’ve we got? Well first of all we’ve got some pretty clear homoerotic context to our period. Take Alcuin, who was an influential advisor to Charlemagne: “I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires.”

Fun side note about Alcuin: he basically copy/pasted language from his letters to his lovers. What a guy. Happy Valentine’s. Etc. While he may not have been sexually active, this correspondence suggests acceptability for erotic male friendship.

We’ve also, fascinatingly, two Saints’ lives where a woman dresses as a man to join a monastery; pronouns switch accordingly. These are St Eufrasia & St Eugenia, and in both drag is a way towards holiness, not rejected by any means.

Also, rather joyfully, the monks are very angry with the Abbot for introducing St Eufrasia because he’s just too pretty and they’re all suuuuper tempted. Gender transgression was clearly at least partially acceptable, as was being gay.

Into this context let’s introduce some poetry, and think about literature, because that’s what my mind does. An interesting thing about Old English poetry is that we don’t have have lots of different modes of writing. Notice I’m not saying genre, I think there’s a difference.

That is to say, we have the mode of the heroic everywhere, with specific linguistic features (honour codes, battle-kennings, etc.) – but that doesn’t mean all our poems are about battles! So this mode can take the weight of a lot of genres.

That this is conscious is evidenced by the riddles, which are highly aware of genre, e.g. riddles for everyday items using the language of battle! So it’s clear that the heroic mode can serve a lot of purposes. Religious in the Dream of the Rood, elegiac in the Wanderer, etc.

Into this we introduce a conundrum – we don’t really have any positive love poetry. We’ve got some mournfully separated couples in elegies, but no awkward crush poems or anything. How to do we reconcile this? Well, I wonder...

I think we might be able to read homoeroticism into the master/warrior relationship. It clearly can be the language of love, c.f. The Wife’s Lament, where she misses her “lord”. I’m personally a huge fan of a queer reading of the Dream of the Rood.

I also think the Old English dual (a pronoun that refers specifically to “us two”) can have romantic resonances for a modern reader. So let’s apply this to our big narrative: Beowulf!

Beowulf doesn’t shy away from discussions of femininity. In fact, it’s really important. But interestingly, all application of heterosexuality to Beowulf is a later invention. He never marries, never really interacts with women outside of the realm of etiquette...

And certainly never has children. That would destroy the ideology of Beowulf being in the past! Now of course this doesn’t mean that Beowulf is gay. I do however think that there is an image of masculine friendship between Beowulf and Wiglaf that has origins...

In the Lord/warrior dynamic. So let’s return to Alcuin; who applied erotic language to what were quite possibly platonic male relationships. I think the most natural reading is that this image of erotic heroic masculinity can be applied quite widely. Fin!