Hello fellow readers,

Today I am blogging about the second seminar I attended in college, one that I was very excited for as it was presented by a MedRen professor of Old English Dr Francesca Brooks. The seminar was called “Caedmon on a shell tip” where she discussed Caedmons Hymn in conversation with the works of poet and writer Lynette Roberts and her work “A letter to the dead: collected poems” where the title for the seminar was taken from. This conference was interesting, especially to the MedRen class as we had never attended an Old English conference before (it’s not very popular). I would not exactly call Old English a niche topic, but it is a fact that it is not widely studied, so I was looking forward to the talk.

Firstly, the connection to Caedmon’s Hymn was not strong, but it was present as Roberts laments and reminisces about the story through the environment and nature. I felt a little confused because Dr Brooks is making a connection between Old English and modern literature, and while I have studied both, I was not aware of Roberts until this day. The topic was also a new idea/research project that Dr Brooks intends to write on, and something that came up and stuck with me was the reference to the environment and nature. I read an article that proposed an interesting view on Lynette’s poetry, calling her and another poet ‘frostwork poets,’ “frostwork being window glass which is semi-opaque through its decoration; that is, poets whose writing exhibits a sustained balance between linguistic surface and reference to an external or internal world” (Wilkinson, pg. 98).

Roberts references the eternal world frequently, using her own experiences of moving to Wales and living in a village to make the connection between the internal and external world. By doing this, her poem crosses the boundary of time between the era of old literature and new as nature is the only thing that can evolve, but somehow, stay the same. This is shown through her writing and it is a shame that I have yet to read it, but I will eventually, when I get a copy of it online, which seems impossible to find. Roberts’s poetry consists of descriptive language of the landscape and living in her small village in Wales as someone who moved there from Argentina.

This is vital for understanding and relating to Robert’s poetry, as she describes how she was perceived and how she, in turn, perceived moving to a new place and trying to find a sense of belonging and her role in that village. To connect this with Bede’s Caedmon Hymn, the boy moves from his place as a shepherd to living in the monastery and, regarded as a miracle, he too has to try and find his place in a space that is unfamiliar, but one that may last a lifetime. Some of us can relate to this feeling of trying to fit in, either in a new home or in school. To Roberts, the landscape was her form of meditation and an external space that provided internal solace. The post is titled “Old English and Modern English Literature” because there is a connection between the two through the use of dialogue with the landscape and the familiarity that Robert’s portrays in her poem as she connects with that of Bede.

Dr Brooks explains that Roberts is able to masterfully manipulate the language style into one of familiarity between the narrator and Bede. I thought it would be suitable to link the concept of time-travel here, but upon further discussion, I think it is more suitable to say that Roberts uses the text of a different time to relate to her experience and her writing of the present time, rather than an old text being brought into the present, I would argue that Roberts is trying to show that the relevance of such a text still remains to this day and there are aspects that we can relate to. This shows that Roberts had a vast understanding of the Old English text and the author. During the seminar, listening to Lynette Roberts’s life story, I am always amazed when I think about it, that she read an incredible amount of books and would even contact other writers to send books to her, I believe this is a system that has changed so drastically in today’s world that it is considered lost.

I enjoyed this seminar, and it was great hearing about modern connections to old texts. I would also like to mention that during the questions at the end, there was a suggestion of new information to Dr Brooks, which I found to be really fascinating and interesting. This was about the title “shell tip” and if Roberts purposely used these words due to possible fossil excavations at the time, there may have been a possibility that she encountered it through her extensive readings. Although, I am unable to say much on this as I lack the information, this was inspiring to me, in a way that I thought that I wanted to stay in academia and to reach that level of knowledge. I think sometimes we forget that inspiration plays an important role in our daily lives and our studies. Maybe this is called being academically inspired? I will leave you now, with some words of wisdom:

Works Cited:

Wilkinson, John. “Frostwork and the Mud Vision.” Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry; The Bloodaxe Book of 20th-Century Poetry; The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945by Keith Tuma et al. The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, 2002, pp. 93–105.

Image of frostwork glass, by Dan Howarth, Feb 9, 2013. https://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/09/frost-glassware-by-front-for-stelton/