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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 4. April 26, 1951

Things Requiring to be Objected to . . . — No Honours for Beowulf

page 5

Things Requiring to be Objected to . . .

No Honours for Beowulf

Any discussion of a particular course of study is bound to raise eventually the question of the end of University education, which is in its turn apt to involve even wider issues; however there exists in the university certain anomalies and confusions of aim so striking that one can raise valid objections to them without obligating oneself to produce a whole view of education as a frame of reference. This article has been written to express a dissatisfaction which the authors believe to be widely felt among students, and particularly Honours students, in the English faculty.

Anglo-Saxon (or if you prefer Old English—an obscure pedantry) officially comprises one-sixth of the English course in Stages II and III and one-seventh in Honours, but the student knows from experience that it occupies far more than one-sixth of his time. He is faced with what is virtually a foreign language which would, even were the normal grammatical instructions given in lectures extensive enough, require a great deal of effort to master fully, but as any time over the strict sixth part spent on A-S is time borrowed from another paper he is driven to find some way of passing the examination without actually learning any Anglo-Saxon; It is with the tacit approval, if not the blessing, of the Department that he resorts to learning his texts word by word, line by line. Having no insight into, and usually and quite understandably, no interest in what he is doing, he translates with a crib pouncing on obvious similarities and guessing the rest, acquiring a circumstantial knowledge of a certain set of passages without necessarily knowing a dozen words of the language apart from their particular contexts.

Cracks at Anglo-Sax

While we fall to see (for reasons we shall discuss below) that OE has much importance at all in the course, even if more rationally studied, we cannot but regret that any subject in a University should become so intellectually useless—so trivial. Yet it is just this triviality, especially in the Honours year that takes up for many students more time than all the other papers put together.

If Anglo-Saxon is to be studied at all it should be done intensively by intending specialists, and not in the perfunctory fashion that is usual with students who learn it because they have to and not because they want to. It should constitute a separate course and not, at least in Stage III and Honours, be compulsory for anyone but linguists, for not only is a little crammed knowledge of A-S texts valueless in itself, but the necessity for it is a positive menace to the student of literature. The Honours student who takes the language options, can if he has the requisite ability and a very grim determination, cover all his course and commit the more important parts to memory in one of two years, but a genuine knowledge of literature, as anyone with a degree in it ought to admit, requires a great deal more reading, and thinking about what has been read, than can be fitted even into the whole four-year course.

What the student of literature resents quite justly is part of an alien and intricate specialisation (the whole of Beowulf with all his works, pomps, textual apparatus and German editors) boring in itself and utterly valueless when studied apart from cognate Scandinavian literature being imposed upon him, with no scrap of justification apart from that implicit in a doctrinaire adherence (as we find in Lewis's article in "Rehabilitations") to the principle of historical completeness. For even if he has picked up a little of the language (and if he has it is probably been by neglecting his other papers) what value is a knowledge of A-S to him as a student of literature? Very little. He has not been given the key to a whole new literature, for Anglo-Saxon is limited both in quantity and in range and when, with a good deal of trouble, he has acquired this proficiency in the language he finds that there are no further texts to read that have any more intrinsic value or interest than those he has become so painfully familiar with already.

That oe Epic

Beowulf, that poem of unequalled tediousness and unparalleled circumlocution whose ambitions after an expansive magnificence are circumscribed only by the paucity of the author's invention, his conviction that epic grandeur can be achieved by the constant repetition of the epithet "greatest," by a retelling of the whole story twice over on the slightest occasion—this monument of dullness which he has just read is the showpiece, so that the means and the end of his story prove to be identical. He has wasted his time in an intellectual treadmill which could not have dissipated more thoroughly his energies if it had been consciously designed for the purpose. (There is, to use an expressive if colloquial phrase, no future in it). OE literature has sprung an ill favoured Minerva from the first page of his first book of selections, a mensk lady on molde mon may hir calle, for Gode!

Frustration not Learning

Anyone who has suffered this frustration of three years highly unrewarding study of OE can join heartily with Professor Leavis in his complaint—

"on the plea that unless he knows Anglo-Saxon and the History of the Language (most of which he will leave behind in the examination room) he cannot properly understand modem English, the student is prevented from acquiring any real understanding of anything."

—F. R Leavis in "Education and the University," p. 136.

It seems unfair to the lecturers in language that they should be forced, like high school teachers, to teach classes who may not care a button for their subject, at a pace and on a level that must be intolerable for both the teacher and the student with a flair for linguistic, unfair to the literature lecturers who cannot get the maximum co-operation from always slightly pre-occupied students themselves who are forced so to divide their attention, and often to do full justice neither to themselves nor to the quality of the Department's teaching.

One is inclined to regard other departments (even though they may not be otherwise as good as Victoria's) where Anglo-Saxon has been given entirely to the specialists, as versions of the Ideal. There must indeed be a large number of students who feel envious when they reflect on the possibilities of any Honours school . . . . emancipated literary studies from the linguistic grinds where the candidate for Honours was under no compulsion to spend himself on Anglo-Saxon and the rest."

F. R. Leavis, "Education and the University." Preface.