Ormulum - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis

Exegesis

Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...

, written by a monk named Orm (or Ormin) and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

verse. Because of the unique phonetic

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

adopted by its author, the work preserves many details of English pronunciation existing at a time when the language was in flux after the Norman Conquest

Norman conquest of England

The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...

. Consequently, it is invaluable to philologists

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

in tracing the development of the language.

After a preface and dedication, the work consists of homilies explicating the biblical texts set for the mass throughout the liturgical year

Liturgical year

The liturgical year, also known as the church year, consists of the cycle of liturgical seasons in Christian churches which determines when feast days, including celebrations of saints, are to be observed, and which portions of Scripture are to be read. Distinct liturgical colours may appear in...

; it was intended to be consulted as the texts changed, and is agreed to be tedious and repetitive when read straight through. Only about a fifth of the promised material is in the single manuscript of the work to survive, which is in the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

in Oxford.

Orm was concerned with priests' ability to speak the vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...

, and developed an idiosyncratic spelling system to guide his readers in the pronunciation of the vowels. He used a strict poetic metre

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

to ensure that readers know which syllables are to be stressed. Modern scholars use these two features to reconstruct Middle English as Orm spoke it (Burchfield 1987, p. 280).

Origins

Unusually for work of the period, the Ormulum is neither anonymous nor untitled. The author names himself at the end of the dedication:

Where I was christened, I was
named Ormin by name

(Ded. 323–24)

At the start of the preface, the author identifies himself again, using a different spelling of his name, and gives the work a title:

This book is named Ormulum
because Orm created it

(Pref. 1–2)

The name "Orm" is derived from Old Norse, meaning worm, serpent or dragon. With the suffix of "myn" for "man" (hence "Ormin"), it was a common name throughout the Danelaw

Danelaw

The Danelaw, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , is a historical name given to the part of England in which the laws of the "Danes" held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. It is contrasted with "West Saxon law" and "Mercian law". The term has been extended by modern historians to...

area of England. The choice between the two forms of the name probably was dictated by the meter at each use. The title of the poem, "Ormulum", is modeled after the Latin word speculum ("mirror") (Matthew 2004, p. 936), so popular in the title of medieval Latin non-fiction works that the term speculum literature

Speculum literature

The medieval genre of speculum literature, popular from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, was inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work. The modern equivalent is a summary survey, in the sense of a survey article in a scholarly journal that summarizes...

is used for the genre.

The Danish name is not unexpected; the language of the Ormulum, an East Midlands dialect, is stringently of the Danelaw (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75). It includes numerous Old Norse phrases (particularly doublets, where an English and Old Norse term are co-joined), but there are very few Old French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

influences on Orm's language (Bennett 1986, p. 33). Another—likely previous—East Midlands work, the Peterborough Chronicle
Peterborough Chronicle
The Peterborough Chronicle , one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, contains unique information about the history of England after the Norman Conquest. According to philologist J.A.W...

, shows a great deal of French influence. The linguistic contrast between it and the work of Orm demonstrates both the sluggishness of the Norman influence in the formerly Danish areas of England and the assimilation of Old Norse features into early Middle English (Bennett 1986, pp. 259–63).

According to the work's dedication, Orm wrote it at the behest of Brother Walter, who was his brother both (biologically) and as a fellow canon

Canon (priest)

A canon is a priest or minister who is a member of certain bodies of the Christian clergy subject to an ecclesiastical rule ....

of an Augustinian

Augustinians

The term Augustinians, named after Saint Augustine of Hippo , applies to two separate and unrelated types of Catholic religious orders:...

order (Matthew 2004, p. 936). With this information, and the evidence of the dialect of the text, it is possible to propose a place of origin with reasonable certainty. While some scholars, among them Henry Bradley, have held that the likely origin is Elsham Priory

Elsham Priory

Elsham Priory was an Augustinian monastery in Lincolnshire, England. The only surviving trace is a fishpond in the grounds of Elsham Hall. Beatrice d'Amundeville founded the monastery in the 12th century it was dissolved in 1536.-References:...

in north Lincolnshire (Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75), as of the mid-1990s it has become widely accepted that Orm wrote in the Arrouaisian

Arrouaise (Abbey and Order)

The Abbey of Arrouaise was the centre of a form of the Augustinian monastic rule, the Arrouaisian Order, which was popular among the founders of abbeys during the decade of the 1130s. The community began to develop when Heldemar joined the hermit Ruggerius in 1090 but its first abbot, elected in...

Bourne Abbey

Bourne Abbey and the Parish Church of St. Peter and St. Paul is a scheduled Grade I church in Bourne, Lincolnshire, England. The building remains in parochial use, despite the 16th century Dissolution, as the nave was used by the parish, probably from the time of the foundation of the abbey in...

, in Bourne, Lincolnshire

Bourne, Lincolnshire

Bourne is a market town and civil parish on the western edge of the Fens, in the District of South Kesteven in southern Lincolnshire, England.-The town:...

(Treharne 2000, p. 273). Two additional pieces of evidence support this conjecture: firstly, the abbey was established by Arrouaisian canons in 1138, and secondly, the work includes dedicatory prayers to Peter

Saint Peter

Saint Peter or Simon Peter was an early Christian leader, who is featured prominently in the New Testament Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The son of John or of Jonah and from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, his brother Andrew was also an apostle...

and Paul

Paul of Tarsus

Paul the Apostle , also known as Saul of Tarsus, is described in the Christian New Testament as one of the most influential early Christian missionaries, with the writings ascribed to him by the church forming a considerable portion of the New Testament...

, who are the patrons of Bourne Abbey (Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27). The Arrouaisian rule was largely that of Augustine, so that its houses often are loosely referred to as Augustinian (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37; Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27).

The date of composition is impossible to pinpoint. Orm wrote his book over a period of decades and the manuscript shows signs of multiple corrections through time (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Since it is apparently an autograph, with two of the three hands in the text generally believed by scholars to be Orm's own, the date of the manuscript and the date of composition would have been the same. On the evidence of the third hand, a collaborator who entered the pericope

Pericope

A pericope in rhetoric is a set of verses that forms one coherent unit or thought, thus forming a short passage suitable for public reading from a text, now usually of sacred scripture....

s at the head of each homily, it is thought that the manuscript was finished circa 1180, but Orm may have begun the work as early as 1150 (Parkes 1983, pp. 115–27). The text has few topical references to specific events that could be used to identify the period of composition more precisely.

Manuscript

Only one copy of the Ormulum exists, as Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

Junius 1 (Burchfield 1987, p. 280). In its current state, the manuscript is incomplete: the book's table of contents claims that there were 242 homilies, but only 32 remain (Matthew 2004, p. 936).It seems likely that the work was never finished on the scale planned when the table of contents was written, but much of the discrepancy was probably caused by the loss of gatherings

Bookbinding

Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...

from the manuscript. There is no doubt that such losses have occurred even in modern times, as the Dutch

Dutch people

The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

antiquarian Jan van Vliet

Jan van Vliet

Jan van Vliet , also known as Janus Ulitius, was one of the 17th century pioneers of Germanic philology....

, one of its seventeenth-century owners, copied out passages that are not in the present text (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). The amount of redaction in the text, plus the loss of possible gatherings, led J. A. W. Bennett

J. A. W. Bennett

Jack Arthur Walter Bennett was a New Zealand-born literary scholar. He was best known as a scholar of Middle English literature. He was editor of the journal Medium Aevum from 1956 to 1980, having earlier assisted his predecessor, C. T. Onions, and was a colleague of C. S. Lewis at Magdalen...

to comment that "only about one fifth survives, and that in the ugliest of manuscripts" (Bennett 1986, p. 30).

The parchment

Parchment

Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...

used in the manuscript is of the lowest quality, and the text is written untidily, with an eye to economical use of space; it is laid out in continuous lines like prose, with words and lines close together, and with various additions and corrections, new exegesis, and allegorical readings, crammed into the corners of the margins (as can be seen in the reproduction above). Robert W. Burchfield argues that these indications "suggest that it was a 'workshop' draft which the author intended to have recopied by a professional scribe" (Burchfield 1987, p. 280).

It seems curious that a text so obviously written with the expectation that it would be widely copied should exist in only one manuscript and that, apparently, a draft. Treharne has taken this as suggesting that it is not only modern readers who have found the work tedious (Treharne 2000, p. 273). Orm, however, says in the preface that he wishes Walter to remove any wording that he finds clumsy or incorrect (quoted in Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 175–76).

The provenance

Provenance

Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...

of the manuscript before the seventeenth century is unclear. From a signature on the flyleaf we know that it was in van Vliet

Jan van Vliet

Jan van Vliet , also known as Janus Ulitius, was one of the 17th century pioneers of Germanic philology....

's collection in 1659. It was auctioned in 1666, after his death, and probably was purchased by Franciscus Junius

Franciscus Junius (the younger)

Franciscus Junius , also known as François du Jon, was a pioneer of Germanic philology. As a collector of ancient manuscripts, he published the first modern editions of a number of important texts.-Life:...

, from whose library it came to the Bodleian as part of the Junius donation (Holt 1878, pp. liv–lvi).

Contents and style

The Ormulum consists of 18,956 lines of metrical verse, explaining Christian teaching on each of the texts used in the mass

Mass (liturgy)

"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...

throughout the church calendar (Treharne 2000, p. 273). As such, it is the first new homily

Homily

A homily is a commentary that follows a reading of scripture. In Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, a homily is usually given during Mass at the end of the Liturgy of the Word...

cycle in English since the works of Ælfric of Eynsham

Ælfric of Eynsham

Ælfric of Eynsham was an English abbot, as well as a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian , Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist...

(c. 990). The motivation was to provide an accessible English text for the benefit of the less educated, which might include some clergy who found it difficult to understand the Latin of the Vulgate

Vulgate

The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...

Bible, and the parishioners who in most cases would not understand spoken Latin at all (Treharne 2000, p. 273).

Each homily begins with a paraphrase of a Gospel

Gospel

A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...

reading (important when the laity did not understand Latin), followed by exegesis

Exegesis

(Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75). The theological content is derivative; Orm closely follows Bede

Bede

Bede , also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede , was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow , both in the Kingdom of Northumbria...

's exegesis of Luke

Gospel of Luke

The Gospel According to Luke , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Luke or simply Luke, is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension.The...

, the Enarrationes in Matthoei, and the Glossa ordinaria
Glossa Ordinaria
The Glossa ordinaria , Lat., "the ordinary gloss/interpretation/explanation", was an assembly of glosses, from the Church Fathers and thereafter, printed in the margins of the Vulgate Bible; these were widely used in the education system of Christendom in Cathedral schools from the Carolingian...

of the Bible. Thus, he reads each verse primarily allegorically

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

rather than literally (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). Rather than identify individual sources, Orm refers frequently to "" and to the "holy book" (Bennett 1986, p. 31). Bennett has speculated that the Acts of the Apostles, Glossa Ordinaria, and Bede were bound together in a large Vulgate

Vulgate

Bible in the abbey so that Orm truly was getting all of his material from a source that was, to him, a single book. (Bennett 1986, p. 31).

Although the sermons have been deemed "of little literary or theological value" (Burchfield 1987, p. 280) and though Orm has been said to possess "only one rhetorical device", that of repetition (Bennett 1986, p. 32), the Ormulum never was intended as a book in the modern sense, but rather as a companion to the liturgy

Liturgy

Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those...

. Priests would read, and congregations hear, only a day's entry at a time. The tedium that many experience when attempting to read the Ormulum today would not exist for persons hearing only a single homily each day. Furthermore, although Orm's poetry is, perhaps, subliterary, the homilies were meant for easy recitation or chanting, not for aesthetic appreciation; everything from the overly strict meter to the orthography might function only to aid oratory

Oratory

Oratory is a type of public speaking.Oratory may also refer to:* Oratory , a power metal band* Oratory , a place of worship* a religious order such as** Oratory of Saint Philip Neri ** Oratory of Jesus...

(Bennett and Smithers 1982, pp. 174–75).

Although earlier metrical homilies, such as those of Ælfric and Wulfstan

Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York

Wulfstan was an English Bishop of London, Bishop of Worcester, and Archbishop of York. He should not be confused with Wulfstan I, Archbishop of York or Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. He is thought to have begun his ecclesiastical career as a Benedictine monk. He became the Bishop of London in 996...

, were based on the rules of Old English poetry

Anglo-Saxon literature

Old English literature encompasses literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period from the 7th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others...

, they took sufficient liberties with meter to be readable as prose. Orm does not follow their example. Rather, he adopts a "jog-trot fifteener" for his rhythm, based on the Latin iambic septenarius, and writes continuously, neither dividing his work into stanzas nor rhyming his lines, again following Latin poetry (Bennett 1986, p. 31). The work is unusual in that no critic ever has stepped forward to defend it on literary grounds. Indeed, Orm was humble about his oeuvre: he admits in the preface that he frequently has padded the lines to fill out the meter, "to help those who read it", and urges his brother Walter to edit the poetry to make it more meet (Treharne 2000, pp. 274–75).

A brief sample may help to illustrate the style of the work. This passage explains the background to the Nativity

Nativity of Jesus

The Nativity of Jesus, or simply The Nativity, refers to the accounts of the birth of Jesus in two of the Canonical gospels and in various apocryphal texts....

As soon as the time came
that our Lord wanted
to be born in this middle-earth
for the sake of all mankind,
at once he chose kinsmen for himself,
all just as he wanted,
and he decided that he would be born
exactly where he wished.

(3494–501)

Orthography

Rather than conspicuous literary merit, the chief scholarly value of the Ormulum derives from Orm's idiosyncratic orthographical system (Treharne 2000, p. 273). He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously (Bennett 1986, pp. 31–32).

Orm's chief innovation was to employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long (Treharne 2000, p. 273). For syllables that ended in vowels, he used accent marks to indicate length. In addition to this, he used two distinct letter forms for , using the old yogh

Yogh

The letter yogh , was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing y and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Old English form of the letter g.In Middle English writing, tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh....

for [d͡ʒ] and [j], and the new for [ɡ] (Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37). His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having originally used and inconsistently for words such as "beon" and "kneow," which had been spelled with in Old English, at line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all "eo" spellings, replacing them solely with "e" alone ("ben" and "knew"), to reflect the pronunciation (Matthew 2004, p. 936; Jack, George, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, pp. 936–37).

The combination of this system with the rigid meter, and the stress patterns this implies, provides enough information to reconstruct his pronunciation with some precision; making the reasonable assumption that Orm's pronunciation was in no way unusual, this permits scholars of the History of the English language

History of the English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the...

to develop an exceptionally precise snapshot of exactly how Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the twelfth century (Matthew 2004, p. 936).

Significance

Orm's book has a number of innovations that make it valuable. As Bennett points out, Orm's adaptation of a classical meter with fixed stress patterns anticipates future English poets, who would do much the same when encountering foreign language prosodies (Bennett 1986, p. 31). The Ormulum is also the only specimen of the homiletic tradition in England between Ælfric and the fourteenth century, as well as being the last example of the Old English

Anglo-Saxon literature

verse homily. It also demonstrates what would become Received Standard English

Modern English

Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...

two centuries before Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

(Burchfield 1987, p. 280). Further, Orm was concerned with the laity. He sought to make the Gospel comprehensible to the congregation, and he did this perhaps forty years before the Fourth Lateran Council

Fourth Council of the Lateran

The Fourth Council of the Lateran was convoked by Pope Innocent III with the papal bull of April 19, 1213, and the Council gathered at Rome's Lateran Palace beginning November 11, 1215. Due to the great length of time between the Council's convocation and meeting, many bishops had the opportunity...

of 1215 "spurred the clergy as a whole into action" (Bennett 1986, p. 33). At the same time, Orm's idiosyncrasies and attempted orthographic reform make his work vital for understanding Middle English. The Ormulum is, with the Ancrene Wisse
Ancrene Wisse
Ancrene Wisse or Guide for Anchoresses is an anonymous monastic rule for anchoresses, written in the early 13th century. Ancrene Wisse was originally composed for three sisters who chose to enter the contemplative life...

and the Ayenbite of Inwyt
Ayenbite of Inwyt
The Ayenbite of Inwyt is a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English...

, one of the three crucial texts that have enabled philologists to document the transformation of Old English into Middle English (Burchfield 1987, p. 280).

Endnotes

Quotations are from Holt (1878). The dedication and preface are both numbered separately from the main body of the poem.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Origins

Manuscript

Contents and style

Orthography

Significance

See also

Endnotes