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Ormulum

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: General Literature

   A page from the Ormulum: Note the careful and repeated editing
   performed over time by Orm, as well as the insertions of new readings
   by "Hand B."
   Enlarge
   A page from the Ormulum: Note the careful and repeated editing
   performed over time by Orm, as well as the insertions of new readings
   by "Hand B."

   The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a 12th-century work of Biblical exegesis,
   written in early Middle English verse by a monk named Orm (or Ormin).
   Because of the unique phonetic orthography adopted by the author, the
   work preserves many details of English pronunciation at a time when the
   language was in flux after the Norman Conquest; consequently, despite
   its lack of literary merit, it is invaluable to philologists in tracing
   the development of English. Orm was concerned that priests were unable
   to speak the vernacular properly, and so he developed an idiosyncratic
   spelling system to tell his readers how to pronounce every vowel, and
   he composed his work using a strict poetic meter that ensured that
   readers would know which syllables were stressed. Modern scholars can
   use these two features to reconstruct Middle English just as Orm spoke
   it.

Origins

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

Icc was þær þær i crisstnedd wass
  Orrmin bi name nemmnedd            Where I was christened, I was
                                     named Ormin by name
                                                                  (Ded. 323-324)

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

          Þiss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum
            forrþi þatt Orrm itt wrohhte This book is named Ormulum
                                         because Orm wrote it
                                                                     (Pref. 1-2)

   The name "Orm" is derived from Old Norse, meaning worm, dragon. With
   the suffix of "myn" for "man" (hence "Ormin"), it was a common name
   throughout the Danelaw area of England. The choice between the two
   forms of the name was probably dictated by the meter. The title of the
   poem itself, "Ormulum", is modeled on the Latin speculum ("mirror"); it
   can be interpreted as either the boastful "Reflection of Orm" or the
   modest "Researches of Orm."

   The Danish name is not unexpected; the language of the Ormulum, an East
   Midlands dialect, is stringently Danelaw. It includes numerous Old
   Norse phrases (particularly doublets, where an English and Old Norse
   term are cojoined), but there are very few Old French influences on
   Orm's language (Bennett 33). Orm therefore shows both the sluggishness
   of the Norman influence in the formerly Danish areas of England
   (compare the Peterborough Chronicle, also from the East Midlands, which
   shows a great deal of French influence even though it was likely
   written before Ormulum) and the assimilation of Old Norse features into
   early Middle English.
   The interior of the church of Bourne Abbey, where the Ormulum was
   composed: the two nave arcades, though now unpainted, remain from the
   church Orm would have known.
   Enlarge
   The interior of the church of Bourne Abbey, where the Ormulum was
   composed: the two nave arcades, though now unpainted, remain from the
   church Orm would have known.

   According to the work's preface, Orm wrote it at the behest of one
   Brother Walter, who was his brother both affterr þe flæshess kinde
   (i.e. biologically) and as a fellow canon of an Augustinian order. 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 have held that the likely origin is Elsham Priory in
   north Lincolnshire, recently it has been widely accepted that Orm wrote
   in the Arrouaisian Bourne Abbey (in Bourne, Lincolnshire). Two
   additional pieces of evidence support this conjecture: firstly, the
   Arrouaisian abbey was established by Augustinian canons in 1138, and
   secondly, the work includes dedicatory prayers to Peter and Paul, who
   are the patrons of the Arrouaisian abbey (Parkes).

   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. Since it is apparently an autograph, with two
   of the three hands in the text generally believed to be Orm's own, the
   date of the manuscript and the date of composition will be the same. On
   the evidence of the third hand, a collaborator who entered the
   pericopes at the head of each homily, it is thought that the manuscript
   was finished circa 1180, but Orm himself may have begun the work as
   early as 1150 (Parkes). The text has few topical references to specific
   events that could be used to identify the period of composition more
   precisely; Orm may have been an eyewitness to the Anarchy of the reigns
   of Stephen and Matilda, since some have seen references to this in some
   of his admonitions to readers, but, if so, he is quite elliptical, as
   the sermons almost never stray from their source material.

Manuscript

   Only one copy of the Ormulum exists, as Bodleian Library MS Junius 1.
   In its current state, this is incomplete: the book's table of contents
   claims that there were 242 homilies, but there are only 32 remaining.
   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
   will have been caused by the loss of gatherings from the manuscript;
   there is no doubt that such losses have occurred even in modern times,
   as shown by the fact that the Dutch antiquarian Jan van Vliet, one of
   its 17th-century owners, copied out passages that are not in the
   present text. The amount of redaction in the text, plus the loss of
   possible gatherings, led J. A. W. Bennett to comment that "only about
   one fifth survives, and that in the ugliest of manuscripts" (Bennett,
   30).

   The parchment used in the manuscript is of the lowest quality, and the
   text itself 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, 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. Some (e.g. Treharne, 274) have taken this as
   suggesting that it is not only modern readers who have found the work
   tedious. Orm himself, however, says in the Preface that he wishes
   Walter to remove any wording that he finds clumsy or incorrect; this
   implies that a revision or approval process was anticipated, and it is
   possible that the Ormulum remained in draft form simply because it
   never left Walter's possession.

   The provenance of the manuscript before the 17th century is unclear.
   From a signature on the flyleaf we know that it was in van Vliet's
   collection in 1659; it was auctioned in 1666, after his death, and was
   probably purchased by Franciscus Junius, from whose library it came to
   the Bodleian as part of the Junius donation (Holt, liv-lvi).

Contents and style

   The Ormulum consists of 20,000 lines of metrical verse, explicating
   Christian teaching on each of the texts used in the mass throughout the
   church calendar. As such, it is the first new homily cycle in English
   since the works of Ælfric (c. 990). The motivation was to provide an
   accessible English text for the benefit of the less educated
   Englishmen, from clergy who could not navigate the Latin of the Vulgate
   to the parishioners who would not understand spoken Latin.

   Each homily begins with a paraphrase of a Gospel reading, followed by
   exegesis. The theological content is derivative; Orm closely follows
   Bede's exegesis of Luke, the Enarrationes in Matthoei, and the Glossa
   ordinaria of the Bible. Thus he reads each verse primarily
   allegorically rather than literally. Rather than identify individual
   sources, Orm refers frequently to "ðe boc" and to the "holy book", and
   Bennett has speculated that the Acts of the Apostles, Glossa Ordinaria,
   and Bede were bound together in a large Vulgate Bible in the abbey and
   that Orm was truly getting all of his material from a source that was,
   to him, a single book (Bennett 31).

   Although "the sermons are of little literary or theological value"
   (Burchfield) and Orm possesses "only one rhetorical device", that of
   repetition (Bennett), the Ormulum was never intended as a book in the
   modern sense, but rather as a companion to the liturgy. 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 at a time. Further,
   although Orm's poetry is, at best, 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.

   Though earlier metrical homilies, such as those of Ælfric and Wulfstan,
   were based on the rules of Old English poetry, 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
   (Bennett 31), based on the Latin iambic septenarius, and writes
   continuously, neither dividing his work into stanzas nor rhyming his
   lines, again following Latin poetry. The work is unusual in that no
   critic has ever stepped forward to defend it on literary grounds.
   Indeed, Orm himself was aware of its flaws: he admits in the preface
   that he has frequently 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.

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

  Forrþrihht anan se time comm
    þatt ure Drihhtin wollde
  ben borenn i þiss middellærd
    forr all mannkinne nede
  he chæs himm sone kinnessmenn
    all swillke summ he wollde
  & whær he wollde borenn ben
    he chæs all att hiss wille. 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.
                                                                     (3494-3501)

Orthography

   Rather than any literary merit, therefore, the chief value of the
   Ormulum for scholars derives from Orm's idiosyncratic orthographical
   system. 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.

   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. For syllables that ended in vowels, he used accent marks to
   indicate length. In addition to this, he used two distinct letter forms
   for <g>, using the old yogh for [ʤ] and [j], and the new <g> for [g].
   His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having
   originally used <eo> and <e> inconsistently for words such as "beon"
   and "kneow" that had been spelled with <eo> in Old English, at line
   13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all "eo" spellings
   and replace them solely with "e" alone ("ben" and "knew"), to reflect
   the pronunciation.

   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
   to develop an exceptionally precise snapshot of exactly how Middle
   English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th
   century.

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. The Ormulum is also
   the only specimen of the homiletic tradition in England between Ælfric
   and the 14th century, as well as the last example of the Old English
   verse homily. It also demonstrates what would become Received Standard
   English two centuries before Chaucer (Burchfield). Further, Orm himself
   was concerned with the laity. He sought to make the Gospel
   comprehensible to the congregation, and he did this perhaps 40 years
   before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 "spurred the clergy as a
   whole into action" (Bennett, 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 and the Ayenbite of Inwyt, one of
   the three crucial texts that have allowed philologists to document the
   transformation of Old English into Middle English.
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