Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature

The first comprehensive study of the use of compound words in Old English poetry, homilies, and philosophy, "Joinings" explores the effect of compounds on style, pace, clarity, and genre in Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature. Jonathan Davis-Secord demonstrates how compounds affect the pacing of passages in "Beowulf", creating slow-motion narrative at moments of significant violence; how their structural complexity gives rhetorical emphasis to phrases in the homilies of Wulfstan; and how they help to mix quotidian and elevated diction in Cynewulf's "Juliana" and the Old English translations of Boethius. His work demonstrates that compound words were the epitome of Anglo-Saxon vernacular verbal art, combining grammar, style, and culture in a manner unlike any other feature of Old English.Old English compounds have been widely studied as linguistic entities, in terms of their function in metrical and formulaic composition, and in relation to style. Davis-Secord’s book embraces this scholarship intelligently, but goes beyond it by assimilating recent work in both literary and linguistic disciplines. He applies translation theory, linguistic neuropsychology, speech genres, and stylistic analysis to compounds and their use in both prose and poetry in useful detail.