The Specter of Old Age: Nasty Old Men
in the Sagas of Icelanders

Susan E. Deskis, Northern Illinois University

The aesthetic and rhetorical strategies of the Old English gnomic poems remain somewhat mysterious to modern readers, in large part because the genre is so foreign to our experience. Heroic poetry like Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon may no longer be much in style, but narrative is, so we can approach those historically distant works with a modicum of familiarity. The gnomic poems, however, seem to resist any connection with postmedieval literature. Comparative studies can provide some context by showing that wisdom literature is more important to oral than to literate cultures. But within a specific culture, such as that of Anglo-Saxon England, how do we judge whether Maxims I or The Fortunes of Men is a "better" poem when we have little clue as to exactly what (besides the imparting of information) each poet was trying to accomplish?