Manipulations of the Mind-as-Container Motif in Beowulf, Homiletic Fragment II, and Alfred's Metrical Epilogue to the Pastoral Care

by BRITT MIZE, Texas A&M University


Old English poetry regularly represents the mind as a metaphysical enclosure. Figures of speech reflecting a similar model of mentality are frequent in many languages, including Modern English (keep it in mind, he's closed-minded, it never entered my mind), but Anglo-Saxon poets working in the vernacular used the idea more consciously than we normally do now, often formulating it in more concrete or developed metaphors and sometimes exploiting its possibilities for considerable rhetorical effect. Any enclosure has, in principle, two functional properties, the ability to keep things in and the ability to keep things out, and both characterize the human mind as it is imagined within the surviving canon of Old English