2025 Theses Doctoral

Dead Stones and Dumb Trees: Old English Logics of Dispossession

Hitchcock, Emma

This dissertation brings Indigenous critical theory to bear on Old English archives. In so doing, it reconciles a longstanding problem faced by scholars of Old English: of how to recognize the subject of Old English poetry by methods that withstand interpellation into the modern episteme.

There is a double motion to this approach. On the one hand, I show how the logic of Old English poetic affect becomes clearer when analyzed through Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty as a matrix or root system rather an individual right. Against the nationalist formulation of subjecthood, in which “recognition” catalyzes sovereignty, Indigenous critics assert a sovereignty generated by affective attachment. While “recognition” implies identification with an intelligible Other, affective bonds are formed by the ongoing invocation of the Other, which does not depend on an intelligible response. By this analytic, we can read the Old English poetics of binding as a function of, rather than constraint on, sovereignty. I show how this function of poetics is at work in the lyrics of the Exeter Book (Chapter 1) and the medicinal remedies of the Lacnunga (Chapter 2), which invocatively bind “I” with “you” to formulate sovereign homes and bodies.

On the other hand, however, I argue that Old English poetic manuscripts enact a colonial conversion of the affective subject. Since there is no distinction between theory and poetry in the Old English archive, and since this archive actively teaches its reader how to read, I argue that we can detect in it “logics of dispossession” in the sense of geographer Mishuana Goeman when she writes that all colonial regimes “obfuscate the power of the land to possess us” (“Land as Life,” 79). Put another way, Old English poetic manuscripts perform a conversion that I call mind-binding: they reify intelligibility as the mark of responsiveness and teach readers to bind themselves to singular truth.

As the Exeter lyrics motivate the practice of binding oneself to an eternal home with God, they turn their readers away from “unfamiliar” bird-song and wolf-calls (Chapter 1). Meanwhile, the dialogic poem Solomon and Saturn I purports to make the healing power of plants intelligible by alphabetic code and thereby teaches that invocation of the plants is superfluous to herbal medicine (Chapter 2). Finally, the Old English Daniel stages the heathen king Nebuchadnezzar’s recognition of himself in a magnificent world-tree. The text expressly fixes a typological reading of the tree as a sign of the true cross, yet simultaneously reveals a concern that readers might become bound to the tree qua person (Chapter 3).

This “new” approach to premodern affect is, more precisely, a reconfiguration of very old interpretive methods. In a coda, I foreground the presence of the Sámi in the Old English and Old Norse archives, which troubles the historical narrative of first contact between Indigenous and European peoples as a modern event. The project of reading European medieval archives with Indigenous critical theory is not anachronistic, but rather urges alternative historiographies by making legible latent authorities and sovereignties.