Old English poetry directs our gaze not only to normative expectations attached to the performance of age identity, but to the fluid, surprising, and contingent nature of the life course. The corpus sometimes appeals to fixed ideas about life stages and their associated characteristics, suggesting a person passes through such phases in a predictable way, but it also consistently foregrounds idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, and variability as inherent to the passage of each life. Its age narratives are full of twists and turns, periods of flourishing and sudden curtailments. At times, the poetry’s framing of a life’s progression can even resemble what Rorty terms the ‘improvisatory accident-prone dramas of (what passes for) a person’s life’, or the ways in which Malabou perceives lives to ‘run their course like rivers’ which sometimes ‘jump their bed’.¹ In their irregularity, Old English poetic discourses of the life course are embedded in the wider narrative and rhetorical strategies which shape this tradition of verse, especially its tendency towards the narration of relatively continuous intervals of experience broken up by pivotal moments of change. As part of a wider poetics of punctuated equilibrium, intervals of life experience therefore tend to continue until they meet with a sudden disruption or watershed moment, at which point they are suddenly superseded by a new state of being.

The Exeter Book Riddles offer an array of accounts of ageing which follow this kind of punctuated rhythm, often in a way which disrupts some of the key assumptions commonly underpinning modern views of the life cycle. For example, birth imagery is largely avoided as a means of beginning vernacular riddlic life narratives, in favour of depictions of sustained periods of gradual, cumulative growth, facilitated by a nourishing environment. Key watershed moments arrive when any given creature begins to participate usefully in a wider social network, and this upheaval often involves entry into an economy of violence – a world in which physical and emotional hurt is consistently caused, for all that many riddle-creatures enter into protective, defensive, and much-valued relationships with others. The Riddles therefore not only dwell on the precarity of early life, in the form of its reliance on carefully calibrated conditions, but also the precarity of life and well-being across the rest of the life course. In other words, fragility and vulnerability do not cease to be problems as a creature ages.

In the long narrative poems describing holy lives discussed in Chapter 2, several pictures emerge of contingent, variable, and often unpredictable adulthood. In Guthlac A, it is clear that masculine youthful unruliness constitutes a disruptive force that requires interventions from others for its management, and the full flourishing of youths into usefulness is therefore reliant on a delicate set of circumstances. In Juliana, we find another portrait of youthful unruliness, in a manner that previous scholarship has largely overlooked due to a preoccupation with the poem’s gender politics; Juliana exhibits a disruptiveness that is overtly ascribed to her youthfulness by her earthly community, but her own life course is ultimately arrested at a point of social liminality, on the cusp of marriage and integration into a new home. In Andreas, the associations of youth are largely more positive, although there are multiple competing discourses in the poem. Andreas initially seems to understand youth as a condition requiring improvement, such that the comedy of the poem is found in his difficulties comprehending the significance of Christ’s youth as representative of regeneration and renewal. His own intellectual maturation is markedly nonlinear, requiring its own renewals, as scholars have previously explored. Judith too suggests that later adulthood does not automatically bring wisdom, and stages a conflict between Judith’s efficacious, productive mode and the social chaos of Holofernes. These four poems therefore offer different angles on the contingencies, vagaries, and irregularities of adult experience.

Chapter 3 suggested that much of Old English poetry understands living into old age as a kind of outliving, bound up with witnessing death, enduring trauma, and facing the truth of worldly precarity. It particularly stressed the moments in Beowulf and Cynewulfian epilogues when verbalisation and poetic craft are presented as means of negotiating trauma and loss. As such, it dwelt on an aspect of the life course which is inherently variable and deeply personal – not anchored in reaching certain milestones or decades, but instead inextricably bound up with interpersonal attachments and idiosyncratic experiences of loss, which can then be related to other people’s loss through painstaking intellectual, spiritual, and compositional work. The present moment of the aged person’s experience too varies greatly – their emotional and creative life unfolds differently depending on social context and, in particular, their relationship with an audience. Their audience may be captive and encouraging (as in the case of Hrothgar), elevated and privileged above the speaker’s internal world (as in the case of the nightingale of Riddle 6), or absent altogether (as in the case of the unnamed father mourning his son). One shared common denominator nonetheless binds together these experiences of elderliness: the simultaneous avoidance of and exposure to death over the course of a lengthy life course.

Chapter 4 turned, finally, to contemplate death itself, and ranged more widely over the Old English poetic corpus, dwelling particularly on wisdom poetry and poetry on the theme of Judgement Day. It highlighted how many different poems opt to construct death as a physical condition rather than a solely social phenomenon experienced by the living, and traced the ways in which the death state is connected with other kinds of cognate experience, notably sleep and drunkenness. By pointing out the blurred boundaries between these phenomena, this chapter suggested that death is not usually represented as sitting neatly outside of the life course, and certainly not as predictably following the phase of old age: not only can a person fall into a death state at any point, but other kinds of experience can also threaten a person’s vitality in deathlike ways. Forms of waste – shocking, lamentable, spectacular, or all three – are a major preoccupation of Old English poetry, especially that which takes the order and disorder of the cosmos as its primary theme, and human death forms a part of these wider discourses.

Indeed, in addition to uncovering the irregularity and contingency of the life course in Old English poetry, a major through line of this study has been tracing how the human life course is embedded in nonhuman structures and experiences. The largely nonhuman subjects of the Exeter Book Riddles have been a powerful presence in this book, the primary focus of Chapter 1 and appearing intermittently throughout – these texts construct narratives of life development which hover between human and nonhuman referents, pertaining to both, as part of their isomorphic (rather than necessarily anthropomorphic) approach. Much of their preoccupation with growth-into-usefulness resonates with the preoccupations of longer verse narratives more overtly concerned with human life courses, like Guthlac A, as Chapter 2 found. Chapter 3 considered how all parts of the cosmos witness destruction as a condition of living a long time, particularly obvious in Solomon and Saturn II. Chapter 4 then explored the forms of death met by human bodies alongside the making-idle of things and the cosmos. In myriad other ways, this study has pointed out how the boundaries of the human body are blurred when it comes to the rhetorics and discourses of the life course, whether through imagery of vegetative growth or the nonhuman narratives of maturation which are integral to traditions of the ages of man (anchoring human ageing in phenomena like the seven days of Creation, the five primary positions of the sun in the sky, or the various natural forces organised into the ‘fours’).² This monograph has aimed to demonstrate the advantages of integrating new theories of materiality and the nonhuman into our approaches to various aspects of medieval texts, especially dimensions (like the life course) which may seem exclusively to do with humans on the surface.

This study has also reflected on how each life course is tied up with other facets of individual identity, especially gender. The lives of men attract the bulk of attention in Old English poetry, but this is no reason to follow in the track of scholarship which presumes we can speak of only male ageing in the context of this tradition.³ The unfolding of women’s lives is certainly staged in this group of texts, whether in the form of Juliana’s rebellion in the face of the version of social adulthood she is offered, Sarah’s miraculous postmenopausal pregnancy in Genesis A, or the performances of the aged female nightingale who entertains audiences in Riddle 6. Disability and illness too have recurred as part of this study’s treatment of the life course, most consistently when discussing the norm of the adult male body and its implication of able-bodiment. Further work in the area of personal identity in early medieval literature and culture will draw out similar intersections and dialogues between ostensibly separate aspects of identity.

As a whole, this study has advocated bringing contemporary theoretical frameworks to bear on Old English poetry, simultaneously allowing these texts to reflect a new set of perspectives back onto modern theory. It has connected Old English poems with larger discourses about ageing and the life course, especially when considering how traditional concepts of the life cycle are currently being challenged, whether though sociological concepts in age studies (such as the extended life course) or calls in philosophy to question whether lives readily fall into coherent, linear narratives at all. It has also engaged with other theoretical frameworks, such as gender and queer theory and some aspects of disability and trauma studies, in a way which aims to open up further avenues for future research.

On another level, this study has also made a case for the interconnectedness of the Old English poetic corpus and the justifiability of continuing to approach it as a single (though deeply multifaceted) tradition, for all that an abundance of recent scholarship has worked to divide the corpus into smaller units, often attached to specific historical milieux (on which see the Note on the Chronology of Old English Poetry with which this study began). It has found a number of trends across the corpus when it comes to depictions of the life course, albeit manifesting in different ways across different poems or groups of poems. Sometimes there is also evidence of direct borrowing between poets in their handling of related issues, as in the self-presentation of the poet-persona of The Phoenix, for instance, carefully gathering materials for poetry (through the verb samnian) and describing the figure of the old poet in much the same manner as Cynewulf. As will now be seen, the experimental piece of verse in the Exeter Book known as The Rhyming Poem may also be meaningfully described as post-Cynewulfian in its approach to the human life course, therefore offering one final piece of evidence for strong lines of influence shaping the vernacular poetic corpus.

Moreover, reflecting wider trends identified in Old English poetry by this monograph, The Rhyming Poem once again asserts the contingency of the life course, foregrounding its tendency to be shaped by sudden reversals as well as its enmeshing of discourses of human and nonhuman development. As such, it both benefits from contextualisation amid the wider landscape of poetic representations of the life course and offers a condensed articulation of many of the qualities this study has found to be present more diffusely elsewhere. Furthermore, this text uses its innovative metrical scheme – possibly exploiting an existing association between rhyme and antithesis – to create an account which, more than any other Old English poem, stresses the violent and unpredictable transformations which accompany ageing.

The Life Course in The Rhyming Poem

The highly enigmatic text known as The Rhyming Poem survives in the Exeter Book and seems to have been composed relatively late, possibly in the tenth century.⁴ The poem is primarily known for its experimental form, combining alliterative metre with continuous end-rhyme across its eighty-seven lines. Its incorporation of this device seems to have been influenced by Latin hymnal traditions, possibly mediated through the octosyllabic verse of Aldhelm and his pupil Æthilwald.⁵ Historically, the subject matter of the text has been viewed as highly obscure and attracted little critical attention. In 1969, Edward B. Irving Jr unfortunately described the poem as ‘a bit of trash’.⁶ More recently, the text’s ‘extravagant combination’ of double alliteration and rhyme has been called the achievement of a poet ‘heedless of the consequences to the comprehensibility of his text’.⁷

The text gains coherence, however, if viewed as describing a life course, bearing in mind all of the potential for the fluidity, contingency, and irregularity towards which that label points us. In part, the text becomes clearer if we connect it with the Augustinian model of the six ages of man, but beyond this, we must appreciate the poem’s depiction of age as intimately connected with its form. When the poet toggles with the norms of Old English poetry, integrating rhyme, they discover new ways of describing the process of growing older and – in particular – accentuating its sudden shifts and redirections. As will be seen, the device of end-rhyme, when incorporated into Old English verse, seems to have accrued associations with antithesis and conflict in a manner which the poet of The Rhyming Poem has embraced. Moreover, the poem harnesses this tradition in a manner which throws Old English poetry’s typical concern with age and unpredictable change into overdrive.

At times, scholars have noted how this poem seems to trace two major phases of a single human life, as the speaker initially seems to experience prosperity in earlier life, but then, after line 43, experiences many afflictions ‘in what is evidently his age’.⁸ This contrast between ‘a joyful past’ and ‘a wretched present’ has led to the text being categorised as one of the Old English ‘elegies’.⁹ The text nonetheless explores a number of facets of life progression beyond the binary of youth and age, although this is the primary contrast. It does so while asserting intricate connections between human maturation and other kinds of social and cosmic development. As scholars have also observed, the poem views ‘man as a microcosm of the macrocosm’ – over the course of its narrative, the poet is continually mindful of both ‘both homo and humus’, to invoke an etymologically connected pairing much emphasised by Isidore.¹⁰ Ultimately, the poet contemplates the development of a single life from a perspective which takes in wider processes of nonhuman and cosmic maturation, growth, and decline.

In the very first lines of the poem, as Anne Klinck tells us, ‘the speaker introduces his life and associates it with the beneficent power of God’:

These lines are more specifically reminiscent of Augustine’s First Age, including as mediated through Isidore and Bede, as I have argued elsewhere.¹² For Augustine, commenting on Genesis, ‘the beginnings of the human race, in which it began to enjoy this light, can well be compared to the first day on which God made the light’ (‘Primordia enim generis humani, in quibus ista luce frui coepit, bene comparantur primo diei quo fecit Deus lucem’); each individual, in being born, ‘comes out into the light’ (‘exit ad lucem’).¹³ As Bede remarks in his commentary on Genesis, ‘Let light be made, and light was made, corresponds to the first age, in the beginning of which this same world was made and man was placed in the delights of the paradise of pleasure’ (‘Fiat lux et facta est lux, primae aetati congruit in cuius initio mundus idem factus et homo in deliciis paradisi uolupatis positus est’).¹⁴ Elsewhere, Bede explains that ‘the created Sun which lights up all the stars signifies the true and eternal light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ (‘uidelicet sol ille creatus omnium illuminator astrorum, aeternam ueramque lucem significat, quae illuminat omnem hominem uenientem in hunc mundum’, John 1:9).¹⁵ In announcing connections between life and light in its opening lines, the poet of The Rhyming Poem signposts the text’s engagement with these grand narratives of the formation of man and the world.

In initially declaring the significance of light, the poem furthermore lays the groundwork for a binary between light and dark which is ultimately key to the poem’s form. Our poet has previously been described as ‘post-Cynewulfian’ by Macrae-Gibson, and in support of this claim we can note specific correspondences between the thematic concerns of The Rhyming Poem and those of Cynewulf’s more substantial rhyming passages, especially Elene 1236–50 and Christ II 591–6.¹⁶ These instances of sustained end-rhyme coincide with the exploration of antithetical relationships and profound reversals, particularly between light and darkness. The ‘epilogue’ to Elene was treated at length in Chapter 3, but merits quotation again here to allow its staging of antithetical relationships to unfold. The end-rhymes vary in their precision, interweaving ABAB across lines 1240–2, working only through faint homeoteleuton in 1246, and dipping into assonance in lines 1236 and 1245. Rhyming effects and assonance are highlighted in bold and underlined, respectively, and likewise the words in the translation corresponding to such effects:

Major contrasts picked out by the rhyme include not only the constrictive night and divine revelation of learning, repeatedly described as a kind of light, but also between sin and grace, solitary oppression and divine assistance. In Christ II, end-rhyme similarly accompanies an explanation that each ‘cwic’ person may choose:

Light and night imagery remain key, as does the division between solitude and company. In addition to emphasising the imagery of divine illumination so pronounced in both of these Cynewulfian passages, The Rhyming Poem is interested in the intersection of power and crowds in a manner particularly reminiscent of the lines from Christ II. The speaker offers many variations on the theme of ‘household retainers surrounded [me]’ (‘hyge-dryht befeold’, 21b), followed by reflections on isolation and deprivation in the later part of the poem, as ‘the kindred of hope departs’ (‘wen-cyn gewiteð’, 61a). The poet thus elaborates on the same subject matter which Cynewulf saw as appropriate for exploration in rhyme: mutually exclusive and conflicting modes of experience, pitted against each other. If sudden changes of circumstance characterise the presentation of the life course in Old English poetry, this poet has seen rhyme as an opportunity to supercharge the contrasts of his poem, following in Cynewulf’s footsteps.

The tradition of antithesis explored through rhyme is also attested in the macaronic Latin-English Proverbs, attested in eleventh-century contexts and of uncertain date, although Dobbie wonders if the third line of this text imitates a similar line in The Rhyming Poem: ‘searing whiteness becomes dirty, summer-heat becomes cool’ (‘searo-hwit solaþ, sumur-hat colað’, 67).¹⁷ As we have seen, the extent of each rhyme varies, and some only register as faint homeoteleuton:

A series of transformations are sharply drawn into parallel by rhyming verbs here, developing a ‘prevailing metaphor of decay’.¹⁹ Nouns describing original conditions are aligned through alliterative stress (hat, hwit, leof, leoht), while processes of decline share rhyming grammatical endings (-að/-aþ). In their chiaroscuro, and their interest in describing transitions between other sharp contrasts, these lines share much with The Rhyming Poem and Cynewulf’s rhyming passages, such that style may influence substance (or vice versa). Across these texts, the combination of rhyme and alliteration appears to offer an ideal medium for accentuating antithesis, collision, and metamorphosis: key aspects of vernacular poetic discourses of the life course.

In keeping with this theory, when the rhyme of The Rhyming Poem kicks into hyperdrive – offering a heady concentration of self-rhyming compounds (including many hapax legomena) and short phrases – the subject matter is a series of extreme transformations.²⁰ The tongue-twisting phrases of this passage rhyme to the extent that they make pronunciation a challenge: these lines are a nightmare to recite aloud, in addition to being, as Thornbury has pointed out, ‘a scribe’s worst nightmare’.²¹ The extra rhymes are here underlined:

The passage builds ultimately to the declaration of inevitably soiled ‘searo-hwit’ and cooled ‘sumur-hat’ that also appear in the Latin-English Proverbs (67). When The Rhyming Poem rhymes most, then, its concern is with extremes of cosmic and social conflict, and profound moments of change. Just as Cynewulf puts rhyme to work in order to heighten explorations of antithetical states colliding, the Rhyming-poet doubles up the rhyme scheme to the same end.

While pursuing this enterprise, The Rhyming Poem includes many details that are loaded with significance in relation to processes of ageing, supplementing its central dichotomous relationship between youth and age. Following the reference to light in the opening lines, a series of subsequent early life experiences are listed:

Although Lois Bragg sees these lines as pointing us towards a ‘very special and privileged person’, they may more simply signpost the experiences of early life.²² The happiness of the young individual is consistent with how joy and youth are connected elsewhere in Old English poetry, including notably the ox drinking with ‘geoguð-myrþe’ in Riddle 36 (2a), Juliana dwelling at home ‘glæd-mode’ (91a), and the young men who enjoy the ‘worulde wynnum’ in Guthlac A (105a; 498a). Furthermore, as Macrae-Gibson has noted, a similar image of a clothed and cared-for child can be found in the opening passage to The Fortunes of Men, where the parents bear a child and ‘clothe it with colours’ (‘mid bleom gyrwað’, 3b).²³ The term bleo could in both cases refer to a body, given its second sense as ‘form, shape’, although Macrae-Gibson ultimately opts for a referent of ‘the colours of a noble youth’s fine clothes’.²⁴ The Riddles also associate coverings with formation in early life (Riddle 7, 4–5, 7a; Riddle 8, 4a, 7b–8), while a play between the moment of embodiment and the donning of garments can be found in Genesis A’s reference to Enoch born ‘in those clothes’ or ‘in that form’ (‘on þam gearwum’, 1212a).²⁵ The reference to blossom may recall Job 14.1–2: ‘Man … cometh forth like a flower and is destroyed, and fleeth as a shadow, and never continueth in the same state’ (‘Homo … quasi flos egreditur et conteritur, et fugit velut umbra, et numquam in eodem statu permanet’), as Macrae-Gibson points out.²⁶ The image is furthermore reminiscent of the abundance of growing plants in the Riddles, including the happily established reed of Riddle 58 (3a) and the plants which the rake of Riddle 32 leaves in place, ‘shining brightly, flourishing and growing’ (‘beorhte blican, blowan ond growan’, 9).

As in several of the Riddles, the impression of nurture and seclusion given by the poem’s opening lines is only heightened by the contrast provided by the subsequent phase of entrance into society:

The imagery of growing plants is continued, but newly accompanied by the description of movement and new social integration. The very first half-line of this passage can be registered as a compact allusion to the process of socialisation, in the form of the newly encountered gaze of peers: ‘men saw me’ (‘Secgas mec segon’, 5a). This is elaborated by the reference to the ‘feast’ (‘symbel’, 5b), followed by the allusion to the ‘gift of life’ (‘feorh-gife’, 6a), here enjoyed by a plurality of people, no longer one solitary figure. The references to the joyful movements of horses parallel the scene in which warriors enjoy similar movement in Beowulf:

This passage stresses social participation, apparent even as the appropriateness of the paths is agreed upon, while the diversity of age among the warriors signals a cross-generational social network. In The Rhyming Poem, as the speaker integrates within a group, the world seems to literally expand, ‘spread out under the sky’ (‘under roderum areaht’, 10a).

The world of The Rhyming Poem is now imbued with ræd-mægen (10b), a hapax legomenon which Bosworth-Toller tentatively defines as ‘Beneficial force (?), force that is productive of good or abundant good’, though Klinck recommends a slightly more literal translation: ‘wise power’.²⁸ Mægen nonetheless appears elsewhere in distinctly age-related contexts. Yldo takes away Hrothgar’s ‘joys of strength’ (‘mægenes wynnum’, 1887), for example, and when Ælfric formulates the five ages, he sees old age as when ‘the ageing man’s mægen wanes’ (‘ðæs ealdigendan mannes mægen bið wanigende’).²⁹ Other terms for strength have recurred across the previous chapters of this study. In Chapter 2, for example, cræft, which can mean ‘power’, was traced in its relation to adulthood in Andreas.³⁰ The ‘delight in power and physical motion’ and ‘self-fulfilment’ narrated in these lines (as described by Klinck) suggest a new step in an age narrative.³¹

The enigmatic lines which follow this passage elaborate upon these themes. Different kinds of travel make an appearance. A ship travels a wisely appointed course (13), ‘a path on the water-streams’ (‘on lagu-streame lad’, 14a).³² More abstractly, the speaker recounts how the troop simply ‘moved’ (‘rad’, 16a). The speaker furthermore says he was praised and protected ‘while I was in strength’ (‘þenden wæs ic in mægen’, 18b), reinforcing the rhetoric of physical power and connecting it with social acceptance and integration.³³ Nuances of social distinction are developed as the speaker’s status as a ruler becomes increasingly clear; invoking the language of had (explored in Chapter 2 with reference to Guthlac A), the character declares he ‘had high status’ (‘hæfde ic heanne had’, 15a).³⁴ Later, the speaker seems to hold his status and productivity in parallel with the earth’s productivity:

One might think of intellectual traditions attached to iuuentus, especially Bede’s account of the Fourth Age as the perfect time for governance: ‘From this Age – youth, so to speak – the era of the kings began among the people of God, for this age in man is normally apt for governing a kingdom’ (‘A qua uelut iuuenali aetate in populo Dei regum tempora coeperunt, haec namque in hominibus aetas apta gubernando solet existere regno’).³⁶ The era of the kings begins with David and Solomon, and as Bede notes, the temple flourished throughout the reign of these kings, ‘and especially by the one which the Lord swore to the first and most eminent of the kings pleasing to himself, when he said Of the fruit of your womb I will set upon my throne’ (‘perque illud maxime, quod primo ac praeeminentissimo regum sibi placentium iurauit Dominus, dicens, De fructu uentris tui ponam super sedem meam’).³⁷ In Bede’s reference to David as the crowning triumph of the Fourth Age, a particularly salient context for The Rhyming Poem emerges.

The figure of David has previously been brought into connection with the ruler of The Rhyming Poem, in light of the ruler’s singing and harp-playing.³⁸ In this passage, the speaker reports that he ‘sang powerful words’ (‘galdor-wordum gol’, 24a), combining the verb galan (‘to sing, recite formally; to cry out’) and the hapax legomenon galdor-word, translated by the DOE as ‘words of incantation’, or possibly ‘words having power’.³⁹ The similar compound galdor-cwide appears in Riddle 46 (7a) in the apparent context of its inscription on a paten; here pointing to the Psalms specifically.⁴⁰ Given this link between the two galdor-compounds, Karl P. Wentersdorf wonders whether the singing of the ruler in The Rhyming Poem could be prayer or participation in liturgies, ultimately seeing them as ‘royal prayers of thanksgiving’ comparable with David’s psalms of thanks.⁴¹ The music of the harp is indeed dwelt upon over the course of the next few lines, including in a reference to a ‘resounding string’ (‘gellende sner’, 25b), and in the following passage:

All these details furthermore resonate with the Fourth Age as a time of good governance and robust social structure, aligned with the creation of the heavenly bodies in the firmament and the creation of the temple. They also reinforce the impression given elsewhere in Old English poetry and prose that maturity is a time of superlative ability to contribute to a community. At the end of this section of the text, the speaker asserts, ‘my life was long among my people’ (‘lif wæs min longe, leodum in gemonge’, 41), offering a neat summary of the interwoven prosperity of individual and community in this text.

The period of spiritual decline subsequently experienced by the ruler and his people is described as a an ‘interval of exile’ or ‘time of suffering’ (‘wræc-fæc’, 64a), in a manner which might hint at the progression of the six ages, given that the Fifth Age is associated with the physical and spiritual wandering of the Babylonian exile, prompted by the sins of the kings of Israel and Judah. According to the poet of The Rhyming Poem, his is a time in which the world is ageing: ‘the earth’s power becomes old, strength becomes cold’ (‘eorð-mægen ealdaþ, ellen cealdað’, 69). Outside of a strictly Augustinian context, the poet’s depiction of lost personal youth and the ageing world also has much in common with Cynewulf’s epilogue to Elene, as does the language of constriction, anxiety, and mental turbulence.⁴³ The onset of these experiences is associated, as in Elene, with the coming of the night:

The ‘complex allegorical images of … spiritual warfare’ at play here have been connected with Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ in Beowulf, particularly in their ‘plantlike’ aspect, as Hrothgar reports that ‘a portion of pride grows and flourishes’ (‘ofer-hygda dæl / weaxeð ond wridað’, 1740b–1a).⁴⁵ The speaker’s language of intrusion continues over the course of the latter half of the poem, and at one point offers a parallel to Hrothgar’s reference to Grendel as ‘my invader’ (‘ingenga min’, 1776b), as well as the intrusion of the dragon into Beowulf’s kingdom, in describing the intrusion of death:

The final line suggests the paradox of death as a kind of symbolic exile – a removal from one’s most intimately known social world – while at the same time a force that attacks within one’s homeland. In the latter half of the poem, we also see a hint of the death-as-lethargy motif discussed in Chapter 4, as the journeys of death are described in terms of tiredness: ‘the weary one struggles, the wide journey begins’ (‘werig winneð, wid-sið onginneð’, 51). The aptitudes implicitly associated with a condition of full vitality are left behind, as the speaker observes that this figure will ‘part from skills’ (‘listum linneð’, 54a). As in Beowulf, advanced age brings an enhanced consciousness of sin, death, and destruction. A phase of anxious mental constriction and psychomachic drama ultimately opens out into the speaker’s reflections upon the wider decline of the world, emphatically picked out by a great excess of rhymes. This aged figure is yet another witness to the physical and spiritual decline of the world.

The narrative of The Rhyming Poem has long been remarked upon for its apparent unintelligibility and ambiguity, but approached from the perspective of the life course, it gains coherence. The poem engages with motifs attached to ageing which have been traced across the rest of Old English poetry in this study, and at times seems to draw specifically on the ages of man and the ages of world history as Bede understood them. These ages peak in successful governance in the Fourth Age before declining into moral and physical degradation, the only positive aspect of which is the enhanced potential for spiritual improvement, just as the Sixth Age sees opportunities for spiritual profit and (historically) the coming of Christ and the saints. The Rhyming Poem thus concludes with eyes set on the promise of heaven:

Perhaps nodding to the Seventh Age as understood in the Augustinian tradition, extending after death, the life course of the soul continues, even as the worldly life course comes to an end. At the same time, The Rhyming Poem enthusiastically embraces the narrative structures of disruption, surprise, and redirection that are so typical of life narratives in Old English poetry. The poet turns to the chiaroscuric effects of rhyme, and possibly its existing association with antithesis, in order to use the device in a radically sustained way to fuel descriptions of the sudden, intense transformations of a life course. In its wide-reaching focus, taking in the growth and decline of the wider world, it simultaneously suggests the deeply integrated nature of humanity’s processes of maturation amid other kinds of maturation in the cosmos, both as formalised in models of the ages of man and reaching beyond these, like many other texts discussed in this study.

In tracing rhetorical and discursive patterns attached to age, I offer in this book a new departure point for discussions of human growth in Old English poetry. The ‘life course’ concept helpfully allows us to range across and beyond the tradition of the ages of man, and indeed beyond discrete normative stages of life experience as commonly understood in modern developmental discourses. It permits the fluidity, unpredictability, and variability of the process of ageing to come into clearer view as a major concern of Old English poetry. It also leaves space for life courses beyond the human, and this study has emphasised the ways in which human ageing in Old English poetry is rarely separable from age-related experiences in the wider cosmos – it is only through construction against and alongside these other experiences of growth, flourishing, and decline that the human life course has meaning. When the poet of The Rhyming Poem chooses to experiment with end-rhyme sustained throughout a text, it is these themes that they choose to explore, focusing on the tensions between the ‘bold’ and the ‘old’ (‘bald’, ‘ald’, 63b). Using the innovation of continually sustained rhyme to intensify concerns and conflicts which run throughout the vernacular poetic tradition, we have in The Rhyming Poem a late text which – perhaps more than any other Old English poem – demands contemplation of the life course in all its strange metamorphoses, sudden interruptions, and disorientating irregularities.