5 - The literary milieu of Vercelli IX and the Irish tradition in Old English literature

Summary

In its indebtedness to Irish sources and literary models, Vercelli IX is by no means unique or isolated. Several of the Old English texts which I shall discuss in this chapter also have an enumerative structure or employ numerical rhetoric, and many incorporate eschatological and cosmological motifs paralleled in Irish sources. A few share specific stylistic and thematic features with Vercelli IX and may be regarded as products of an Irish-influenced literary milieu. The stylistic affinities between Vercelli IX and the Prose Solomon and Saturn Pater Noster Dialogue, in particular, are sufficiently striking to attribute these two texts to a common workshop.

Three prominent eschatological themes in anonymous Old English homilies are based on apocryphal traditions transmitted by the Irish: the Three Utterances of the Soul, the Seven Heavens apocryphon and the ‘Niall’ version of the Sunday Letter. The Three Utterances exemplum, which tells of the exclamations of a good and a bad soul to the angels or demons who lead them to heaven or hell at the moment of death, was adapted independently by three Anglo-Saxon homilists. Versions of this exemplum survive in an Old English Rogationtide homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114 (Worcester, s. xi), 102V–105V; in a sermon Be heofonivarum 7 be helwarum in London, BL, Cotton Faustina A. ix (s. xii1), 21v–23v, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302 (s. xi/xii), pp. 71–3; and in a Lenten homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85/86 (s. xi^med; provenance St Augustine's, Canterbury?), 25r–40r.