Old English poetry sometimes suggests that normative life phases are experienced by each person in the same way, but it also disrupts this idea, directing our attention to the contingencies, surprises, and sudden shifts which shape each person’s life course. This study’s introductory chapter advances this central argument and establishes the literary-critical scope of the wider monograph. It also provides a theoretical grounding in sociological and philosophical approaches to the life course, as well as the theories of the nonhuman which inform this study’s inclusion of narratives of the lives of objects, animals, and other natural phenomena in its discussion of human ageing – illustrated by a case study of the ‘oyster’ riddle of the Exeter Book (Riddle 74). Relevant material-cultural and linguistic contexts are then surveyed, and the structure of the rest of the book outlined.

When the Riddles of the Exeter Book depict early life in the world, they show a striking lack of interest in birth imagery – rather than focusing on a moment of parturition (like many aenigmata in the Latin tradition), these texts instead present early life as a time of gradual growth, contingent on continued care provided by others. To contextualise these scenes in the Riddles, this chapter considers other Old English poems such as The Fortunes of Men, contemporary embryological thought, prose accounts of the ages of man and the world, and plastic art, including carved scenes of animals nurturing their young on an eleventh-century baptismal font and the depiction of Romulus and Remus on the Franks Casket. In the chapter’s later stages, it stresses another kind of transformation as the riddle-creatures take up a variety of social roles, frequently involving the perpetration, witnessing, and suffering of violence.

Constructions of adulthood tend to be under-studied and under-theorised. In the face of this challenge, this chapter focuses on three vernacular verse hagiographies – commonly known as Guthlac A, Juliana, and Andreas – as well as Judith, which centres on a deuterocanonical Old Testament figure. In different ways, these poems all depict maturity as associated with increased social usefulness. Masculine youthful waywardness seems to be more of a source of interest to poets than similar behaviour in women, but it is an underappreciated quality of Old English poetry that unruly youth in women is represented; in particular, St Juliana rebels against societal expectations in a manner that is explicitly linked with her youth. Nonetheless, the seemingly later poems, Andreas and Judith, both problematise – in different ways–the idea that growth through adulthood is always, or even commonly, a linear, teleological drive towards physical and intellectual excellence.

Summarising this study’s findings, this concluding chapter explores a little-discussed and much-maligned text in their light: the relatively late, formally innovative, and greatly enigmatic Rhyming Poem of the Exeter Book. This poem is known for its apparently disorganised structure and ambiguous subject matter, moving rapidly between human and nonhuman referents, and operating on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Yet The Rhyming Poem gains a great deal of clarity when approached as an articulation of a human life course, blurring with that of the world itself. Drawing on arguments built throughout the book, this final chapter sets out a new account of the poem, finding more coherence to its structure than scholars have previously detected, and pointing particularly to key connections between form and content in the poet’s bold use of rhyme to accentuate the sudden shifts and transformations of the life course.

The first principles behind the developmental idea are linear time, interiority and staged structure. ‘Development’ is one particular historical way of conceptualizing the primary principle of change; in it, human time is an attempt at successful ‘recapitulation’ (a term that would reappear with modern developmental psychology’s founder, G. Stanley Hall) of Adam’s initial failure. In monotheism, time constructs interiority as permanence, ‘the mind’, in contrast with the temporary visitations of pagan or shamanic religion. Medieval psychology saw a proliferation of its ‘faculties’ (memory, imagination, judgement) and ‘operations’ (abstraction, attention, consciousness, logical reasoning, information-processing), which penetrated both the monastic and the humanist idea of the individual. Augustine’s ‘six ages’ of man gave the lifespan a fixed structure. Following the Reformation, change in the elect minority was seen either as instantaneous or as a stadial sequence: Jansenists and Calvinists on the one hand, Jesuits and Arminians on the other, disputed the function of human agency in relation to divine determinism.