Abstract
Extending a line of inquiry begun by Thomas Hill in 2005, this article uses attestations of palmtwig (“palm twig” or “branch”) and palmtreow (“palm tree”) across the Old English corpus to understand three strange uses of those terms in the enigmatic poem “Solomon and Saturn I”. Specifically, the vernacular collection known as the Blickling Homilies provides a semiotic narrative for the term palmtwig, which originates in a literal account of the palms used to honor Christ’s victory over death and culminates in a palmtwig that is given to Mary by an angel before her ascension, an object which takes on the illuminating and healing powers of Christ himself. The Blickling evidence suggests that in “Solomon and Saturn I”, the Pater Noster prayer is called “palmtwigged” because it is the same kind of charged, resonant object as the palmtwig of the Blickling Homilies. Both are metonyms for Christ. This work relates to recent work on medieval materiality and vernacular Incarnational poetics, as it explores the ambiguity and interpermeability among objects, words, and symbols as signs, specifically as they relate to the ultimate word of Christianity.
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Beechy, T. The “Palmtwigede” Pater Noster Revisited: An Associative Network in Old English. Neophilologus 99, 301–313 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9418-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9418-0