![]() The present article questions the widely assumed disunity of Fortunes (itself an unfortunate outcome of the Germanist approach) and traces the poem's gruesome preoccupations to pastoral texts known to English audiences. Only a handful of articles and chapters have tried to make sense of the poem, and many of these, however meritorious, seem locked in old ways of thinking about early English verse, reliant as they often are on somewhat hazy notions of pan-Germanic prehistory. ![]() Where its assemblage of tortured and abused bodies comes from is a matter that seems to have evaded much systematic investigation. Aside from Soul and Body, with its lengthy and hideous account of worms ravaging a corpse, few yield to this distasteful tendency more than another poem preserved in the late tenth-century Exeter Book known variously as The Fortunes of Men, The Fates of Men, and The Fates of Mortals. (1) A handful of verse texts nearly make this theme their exclusive subject. Benedict's dictum to "have death always before our eyes," the Old English poetic tradition seems unusually given to depictions of the indignities suffered by dead bodies. Whether it is an effect of what was once called the "somber cast of the Teutonic mind" or of St. ![]()
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