Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos - Style

Style

Wulfstan attained a high degree of competence in rhetorical prose, working with a distinctive rhythmical system based around alliterative pairings. He used intensifying words, distinctive vocabulary and compounds, rhetorical figures, and repeated phrases as literary devices. These devices lend Wulfstan's homilies their tempo-driven, almost feverish quality, allowing them to build toward multiple climaxes. The genius of his style is based chiefly on sound and parallelsim. The passage below, taken from the Sermo Lupi, employs numerous rhetorical devices, including alliteration, parallelism, tautology, and rhyme:

Forþam hit is on us eallum swutol & gesene þæt we ær þysan oftor bræcan þonne we bettan, & þy is þysse þeode fela onsæge. Ne dohte hit nu lange inne ne ute: ac wæs here & hunger, bryne & blodgyte, on gewelhwylcan ende oft & gelome. & us stalu & cwalu, stric & steorfa, orfcwealm & uncoþu, hol & hete & rypera reaflac derede swyþe þearle.
Therefore it is clear and well seen in all of us that we have previously more often transgressed than we have amended, and therefore much is greatly assailing this nation. Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed in nearly every district time and again. And stealing and slaying, plague and pestilence, murrain and disease, malice and hate, and the robbery by robbers have injured us very terribly.

The Sermo Lupi, as with all of Wulfstan's literary works, is known for its frequent, almost habitual, use of intensifying phrases. Examples from the passage above include oft & gelome "often and frequently" and swyþe þearle "very terribly." Other intensifying phrases frequently used by Wulfstan, in the Sermo Lupi and in other of his works, are ealles to swyðe "altogether too much", georne "eagerly", mide rihte "in right manner", for Gode and for worulde "for God and for world", among others. Famously, Wulfstan often created long 'lists of sinners', wherein he joined a series terms (of compound words, and often used by no-one else) into groups using alliteration. One of the most famous examples is found in the Sermo Lupi:

Her syndan þurh synleawa, awa hit þincan mæg, sare gelewede to manege on earde. Her syndan mannslagan and mægslagan and mæsserbanan and mynsterhatan; and her syndan mansworan and morþorwyrhtan; and her syndan myltestran and bearnmyrðran and fule forlegene horingas manegel and her syndan wiccan and wælcyrian; and her syndan ryperas and reaferas and woroldstruderas; and, hrædest is to cweþenne, mana and misdæd ungerim ealra.
Here, so it might seem, too many in the land are sorely injured by the wounds of sin: here are man-slayers, and killers of kinsmen, and murderers of priests, and enemies of monasteries, and here are cruel perjurers and murderers, and here are whores and child-killers, and many foul fornicating adulterers, and here are witches and Valkyries, and here are robbers and plunderers, and mighty despoilers, and, to speak briefly, numberless kinds of crime and every misdeed.

A similar device is at work in his list of afflictions in the first passage given above (here & hunger, bryne & blodgyte ... stalu & cwalu, stric & steorfa, orfcwealm & uncoþu, hol & hete...). The Sermo Lupi is considered to excel particularly in the use of repetition as a rhetorical device . Other devices which have been noticed in Wulfstan's works are dubitatio and verborum exornatio. His works are almost completely without metaphor and simile, and Wulfstan as a rule shies away from narrative and descriptions of the particular. The Sermo Lupi is one of his only works where description (i.e. of the moral decline of the nation) plays a significant role.

Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi also employs the rhetorical device known as Ubi sunt (Latin, "where are... ?"), a common medieval literary refrain used "to designate a mood or theme in literature of lament for the mutability of things." Though the refrain never properly arises in the Sermo Lupi (in English nor in Latin), the theme is nevertheless vigorously active as Wulfstan presents the cherished goods and virtues of the past as lost in the present due to the moral decline of Men and the world through time.

Read more about this topic:  Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos

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