LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      The “boat song” of King Cnut survives in the twelfth-century monastic chronicle of Ely, making it the earliest post-Conquest evidence of an English lyric.¹ The chronicle preserves the song’s first quatrain, along with an account of its composition and performance:

      When they were approaching the land, the king rose up in the middle of his men and directed the boatmen to make for the little port at full speed, and then ordered them to pull the boat forward more slowly as it came in. He raised his eyes towards the church which stood out at a distance, situated as it was at the top of a rocky eminence; he heard the sound of sweet music echoing on all sides, and, with ears alert, began to drink in the melody more fully the closer he approached. For he realized that it was the monks singing psalms in the monastery and chanting clearly the Divine Hours. He urged the others who were present in the boats to come round about him and sing, joining him in jubilation. Expressing with his own mouth his joyfulness of heart, he composed aloud a song in English the beginning of which runs as follows:

      This and the remaining parts that follow are up to this day sung publicly by choirs and remembered in proverbs.

      The king, while tossing this around in his mind, did not rest from singing piously and decorously in concert with the venerable confraternity, until he reached land.²

      The chronicle’s description of the composition and performance of Cnut’s song suggests certain features of the survival, composition, reception, and adaptations of vernacular lyrics in later medieval England. Hearing the liturgical singing by chance, Cnut first joins and then departs from it. Liturgical formulae frequently occasioned new Anglo-Saxon and Middle English verses, in the form of tropes or sequences that amplified the original Latin text.³ Yet Cnut’s song differs from these kinds of adaptations in the oblique relationship it poses between the liturgical source and the new poem, which does not cite or embellish the liturgical text. Rather, it narrates its own inspiration and situation of composition as at once aleatory and somatic. According to the prose account, Cnut’s inspiration occurs by chance, and his response to the liturgical song engages multiple senses: sight (“he raised his eyes towards the church”), hearing (“he heard the sound of sweet music”), and, metaphorically, taste (“and … began to drink in the melody”).⁴ By describing Cnut’s response to the song in this way, the chronicler suggests features of vernacular lyric that at once identify it with and distinguish it from the monks’ song. Such songs were central to regulated institutional practices, from their liturgical use to their function in early education, as children learned them in cathedral “song schools.”⁵ Yet, as the chronicler’s account shows, even these songs can have an element of chance in their reception. Cnut’s sensory response to the song emphasizes the somatic and sensual aspects of all music, produced and heard by the body, notwithstanding medieval theories of music that foregrounded its abstraction as a branch of mathematics.⁶ Although emanating from the architecturally and symbolically fixed point of the church, the monks’ song seems, to the rowers, to have no single point of origin but “echo[es] on all sides.” It inspires both a communal performance of the original song (“He urged the others who were present in the boats to come round about him and sing”) and a new, spontaneous, vernacular composition. The performances are simultaneous and multiple, as Cnut sings his song over (and with) a chorus of the monks’ and knights’ liturgical song and continues either aloud or mentally, by “tossing [it] around in his mind.”⁷

      The surviving quatrain, too, takes as its subject its own composition and in particular its debts to, and differences from, its inspiration. The lyric first describes the occasion of its composition in the third person (“Merie sungen the munekes binnen Ely / Tha Cnut king rew ther-by”). It then shifts tense (from past to present), point of view (from third person to first person), and mood (from indicative to imperative): “Roweth, cnihtes, ner the land, / And here we thes munekes sang.” Who speaks the final two lines? The first-person plural at once suggests

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