“the tower, intended as a sign of their [fame and glory] becomes the marker of the limits of their possibilities and a sign of their divinely imposed ungedheode, a word whose use in this context reminds of the close relationships between OE dheod (“nation”), gedheodan (“unite”), and gedheode (“language”)” (4).
“The sign of a ruined tower and the isolation of linguistic diversity are here joined to the story of migration that is, as Nicholas Howe has persuasively argued, part of the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity” (4).
“The tower is a sign of pride . . . but also an emblem of the wreckage of social cohesion and of the sad failure of a people’s striving for monumental commemoration” (4).
“a shattering of language that guarantees not only cultural fragmentation but the failure of memory and the isolation from a shared past” (4).
“The tower is . . . a beacon of oblivion” (4).
“The Tower of Babel story in Genesis A points to the [ruin] motif’s imbrication in a far larger and more complex set of concerns, including divine punishment, migration history, and the cultural specificity of language” (5).
THE RUIN MOTIF
“The Anglo-Saxons lived, then, in a landscape punctuated by the remains of a Roman stone world that was falling into ruin” (5).
“Discoursing on the ruined Tower of Babel, then, naturally led early commentators to considerations of divine punishment for pride, questions of linguistic diversity, and an examination of the division of the world into separate nations and peoples” (7).
“Their [ruins] etiology and teleology are explicable within a moral and historical paradigm” (8).
“the depiction of ruins . . . [deal with] the more general and more complex questions of memory and forgetting, belatedness and transitoriness” (8).
THE WANDERER
NOSTALGIA, WRITING, AND HEROIC HISTORY
“reorganization of the social order entails some redrawing of the boundaries between margin and centre, high and low, inside and outside; these redrawn boundaries make articulate and visible states that may have been invisible before” (16).
“The story told by the the ruins in The Wanderer . . . is a dis-membering rather than a re-membering” (16).
“most surviving OE poetry, simply because it has been preserved in a manuscript, reflects some degree of successful collaboration between a traditional poetics and textual praxis” (18).
“For many readers, perhaps, the ruins are ultimately a mirror of the poetry itself, a battered container for the once-bright world of heroic zeal; like the ruins, the poems have been shattered and reused, rebuilt to a different purpose, shifted to new locations, abandoned in codexes, and left to the elements” (23).
“Like the dazed builders of Babel, we stumble about in our jumble of languages, trying to shore fragments against our own ruins” (23).
“The crisis of Babel is not undone [by textuality]—we cannot return to some mythic state of an unbroken language—but it can be mitigated” (24).
“What remains underneath the rubble or behind the silent page is the echo of the life that gave meaning to the world it created” (24).