Form versus Catastrophe in the Old English Christ III

Christian Doomsday literature is largely designed to transform the end of the world from a surprise to an object of suspense. Hampered only a little by the Gospels’ admonition that “of that day and hour no one knoweth,” homilies, field guides like the “Fifteen Signs before Doomsday,” and narrative works like the Old English poem Christ III set out to revise natural disasters into something like Hitchcock's “clock in the decor.”¹ But texts of this sort sought to involve their audiences in a way far more intense and immediate than even the greatest filmmaker could hope for. Judgment Day literature reminded its hearers and readers that the bomb was beneath their seat because they had put it there themselves, and that they were responsible for whether it was filled with shrapnel or glitter—yet could never be quite sure how much of either they'd put in.

The literature of Doomsday thus set out to solve a structural problem inherent to Christian eschatology. Between the Apocalypse of John, the many other less canonical but still widespread apocalypses, and the large preaching literature, Christians knew a bit too much about what the last day would hold. For Doomsday was assuredly the chief of all catastrophes imaginable in early medieval England, and the object of intense and constant interest. The literature of the coming Day of Judgment is certainly catastrophic in the sense in which we tend to use the word: descriptions spare no detail of the sublime terror that will accompany the collapse of all that binds together the present world, including the distinction between life and death. But Doomsday was also a catastrophe in the very technical sense applied to the word by early grammarians, and this created the structural bind faced by authors of Doomsday literature.

On Doomsday, all time will culminate in total clarity of understanding for all beings, the Great Unravelling of the plot of Christian salvation history: its catastrophe. As defined by Aelius Donatus—the fourth century Roman grammarian whose name became, to many medieval students, synonymous with grammar—“καταστροφή explicatio fabulae, per quam euentus eius approbatur” [the catastrophe is the unfolding of the narrative, through which its outcome is made evident].² His formulation had a curious corollary. Certain dramatic characters could in effect meld with the catastrophe if their chief purpose was to reveal something that enabled the story's outcome. Such was the import of his remark on a speech in act 4 of Terence's Andria: “in hoc loco persona ad catastropham machinata nunc loquitur, nam hic Crito nihil argumento debet nisi absolutionem erroris eius” [at this point a character contrived for the catastrophe now speaks; for except in resolving its mistake, this Crito contributes nothing to the plot].³ As Alan Rosen shows, later authors actually called such characters “the catastrophe” and turned the very obviousness of their contrivance to various artistic uses.⁴

As best I can tell, the word catastrophe was recorded but once in pre-Conquest England. In the Corpus Glossary, a trilingual assemblage of various glossaries copied in Canterbury in the early ninth century, we find catastrofon interpreted as conuersationem (“reversal”).⁵ This truncated gloss seems closely related to a definition like that in Evanthius's commentary on Donatus: “catastrophe conuersio rerum ad iucundos exitus patefacta cunctis cognitione gestorum” [the catastrophe is the reversal of events into a happy outcome, with the understanding of the plot made apparent to all].⁶ Since the word preceding catastrofon in the Corpus Glossary is caracter (glossed as “stilus uel figura,” probably meaning “composition or form”), it seems likely that both terms were extracted from a work dealing with drama, though whether this happened in seventh- or eighth-century Canterbury (where the Corpus Glossary's precursors were assembled), or earlier and somewhere else, is impossible now to ascertain.⁷ But medieval readers did not need extensive familiarity with the technical terminology of Latin comedy to be able to perceive a comic form in the narrative of Christian salvation. The story's essential qualities marked it out as such, as Isidore's definition reveals:

In telling some ordinary shepherds, “I bring you good tidings of great joy that shall be to all the people,” the angel of the Nativity defined the Christian story's genre.⁹

Dante Alighieri of course recognized this. But even in the early Middle Ages, before the revival of interest in Classical Greek literary theory, I believe we can gain by recognizing the enduring imprint of paradigmatic classical forms on later Christian narratives. The authors of the first three Old English poems in the tenth-century manuscript called the Exeter Book would not have called their poems comedies, certainly. Yet by sequencing these texts as he has, the manuscript's compiler allows us to perceive the comic form of the narrative that emerges from this arc of poems dealing respectively with Christ's birth, departure, and return. In reading the final poem of the three—Christ III, or Christ in Judgment—we can use Donatus's technical term catastrophe to articulate precisely the poem's place in the manuscript and in the narrative arc of salvation history. This term also enables us to understand why Christ's long speech to the assembled souls was formally essential. In clarifying the true nature of human action, Christ ends all error and deception, and reveals the final outcome of all the assembled characters’ prior deeds. In so doing, he enables—and indeed embodies—the catastrophe of world history.

But by spilling in advance the happy ending of the universal plot, Doomsday literature created a difficulty for itself. It removed the ignorance of those for whom the return of Christ would have come as a surprise, but in so doing, it risked also ruining the narrative's suspense. This posed not simply an aesthetic, but a moral problem. An audience either complacent about the promise of mercy or resigned to despair would not perform good works with the zeal that might win them a place as one of the global comedy's protagonists.¹⁰ For Doomsday to remain an object of wholesome suspense, believers would have to know enough to expect the outcome, yet remain in the dark about their own place in it. This complex balance of knowledge and ignorance, certainty and uncertainty, was difficult to maintain.

In one Old English poem, we find an extremely ingenious solution: metrical form as a weapon against spiritual complacency. Christ III is not only remarkable for allowing us to perceive how certain classical forms persisted even as they changed almost beyond recognition; the structures underlying its verses are also unusual. Compared to Latin (or Old Irish, or a number of other contemporary literatures), Old English poetry was highly restricted in its metrical form, possessing only one basic metrical template and only one widely prevalent variant. This variant, an extended form of the normal line, is now usually referred to as hypermeter. Hypermetric verse was never freestanding, and there seems to have been no circumstance of content, speaker, genre, or other literary elements in which Old English poets were compelled to use it. It was thus an ornament, but a peculiarly distracting one: as we shall see presently, the structure of the meter made hypermetrics more challenging for audiences to track. In Christ III, hypermetric verses were combined with standard verses in a way that added an even greater level of difficulty. The result is a metrical form that repeatedly and overtly resists the clarity of catastrophe. Through the strategic deployment of unpredictable meter, the poem could induce in audiences the vertiginous sense that they would never—until the Day of Judgment itself—really know what they knew themselves to know.

Christ III in context

Of the four largest surviving codices containing Old English poetry, the Exeter Book—a compilation only of poetry—is perhaps the most readily amenable to modern methods of literary interpretation.¹¹ It was written by a single scribe working somewhere in southern England during the third quarter of the tenth century.¹² Remarkably, the book has remained at Exeter since Bishop Leofric (†1072) gave it to the cathedral library: it almost certainly appears in his will, on what is now the first folio of the Exeter Book, as “.i. mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisan geworht” [item, one large English book about various things, composed in verse].¹³ Though the codex's contents are indeed “about various things,” the manuscript's uniform appearance—and, perhaps, the fact that it was valued enough to be included in Leofric's will—have led modern scholars to view it as a planned collection, rather than a haphazard hodgepodge of whatever texts came to hand. One recurrent point of comparison is Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.5.35, a large collection of Latin poetry assembled and copied in eleventh-century Canterbury, whose contents so closely link it to what we know of the early English grammatical curriculum that it is often known as the “Cambridge Classbook.”¹⁴ Both manuscripts contain a wide range of texts by different authors; both, too, begin with longer works on scriptural or hagiographical topics and end with riddle collections, and in between contain a number of formally daring medium-length poems. The Exeter Book's very heterogeneity would thus seem to connect it to learned literary culture, and some scholars have argued that it represented an English-language counterpart of the Latin poetry that flourished in reformed Benedictine monasteries under the patronage of King Edgar (r. 959–75).¹⁵ Whether or not it was intended as an instrument of monastic reform, the book seems to have been a work of care and reflection.

Christ III is an editorial title for the third and final major division within the Exeter Book's opening sequence.¹⁶ It is preceded by a group of devotional poems based mainly on antiphons for Advent (Christ I, or Advent Lyrics), and by a poem drawing on a homily by Gregory the Great and a hymn by Bede, both for Ascension Day.¹⁷ The latter Old English poem (Christ II, or The Ascension) bears Cynewulf's runic signature.¹⁸ While neither Christ I nor II is precisely a translation, both certainly take the words of readily identifiable Latin texts as their point of departure for expansive English poems of devotion. Christ III, on the other hand, has a much more complex and mediated relationship to its array of source material.¹⁹ Whatever additional authority might have accrued to each of the first two parts of the sequence from a learned reader's recognition of their canonical sources would thus not seem to apply to Christ III. Instead of rooting itself in particular liturgical or patristric texts, Christ III seems to turn to a more diffuse homiletic tradition in both Latin and Old English, for style as well as content.²⁰

Somewhat paradoxically, then, the Christ sequence is both a planned unity and highly disparate; in this regard, it appears as a microcosm of the Exeter Book as a whole. While current scholarship tends to accept that at least three authors are responsible for the various parts of the sequence, critics have also returned repeatedly to the idea that these poems, as we now have them, were meant to be read together in order, and that they may have been adapted or even composed for that purpose.²¹ This view underpins my own reading of Christ III. While my focus is on the manipulations of meter that make this poem unique within the Old English corpus, only within the Christ sequence is the full extent of its power made clear.

The challenge of hypermeter

Among its companion poems in the Exeter Book's opening sequence, Christ III stands out for its frequent and distinctive use of hypermetric verse. This variant form of Old English meter is both well-known—having been discussed by metrists from the nineteenth century onward—and extremely elusive. No treatises on poetics—or even casual discussions of vernacular poetry—survive from the Old English period, so our understanding of how and why the standard and variant meters were employed must be derived from the surviving texts themselves. On this basis, we can be reasonably sure what hypermetric verses were: they were augmented versions of normal verses (hence the name, though the German Schwellvers is perhaps even more precise).²² Lewis E. Nicholson's investigation of how recurrent normal-verse formulas could be expanded into hypermetric verses remains perhaps the clearest exposition of how Old English poets might have approached their composition.²³

But this leaves us with the question of why hypermetric verses appear, and this has proved far more difficult to answer. First, no surviving poem is composed entirely in hypermetric verse, and unlike, for example, Latin elegiac verse or stanzaic lyric forms, or indeed many Old Norse meters, there seems to be no clear generic coding for the form. Gnomic poems, or gnomic passages in other poems, often include hypermetric lines or sections, sometimes in configurations that seem particular to the gnomic form.²⁴ But gnomic statements in Old English verse need not be hypermetric, and most hypermetric lines are not gnomic. Nor does there seem to be any other aspect of a poem's content or structure that obliged a poet to use hypermetric verse: as Bliss concluded, “No satisfactory explanation of the reason for their appearance has yet been found.”²⁵

My own view is that the nonobligatory character of Old English hypermetric verse was a crucial aspect of such verses’ nature and function.²⁶ They appear to have been genuinely ornamental, which is to say, perceptibly superadded to a basic structure. The very closeness of their relation to normal Old English verse, and the fact that they seemingly could not exist independent of it, draws continual attention to the “moreness” of hypermetric verses.²⁷ This is not, however, to say that they were therefore nonfunctional, “purely decorative.” In early English thought, ornament transformed the thing adorned and constituted that thing's function.²⁸ This idea is often casually alluded to in the verse. For example, when St. Juliana is about to be executed by fire, “Ða cwom engel godes / frætwum blican ond þæt fyr tosceaf” [Then God's angel came shining in his adornments, and parted the flame].²⁹ Or in the metrical version of Psalm 101:26, the Latin “Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti, et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli” [In the beginning, O Lord, thou foundedst the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands] becomes “Æt fruman þu, drihten, geworhtest / eorþan frætwe and upheofen; / þæt is heahgeweorc handa þinra” [In the beginning you, O Lord, made earth's adornments and heaven above; that is the great work of your hands].³⁰ In both these instances, the frætwe (“trappings”) neatly encapsulate the paradox of ornament in early medieval English thought. They are, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the passages, in that the basic sense would be unchanged if “frætwum blican” (Juliana) or “frætwe” (Psalm 101) were omitted. And yet their presence is integral, constituting the core of these passages’ force. In Juliana, the angel's first action is not simply to appear, but to “come shining in adornments,” a kind of counter-glow that enables him to drive back the fire; while in Psalm 101, it is strictly speaking the trappings, rather than earth in general, which are described as God's masterwork. Ornament is superadded, yet it also constitutes and manifests the value or power of what it adorns.

Defining hypermetric verses as ornaments of this kind thus implies that they do something crucially important for, and to, the poem as a whole. But just as the earth's adornments do not work in the same way as the angel's, we cannot know ahead of time the precise nature of their force. We must see them in action to be sure.

Moreover, the nature of the relationship between normal and hypermetric verses means that the experience of these particular ornaments was not necessarily an easy or altogether pleasant one. Art can be aggressive; and I believe that Old English poets frequently used hypermetric verse as a tool to destabilize their audience's sense of control.³¹ The reason it was so effective for this purpose has to do with the underlying template of Old English verse. Even without contemporary accounts to draw from, most modern metrists would agree that the standard Old English long-line consisted of a pair of verses, each of which contained four audible metrical positions.³² Two lines in succession would thus sound like this (with one vertical bar representing a caesura, and two a line-break):

Given that each metrical position could be represented by a heavy syllable, a resolved stressed syllable, or a sequence of unstressed syllables, two lines of poetry could in practice manifest as hundreds of slightly different rhythms. But the underlying template was extremely straightforward, and it is likely that most native speakers could readily learn to scan poetry as they heard it.

Hypermetric verses, however, would have presented an unpredictable challenge to this simplicity, since they could contain five or six metrical positions. So an audience encountering a hypermetric line after normal ones would be faced with a dilemma about what they were hearing. At first, expecting regularity, they might hear wrongly (where an asterisk indicates a possible but uncertain break)

The audience could be plunged into confusion before realizing that what they had really heard was

The more fluently and automatically the audience scanned, in fact, the more likely hypermeter was to disrupt their experience of the verse. Poets could (and did) alleviate this disruption with a variety of devices, including clear syntactic boundaries and, especially, extra alliteration. But such tactics in themselves would tend to direct attention to the poet, rather than the audience, as agent in the experience of the verse.

In Christ III, the inherent difficulty posed by hypermetric verses is multiplied by the way the poet structures and deploys them. First, as Thomas Bredehoft has shown, the form of many hypermetric verses in this poem is unusual within the Old English corpus.³³ The most common structure of hypermetric verses (preferred in, for instance, Beowulf and Judith) can be represented like this:

The letter A represents a stressed alliterating sound. The syllable represented here by B might alliterate if the poet chose, but C could not. The sections in parentheses could be replaced by any legitimate four-position verse. In other words, the a-verse (or first half-line) of most hypermetric lines has six positions and begins with an alliterating stress; the b-verse (or second half-line) has five positions and begins with an unstressed position followed by the alliterating stress. While more complicated than the normal verse line, then, the most common hypermetric verse was in its own way relatively predictable. The challenge to hearers would come when the poet switched between hypermetric and normal lines. In Christ III, however, the poet happily used five positions in the a-verse, and six positions (with two nonalliterating stressed syllables) in the b-verse.³⁴ Moreover, in an unusually large number of instances, a hypermetric a-verse is paired with a normal b-verse (or vice versa), so that a hearer could make no prediction about the structure of the b-verse even on hearing the a-verse. Here are some examples of how such verses might be perceived, or misperceived. A normal verse line followed by a combination of five-position hypermetric a-verse and a normal b-verse would sound like this:

Little time would be left for hearers to realize their mistake, leading to additional confusion about the structure of the next verse. Likewise, a normal a-verse plus a six-position b-verse, followed by a normal verse, would create a reciprocal set of troubles: what the poet or performer knew to be

might appear to a bewildered audience as something like

as they struggled to locate the end of the preceding verse and move on to the next. Since the final two stresses of a six-position hypermetric b-verse do not alliterate, audiences would likely be at sea when the next verse arrived and its alliteration failed to connect those stresses to the rest of the line; it might have taken another full verse or two before the metrical structure became retroactively apparent.

As a result, the meter of Christ III is exceptionally disorienting. One might be tempted to conclude—as Pope seems to suggest—that the poet was simply careless about the meter.³⁵ After a careful study of Christ III's scansion, however, Jane Roberts has deduced a method behind these apparent anomalies: “those aspects of his metre which are least in line with the conventions to be glimpsed in Beowulf have a certain self-consistency.”³⁶Christ III's disruptive hypermeter is not the random failure of technique, then. It is, rather, an essential part of the experience of the poem, in which the destabilizing effects of Old English hypermeter are extended to their limits as form is made an instrument of uncertainty. In so doing, they construct Judgment Day as an object of general knowledge and personal suspense.

Hypermeter and the unknown knowns of Judgment Day

To analyze features of hypermetric lines in Christ III, the following indicators are used: a single underline represents a strong metrical position (a heavy or resolved syllable bearing metrical stress); absence of underline, a weak or unstressed metrical position; and a double underline, a strong metrical position directly following another strong position. Broken lines indicate ambiguous metrical positions, which are usually either probable strong positions not endorsed by the alliteration, or metrically weak positions that alliterate.

The first occurrence of hypermeter in Christ III is, one might say, straightforwardly uncanny:

The bodily resurrection of the dead seems an appropriate point to shift from a normal meter to a slightly stranger and more challenging one, as happens in line 888, when the summary account expands into a more dramatic narrative, imagining the dead physically rising out of the earth. Line 888 itself is a perfect example of “standard” hypermeter, with six metrical positions and two alliterating stresses in the a-verse, and five metrical positions with one alliterating stress in the b-verse. This pattern continues into 889a, but begins to crumble in the b-verse, which can be scanned either as a normal four-position verse (Sievers's B-type, with “sorg” and “folc” bearing the metrical stress) or a hypermetric verse with three metrical stresses, the latter two of which (including the heavy participial inflection -end-) do not alliterate. Line 890a likewise poses a dilemma: it has three metrical stresses, and audiences scanning in real time would be left wondering whether it was hypermetric until the onset of the (unquestionably normal) b-verse. At this point 890a is revealed to be a heavy normal verse with an extrametrical prefix—which perhaps in retrospect would make 889b more likely to be normal too.

The result, prosodically, is a sense that the landscape is shifting too quickly for one to maintain balance; just as one begins to adjust to the meter, it transforms itself again. The stage for this effect was in fact set a few lines earlier, when the angels appear:

At 881b, a kind of formal tremor accompanies the apocalyptic earthquake as the alliteration and metrical stress cease to sync up. While the compound “middangeard” bears both stresses in this normal B-type verse, the alliteration falls on the metrically unstressed finite verb “beofað” [trembles]. This quick metrical witticism signals the larger shifts to come.

The shock of the herald angels’ apparition is echoed and amplified when God appears surrounded by the heavenly host:

The diction here recalls that of the first hypermetric passage (ege, sorgende, hearde), reminding hearers that the risen dead are the terrified audience for the Second Coming. Though this passage is in normal meter, it seems to partake of some of the earlier hypermetric passage's instability, particularly in the scansion of sorgende. Here, at line 1016b, the participial ending -end- must occupy the verse's third metrical position, and thus cannot be fully unstressed; does this make line 889b above retrospectively hypermetric? At a moment that promises the clarity of revelation, the metrical echo interjects a note of uncertainty.

For the imagined souls—and their prior counterparts, the poem's hearers—this uncertainty seems to embrace not just personal apprehension but something more aesthetic: the breaking of mental boundaries accompanying the experience of the sublime. This is invoked directly in the description of the world-consuming firestorm:

This passage is again in normal meter, but it teeters on the brink of becoming hypermetric with the sequence of a-verses in 991–93. It is not clear whether the alliterating finite verbs that begin 991a and 992a bear metrical stress: either these are heavy verses, or they contain extrametrical alliteration. 993a is unquestionably a heavy verse, and would be hypermetric if hyge did not resolve into a single metrical position. The description continually threatens to overflow the boundaries of the verse.

The threatened rupture of the sublime seems truly to arrive with the apparition of Christ bearing the wounds of the Crucifixion:

All the b-verses in this passage are in normal meter, and indeed rather compressed, with both 1108b and 1109b represented by a single compound word. Three of the a-verses, however, are hypermetric, and of a type that would have been unusually difficult to scan, since they sound precisely like normal verses until the final inflectional syllable that gives them five positions rather than the normal four. Moreover, the continuing alliteration on “dolg” and “dryhtne” from 1107b to 1108a would have made locating the line-break exceptionally difficult—a challenge that would return almost immediately, as the alliteration on “niðhycgende” and “hwitan honda” blurred the boundary between lines 1109 and 1110. The result of these rapid metrical shifts and ruptured boundaries is likely to have been an audience off-balance, uncertain of where they are in time. In other words, they would be in the proper frame of mind for the subsequent passage, which recounts the events of the Crucifixion in a way that leaves genuinely open the question of whether the Crucifixion prefigured the Last Judgment, or the Last Judgment recapitulated the Crucifixion, or if both were somehow the same event. The narrative rises to a hypermetric peak as it describes the Harrowing of Hell:

Only three of these verses—all of 1162, and 1163a—are hypermetric; interestingly, these describe the relief and liberation of the souls freed from hell. Each has six metrical positions, and 1162a has triple alliteration. A hearer expecting a normal verse would have likely placed a caesura—and a syntactic boundary—between hatan and hreðre, briefly hearing “the troop from the hot [place]; in the heart the intention became . . . ” before realizing that neither a new line nor a new thought had begun. Metrically, then, the Harrowing of Hell becomes a moment of astonishment.

The repeated unsettling of the narrative at moments of revelation, and the implication—or outright statement—that it is all too much to take in, thus seems to continue the irony encoded in the poem's promise that discernment will be easy when the time comes. At lines 910–20, Christ III states that, to the righteous, Christ will be kindly in appearance, and wrathful-seeming only to the sinful:

As Karma Lochrie has shown, prudence recurs in Old English Doomsday literature—including several poems later in the Exeter Book—as a partial defense against an inscrutable future judgment.³⁹ With the hypermetric a-verse in 921, Christ III seems about to offer a truism in the gnomic mode: something suitable for “the one who possesses wise forethought” to keep in mind.⁴⁰ Instead, the poem returns to normal meter as it proceeds to describe the advent of the angelic army and the fall of the moon and stars. Prudent forethought, Christ III slyly suggests, had better be very prudent to cope with that.

Form versus catastrophe

I began this essay by suggesting that Christian salvation history took the shape of comedy. This idea is hardly my invention: while Dante most famously embraced the concept in his Commedia, many others have taken the same view. Hegel, for instance, implies in his Phenomenology of Spirit that development of comedy was a necessary precursor to revealed religion and helped to give it form.⁴¹ While this view of salvation history's genre was not widespread in the early Middle Ages, neither was it unavailable in general, or to early readers of Christ III. As we have seen, the Exeter Book is structured in a way designed to encourage—one might even say, oblige—its readers to perceive the first three poems as a coherent unit. The very fact of their temporal progression from Christ's birth, to his departure, to his return, forms the group into a narrative of which Christ III is necessarily the culmination. A reflective reader with access to Isidore (which is to say, most Latin-literate readers in an early medieval monastery) might well conclude that this story—concerning, as it does, the fates of ordinary people and concluding in the joys of heaven—must necessarily be the kind of thing meant by “comedy.”

Explicit knowledge of drama as the modern or ancient world would have understood it was probably fairly abstract in early medieval England, deduced mainly from grammatical commentaries and glosses. What Latin-literate scholars gleaned evidently did not align particularly closely with anything in their vernacular culture. There is no surviving evidence of secular dramatic performance, or for religious performances in secular spaces along the lines of the later medieval mystery plays. Scholars have nonetheless sought evidence for what one might call a dramatic sensibility in Old English literature: George Anderson concluded that “the one poem in Old English literature which comes nearest in form to a play” is, in fact, the Exeter Christ sequence, “three sections of which are virtually in dialogue form,” and, he adds, “dialogue in narrative verse is a fair enough approximation of poetic drama.”⁴² As M. Bradford Bedingfield has pointed out, though, the quest for precursors of modern drama's dialogic exchange ultimately leads away from the kind of performativity that likely mattered in the period: a communal presentation of sacred history which enabled “the congregation themselves [to] become the protagonists in the story.”⁴³

Bedingfield's work on the nature of liturgical performance and Seeta Chaganti's more recent exploration of ritual performance in relation to the Ruthwell Cross, Brussels Cross, and The Dream of the Rood, indicate how contemporary performance cultures may indeed have conditioned the reception of Christ III.⁴⁴ Whether laypeople, secular clerics, or professed monastics, early medieval Christians would have engaged habitually in rituals that used spoken or chanted texts to dissolve the barriers of time and allow performers to inhabit crucial events of salvation history. While most of those rituals focused on the past—the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the entry into Jerusalem—their goal of constructing a transcendent ecclesia, a community outside of time, would have enabled a visionary experience of the future as well. Although no single festival was dedicated to the Last Judgment, Christ's future return was encoded in two recurring rituals: the yearly season of Advent and the daily monastic Night Office.⁴⁵ Already primed to perceive Christian history as a narrative with a beginning and a foreseeable end, audiences used to liturgical performance would have been ready to enter into that narrative. Uniquely, though, the Last Judgment promised a named role for all humans: it would be the ultimate participatory drama, for which Doomsday texts like Christ III offered themselves as theaters for rehearsal.

Even without explicitly calling themselves “drama” or relying on classical dramatic terminology, then, early medieval practices of participatory ritual likely shaped Christ III's reception in some crucial ways. Those used to seeing or performing the liturgy would have understood the necessity for intense personal investment in historically remote events; and they would have known how to connect discrete events into an overarching story. No medieval reader thus need have consciously applied the name or technical terminology of classical drama to perceive that Christ III represents the conclusion to the Christian narrative, in which all the errors that came before are first made manifest and then abolished, and that this abolition of error is the essential precursor to the happy end of all things. The point of the Last Judgment is that it is, in Donatus's sense, a catastrophe: “the unfolding of the narrative, through which its outcome is made evident.” In Christ III, the clarity of this catastrophe is made memorably literal, as the flesh of the resurrected is made “swa þæt scire glæs” [like clear glass] (1282b) so that every good and bad deed is visible to all.⁴⁶ But the chief vehicle for the world's catastrophe is Christ himself. In a long (more than 150 lines in total) pair of speeches to the saved and damned, he recounts the whole history of the world and interprets its true meaning.

This dramatic choice, however, placed the poet in a bind. Old English poetry contains other “secret histories,” perhaps most notably the devil's history of the world in Juliana and John the Baptist's speech in the Descent into Hell; but the point of these stories was the obviously partial perspective of their tellers.⁴⁷ To have Christ himself reveal the full truth of all human actions does more than place an exceptionally high burden on the poet's skill: it risks compromising the asymmetry of knowledge that makes the Last Judgment an object of suspense. The more complete and perfect the poet's representation of the great catastrophe, the more likely the audience will be left with a sense of certainty about their own place in the afterlife. Artistic success risked becoming a moral hazard.

The Christ III poet's solution to this dilemma was, as we have seen, the ingenious one of anomalous form. By using an array of hypermetric verses that were unpredictable even for this challenging metrical variant, the most vivid and arresting descriptions of the coming judgment could nonetheless induce in their audiences a sense of disorientation, or the feeling that they were not fully capable of grasping the vision laid out for them. With this device, the poet could also allow Christ to reveal the truth with pointed precision, yet still prevent audiences from settling into complacency with their knowledge of the world's order. Here, for example, is the beginning of his address to the damned, in which he describes creation:

In ordinary circumstances, the first verse of this passage would be unmetrical, with only one stress and two positions. In context, however, it seems clear that every word bears full phrasal stress as Christ says, “Lo, I [made] you human.” From this already ominous beginning, the passage proceeds in unexpected ways through the orthodox story of creation. The problems begin in line 1380b, which shifts into hypermeter as we come to the crux of the problem: the failure of human understanding. And throughout the subsequent account, the audience is required to make quick formal judgments—Are the b-verses normal or hypermetric? Are the pronouns stressed or unstressed? Where, really, does the verse end?—culminating in line 1385, whose abundance of pronouns and alliteration on þ leaves open the metrically impossible possibility that each verse has at least four stresses. Hearers—and perhaps more especially readers, who would have been responsible for deciding phrasal stress for themselves—would likely indeed be left with the sense that their judgment had proved inadequate, even as their creator assured them they had been endowed with it.

The culmination of this strategy appears in the mirrored conclusions to each speech. To both the saved and the damned, Christ describes their own actions. The righteous helped the poor and everyone who asked for charity in Christ's name; likewise,

Faced with the same choices, the unrighteous acted differently:

These speeches are, in a sense, the poem's true catastrophe, as Christ reveals that he was never really absent from his creation, but present in the person of everyone who sought their fellow-creatures’ aid. In both passages, the revelation is encoded in the verse's form, as me in the repeated line “Eall ge þæt me dydan” [All that you did to me] bears the metrical stress and alliteration. To rest the weight of a verse's structure on a personal pronoun was always a slightly startling gesture: it was not unmetrical, but it created a strong rhetorical emphasis where ordinarily there would be none. In Christ III, that emphasis reveals the truth of human life; but then, in each case, the passages immediately shift into hypermetrics—not obscuring the message, but rendering it harder to take in. For the saved, the shock is brief, as the verdict returns quickly to normal verse. But the judgment on the damned continues in hypermetrics, and ends on a six-position b-verse: the kind that continues on after the audience believes it must surely have stopped.

In Christ III we thus see a remarkable instance of form used to solve another form's inherent flaw. Instead of refusing to provide the clarity of revelation demanded of the conclusion to the Christian comedy, the poet boldly represented that clarity, yet simultaneously troubled the audience's ability to feel they had properly grasped or perceived it. The affect designed by Christ III is thus a kind of inversion of that produced by the liturgy. The major rituals of the Christian year enabled believers to enact each year a kind of pilgrimage into the past, in which they traversed Jerusalem alongside Jesus and in so doing entered into the key events of salvation history.⁴⁸ The liturgy thus oriented its participants, assuring them of their constant access to the time and place of Christ incarnated, crucified, and resurrected, and thus of their secure position within salvation time. But while Christ III depended on the narrative generated by the ritual year, it broke down any comfort entailed by the familiarity of that narrative's arc. While Easter week rituals allowed congregants to visit Jerusalem and perceive Jesus there, Christ III unsettlingly reveals that Jesus was there with them all along, and that they themselves had somehow always inhabited the everyplace and everytime of the end times. The ideal reader or hearer would emerge from the experience of the poem with the disorienting sense that the mysteries of the last day had been revealed in every precision of detail; that they themselves knew what would surely happen, and yet that they could not be assured that they really understood it. The suspense created by Christ III in its audience is thus not about the events of Doomsday, but about the content of their own mind and heart.

Notes