The Author and Their Tools
The Author and Their Tools (I)
Ever since the Middle Ages, we have found ourselves in a writing period. It holds true that we have writings dating from well before the year 0 AD (i.e. Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey). The following article shall provide the reader with a little background information regarding authorship and historical writing. How did the first ‘authors’ differ from today’s? Do we find ourselves in a luxury problem? Are there too many tools out there? All in all, I hope to provide new information to the reader (and myself while doing this research).
Authorship was not always the same as it now was. Copyright did not exist until the expansion of the printing press. In fact, The Statute of Anne was the first released in the year 1710. It served as a legal protection against any potential thieves. Before that, there was little need to ward off your texts against legal piracy. Authors and poets remained anonymous in their works. Their texts tended to be non-original, as they copied and edited previous work. The reason for its anonymity rests in the fact that the compiling process of a manuscript was significantly different from today.
The Medieval Scribe & the Modern Editor
During the English Middle Ages, the writing process involved various hands before the product of the manuscript reached its ‘end stage’. Two distinctive hands made Beowulf, as there are two different handwritings. Scribes marked the final station in the writing process. These were individuals who trained in copying and editing other people’s stories. This was unlike modern editors. Emily Thornbury said that ‘I will consider as a scribe anyone who has written or contributed to the writing of a complete text. This excludes only a few categories of activity — mostly isolated glosses and doodles — and would perhaps be considered overly capacious by the standard of a well-run scriptorium’. As one could already observe, the medieval scribe’s tasks appeared to have been broad.
How did they differ from today’s editors? Well, the first thing that needs to be addressed here is the fact that medieval manuscripts served another purpose than today’s books. The monastery compiled the medieval manuscript. In such, religion played a major role in its composition and performance. There is a consensus among Germanic philologists (of whom I am one as well) that the language usage and poetic pattern in Beowulf demonstrates that we are dealing with a story that was once performed orally. What does this even mean? It means that Beowulf’s original poem was told and performed through the use of storytelling. The use of alliteration and kennings suggest that the ‘original’ performer required them to make ‘sense’ and establish structure in their story. One could imagine that poetic formula proved tremendously useful to remember and conjure certain lines while executing the performance.
The medieval scribe
The Anglo-Saxon scribe stood apart from today’s editing world. Another reason for this rests in publication. In particular, I should say mass production here. A modern editor namely fixates on getting an author’s story ready for the public. A medieval scribe’s task was to assemble and gather tales and store them into an original and exclusive manuscript. Most times, these tales and texts were highly personal. Even to such an extent, that a scribe’s dialect influenced the language. This is another difference between the past and present: a standardised language. The Middle Ages did not see any kind of standardised language as we now know it. This came after the arrival of the dictionaries.
The clergy were the ones who were responsible for most — if not all — literature produced during the European Middle Ages. It is, therefore, interesting to acknowledge the fact that writing once served as a religious tool in Europe’s journey to literacy. A Christian monk may have penned (or quelled) down Beowulf to entertain his fellow clergy. Throughout the poem’s long 200-years literary scholarship, this previous statement may have once enraged many scholars, as some could not have shaken the thought that the Old English poem reeks of paganism!
How could an Anglo-Saxon monk ever get it into his right state of mind to compose a significantly long poem about a so-called ‘Scandinavian’ pagan hero without ever mentioning a fellow Englishman in his tale? Was he deranged? This is preposterous without any doubt! The plot must have been compiled by either a lover of Scandinavian paganism or a pagan Anglo-Saxon who needed to be converted to Christianity still. Why would a Christian ever write about a hero that slays monsters for his renown and glory? It would not make any sense at all.
Of dragons
The reason, why I meant to point this out, is to demonstrate that medieval manuscripts served as highly personal products for the scribes making them. Perhaps, it holds true that Beowulf was a ‘classic’ among Anglo-Saxon people, but we could never know with certainty. We do know that — like Tolkien already mentioned in his famous Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics essay — the anonymous scribe loved his dragons. Today’s editors produce and edit literature for the public. They are far more inclined to let the literature speak to the majority of the people. To be more concise, modern editors lean much more on what the market demands of the book that they are trying to sell. This is naturally in stark contrast to what medieval scribes were trying to do with their composition. Although one could not say it with certainty once more, it seems highly unlikely that the medieval scribe aimed for public attention.
Even as a function, a scribe would not have been a common position in medieval society. The majority of them were illiterate and could neither read nor write. According to Brantley, the medieval manuscript could be designated as a fine craftsman’s artefact that housed the making and writing of/on parchment, iconography, codicology (which is the study of a codex), palaeography (which is the study of all aspects regarding old books/manuscripts), textual criticism, historical documents, decoration/illumination and much more! All in all, these texts were ‘written by hand (Latin manu scriptus) on any kind of surface’. One may already see that a scribe’s task was not merely to copy and paste certain lines of text. Their position demanded much from them. It is good to notice that — for this article — medieval writing originated by writing on ‘any kind of surface’. This shall serve as a reminder, when this article shall introduce to you the modern writer’s concern(-s).
The New Age: Computers & Typewriters
The modern computer era originated approximately eighty years ago during the 1940s. More specifically, the first electronic computer was first used by the British to intercept and translate the potential secret codes that Hitler sent towards his generals. The Colossus saw the light of day in 1943. The word Colossus finds its roots in Ancient Greece, where its meaning denoted ‘a statue of a person or god that is significantly bigger than a human body’ (OED). The first computer did not fall ‘short’ when looking at its formidable size; it was a rather massive machine! One should remember that this was the first personal computer. As in, it did not yet correspond to what an actual writer needed, although I could see how a possible message decoder may prove useful for writing a fictional story.
It would take a little longer before authors could write their fiction on a personal computer. Until that period arrived, authors worked on their ideas on typewriters. In the year 1868, these splendid machineries saw their light. For many succeeding authors, typewriters played not solely their act as tools; they transformed into artefacts which proved to be rather personal and untamed. It could have been deemed untamed because authors tried to write with utter precision; each mistake may have proved fatal. M. Lyons once said that without ‘the convenience of instantly crossing out an error by hand, and without the luxury of the delete key, the typewriter encouraged the author to be disciplined and even miserly with words because revision was possible only if the text were completely redrafted. The typewriter thus collaborated with the writer in the creative process’.
Typewriters were, certainly, personal devices that made the transition from the written word from pen and quill to typing words on paper. It proved to be the first instance that we could now recognise as a word processor. In part II of this article series, there shall be a focus on modern word processors, and how they compete against each other. Why are there so many word processors available today? What makes the one better than the other? Is there a word processor for anyone?
Works cited:
Brantley, Jessica, in Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
Deazley, Ronan, ‘History I: 1710 — 1774’, in Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006, p. 13.
Lyons, Martyns, ‘Introduction: The Typewriter as an Agent of Change?’, in The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices, University of Toronto Press, 2021, p. 4.
Thornbury, Emily, ‘Scribes’, in Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 65.
Tolkien, J.R.R., ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien, London: George & Allen Unwin, 1983.