Looking for Home at the End of the World: A Study of Regional Belonging in Old English Environmental Literature

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The field of medieval ecocriticism has experienced a surge in interest in recent years, with Old English texts provingan especially fruitful object of study. Corinne Dale's 2017 monograph examines The Natural World in the ExeterBook Riddles, while Heide Estes' Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes covers texts ranging from Beowulf to Saints'Lives to passages from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Old English Rogationtide homilies and charter bounds, however,remain something of an untapped resource. This project will use these texts to study how early medieval agrariancommunities conceptualised and engaged with their immediate physical environments. Through bringing thesetenth-century texts into conversation with contemporary ecocritical theory and ecopoetics, I seek not only to shedlight on their previously overlooked environmental resonances, but also to explore how medieval ecocriticism cancontribute to contemporary environmental discourse. Contextualised by the Devolution of Greater Manchester,my research will focus particularly on whether as Estes argues - 'the example of the early Middle Ages is that areturn to localised economies is possible', and how regionalism and communal identification with regionallandscapes can allow us to 'be ecological' at a time of environmental breakdown (Timothy Morton, 2018).A study of Rogationtide homilies and charter bounds will break new ground not only because they haveyet to be examined from an ecocritical perspective, but also because both bodies of texts are associated with ritualacts of walking which immersed communities in their local landscapes. Called gangdagas or 'walking days' in thevernacular, Rogation days were devoted to praying for the ongoing fruitfulness of the land, and structured arounddaily walks that marked out the boundaries of a local settlement. Boundary walks also constituted a key aspect ofAnglo-Saxon land tenure, communicating changes in settlement boundaries to the orally literate communities wholived and worked on the land. By the 10th century, the vast majority of Latin land grants contained a boundaryclause in Old English. These remarkable texts trace the new boundary line by moving from one meaningfullyimbued landmark - a grave mound, a weasel's den, a goblin's spring - to the next. Beating the bounds, which gavewalkers a peripheral perspective on a familiar place, speaks eloquently to contemporary ecowriting and itsemergent focus on walking - an act, as radical landscape poet Mark Dickinson writes, 'of distance and intimacy,and of relocating ourselves within the world'.