The Old English Pharaoh: A Neglected ubi sunt Poem

Abstract

The Old English poem Pharaoh has been largely unconsidered in critical literature owing to its formal and interpretive obscurities, which have led to its relegation to a secondary place in the Old English poetic canon. The text has traditionally been read as an unsuccessful attempt at replicating Latin models of dialogic literature to invite reflection on the typological associations of the crossing of the Red Sea. It has accordingly been read almost exclusively as part of an Easter sequence within the Exeter Book. As a result, the poem has remained unexplored in terms of its artistic quality and potential intertextual connections with other texts and traditions within and beyond the corpus of Old English poetry. This study reassesses the form, function, and interpretation of Pharaoh and provides a new reading of the poem by relocating it within its appropriate contextual background in both Christian doctrine and the Old English poetic corpus. To this end, a new reconstruction of a textual crux is proposed, which reveals that Pharaoh should be read against a new interpretive framework. Drawing from textual parallels in Latin and Old English, this study suggests that Pharaoh is an experiment in textual form and poetic mode that draws inspiration from the common ubi sunt motif and its vernacular adaptation in Old English literature. Ultimately, the interpretive complexity of Pharaoh poses a challenge to modern ideas of intertextuality and literary genre, which prioritise a hierarchical rather than horizontal model of textual influence.