The Owl and the Nightingale is a humorous bird-debate carried out expansively to a length of 1794 lines in octosyllabic couplets. The meter matches that of another English item in Jesus 29: the tonally dissimilar Eleven Pains of Hell (art. 28). The octosyllabic couplet, a common meter in Anglo-French, is also the manner adopted for three long works by Chardri in both Jesus 29 and Cotton Caligula A.ix. These two manuscripts are the only sites where copies of Owl and of Chardri are found. Physical correspondences confirm that each scribe copied Owl from the same lost exemplar (“X”; see Introduction, pp. 5–7). In Jesus 29, Owl opens a new quire that follows the first one holding The Passion of Jesus Christ in English (art. 1). After Owl comes the long set of English works edited in this volume, which extends continuously to The Shires and Hundreds of England (art. 27). In the Cotton manuscript, Owl sits at the head of a briefer sequence of eight English poems: after Owl, arts. 7–9, 13–16 in this volume.

Owl’s date of composition remains uncertain. Before Neil Cartlidge’s careful reassessment of the facts in 1996 (“The Date”), the composition, as distinct from the copying, was usually set between 1189 and 1216 on the basis of lines that appear to refer to a deceased king: “That underyat the Kyng Henri. / (Jhesu his soule do merci!)” (King Henry learned about that. (Jesus have mercy on his soul!)) (lines 1091–92). The passage was thought to refer to England’s Henry II, who died in 1189. Cartlidge shows how a later date — the second half of the thirteenth century — is quite possible; the name might then refer to Henry III (d. 1272). In another Jesus poem, a showy compliment to Henry III appears at the midway point (Love Rune (art. 19), lines 41, 51). Combined with the mention in Owl, the royal references suggest a historical-political milieu for the Jesus 29 poems of around 1250–1280, and a post-1272 date for both manuscripts.

The authorship of Owl is also subject to speculation, and several of the most provocative clues are detailed in the Introduction to this volume (pp. 16–19). The clerk named by the birds, Nicholas of Guildford (lines 191, 1778), might be the poet or merely someone known by the poet. The poet (in the birds’ words) praises Nicholas for his eminent good sense and sues for Nicholas’s career preferment, but injudiciously mocks the authorities who might grant it. The tone might be taken to be sufficiently humorous, and the circle of first listeners sufficently intimate, that the mockery is to be taken as a joke. The most likely candidate for authorship thus remains the otherwise unknown Nicholas (Cartlidge, “Nicholas of Guildford”). There is, however, an alternate line of argument that proposes that the author was a woman (Barratt, “Flying in the Face of Tradition”). Unfortunately, the question cannot be settled one way or another, and Owl remains an anonymous work.

The poem records a debate overheard by the narrator between a serious-minded owl and a light-hearted nightingale as to the benefits each confers on humankind. In the manner of Latin and French conflictus that oppose two sorts of existence, each represented by an abstract essence, one side is paradigmatically harsh, restrictive, regulated, while the other is free-spirited, permissive, generous. A good specimen of the type is the Anglo-French Debate between Winter and Summer found in Harley 2253 and probably authored by Nicholas Bozon (CHMS, 2:34–47). Within Jesus 29, the debate form can be found in two Anglo-French poems: William the Clerk of Normandy’s Four Daughters of God (between Justice, Mercy, Peace, and Truth) and Chardri’s Little Debate (between youth and eld). In early Middle English poetry, secular debates like Owl are extremely rare, but one does encounter the debate format with a religious, didactic slant in Christ’s debate with Satan in The Harrowing of Hell and in a range of popular debates between a soul and its body (as partly appears in Death (art. 14)). The only secular debate in Middle English that is contemporary with Owl is the much briefer, yet seemingly related The Thrush and the Nightingale found in MS Digby 86 (ca. 1280) and the Auchinleck manuscript (ca. 1330–1340) (Conlee, ed., Middle English Debate Poetry, pp. 237–48). Other non-religious examples from before 1350 survive chiefly among the lyrics of Harley 2253: in English, the male/female dialogues on love in The Meeting in the Wood and The Clerk and the Girl (CHMS, 2:148–51, 276–77), and in Anglo-French, more pertinently, the long free-wheeling debate about female sexuality known as Gilote and Johane (2:156–73). The latter is cousin to another lively French debate on female life-choices that survives in Digby 86: L’Estrif de deus dames (The Debate between Two Ladies). The content of debates that focus on the desires and behaviors of women reflects closely the concerns of a long exchange in Owl about women and marriage (lines 1340–1602). It stems from what was evidently an avid taste for debating the female nature — a subject laid out for entertainment across many works in Digby 86 and Harley 2253 (see especially Corrie, “Misogyny in MS Digby 86”; Cartlidge, “Gender Trouble?”; Dove, “Evading Textual Intimacy”; and Nolan, “Anthologizing Ribaldry”). Additional specimens of the broad pan-European taste for debate poetry have been usefully collected and translated by Michel-André Bossy in Medieval Debate Poetry: Vernacular Works.

As the most brilliant of long poems in the early Middle English corpus, The Owl and the Nightingale is often judged to be a singular literary event — that is to say, an inexplicable phenomenon — in its never-before-seen combination of remarkable features: avian characters of opposed instincts and habits who are colorfully loquacious and dramatic; a high-spirited match of rhetorical wits at times ingenious, at times specious; a linguistic showcase of English idiomatic invention; and an encyclopedic display of learning on an array of subjects: musical skills and styles (both human and avian), sophisticated rhetoric, legal pleading and wrangling, prophecy and foreknowledge, confession and mortal sins, natural science, human psychology (love, jealousy, vengeance, and so on), house design, potty training, and much more. Bestiary lore, beast fables, and even one of Marie de France’s Breton lais are among its many allusions and potential sources. Both birds are female, both nocturnal, and both English in their habitats. With native fervency, both favor the ancient Anglo-Saxon King Alfred as the best font of wisdom. Each credits him often as the sayer of proverbs that they think will clinch their arguments, even though the actual proverbs they spout are seldom found in the extant Proverbs of Alfred tradition.

Owl is thus a virtuoso poem, highly accomplished in its lightly satiric style and broadly humorous tones. It exudes the very spirit of oppositional play, and the debate itself never achieves a definitive resolution. In the end, the birds decide that their arguments are to be submitted to Nicholas of Guildford’s astute judgment. Once the clerk has heard the full set of arguments (for the owl has committed it to memory and will recite it verbatim), Nicholas will know who to judge as winner of the dispute. The long poem’s inconclusiveness has attracted an army of critics seeking to pin down its ultimate meaning and ideological bias: should we side with the owl or with the nightingale? Such studies, while valuable for explaining particular points raised by the birds, often prove too narrow to embrace the spirit of the entire poem. Alexandra Barratt notes that the critical “interest in the multifarious subjects raised in the poem (and then so carelessly abandoned) is much more serious than that of the birds themselves” (“Avian Self-Fashioning,” p. 17). A good, bibliographic sorting-out of critical topics is proffered by Neil Cartlidge in a 2016 Oxford Bibliographies article. The dominant topics include: the birds’ personalities; rhetoric and dialectic; law and legal matters (on which, in Jesus 29, compare the legal domains presented in Shires (art. 27)); orality and performance; play, games, irresolution, and self-referentiality; love, sexuality, and marriage; and studies of animal versus human perspectives (“The Owl and the Nightingale”).

Beyond these approaches, one might look, as well, at the rich interpretive possibilities lent by the pairing of Owl with The Proverbs of Alfred (art. 24) in Jesus 29. One might say that Owl adopts the essentially secular outlook of Proverbs, which springs from the human desire for a good, orderly life, and then extravagantly embellishes it with beast fable and debate. Each work concerns the aspirations of lived existence and the deployment of one’s instinct for survival (the motive of beast fables) amid other responsiblities. Questions arise: What are the best practices among competing possibilities? What are the right strategies? In the beast-fable parlance of the nightingale, is it better to have one best trick (like the cat) or many tricks (like the fox) (lines 793–836)? The poem confirms how every creature opposes any means unnatural to it and will rationalize to defend its own inherent proclivities. The poem is unresolved because such proclivities are both individualized and species-based, hence irresolvable against another’s. Humans too are idiosyncratic and varying: they can be bad or good, male or female, married or unmarried, faithful or unfaithful. Yet all pursue similar needs and goals: try to determine precepts by which to survive, seek happiness, maybe gain bliss. The arguments in Owl thus adhere (much like Proverbs, but in a different medium) to a sense of time lived instinctively inside a body. They concern habits, habitats, and workable strategies for thriving: infants having physical needs met (eating, defecation, protection from predation); youths becoming bred and educated; adults finding love, sexuality, marriage, male/female strife; and, eventually, bodies dying and turning into corpses (the owl notably makes claims of her usefulness after death). Spiritual life is scarcely perceived of. Owl does not paint a picture of heaven and hell, as do many other poems in Jesus 29. The birds view those places as somewhere else, beyond view, yet birdsong may give humans a foretaste of heaven. Each bird sees her own song as allied, naturally, with virtue.

A note about this edition: This edition of The Owl and the Nightingale differs in two crucial ways from others that already exist. First, it is based on the version appearing in Jesus 29, not the one in Cotton Caligula A.ix that has become standard as the base-text for most editions and all previous translations. Until now, the Jesus Owl has not been edited on its own: presentations of it in the editions by Wells (1907), Hall (1920), Atkins (1922), and Grattan-Sykes (1935) set it beside the Cotton Owl on juxtaposed facing pages. Scholars have ascertained that the scribes shared the same exemplar X, in which some letter-forms were too unfamiliar, or written too similarly and interchangeably (for example, þ, ƿ, ȝ, p, and y), for the scribes to be always successful in replicating them. The more conservative Cotton scribe generally attempted to write what he saw (even if it introduced error), while the Jesus scribe was prone to adapt and alter what he could not construe (on the scribes, see Ker, ed., The Owl and the Nightingale Reproduced in Facsimile, p. xviii; Stanley, p. 6; and Scahill, “Abbreviations”). As is especially clear when their work is assessed in tandem, both scribes strove to give reliable witness to the poem set before them, as they understood it. This edition offers the Jesus scribe’s Owl while acknowledging that the Cotton version often preserves better readings that resolve problems in Jesus and must be adopted. At the same time, as editors of Cotton have conceded, there are many instances where a Jesus reading is able to solve a crux in Cotton. In weighing the variations between copies, I have not sought to restore X, but instead to make an edition of the text copied (and admittedly sometimes altered) by the Jesus scribe, conservatively corrected by reference to Cotton (just as editions of Cotton are traditionally corrected by reference to Jesus).

Second, it must be noted that this edition of Owl is the first to display the poem situated contextually in its manuscript setting, where there are clues regarding the tastes of an authentic medieval readership. In Jesus 29, Owl is part of a long sequence of English lyrics, mainly religious in tenor, as recorded in this edition. In Cotton, its second witness, Owl is the first and by far longest item in a set of eight English poems — an abbreviated rendition of the sequence found in Jesus 29. Working out a hypothetical reconstruction of X, Cartlidge finds it likely that Owl traveled there with numerous English lyrics congruent with what we find in Jesus and Cotton, and, in addition, with the three Chardri works (“Imagining X,” pp. 42–43). It is worth noting in this regard that the Jesus scribe heads Poema Morale with a Latin incipit “Tractatus quidam in anglico” (Another treatise in English) that emphasizes its sequencing after Owl. For Ivana Djordjevic, the reading matter that surrounds Owl confirms that its ideological thrust is “manifestly . . . didactic,” with both books “most probably produced in monastic scriptoria” (“The Owl and the Nightingale,” p. 373). Treharne agrees that the two manuscripts situate Owl in a religious/didactic context, and she further observes that in Cotton it travels with Layamon’s Brut, a lengthy chronicle in English on the history of the Britons (see Laȝamon, Brut, ed. and trans. Barron and Weinberg). She takes this as sign that we might foreground “the historical aspects of the poem — the reference to a King Henry [line 1091] and the contemporary resonances throughout” (p. 370). In the verse sequence of Jesus 29, contemporary references occur most forcefully in When Holy Church Is Under Foot and Love Rune (arts. 12, 19).

It is possible, moreover, to detect other facets of Owl’s ebullient nature refracted in its two manuscript contexts. Cartlidge, Owl’s premier modern critic and editor (of the Cotton text), characterizes it as “the earliest extant long comic poem in the English language” (“The Owl and the Nightingale”). A skilled though less ambitious comic poem, A Little Sooth Sermon (art. 16), is preserved in both manuscripts; in Cotton, it concludes the English sequence headed by Owl, causing the pair to frame the English religious verse as entertaining bookends. Another feature of Owl’s character, the secular strains of love lyric as reflected in the nightingale’s song, is delicately evoked and refocused toward love of Jesus in Love Rune (art. 19), one of Jesus 29’s major poems. Another chief text in Jesus 29 is an extremely apt companion to Owl (rarely noted by critics): The Proverbs of Alfred (art. 24). The contrafacta song-pair Death’s Wither-Clench and An Orison to Our Lady (arts. 7, 8) immediately follows Owl in Cotton, and their primal opposition (death’s gloom versus heaven’s comfort) offers an epilogue that may comment on the birds’ emblematic opposites as well as their musical competitiveness. The dialogue-debate form exists, too, in Chardri’s Le Petit Plet (in both manuscripts). Beyond these provocative correspondences, there are many individual instances of verbal resonance among Owl and other Jesus poems, as detailed in specific Explanatory Notes.

The Explanatory Notes provided here are much indebted to three editions in particular: those of Atkins (1922), Stanley (1960), and Cartlidge (2001). These scholars supply superb editions with philological and critical notes, each constituting a virtual variorum on the state of scholarship at the time of the edition’s making. I have also relied on modern translations of the Cotton Owl produced by Cartlidge-Owl (2001) and Millett (2003), supplemented by etymological and philological data in the MED.

For a facing-page facsimile of both manuscripts of Owl, see Ker, ed., The Owl and the Nightingale Reproduced in Facsimile. Grattan-Sykes provide facing-page diplomatic readings of both manuscripts. MS Cotton Caligula A.ix is viewable by digital facsimile at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Caligula_A_IX(Opens in a new tab or window).

[Fols. 156ra–168vb. NIMEV 1384. DIMEV 2307. Utley, MWME, 3:716 –20, 874–82 [45]. Quires: 2–3. Meter: 1794 lines rhyming in octosyllabic couplets. Layout: Short lines written in double columns. Colored capitals (some enlarged) mark divisions of content (indicated in this edition by double spacing). One other MS: London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fols. 233r–246r. Editions of the JesusOwl(on pages facing the CottonOwl): Wells, pp. 4–147; Hall, 1:148–75, 2:553–79 (extracts); Atkins, pp. 2–151; Grattan-Sykes, pp. 1–56. Select other editions of the Cotton Owl: Wright; Dickins-Wilson, pp. 49–57, 182–87 (extract); Stanley; Bennett and Smithers, eds., Early Middle English Verse and Prose, pp. 1–27, 262–75 (extract); Sisam and Sisam, eds., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, pp. 6–10 (extract); Dunn-Byrnes, pp. 54–98; Cartlidge-Owl, pp. 2–43; Treharne, pp. 468–505. Critical editions: Gadow, ed., Das mittelenglische Streitgedicht Eule und Nachtigall, pp. 99–165; Morris-Specimens, pp. 171–93, 343–49 (extracts). Translations of the Jesus Owl: None. Translations of the Cotton Owl: Atkins, pp. 152–81; Sisam and Sisam, eds., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, pp. 6–10 (extract); Stone, trans., The Owl and the Nightingale, pp. 155–244; Gardner, trans., The Alliterative Morte Arthure, pp. 185–231; Cartlidge-Owl, pp. 2–43; Millett.