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Number 3, Fall 2002 cartographic perspectives sounds when read aloud, particularly its four major stresses and repeti- tions of initial "s" and "g": shíptamed gúllgraced sóft to our glídings... In "Mappemounde," Birney's division of lines into two parts signals the poem's roots in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Such obvious caesurae (or pauses) are used by editors of Old English poetry to emphasize that every line is actu- ally a combination of two short phrases, each with its own rhythm and two stressed syllables. The scop joined these phrases when he alliterated the sound beginning one or more of their stressed syllables: "shiptamed" and "soft," "gullgraced" and "glidings." By inserting central caesurae and eliminating the punctuation that distinguished his Strait of Anian version (where the line read "shiptamed, gullgraced, soft to our glidings"), Birney deliberately recast "Mappemounde" in a typography unfamiliar to the non-specialist and made the poem look as strange as it sounds. Yet its very "foreignness" is key to its heritage. Old English might as well be a foreign language, and Anglo-Saxon poetry not only was meant to be heard but was composed and transmitted orally (Birney 1972, 85; Alexander 1966; Bessinger 1974, 587-88). Nor did Birney stop there. In theme and content "Mappemounde" recalls such classics of Old English literature as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer. Birney's nadders conjure up the fire-breathing, treasure- hoarding dragons in Germanic literature, like the one Beowulf slays in the oldest extant Anglo-Saxon poem (Beowulf, 2000-3187, in Jack 1994; see Raver 2000). Birney's "wanderer" and his ill-fated "pledges" evoke the speaker of The Wanderer, a man forced to sea after the deaths of lord and kin. Birney's "seafarer" and "whalehall" allude to The Seafarer, whose pro- tagonist crisscrosses the hwaelweg ("whale-route"), far from his loved ones and bitter in breosthord (lines 55-63: see Alexander 1966, 90-105; Crossley- Holland 1982, 47-52). Like The Wanderer and The Seafarer, "Mappemounde" imagines the sea voyage—with its isolation and terror, its loneliness and awe—as a poignant metaphor for life's journey. Birney's title, however, is not Anglo-Saxon. The medieval word mappe- mounde appears six centuries after the composition of Beowulf and three centuries after William the Conqueror installed a French-speaking aris- tocracy on English soil. In fact, when the word was first recorded near the end of the fourteenth century, the royal court still spoke Anglo-French. 3 Birney picked this Middle English word, in part, because Chaucer—the focus of Birney's scholarly work—may have been the first to write it in English. Here are the opening lines of Chaucer's lyric poem, "To Rose- mounde": 4 Madame, ye ben of al beautè shryne As fer as cercled is the mappemounde;... Mappemounde is one of eleven words that Chaucer rhymes with "Rosemounde," the name he gives to the poem's unidentified beloved in line 15. "To Rosemounde" is a light-hearted ballade about courtly love modeled on the French forms Chaucer preferred for his shorter poems (Davies 1963, 42-43; Reeves 1970, 157-58). Though the speaker declares undying love in the face of his beloved's thrice-remarked indif- ference ("thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce": lines 8,16,24), he cannot help also comparing his passion to a fish wallowed in sauce ("...pyk walwed in galauntyne": line 17). Birney had catalogued some of that poem's whimsical qualities in his essay "The Beginnings of Chaucer 's "'Mappemounde' imagines the sea voyage—with its isolation and terror, its loneliness and awe—as a poignant metaphor for life's journey." "The medieval word mappemounde appears six centuries after the composition of Beowulf and three centuries after William the Conqueror installed a French-speaking aristocracy on English soil."

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