ubi sunt

Ubi sunt (literally "where are...") is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?"

Ubi sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf. The phrase also occurs in the second stanza of De Brevitate Vitae.

Sometimes considered to be a nostalgic longing for the clichéd "good old days", the ubi sunt motif is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience. The medieval French poet François Villon famously echoes the sentiment in the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") with his question, Où sont les neiges d'antan? ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?"). The Spanish poet Jorge Manrique wrote some equally famous stanzas about contemporaries that death had taken away.

A general feeling of ubi sunt radiates from the text of Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxons, at the point in their cultural evolution in which Beowulf was written, experienced an inescapable feeling of doom, symptomatic of ubi sunt yearning. By conquering the Romanized Britons, they were faced with massive stone works and elaborate Celtic designs that seemed to come from a lost era of glory (called the "work of giants" in Seafarer).

Other prominent ubi sunt Anglo-Saxon poems are The Wanderer, Deor, The Ruin, and The Seafarer (all part of a collection known as the Exeter Book, the largest surviving collection of Old English literature). The Wanderer most exemplifies Ubi sunt poetry in its use of erotema (the rhetorical question): "Where has the horse gone? Where the young warrior? Where is the giver of treasure? What has become of the feasting seats? Where are the joys of the hall?"

Interest in the ubi sunt motif enjoyed a renaissance during the late 18th century following the publication of James Macpherson's "translation" of Ossian. The eighth of Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) features Ossian lamenting,

Where is Fingal the King? where is Oscur my son? where are all my race? Alas! in the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou bringest back the memory of the past.^[1]

This and Macpherson's subsequent Ossianic texts, Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), fueled the romantics' interest in melancholy and primitivism.

References

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