Ubi sunt.html



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 nunc...?, "where now?", is a common variant.¹

Ubi sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems and occurs, for example, in the second stanza of the song De Brevitate Vitae (also known as Gaudeamus igitur). The theme was the common property of medieval Latin poets: Cicero may not have been available, but Boethius' line was known: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent? ²

Sometimes thought to indicate nostalgia, 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?"), a refrain taken up in the bitter and ironic Berthold Brecht/Kurt Weill "Nannas lied", expressing the short-term memory without regrets of a hard-bitten prostitute, in the refrain

Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend?
Wo ist die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?³

In "Coplas por la muerte de su padre", the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique wrote equally famous stanzas about contemporaries that death had taken away. In medieval Persian poetry, Ubi sunt? is a pervasive theme in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad 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).

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 Wanderer⁴ most exemplifies Ubi sunt poetry in its use of erotema (the rhetorical question):

Where is the horse gone?
Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?

For his fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a similar poem, composed by his fictional people of Rohan who are partially modelled after the Anglo-Saxons. Part of this goes:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? [...]
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.⁵

This is adapted for the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers wherein it is used by King Théoden to lament his son's death.

Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare's plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment,that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning -- quite chap-fall'n. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.⁶

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.⁷

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

See also

• Timor mortis conturbat me
• Memento mori
• Vanitas

References

• Garde, Judith N. (1991). Old English Poetry in Medieval Christian Perspective. p. 191. ISBN 9780859913072.