Interlacing: an aesthetic

Ackroyd spells out his aesthetic thesis in Albion: the origins of the English imagination (2002):

[….] The association with the weaving of tapestry is apposite here, and the poetic technique has become known as that of “interlace.” The “interlace structure” has thus been defined as expressing “the meaning of coincidence,” the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time5 as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.

  It is not simply a technique, therefore, but a vision of the world. The great stone crosses of Northumberland and Cumberland, hewn in the early eighth century, are carved with abstract interlace patterns in which bands or threads or vines turn back upon themselves to form woven intersections or knots. They may be symbols of eternity, like the spirals upon even more ancient stone, but they seem also to display a delight in intricacy or ornament for its own sake. Ivory caskets, sword-hilts, brooches and rings are emblazoned with the same labyrinthine device; a large gold buckle, discovered during the excavations at Sutton Hoo and dated to the early seventh century, has an interlacing of snakes and birds’ heads wrought upon it. It was what the Beowulf poet described as “hring-boga ,” ring-coiled. The manuscript illuminations from the seventh and eighth centuries are irradiated by interlace; the initial pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels are peculiarly rich in this art, with one page bearing several thousand “intersections” while in another only two threads or bands are employed to create an entire and effortlessly detailed “carpet-page.” The pattern occurs at a later date. When one Middle English poem, known as The Owl and the Nightingale, is depicted in terms of “chain-stitch”6 the relation to the “carpet-page” of the illuminated gospels is reinforced. If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end; there is no sequence and no progress, only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces. Thus “interlace” has variously described Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Langland’s Piers the Plowman and the penitential lyrics of the thirteenth century. The term has been used to define the novels of Charles Dickens….

https://jayrothermel.substack.com/p/hawksmoor-1985-by-peter-ackroyd?r=1vg2di