Beowulf and Other Stories

A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures

Joe Allard, Richard North

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317860419
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Beowulf & Other Stories was first conceived in the belief that the study of Old English – and its close cousins, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman – can be a genuine delight, covering a period as replete with wonder, creativity and magic as any other in literature. Now in a fully revised second edition, the collection of essays written by leading academics in the field is set to build upon its established reputation as the standard introduction to the literatures of the time.

Beowulf & Other Stories captures the fire and bloodlust of the great epic, Beowulf, and the sophistication and eroticism of the Exeter Riddles. Fresh interpretations give new life to the spiritual ecstasy of The Seafarer and to the imaginative dexterity of The Dream of the Rood, andprovide the student and general reader with all they might need to explore and enjoy this complex but rewarding field. The book sheds light, too, on the shadowy contexts of the period, with suggestive and highly readable essays on matters ranging from the dynamism of the Viking Age to Anglo-Saxon input into The Lord of the Rings, from the great religious prose works to the transition from Old to Middle English. It also branches out into related traditions, with expert introductions to the Icelandic Sagas, Viking Religion and Norse Mythology. Peter S. Baker provides an outstanding guide to taking your first steps in the Old English language, while David Crystal provides a crisp linguistic overview of the entire period.

With a new chapter by Mike Bintley on Anglo-Saxon archaeology and a revised chapter by Stewart Brookes on the prose writers of the English Benedictine Reform, this updated second edition will be essential reading for students of the period.

Why read Old English literature?

CHAPTER 1

An introduction to this book

Richard North, David Crystal and Joe Allard

Not a lot of people know about Old English literature, but you can if you read this book. If you like reading literature, then these pages have got something for you. An undiscovered country like ours is more than just one more name to acquire in a list of ‘been there done that’. It is really a whole landscape to explore. There is more than Old English here, too. Besides Old English literature, there is also Old Icelandic and early medieval Celtic and French. Together they could all be called the imaginative equivalent of a terrain full of forests, rivers, marshes, lakes and mountains all peopled by the strangest, most unusual beings in the sunniest but also the most changeable weather. Come and join us there for a day. The following chapters have been written to give you the road into this wild interior. Starting with Old English, we will give you answers – or leads to answers – to questions that you might have about Old English or, further afield, about Old Icelandic or Anglo-Norman literature.

Of course, the first question is what these things are. ‘Old English’ is English literature written in the language of its time in England from around the year 600 to 1100. ‘Old Icelandic’ is poems and prose works from around 850 to 1400 composed and written in Norway and Iceland. ‘Anglo-Norman’ covers literature in England, the Celtic lands and France in the period 1066 to about 1200 and leads into Middle English literature such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Anglo-Saxons who spoke Old English fought, settled down and intermarried with Vikings, i.e. Danes and Norwegians who spoke ‘Old Norse’, a language which was written down in Iceland and is also called ‘Old Icelandic’. Many of the Icelandic sagas – which are rather like historical novels – tell stories about the Vikings in England. The Normans who invaded England in 1066 were themselves of Viking origin and spoke a French which, in due course, changed the English language into its present form. They also cleared the way for new forms of literature from France such as rhyming poetry and ‘romance’. Because Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman overlap in this way we are putting them together in this book. The promiscuity of this venture is such, indeed, that we are going one step further and mixing these subjects quite deliberately up. Old English is the leading theme, which you will find dealt with in this and the following chapters until the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Viking wars in Chapter 12. The other subjects will have been brought in here or there but Chapter 12 is where we start the Icelandic theme by including a potted introduction to Old Norse. Thereafter, Chapters 13 and 14 go large on the Old Icelandic literary tradition as such, before our book turns back to Old English literature in Chapter 15, via its mature prose tradition as seen in the writers of the English Benedictine Reform. All this sets the scene for the third main theme in Chapter 16, the rich literary fusions of Anglo-Norman, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Middle Eastern and French.

Teaching these various subjects has been both a challenge and great fun; the editors hope it will remain so. Each in our own area, we and all the contributors in this book have got years of experience of reading the literature, of researching the literature and – most importantly – of teaching the literature. These days, however, we are beginning to feel that the subjects should get a higher profile in education. The figures speak for themselves. In 99% of schools not only the world over, of course, but also in the UK where Old English came from, the coverage of Old English literature is zero. In 90% of university English departments in the whole Anglophone world it is also zero. Old Icelandic hardly gets a look in. French is mostly taken at the modern end. ‘Celtic’ has become a catch-all for something between the Romans and Chaucer. This state of affairs is ironic at a time and in a culture where much of the public imagination is enthralled by stories and images, whether in book or film, cartoon or computer game – which are drawn directly from Old English and Old Icelandic and from Celtic and medieval Romance. In his creation of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, himself a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, drew deeply from Beowulf, Celtic mythology and heathen Norse poetry recorded in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see Chapter 2).

Just as Tolkien drew on Old English, in particular, so Peter Jackson drew on Tolkien, for a trilogy of films at the dawn of the new millennium. Jackson’s three films on The Lord of the Rings have become a phenomenon, tapping into a remarkable seam of international interest. Tolkien’s original, too, was a global phenomenon. There is a connection and it is a very human connection at that. Just as we have been entertained – enthralled, even – by Jackson’s films, so our forebears, more than 1000 years ago, were enthralled by the works we will discuss in the chapters that follow. As we hope the book will make clear, we have an affiliation with these people who, though far away in time, are not so far away in spirit. We can infer from the works that remain that they, like us, could be moved by the written word; that they, like us, could be inspired by heroism; that they, like us, could laugh at themselves and those around them. It is quite an inheritance, and we well might ask where we would be without all the runes and Vikings. To put it less whimsically, where would the world of entertainment and the imagination be without them? If you want to know where it all came from, read on.

To take the leading subject here, Old English literature, we feel that the recent academic attitude that Old English no longer has the right to be considered part of the English literary canon is stupid. French, German, Italian and Spanish have no such abundance of literature in their own languages going back as far as the seventh century. And what do we do? We call it inconvenient and pretend it’s not there. There are also those who are more considered in their opposition. They would say that there is a lack of continuity between Old English and that of later periods, given that literary English fell out of general use from about 1100 to 1300. That is true, while there is also the huge influx of French, Latin and Greek vocabulary in the twelfth, fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, which nowadays accounts for more than half the English word-stock. But that doesn’t mean Old English is finished, or that it is not relevant to a wider understanding of our rich literary heritage. As you can find in Chapter 11, the remaining vocabulary, most of it derived from Old English and a significant amount from Old Norse, is used with far higher frequency than later additions from French, Latin and Greek, and the underlying syntax is more or less the same. Although Old English literature stopped short before its Norman–French successor, it was long ago clear, bizarrely so you might think, that the poetry of the moderns has turned back to the accentual, alliterating, compound-building verse craft of Old English poets for much of its inspiration. By this we mean poets such as Gerard Manly Hopkins, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, E.H. Prynne and Seamus Heaney. But there will be others out there, too. Some of the negative attitudes current today are the result simply of laziness. They are lazy because those who espouse them won’t take the time or make the effort to learn to read the old texts in the original, or even in translation. We hope to recommend some good translations, mainly our own. But we also hope to show that the originals themselves are neither so difficult, nor quite so distant, as people have been led to believe.

We have subtitled our book a ‘new’ introduction because many of the recent and available introductions to the subject are far too specialised for the ordinary reader. This collection of essays should be both scholarly and accessible. It aims to give the reader a reliable panorama of the literature of the period. Let’s call it ‘Anglo-Saxon’ for the people and history, ‘Old English’ for literature. Ditto ‘Old Norse’ for the general period (and some of the poetry) and ‘Old Icelandic’ for the literature.

The Anglo-Saxon period starts with an invitation from King Vortigern to the Jutes Hengest and Horsa in 449 to sort out some unruly local tribes. They came, they conquered, they remained. We read about these brothers in the work of the Venerable Bede in the early eighth century. Bede also tells us about the remarkable Cædmon, the first recorded English performance poet, divinely inspired to verse in the later seventh century. In this book we’ll find out about important intellectual and literary developments in Old English in the work of Alcuin. He was a scholar at the court of King Charlemagne, whose empire was the blueprint of modern France, Germany and Italy all rolled into one. We will look at King Alfred the Great, who made much better books than he did cakes. Looming large through much of our book are the tumultuous years recorded in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. An entry for 793 tells us of the first Viking raid at Lindisfarne. This heralds a long period of horror stories of Scandinavian raids and battles and a lot of immigration, settlement and intermarriage. Indeed, for a long time large parts of the country were run by the Danes and in the early decades of the eleventh century the entire country was under Danish rule, part of a confederation of states with Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden. How does that grab you for an early alternative to the European Union?

This Viking peril that we so vividly love to imagine finally drew to a close in the eleventh century with the triumph of William the Conqueror (aka the Bastard) of Normandy. He defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Only two weeks earlier, Harold had cut down the seven-foot Norwegian, King Haraldr, ‘the Harsh Ruler’ at Stamford Bridge (in Yorkshire, not the London football ground). These events signal the start of serious Anglo-Norman influence on the literature and language and the end of Old English as a working literary tool. When English popped up again it had French words and looked different. But actually Middle English, as it is called, consisted of dialects of Old English with a new extra power.

Diversity is strength: the people in the British Isles have always been diverse and the literature of all this early period reflects that no less than English texts of the twenty-first century. Old English and the other languages and cultures were anything but pure. The Anglo-Saxons were the latest in a long line of immigrants to Britain and they knew it. They often feared they would not be the last. In Northumbria in the seventh century the Anglian royal family learned to speak Irish Gaelic and Welsh as well as Northumbrian Old English, no doubt some Pictish too. Their priests spoke Latin and when they started building monasteries they added Italian to the list and blended all these cultures together. So multiculturalism is not simply the invention of some twentieth-century sociologist; we have been there before. If you hear people question the relevance of Old English to today – or deride it for being alien or ideologically unsound – remember that ‘relevance’ can be the puritan’s opening gambit for a monocultural takeover.

Obviously, the world around us today, in the early twenty-first century, is facing a raft of new challenges of mass migration and potential conflict. American English is absorbing Latin American Spanish and Spanish is doing the same by English, and so on. But the challenges here are actually not new at all, not by the standards of the period featured in this book. In this period there was a fluid interchange and development of a variety of languages all the time. And, indeed, regular changes of allegiances, boundaries and laws. You can find this fluidity almost anywhere in Britain. The town of Colchester in Essex, for example, is not only where one of the authors of this chapter is gainfully employed; it was also the original Roman capital of Britain. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni torched the place and the Romans moved the capital to London leaving an important garrison behind. Colchester became part of the Danelaw in 886 with the agreement of King Alfred and a Danish earl named Guthrum. A Saxon church in the town centre has a door scarred with what the tourist office claims are axe marks from marauding heathen Vikings in the tenth century. Just down the road is the town of Maldon, immortalised in verse (The Battle of Maldon) for the last stand of Byrhtnoth, the local earl, against an army of Norwegian heavies in 991. These raiders were probably led by a man who became king of Norway four years later and converted Iceland to Christianity four years after that, one Óláfr Tryggvason. We see a lot of this human dynamo in the Sagas of Icelanders. Back in Colchester in 1066 when the Normans arrived, they found a pretty usable Roman fortress itself built on a temple to old Emperor Claudius. They built this up into their keep, the biggest in Britain....