Old English and Middle English Poetry

Derek Pearsall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.

1 Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxonpoetic tradition

A history of English poetry might begin with Tacitus, and his report of the traditional hymns sung by the tribes of Germania in the first century AD;¹ or it might begin with the landing of St Augustine in Kent in 597 and the Christian mission to the Anglo-Saxons. Tacitus would serve to remind us that the sources of a nation’s poetry are to be found in the deepest recesses of its history; that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them from the continent, and held in common with other Germanic peoples, certain materials, notably heroic legends, and certain habits of verse-making, hymnic, encomiastic and mnemonic, which lie obscure yet potent behind some of the extant written remains; that they brought with them, above all, a form of verse, the alliterative four-stress line, also part of a common Germanic heritage, which held universal sway throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, survived vigorously in various metamorphoses thereafter, and which can lay claim to being the dominant pattern in English versification, fairly ingrained in the language, the secret power and anvil of the pentameter. English verse, on this reading, would go back to the earliest recorded Germanic alliterative line, the runic inscription on the horn of Gallehus, dug up in 1734 on the German-Danish border, and dated about 400 AD:

Ek Hlewagastir Holtijar horna tawido.²

(I, Hlewagastir a Holting, made this horn.)

What scraps and fantasies these may seem, though, when set beside the consequence of the Gregorian mission, the integration of Anglo-Saxon England into the world of Latin Christendom. For if by poetry we mean extant poetic literature, litterae, letters, and not unrecorded oral verse-making, then England has no poetry but that of the Christian tradition—‘In England there has never been any literacy other than Christian literacy’³—and the Germanic heritage, when it emerges in Anglo-Saxon poetry, emerges re-shaped, absorbed, chastened, in a form quite distinct from survivals elsewhere of the pagan, heroic, Germanic past. There is no pagan mythology in Anglo-Saxon poetry as there is in the Elder Edda, no weird cosmogony such as we find in the Volospá, nothing alien or unfamiliar: the way back is smoothed by the common inheritance of Latin Christianity, even to Grendel and his descent from Cain. Beowulf is understandable in a way that Grettir—or Achilles, or Cuchulain—is not.⁴ From this point of view, English poetry begins with Caedmon’s Hymn of Creation, composed, according to Bede, during the abbacy of Hild at Whitby (657–80), and copied, in the Northumbrian dialect, into the earliest manuscript of the Latin Ecclesiastical History (737).⁵

The interpretation of Old English poetry might sway for ever between these two poles. In the past the poetry has been ransacked, especially by German scholars, for Germanic remains : poems have been fragmented and broken open to reveal the essential pagan kernel, and the links sought have been with history, archaeology and Old Norse analogues. Even Klaeber, in his monumental edition of Beowulf speaks of the ‘Christian coloring’ of the poem, as if it were something that could be washed out again in an easy operation. The present mood is to stress the position of Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘part of the literature of Western Christendom and not as part of the common Germanic literary heritage marred in preservation.’⁶ The very existence of the poetry is due to the Church, for of the 30,000 lines remaining (it is less than the output of a single poet like Chaucer) the great bulk, apart from specialised productions like the verse translations of the Psalter and of the Metra of Boethius, is extant in four codices, all of them the product of the monastic revival of the late tenth century : MS Junius XI in the Bodleian (the ‘Caedmon manuscript’), containing the ‘scriptural’ poems, Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan; MS Cotton Vitellius A XV in the British Museum, containing Beowulf and Judith, with some vernacular prose; the Vercelli MS, still in the cathedral library of Vercelli in northern Italy, where it was deposited by some early eleventh-century traveller to Rome,⁷ and containing homiletic, devotional and hagiographical writing in prose and verse, including Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, The Dream of the Rood and Elene; and the Exeter Book, donated to Exeter cathedral library, where it remains, before 1072, and containing a rich miscellany of verse, including Christ, Guthlac, Juliana, The Phoenix, Widsith, Deor, the ‘elegies’, and the riddles. All of these books survive by singular chance, two of them probably because they had pictures, and none of them is likely to have been much read.⁸ With such a comparatively small corpus of poetry surviving, and with so few poets known by name (apart from Caedmon, only Cynewulf, of whom we know nothing more than his name, spelt out in runic ‘signatures’ to four poems), it is not surprising that Old English poetry may appear comparatively unimportant beside the central Latin tradition of Bede, Aldhelm, Alcuin,⁹ or beside the tradition of vernacular prose, of Alfred, Ælfric and Wulfstan, in which far more of the intellectual impetus of the Anglo-Saxon is engaged. Against this it might be said that the circumstances of preservation are not the circumstances of composition (Beowulf was copied into a book which seems to have catered for an interest in monsters,¹⁰ but this is not why the poem was written); that intellectual history is not the history of poetry; and that for Anglo-Saxon poetry to become a series of addenda to the Patrologia Latina would be as sad a distortion as for it to be treated on a level with runic scrapings.

Germanic traditions

Evidence of the Germanic inheritance is unquestionably present in the extant poetry, in a whole range of allusion in Widsith, Deor, and Beowulf to the legends of the Völkerwanderung, the great tribal migrations of the fourth to the sixth centuries, and to early Germanic history. Figures like Sigemund, Heremod, Ingeld, Eormenric, Weland, appear, their ‘history’ hammered out into authentic heroic shapes of loyalty and revenge, in allusions so cryptic and casual that they argue the presence of a body of well-known heroic ‘lays’ behind the extant remains. These lays would have been short recitations, celebrating a hero, or some exploit in which heroic values were crucially tested, and would have been sung to the harp by the minstrel, or scop, in the mead-hall before the king and his warriors. The classic model would be the fight to the death in a narrow place, and the classic literary allusion in Old English poetry is in Beowulf, where the lay of Finnesburh is sung at the feast following Beowulf’s victory over Grendel:

Þær wæs sang ond sweg samod ætgædere

fore Healfdenes hildewisan,

gomenwudu greted, gid oft wrecen,

ðonne healgamen Hroþgares scop

æfter medobence mænan scolde,

be Finnes eaferum… .¹¹

(There was both song and music together before Healfdene’s battle-leader, the harp plucked, many a lay recited, when Hrothgar’s scop was to regale the mead-benches with the story of Finn’s retainers.)

It is likely that such an allusion represents, in idealised and elevated form, the actual practice at Anglo-Saxon courts during the sixth to eighth centuries: the society, even long after the conversion, was essentially a warrior-society, heroically violent, such as would nurture heroic lays. The history of the times is full of kings, such as Edwin of Northumbria or Cædwalla of Wessex, whose lives and actions seem an epitome of the heroic warrior-ethic, and full of themes and motives, often explicitly recognised, which reflect those prevalent in heroic poetry—loyalty to the death, blood revenge, treachery and exile.¹² The laws of Anglo-Saxon England record the painful progress towards containment of this violence, the substitution of wergild (‘payment for a man’, i.e. payment of legal compensation for injury or death), for instance, for the blood-feud. It is possible that heroic episodes in historical narrative, such as that of Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (s.a. 755), may be adapted from lays celebrating contemporary events.¹³

This is all hypothesis, of course, and has to be: the literary culture was that established by Latin Christianity, which means that heroic lays had little chance of being written down in their ‘pure’ form, and even less of being preserved. Literacy, education, books, libraries, were the exclusive preserve of the Church, and above all of monasteries, and only those aspects of heroic tradition which could be construed in some way as consonant with Christian teaching were likely to survive in written form. Such a construction might be easier to make in the tenth century, where two battle-poems, Brunanburh and Maldon, full of heroic gesture, embody a concept of the theocratic nation-state embattled against a heathen enemy, but the resistance of earlier monastic tradition to poems about contemporary events seems to have been extraordinarily rigorous; a poem like Beowulf has an almost antiquarian air, as if the materials must be remote before they can be ‘safe’. It should be stressed that this is a peculiarly English phenomenon: literacy as it was introduced into Ireland and Iceland was equally a Christian literacy, yet in both countries a substantial pagan and heroic literature, in both prose and verse, survives. Various explanations of this difference might be offered. One concerns the depth and tenacity of the native secular culture, and another the circumstances under which Christianity, and literacy, were introduced. The Icelanders received Christianity in AD 1000, only a hundred years after colonisation, but they had already established a settled community, a national identity, and a saga-culture, which conversion, accepted with a respectful pragmatism, barely disturbed,¹⁴ though the new literacy did make it possible for the sagas and the Eddie poetry to be written down. In Ireland a much longer-established pagan culture had its own secular learning, represented by the filid, a close corporation of official savants and litterateurs, with schools, an elaborate system of training, a cryptic language, great prestige, and an established responsibility to preserve and pass on, orally, the national inheritance of saga and history, and to compose panegyric, satire and lament.¹⁵ The Patrician conversion of the fifth century struck deep root, but in independent monastic communities, largely isolated from the secular state, rather than in an organised pastoral system. As a result, secular literature, when it began to assume written form in the early seventh century, underwent Latinist influ...