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OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

a) Historical Context.

The history of England, “the land of Angles” starts in the 5^th century A.D. , when the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes began to raid and later settle in Britain. The languages spoken by the three tribes were mutually intelligible and quickly fused together to form OE.

Anglo-Saxon society. The new masters of Britain were migrant tribes. Their society was organized by families; the units gradually grew larger under a single king – chiefthane. They lived in small villages, their houses grouped around the house of their lord. The chief values were loyalty to the lord, hospitality and an acute sense of fate – wyrd.

Throughout the earlier centuries the Anglo-Saxons were politically divided and lived in a mosaic of small tribal kingdoms, often competing, but gradually those kingdoms amalgamated. By about 800 there were four great kingdoms of Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. There was great difference between four main dialects spoken in England: Mercian, Northumbrian. Nearly all the surviving manuscripts that have literary importance were written in the West Saxon dialect.

Around the year 800 a new wave of invasions began. The Vikings occupied large areas in the north and east of England and also in Ireland. The legendary king Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex in 871-899, was successful in defending his kingdom from Danish invaders and even in expanding his holdings at the expense of the Danes. Eventually, his successors won back enough land to create a united kingdom of England.

Christianity and literacy .

During the later period of the Roman invasion Britain had already been converted to Christianity. But the Germanic tribes were pagan.

In the year 597 Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory as a missionary to King Ethelbert of Kent, and within seventy-five years the island was predominantly Christian.

The Germanic tribes were largely illiterate, and with the new religion England also received a new alphabet.The first written specimen of the Old English writing is a code of laws promulgated by the first English Christian king, Aethelbert of Kent, and it is written with the Roman alphabet. Literacy was limited and concentrated in monastic centers.

There must have been an impressive body of Old English vernaculary poetry, but it was oral and therefore lost. The works that do survive do so because they were written down by monastic scribe, who attention to the vernacular poetry and prose, recorded and copied it. Strictly, there isn’t any written OE literature that is not Christian. Of course, the material had to be pious, or at least, sober and dignified.

England produced a large number of distinguished, highly literate churchmen. One of the earliest and the most famous was the Venerable Bede.

The Venerable Bede was a Northumbrian monk who gained an international reputation as perhaps the most learned man of his age. He wrote about 40 books on theology, science, rhetoric, the lives of saints, etc., but his best known work is Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE), completed in 731. It is written in Latin, the universal language of his age. The Historia tells the history of Britain from the time of Julius Caesar’s conquest of the island through the Saxon invasions to the arrival of Saint Augustine, the first Roman missionary, in 597, and the squabbles of the petty kingdoms of Saxon England. The book survives in a surprisingly large number of copies (130), which is a clear sign of its immense popularity. The book is still one of the main sources of information about the history of the period.

Old English culture

English culture is a hybrid culture of mixed origins: Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman.

Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain a rich tradition of oral literature steeped in their customs and pagan beliefs and rituals. The Germanic old poetry dealt with a set of heroic and narrative themes and had a common metrical form.

The style and storytelling technique are richly varied, and it would be a mistake to think of this poetry as inartistic: it was an art that evolved over generations.

Our knowledge of Old English literature is based on four great manuscripts:

- The Beowulf manuscript (The British library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose tracts.

- The Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics, riddles, didactic poems, and religious narratives.

- The Junius manuscript (Oxford) contains biblical paraphrases.

- The Vercelli Book (Italy) contains saints’ lives several short religious poems, and prose homilies.

Nothing else survives. The four manuscripts were written around 1000, but contain earlier material. Each manuscript is a compilation of copied and recopied works by different authors.

Names and dates are almost wholly lacking for OE verse and a significant number of prose texts. The few names that we do now might well be legendary. The same uncertainty applies to chronology.

Alliterative verse

Virtually all Old English poetry was written in single meter, four-stress line with a syntactic break (caesura) between the second and the third stresses, and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line. The alliteration was always on the first stress of the second half-line, which alliterated with either or both stresses of the first half-line.

Examples:

1. Nap nihtscua, norpan sniwde (Seafarer, 31)

2. Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, (The first stanza of Beowulf)

3. beadurofes becn, bronda lafe
wealle beworhton, swa hyt weorðlicost
foresnotre men findan mihton.
Hi on beorg dydon beg ond siglu,
eall swylce hyrsta, swylce on horde ær (Beowulf)

The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying standard epithets to various classes of characters. Scenery is depicted with recurring images, such as eagle and wolf, which wait during the battles to feast on the dead, or the ice and snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems, such formulas, far from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from which the poets could draw.

Other standard devices of this poetry are the kennings and variation. The kenning is a metaphorical name for a thing, an elaborate descriptive phrase: the sea - salt streams, wave-deeps; the ship – wave-goer, broad-bosomed bark, etc. The variation is the repeating of a single idea in different words.

Old English poems are of three major kinds: heroic, religious and elegiac.

Historically and linguistically, the first English poem we know of is Caedmon’s Hymn of Creation. The story of Caedmon is told by Bede in his Historia.

Bede says that Caedmon, employed as a laborer at the monastery of Whitby, was at a feast one night while a harp was being passed from person to person, and the guests were sharing songs. Since Caedmon knew nothing about poetry, he left the

party and went out to the stable to tend the cattle. Bede reports that as Caedmon slept, a heavenly figure appeared to him in a vision and told him to sing. When Caedmon complained that he had left the feast because he couldn’t sing, the heavenly visitor told him to sing a song of Creation. Caedmon responded with what is known as Caedmon’s Hymn. Bede also includes the poem itself. The author uses the style and meter common to Germanic heroic poetry, but substituted the subject matter.

Elegiac poetry (The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Wife’s Lament etc.). Old English elegies are dramatic monologues in the first person.They are eloquent and passionate. In most of these poems the speaker is an exile, separated from the community and from his lord. A man without a lord in Germanic society was outside the sphere of normal human activity, and could only feel lonely, isolated, and vulnerable. Sometimes the soliloquy moves from the speaker’s personal sufferings to meditation upon the transient nature of the world in general.

Religious poetry.

The only Old English poet we know who signed his works was Cynewulf,probably a Northumbrian or Mercian poet of the 8^th or 9^th cent. He is considered to be the author of four religious poems: Juliania, Elena, The Fates of the Apostles, and Christ II. Unlike Caedmon, Cynewulf ‘s poems reveal the author’s knowledge of classical and medieval literature.

BEOWULF

Beowulf is the most important poem in Old English and the first major poem in a European vernacular language. It is a poem of 1,318 lines, surviving in a single 10^th cent. manuscript.

The poem tells of two major events in the life of the Geatish hero Beowulf. The first when in his youth he fights and kills first Grendel, a monster who has been attacking Heorot, the hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, and then Grendel’s mother who comes the next night to avenge her son; the second fifty years later when Beowulf who has for a long time been king of the Geats, fights a dragon who has attacked his people, in which battle both Beowulf and the dragon are mortally wounded.

a) The genre. Beowulf can properly be called an epic poem in the sense that it celebrates the achievements of a hero in narrative verse.

The epic features:

- universal character;

- a warrior, personifying the heroic element, in the centre. The hero protects his compatriots from the hostile force that takes on fantastic forms;

- A close attention is paid to his armament (proper names of swords);

- The time and space of the epic world.

- The tragic finale and the historical background.

The main stories of the poem are versions of common folk-tales, but the poet introduces many incidental stories, some of which (such as that of Sigemund) belong to the world of ancient Germanic legend.

These tales and legends are entangled in a web of other events, mainly set in the Baltic kingdoms of Denmark, Geatland and Sweden; and at least one of these events (the raid against the Francs led by Beowulf’s lord Hygelac, king of the Geats) can be shown actually to have occurred, in the sixth century.

CRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM

There are a number of plainly Christian references in the poem: to the Almighty who is just; to a shepherd who cares for souls; to a power that helps those who help themselves; to a malicious being that attacks souls when they are not vigilant.

There are also definite Biblical reminiscences: Grendel is said to be descended from Cain; the sword hilt that Beowulf brings back from his underwater battle with Grendel’s mother has an inscription referring to an ancient race of giants, alien to God and destroyed by a flood (which is reminiscent of giants of Genesis vi)

On the other hand, the constant references to all-controlling fate, to being doomed to die are in accord with what we know of Germanic pagan habits of thought. Besides, the author refers to man’s fame as the only thing that will live after him. However, there’s no mention of the ancient Germanic divinities.

Because of this controversy the early students of Beowulf thought that the poem was probably a pre-Christian composition, and Christian references were later interpolations made by monastic scribes in order to give it acceptably Christian frame of reference. This argument is no longer tenable. There is no clear consensus on the matter yet, but scholars now believe the author of Beowulf to be a Christian poet, perhaps a monk, versed not only in older native traditions, but also in the culture and literature of the Latin Church. The chief purpose of the poem, if not pious, is at least highly moral.

The anonymous poet-narrator looks back from his own Christian times to an old society with different customs and beliefs. But he in no way adopts a polemic or derogatory attitude towards his pagan hero. He recognizes that though his characters hold to pagan virtues and to pre-Christian world-view, they still live a virtuous life according to their lights.

The poem is dated in the age, when England was being won over from paganism to Christianity. This date is taken to account for the strong thread of Christian commentary which runs through the poem and perhaps for residual paganism.

Discrete Christian elements and what seems to be remnants of pagan thinking appear together in other works of Old English poetry as well (e.g. The Dream of the Rood; Deor; Maldon), and in each case they clearly come from the mind of a single author.

They are probably best described as elements of the Anglo-Saxon Christian viewpoint, which assimilated older views rather than completely discarding them.

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