The Arthurian Legend (NIVEL AVANZADO)

(From George Sampson's Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd ed.).

XII. THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND


The mystery of Arthur's end is not darker than the mystery of his beginning. While the ancient tradition is everywhere, the facts and records are nowhere. The earliest English Arthurian literature is singularly meagre and undistinguished. The romantic exploitation of "the matter of Britain" was the achievement, mainly, of French writers, and, indeed, some critics would have us attach little importance to British influence on the development of the Arthurian legend. The "matter of Britain" very quickly became international property—a vast composite body of romantic tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality drew upon and used for their own purposes. Arthur was non-political and could be idealised without offence to any ruling family. The British king himself faded more and more into the background, and became, in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless "land of faëry". His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they, in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalization, and appear as natives of some region of fantasy, moving about in a golden atmosphere of illusion. The course of the story is too obscure to be made clear in a brief summary which must necessarily ignore the hints and half-tones that count for much in the total effect, and which can take no account of French, German and Italian contributions to the legend. 

Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows nothing whatever of Arthur. To find any mention of him earlier than the twelfth century we must turn to Wales, where, in a few obscure poems, a difficult prose story, and two dry Latin chronicles we find what appear to be the first written references, meagre and casual, but indicating a tradition already ancient. The earliest is in Historia Britonum, which, as we have seen (p. 9), dates from 679, though the existing recension of Nennius was made in the ninth century. The reference of Nennius to Arthur occurs in a very short account of the conflict that culminated in Mount Badon, usually dated 516, though some would put it as early as 470. Gildas, who was a youth in 516, also mentions Mount Badon; but the only hero he names is "Ambrosius Aurelianus". In Nennius the hero has become "The magnanimous Arthur", who was twelve times victorious, last of all at Mount Badon; but he is a military leader, not a king—or, perhaps, as the anthropologist Lord Raglan thinks, "a god of war".

The poems of the ancient Welsh bards have been discussed almost as fiercely as the poems of Ossian; yet there is no doubt that together with much of late and doubtful invention they contain something of indisputably ancient tradition. But the most celebrated of the early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin (sixth or seventh century?) never mention him; to the first to Urien, Lord of Rheged, is the most imposing figure among all the native warriors. There are, indeed, only five ancient poems that mention Arthur at all. The reference most significant to modern readers occurs in the Stanzas of the Graves contained in the Black Book of Caermarthen (twelfth century): "A grave there is for March (Mark), a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; a mystery is the grave of Arthur." Another stanza mentions both the fatal battle of Camlan and Bedwyr (Bedivere) , who shares with Kai (Kay)  pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable. Another Arthurian knight, Geraint, is the hero of a poem that appears both in The Black Book of Caermarthen and in the Red Book of Hergest (fourteenth century). One of the eighteen stanzas just mentions Arthur by name. The Chair of the Sovereign in The Book of Taliesin (thirteenth century) alludes obscurely to Arthur as a "Warrior sprung from two sources". Arthur, Kai and Bedwyr appear in another poem contained in The Black Book; but the deed celebrated in the almost incomprehensible lines of this poem are the deeds of Kai and Bedwyr. Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the only other Old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made to him, a most obscure piece of sixty lines contained in The Book of Taliesin. Here, as Matthew Arnold says, "The writer is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret". Arthur sets upon various expeditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them has as its object the rape of a cauldron belonging to the King of Hades. Ancient British poetry has nothing futher to tell us of this mysterious being, who is, even at a time so remote, a vague, impalpable figure of legend.

The most remarkable fragment of the existing early Welsh literature about Arthur is the prose romance of Kulhwch and Olwen, assigned by most authorities to the tenth century. It is one of the stories that Lady Charlotte Guest translated from the Red Book of Hergest and published in The Mabinogion (1838). Of the twelve "Mabinogion", or stories for  the young (the word has a special meaning but is loosely used), five deal with Arthurian themes. Two, Kullwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabury, are British; the other three are based on French originals. In The Dream of Rhonabury, Arthur and Kai appear, Mount Badon is mentioned, and the fatal battle of Camlan with Mordred is referred to in some detail. The Arthur of Kullwch and Olwen bears little resemblance to the mystic king of later legend, except in the magnitude of his warrior retinue, in which Kai and Bedwyr are leaders. Arthur, with his dog Cavall, joins  in the hunt for the boar Twrch Trwyth through Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, and his many adventures are clearly relics of ancient wonder-tales of bird and beast, wind and water. The wild and even monstrous Arthur of this legend is equally remote from Nennis and from Malory; but the charm of the story is something that the long-winded Continental writers could not achieve.

The serious historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote a few years earlier than Geoffrey of Monmouth, refers to Arthur as a hero worthy to be celebrated in authentic history and not in idle fictions. He adds, "The sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere to be seen, whence ancient ballads fable that he is to come." Plainly, Arthur was already a popular tradition. The transformation of the British Arthru into a romantic hero of European renown was the result of contact between British and Norman culture. No doubt the Normans got their first knowledge of Arthurian story from Brittany; but the real contact was made in Britain itself, where the Normans had succeeded in establishing intimate relations with the Welsh. 

Thus the true father of the Arthurian legend is Geoffrey of Monmouth. How much he derived from ancient sources we shall probably never find out; but we can reasonably assume that he did not invent the fabric of the story, however fancifully he embroidered it. And, after all, the real point is not how much he invented, but how he used his matter, historical or legendary. Geoffrey had the art of making the improbable seem probable, and his ingenious blending of fact and fable not only gave his book a great success with readers, but made Arthur and Merlin the romantic property of literary Europe. So it has been urged that we shoul take Geoffrey's compilation, not as a national history, but as a national epic, doing for Britain what the Aeneid did for Rome, and finding in the mythical Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, the name-giving founder of the British state. In such a story all the legends have their natural place. Geoffrey's History is thus the first Brut—for so in time the records of early British kings with this mythical starting-point came to be called. The first few books of Historia Regum Britanniae relate the deeds of Arthur's predecessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin appears on the scene, and romance begins to usurp the place of sober history. Arthur is Geoffrey's hero. He knows nothing of Tristam, Lancelot or the Holy Grail; but it was he who, in the Mordred and Guenevere episode, first sugggested the love-tragedy that was to become one of the world's imperishable romances.

In the Latin Life of Gildas written at about the time of Geoffrey's death there is a further interesting allusion. Arthur is described as being engaged in deadly feud with the King of Scotland, whom he finally kills; he subsequently comes into collision with Melwas, the wicked king of the "summer country" or Somerset, who had, unknown to him, abducted his wife Guenevere, and concealed her in the abbey of Glastonia. This seems to be the earliest appearance o the tradition which made Melwas (the Mellyagraunce of Malory) an abductor of Guenevere. Some of the Welsh traditions are used in Peacock's delightful story The Misfortunes of Elphin, Melwas and the abduction both appearing.

The value of the Arthurian story as matter for verse was first perceived in France; and the earliest surviving standard example of metrical narrative or romance derived directly or indirectly from Geoffrey is Li Romans de Brut by Wace, who, born in Jersey, lived at Caen and Bayeux, and completed his poem in 1155. Some of the matter is independent of Geoffrey's History. Thus, it is Wace, not Geoffrey, who first tells of the Round Table. The poem, 15,000 lines long, written in lightly rhyming verse and in a familiar language, was very popular. 

Wace's Brut, possibly in some form not now existing, or in some blend with other chronicles, provided the foundation of Layamon's Brut, the only English contrubution of any importance to Arthurian literature before the fourteenth century; for, so far, all the matter discussed is in Welsh or Latin or French. Layamon added something personal to the essntially English character of his style and matter, and he gives us as well details not to be found in Wace or Geoffrey. Thus, he amplifies the story of the Round Table and narrates the dream of Arthur, not to be found in Geoffrey or Wace, which foreshadows the treachery of Mordred and Guenevere, and disturbs the king with a sense of impending doom. Layamon's enormous and uncouth epic has the unique distinction of being the first celebration of "the matter of Britain" in the English tongue.

Not the least remarkable fact about the story of King Arthur is its rapid development as the centre of many gravitating stories, at first quite independent, but now permanently part of the great Arthurian system. Thus we have the stories of Merlin, of Gawain, of Lancelot, of Tristram, of Perceval, and of the Grail. A full account of these associated legends belongs to the history of French and German, rather than of English, literature, and is thus outside our scope. In origin Merlin may have been a Welsh wizard-bard, but he makes his first appearance in Geoffrey and quickly passes into French romance, from which he is transferred to English story. Gawain is the hero of more episodic romances than any other British knight; when he passes into French story he begins to assume his Malorian (and Tennysonian) lightness of character. He is the hero of the finest of all Middle English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and, as Gwalchmai, he plays a large part in the story called Peredur the Son of Evrawc, included in the Mabinogion. Peredur is Perceval, and the story comes from French romance. 

The love of Lancelot for Guenevere is now a central episode of the Arthurian tragedy, but Lancelot is actually a late-comer into the legend, and his story is told in French. The book to which Chaucer refers in The Nun's Priest's Tale and Dante in the famous passage of Inferno VI is perhaps the great prose Lancelot traditionally attributed to Walter Map (see p. 21). The Grail story is another complicated addition to the Arthurian cycle. Out of the quest for various talismans, no doubt a part of Celtic tradition, developed the story of Perceval, as told in French and German romances; and the "Grail", a primitive symbol, proved capable of semi-mystical religious interpretation, and came to be identified with the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. 

The story of Tristram and Iseult is probably the oldest of the subsidiary Arthurian legends, and we find the richest versions in fragments of French poems and fuller German compositions. The English literature of Tristram is very meagre. The whole story bears every mark of remote pagan and Celtic origin. Finally, as an example of how independent legends were caught into the great Arthurian system, let us note the Celtic fairy tale of Lanval, best known in the lay of Marie de France (c. 1175), a fascinatingly obscure personality who, possibly English, wrote in French. And as a postcript we may note that the sceptical twentieth century has nevertheless not lagged behind the Middle Ages or the Victorians in its devotion to King Arthur, as witness the Arthurian trilogy Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram (1917-27) by the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reshaping of the Grail legend in John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (1933), Charles Williams's Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Reign of the Summer Stars (1944), and T. H. White's trilogy The Once and Future King (1958), which inspired the American stage and film success Camelot.

Through all the various strains of Arthurian story we hear "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing"; and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its fables of the "little people", we owe much of the fairy-lore which has, through Shakespeare and poets of lower degree, enriched the literature of England. Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have no doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of the Fairy world:

In th' oldë dayës of the King Arthoúr,
Of which that Britons speken greet honóur,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen with hir joy companye
Dauncëd ful ofte in many a greneë mede.

So let us believe with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in his unquestioned place as the supreme king of Romance.

La structure de La Mort le roi Artu

—oOo—

The Middle English context (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Middle English Literature


Historical background for the Middle English period: http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2016/09/the-middle-english-period-part-1.html





A lecture on Middle English and the Middle English context:
 

 

 

A visual/audio introduction to medieval English literature (not an excellent video, but anyway): 

 







Un audio en español sobre LA GUERRA DE LOS CIEN AÑOS.

Beowulf: NIVEL AVANZADO

NIVEL AVANZADO: Beowulf

Bragg, Melvyn, et al. "Beowulf." BBC (In Our Time) 5 March 2005.* Online audio:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0542xt7

(Ojo, si vuestro navegador no tiene Flash, podéis bajar estos audios en versión mp3).


Un documental de la BBC sobre Beowulf:

Una nota sobre el autoengendramiento del poema en Beowulf

 

 —And some notes on Anglo-Saxon prose.

From Old English to Middle English (NIVEL AVANZADO)

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 3rd ed.).

XIX. CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE TO THE DAYS OF CHAUCER

The three Germanic peoples—the Jutes from Jutland, the Angles from Schleswig and the Saxons from Holstein—who in the fifth and sixth centuries made themselves masters of southern Britain, spoke dialects so nearly allied that they could have had little difficulty in understanding each other. There was no name for their common race and common language. The Britons called all the invaders Saxons; St Gregory had to call them Angles for the sake of his famous pun; but an emperor called the Anglian king of Northumbria rex Saxonum. Though Bede sometimes speaks of Angli sive Saxones, his name for the language is sermo anglicus. Alfred, a West Saxon, calls his language Englisc. Actually the Anglian name was appropriate, for the history of southern English is largely concerned with the spread of Anglian forms. When Camden used lingua Anglosaxonica for pre-Conquest English, he meant not a blend of Anglian and Saxon, but simply "English Saxon" as distinguished from "German Saxon". The term, tough misunderstood, tended to survive. The German philologist Jakob Grimm introduced the practice of dividing a language into its Old, Middle and Modern periods, and so the term Old English came into use. There is, of course, no precise point at which people ceased to speak "Old English" and began to speak "Middle English". The terms are merely philological conveniences. However, we may regard the form of language we call Middle English as having emerged about 1150, and as having ceased about 1500, when the printing press conquered the scriptorium.

Old English retained its inflectional system; but in course of time the inflections tended to be assimilated. Thus in the declension of Gothic guma, a man, there are seven distinctive forms in the eight cases of singular and plural; in the declension of Old English guma there are only three. The almost universal substitution of -es for the many Old English endings of the genitive singular and nominative and accusative plural began before the Norman Conquest; and in the fourteenth century the English of educated Londoners had lost most of its Southern characteristics and had become a Midland dialect. Chaucer's plurals and genitives end in -es, the number of exceptions being hardly greater than in modern English. The dative disappeared from Midland English in the twelfth century. Southern English (Kentish and West Saxon) was much more conservative. The forms of the Old English pronouns of the third person in all dialects were very similar in pronunciation—the pairs him  and heom, hire and heora, being easily sounded alike. The ambiguity was got rid of by a process very rare in the history of languages, the adoption of foreign forms. It is from the language of the invading Danes that we get such forms as they, their, them. But the older forms persisted. Chaucer used her for their and he always has hem for them. The Old English inflections of adjectives and article, and with them the grammatical genders of nouns, disappeared early in Middle English. In these respects Orm and Chaucer are almost alike. All these changes were once generally believed to have been brought about by the Norman Conquest; but the spoken language had travelled far towards the Middle English stage before 1066. Of course the Norman occupation had influence: the new political unity and development of intercommunication tended to diffuse grammatical simplifications; but if we except such effects as the use of of instead of a genitive inflection, and the polite substitution of plural for singular in the second person, hardly any specific influence of French upon English grammar can be traced.

As we have said in an earlier page, the runic alphabet of the heathen English was superseded, under Christian influence, by the Latin alphabet of twenty-two letters, to which were added the runic letters  ᚹ(called wynn); ᚦ (called thorn) and 𐑔 (called eth). The last two were used indifferently and did not represent voiced and unvoiced th. The vowels were sounded nearly as in modern Italian, except that y was like French u and æ like a in pat. The consonants had much the same sound as in modern English. The greatest change in the written language came after the conquest, and was chiefly a matter of spelling. Children had ceased to read and write English, and were taught to read and write French. When, later, a new generation tried to write English, the spelt in French fashion. The changes in pronunciation are too intrincate for summary. How different was the course of development in different parts of the country can be seen in the fact that the English pronunciation home and stone, and the Scottish hame an stane both derive from the Old English long a as in father. The "Zummerzet" pronunciation of initial f and s as v and z was common all over the south and is exactly recorded in the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwit (1340).

The Norman Conquest had a profound influence on vocabulary. A few French words came in before the Conquest; after that event the number steadily increased. Chaucer is quite wrongly accused of having "corrupted" English by introducing French words. It cannot be proved that he made use of any foreign word that had not already gained a place in the English vocabulary. Very sad is the total loss of many Old English words. In the first thirty lines of Aelfric's homily on St. Gregory, there are twenty-two words which had disappeared by the middle of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century alliterative poets revived some of the ancient epic synonymous for "man" or "warrior" —bern, renk, wye, freke; but they did not last.

Only a few peculiarities of dialect can be mentioned here. The use of a dialect, of course, did not indicate an inferior education. Writers emploted for literary purposes the language they actually spoke. Chaucer would not have found it easy to read the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwit and the North-western Sir Gawayne would have puzzled him. The diversity of the written language in the different parts of the country during the fourteenth century may be indicated briefly thus: they say = Kentish hy ziggeth, East Midland they seyn, West Midland hy (or thai) sayn, Northern thai sai; their names (in the same distribution) = hare nomen, hure nomen, hir names, hur namus, thair names. The ultimate triumph of the East Midland dialect was largely due to the fact that it was midland, i.e. midway beween hy ziggeth, and thai sai. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge were linguistically in this area had an influence. The London English of Chaucer and the not dissimilar Oxford English of Wyclif became, in fact, the literary language of England.

—oOo—

The Twelfth Century: NIVEL AVANZADO

1066: Battle of Hastings and Norman invasion. End of the Anglo-Saxon period.

 

12th c. literature in Britain


In Old English: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle




The evolution of the English language: From Old English to Middle English

  _____________________________________

ADVANCED LEVEL:

Anglo-Norman Literature   


Geoffrey Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis. 1135-40.
Wace, Roman de Brut c. 1155.
Thomas. Le Roman de Tristan (Tristan et Yseut)
Marie de France. Lais. c. 1180.  (Lanval)
Richard Coeur de Lion
L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal c. 1220.
Jeu d'Adam (Play of Adam)

—and a lecture on The Anglo-Norman Period


  Anglo-Latin Literature

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), c. 1136. (Source for the Arthurian legend)

William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicanum. (1198)
 
Richard of Devizes, De rebus gestis Ricardi Primi. c. 1190




________________________________

Orientations: Beowulf

From Michael Alexander's 

History of English Literature 

(2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Beowulf

Like Greek literature, English literature begins with an epic, a poem of historic scope telling of heroes and of the world, human and non-human. Compared with the epics of Homer, Beowulf is short, with 3182 verses, yet it is the longest as well as the richest of Old English poems. Like other epics, it has a style made for oral composition, rich in formulas. The poem is found in a manuscript of the early eleventh century, but was composed perhaps two centuries earlier still, on the coasts of the Baltic. This was the northwest Germanic world from which the English had come to Britain. The coming of the Saxons is recalled in a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 937.


... from the east came
Angles and Saxons up to these shores,
Seeking Britain across the broad seas,
Smart for glory, those smiths of war
That overcame the Welsh, and won a homeland

The first great work of English literature is not set in Britain. Beowulf opens with the mysterious figure of Scyld, founder of the Scylding dynasty of Denmark, who would have lived c. 400, before England existed. A Hengest mentioned in a sub-story of the poem may be the Hengest invited into Kent in 449 (see page 12). The Offa who is mentioned may be an ancestor of Offa, King of Mercia in the 8th century.


Beowulf showed the English the world of their ancestors, the heroic world of the north, a world both glorious and heathen. Dynasties take their identity from their ancestors, and the rulers of the English kingdoms ruled by right of ancestral conquest. The date and provenance of Beowulf are uncertain, and its authorship unknown, but the poem would have had ancestral interest to such a ruler. West-Saxon genealogies go back to Noah via Woden; they include three names mentioned in Beowulf—Scyld, Scef and Beow. When in the 7th century the English became Christian they sent missionaries to their Germanic cousins. The audience for poetry was the lord of the hall and the men of his retinue. Such an audience was proud of its ancestors—even if, as the poem says of the Danes, 'they did not know God'.

The text of Beowulf is found in a manuscript in the West-Saxon dialect of Wessex which had become the literary standard. All the texts in the manuscript are about monsters, but the prime concern of Beowulf is not with monsters or even heroes but with human wisdom and destiny. It recounts the doings over two or three generations about the year 500 of the rulers of the Danes and the Swedes, and of a people who lived between them in southern Sweden, the Geats. The name Beowulf is not recorded in history, but the political and dynastic events of the poem are consistent with history. Beowulf is the nephew of Hygelac, King of the Geats, who died in a raid on the northern fringe of the Frankish empire. This key event of the poem is recorded in two Latin histories as having happened in about 521.

Hygelac fell in a raid in search of booty. In attacking the Frisians on the Frankish border, Beowulf's uncle was asking for trouble, says the poem. The Franks took from Hygelac's body a necklace of precious stones, a treasure previously bestowed on Beowulf by the Queen of the Danes as a reward for having killed the monster, Grendel (see below). On his return from Denmark, Beowulf had presented this prize to his lord, Hygelac, but the necklace was lost in this needless attack. Beowulf stopped the enemy champion, Dayraven, from taking Hygelac's armour by crushing him to death with his bare hands. Beowulf returned with the armour of thirty soldiers, and declined the throne, preferring to serve Hygelac's young son. But when this son is killed for harbouring an exiled Swedish prince, Beowulf became king and ruled the Geats for 'fifty years'.

The poem has a mysterious overture in the arrival of Scyld as a foundling child, sent by God to protect the lordless Danes, his victorious life and his burial in a ship. His great-grandson Hrothgar inherits the Danish empire and builds the great hall of Heorot, where he rewards his followers with gifts. At a banquet, Hrothgar's poet sings the story of the creation of the world. The sound of music, laughter and feasting is resented by the monster Grendel, who comes from the fens to attack Heorot when the men are asleep. He devours thirty of Hrothgar's thanes. Beowulf hears of the persecution of the Danes and comes to kill Grendel, in a tremendous fight at night in the hall. The next night, Grendel's mother comes to the hall and takes her revenge. Beowulf follows her to her lair in an underwater cave, where with God's help he kills her. Finally, in old age, he has to fight a dragon, who has attacked the Geats in revenge for the taking of a cup from his treasure-hoard. Beowulf faces the dragon alone, but can kill it only with the help of a young supporter; he dies of his wounds. The poem ends with a prophecy of the subjection of the Geats by the Franks or the Swedes. The Geats build a funeral pyre for their leader.

Then the warriors rode about the barrow
Twelve of them in all, athelings' sons.
They recited a dirge to declare their grief,
Spoke of the man, mourned their King.
They praised his manhood, and the prowess of his hands,
They raised his name; it is right a man
Should be lavish in honouring his lord and friend,
Should love him in his heart when the leading-forth
From the house of flesh befalls him at last.

This was the manner of the mourning of the men of the Geats,
Sharers in the feast, at the fall of their lord:
They said that he was of all the world's kings
The gentlest of men, and the most gracious,
The kindest to his people, the keenest for fame.

The foundation of Germanic heroic society is the bond between a lord and his people, especially his retinue of warriors. Each will die for the other. Beowulf's epitaph suggests an ethical recipe for heroism: three parts responsibility to one part honour. The origin of Beowulf's life-story in the folk-tale of the Bear's son and his marvellous feats, is transformed by the poem into a distinctly social ideal of the good young hero and the wise old king.

The heroic world is violent, but neither Beowulf nor Beowulf is bloodthirsty. The poem shows not just the glory but also the human cost of a code built upon family honour and the duty of vengeance. This cost is borne by men, and differently, by women. In this aristocratic world, women have honoured roles: peacemaker in marriage-alliances between dynasties, bride, consort, hostess, counsellor, mother, and widow. In Beowulf the cost of martial honour is signified in the figure of the mourning woman. Here is the Danish princess Hildeburh at the funeral pyre of her brother Hnaef, treacherously killed by her husband Finn, and her son, also killed in the attack on Hnaef. Shortly after this, Finn is killed by Hengest.

Hildeburh then ordered her own son
To be given to the funeral fire of Hnaef
For the burning of his bones; bade him be laid
At his uncle's side. She sang the dirges,
Bewailed her grief. The warrior went up;
The greatest of corpse-fires coiled to the sky, 
Roared before the mounds. There were melting heads
And bursting wounds, as the blood sprang out
From weapon-bitten bodies. Blazing fire,
Most insatiable of spirits, swallowed the remains
of the victims of both nations. Their valour was no more.

The heroic way of life—magnificent, hospitable and courageous—depends upon military success. It can descend into the world of the feud, violent and merciless. The heroic code involves obligations to lord, to family and to guest, and heroic literature brings these obligations into tension, with tragic potential.

A comparison can be made between Beowulf and the Achilles of the Iliad. When Achilles' pride is piqued, he will not fight, rejoining the Greeks only after his friend and substitute is killed. Achilles takes out his anger on the Trojan Hector, killing him, dishonoring his corpse and refusing to yield it for burial, until at last Hector's father humiliates himself before Achilles to beg his son's body. Achilles is reminded that even he must die. Homer's characterization is more dramatic, brilliant and detailed; the characters of Beowulf are types rather than individuals. The ethos is also different. Beowulf devotedly serves his lord Hygelac, and his people the Geats. His youthful exploits in Denmark repay a debt of honour he owes to Hrothgar, who had saved Beowulf's father Edgetheow, paying compensation for the life of a man Edgetheow had killed. Like Achilles, Beowulf is eloquent, courageous, quick to act, unusually strong. But Beowulf is considerate, magnanimous and responsible. As Hrothgar points out, he has an old head on young shoulders; he makes a good king. Yet as the poem makes clear in a series of stories marginal to Beowulf's own life, most warriors from ruling families fall far short of Beowulf's responsibility and judgement. Beowulf is both a celebration of and an elegy for heroism. The ideal example set by Beowulf himself implies a Christian critique of an ethic in which honour can be satisfied by 'the world's remedy', vengeance.

Grendel envies the harmony of the feast in Heorot and destroys it. He is a fiend: feond means both enemy and malign spirit. He is also in man's shape, though of monstrous size. He is identified as a descendant of Cain, the first murderer, who in Genesis is marked and driven out by God from human society. Fratricide was an occupational hazard in ruling Germanic families, since succession was not by primogeniture but by choice of the fittest. In the heroic age of the north, sons were often fostered out, partly to reduce conflict and risk, but fraternal rivalry remained endemic. In Beowulf the greatest crimes are treachery to a lord and murder of kindred. The folklore figure of Grendel embodies the savage spirit of fratricidal envy. The dragon is a brute without Grendel's human and demonic aspects. He destroys Beowulf's hall by fire in revenge for the theft of a golden cup from his treasure. The dragon jealously guards his hoard underground, whereas the king shares out rings in the hall.

Beowulf commands respect by the depth and maturity of its understanding. Although its archaic world of warriors and rulers is simple, the poem is often moving in its sober concern with wisdom and right action, the destiny of dynasties, the limits of human understanding and power, and with the creative and the destructive in human life. Its style has reserve and authority.

Beowulf

—oOo—

Un pájaro en la noche y la destrucción de los altares

Este capítulo del libro segundo de la Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, de Beda el Venerable (siglo VIII) narra de modo memorable la conversión al cristianismo del rey Edwin de Northumbria, tras la predicación de Paulino.

CHAPTER XIII

OF THE COUNCIL HE HELD WITH HIS CHIEF MEN ABOUT EMBRACING THE FAITH OF CHRIST, AND HOW THE HIGH PRIEST PROFANED HIS OWN ALTARS. [A.D. 627.]

THE king, hearing these words, answered, that he was both willing and bound to receive the faith which he taught; but that he would confer about it with his principal friends and counsellers, to the end that if they also were of his opinion, they might all together be cleansed in Christ the Fountain of Life. Paulinus consenting, the king did as he said; for, holding a council with the wise men, he asked of every one in particular what he thought of the new doctrine, and the new worship that was preached? To which the chief of his own priests, Coifi, immediately answered, "O king, consider what this is which is now preached to us; for I verily declare to you, that the religion which we have hitherto professed has, as far as I can learn, no virtue in it. For none of your people has applied himself more diligently to the worship of our gods than I; and yet there are many who receive greater favours from you, and are more preferred than I, and are more prosperous in all their undertakings. Now if the gods were good for any thing, they would rather forward me, who have been more careful to serve them. It remains, therefore, that if upon examination you find those new doctrines, which are now preached to us, better and more efficacious, we immediately receive them without any delay."

Another of the king's chief men, approving of his words and exhortations, presently added: "The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed." The other elders and king's councillors, by Divine inspiration, spoke to the same effect.

But Coifi added, that he wished more attentively to hear Paulinus' discourse concerning the God whom he preached; which he having by the king's command performed, Coifi, hearing his words, cried out, "I have long since been sensible that there was nothing in that which we worshipped; because the more diligently I sought after truth in that worship, the less I found it. But now I freely confess, that such truth evidently appears in this preaching as can confer on us the gifts of life, of salvation, and of eternal happiness. For which reason I advise, O king, that we instantly abjure and set fire to those temples and altars which we have consecrated without reaping any benefit from them." In short, the king publicly gave his licence to Paulinus to preach the Gospel, and renouncing idolatry, declared that he received the faith of Christ: and then he inquired of the high priest who should first profane the altars and temples of their idols, with the enclosures that were about them, he answered, "I; for who can more properly than myself destroy those things which I worshipped through ignorance, for an example to all others, through the wisdom which has been given me by the true God?" Then immediately, in contempt of his former superstitions, he desired the king to furnish him with arms and a stallion; and mounting the same, he set out to destroy the idols; for it was not lawful before for the high priest either to carry arms, or to ride on any but a mare. Having, therefore, girt a sword about him, with a spear in his hand, he mounted the king's stallion and proceeded to the idols. The multitude, beholding it, concluded he was distracted; but he lost no time, for as soon as he drew near the temple he profaned the same, casting into it the spear which he held; and rejoicing in the knowledge of the worship of the true God, he commanded his companions to destroy the temple, with all its enclosures, by fire. This place where the idols were is still shown, not far from York, to the eastward, beyond the river Derwent, and is now called Godmundinghan, where the high priest, by the inspiration of the true God, profaned and destroyed the altars which he had himself consecrated.

Upon This Bank and Shoal of Time

—oOo—

Primera semana

Primera semana

La primera semana, tras la presentación de la asignatura, hemos tratado de los anglosajones y su literatura.


Deberes:
- ¿Habéis obtenido ya el primer bloque de fotocopias, en Reprografía? Lo estamos utilizando ya: traed a clase el primer texto, Beowulf.
- ¿Habéis hecho un horario que vayáis a seguir para dedicar a las lecturas y preparación de esta asignatura? Hay que incluirlo en la semana laboral, pues la lectura y el estudio llevan su tiempo.
- ¿Tenéis ficha lista para entregármela ya — (digo foto con nombre please)?


Añadiré, antes o después de las clases, enlaces de interés, apuntes, referencias bibliográficas, etc., relacionadas con lo tratado cada semana.  Al principio, bajo el programa, he añadido unos enlaces a algunos de los autores en Internet, como material adicional (que no entra en examen, claro). Entre ellos hay un libro de poemas del inglés antiguo.

Vimos en clase, por ejemplo, este texto de la Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, de Beda el Venerable.




También veremos en clase:

"The Wanderer."  https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-wanderer.html

"The Wanderer." Trans. Cosette Faust Newton and Stith Thompson. In The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old English Poems.
    http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31172/31172-h/31172-h.htm#c22


  ______________________

Aquí unas notas sobre los poemas elegíacos anglosajones (NIVEL AVANZADO):
https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2019/09/nivel-avanzado-david-daiches-anglo.html

Y más materiales de nivel avanzado del tema 1.

Old English and the Anglo-Saxons: NIVEL AVANZADO

OLD ENGLISH AND ANGLOSAXONS: NIVEL AVANZADO:

- Un pequeño tutorial sobre The Early Anglo-Saxons.
 

- The Venerable Bede: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede

A BBC audio on the Venerable Bede: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y26h

- Poesía religiosa anglosajona—around Cynewulf

- Y otros poemas del inglés antiguo que no vimos:

Del Génesis B, la rebelión de Satanás:
https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2019/09/la-rebelion-de-satanas.html

"Los destinos de los hombres": https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-fates-of-men-nivel-avanzado.html

Uno de los poemas-adivinanzas del Exeter Book, "El viento de tormenta": https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2021/09/el-viento-de-tormenta.html

- Documentales históricos sobre la Edad Media:

- In Search of the Dark Ages (Video).



HISTORY OF BRITAIN (VIDEO).

—Una serie en YouTube muy visible. Aquí tenéis otro, también de la BBC, sobre la invasión anglosajona, un poco demasiado revisionista: https://youtu.be/b0-N05K_MKY


- Es muy recomendable el documental de la televisión británica Seven Ages of Britain: Age of Conquest:

https://www.enhancetv.com.au/video/seven-ages-of-britain-age-of-conquest/380

 



  - Una historia literaria clásica, NIVEL AVANZADO, sobre literatura inglesa medieval:

Ward, A. W., and A. R. Waller, eds. From the Beginnings to the Cycle of Romance. Vol. 1 (English) of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. Online at Bartleby.*

         http://www.bartleby.com/211/index.html

         2013

 

La rebelión de Satanás

NIVEL AVANZADO: La rebelión de Satanás


Del Génesis B, poema contenido en un manuscrito de hace mil años, el códice anglosajón Junius 11. Hay una edición en red en Project Gutenberg:


 V

(ll. 235-236) "...Eat freely of the fruit of every other tree. From that one tree refrain. Beware of its fruit. And ye shall know no dearth of pleasant things."

(ll. 237-245) Eagerly they bowed them down before the King of heaven, and gave Him thanks for all, for His teachings and counsels. And He gave them that land to dwell in. Then the Holy Lord, the Steadfast King, departed into heaven. And the creatures of His hand abode together on the earth. They had no whit of care to grieve them, but only to do the will of God for ever. Dear were they unto God as long as they would keep His holy word.

VI

(ll. 246-260) The Holy Lord, All-wielding God, with mighty hand had wrought ten angel-orders in whom He trusted well, that they would do Him service, and work His will. Therefore God gave them reason, with His own hands shaped them, and stablished them in bliss. But one He made so great and strong of heart, He let him wield such power in heaven next unto God, so radiant-hued He wrought him, so fair his form in heaven which God had given, that he was like unto the shining stars. He should have sung his Maker's praise, and prized his bliss in heaven. He should have thanked his Lord for the great boon He showered on him in the heavenly light, and let him long enjoy. But he turned him to a worse thing, and strove to stir up strife against the Highest Lord of heaven, who sitteth on the throne of glory.

(ll. 261-276) Dear was he to our Lord. Nor could it long be hid from God that pride was growing in His angel's heart. He set himself against his Leader, scoffed at God with boasting, and would not serve Him. He said his form was beautiful and bright, gleaming and fair of hue. Nor could he find it in his heart to serve the Lord God, or be subject to Him. It seemed to him that he had greater strength and larger following than Holy God might have. Many words the angel spake in his presumption. By his own power alone he thought to build a stronger throne and mightier in heaven. He said his heart was urging him to toil, to build a stately palace in the north and west. He said he doubted in his heart if he would still be subject unto God:

(ll. 277-291) "Why should I slave?" quoth he. "I need not serve a master. My hands are strong to work full many a wonder. Power enough have I to rear a goodlier throne, a higher in the heavens. Why should I fawn for His favour, or yield Him such submission? I may be God as well as He! Brave comrades stand about me; stout-hearted heroes who will not fail me in the fray. These valiant souls have chosen me their lord. With such peers one may ponder counsel, and gain a following. Devoted are these friends and faithful-hearted; and I may be their lord and rule this realm. It seemeth no wise right to me that I should cringe a whit to God for any good. I will not serve Him longer."

(ll. 292-298) Now when God had heard all this, how His angel was beginning to make presumptuous head against his Leader, speaking rash words of insolence against his Lord, needs must he make atonement for that deed, endure the woe of strife, and bear his punishment, most grievous of all deaths. And so doth every man who wickedly thinketh to strive with God, the Lord of might.

(ll. 299-319) Then Almighty God, High Lord of heaven, was filled with wrath, and hurled him from his lofty throne. He had gained his Master's hate, and lost His favour. God's heart was hardened against him. Wherefore he needs must sink into the pit of torment because he strove against the Lord of heaven. He banished him from grace and cast him into hell, into the deep abyss where he became a devil. The Fiend and all his followers fell from heaven; three nights and days the angels fell from heaven into hell. God changed them all to devils. Because they heeded not His deed and word, therefore Almighty God hurled them into darkness, deep under earth, crushed them and set them in the mirk of hell. There through the never-ending watches of the night the fiends endure an unremitting fire. Then at the dawn cometh an east wind, and bitter frost, ever a blast of fire or storm of frost. And each must have his share of suffering wrought for his punishment. Their world was changed when God filled full the pit of hell with His foes!

(ll. 320-322) But the angels who kept their faith with God dwelt in the heights of heaven.

VII

(ll. 322-336) The other fiends who waged so fierce a war with God lay wrapped in flames. They suffer torment, hot and surging flame in the midst of hell, broad-stretching blaze of fire and bitter smoke, darkness and gloom, because they broke allegiance unto God. Their folly and the angel's pride deceived them. They would not heed the word of God. Great was their punishment! They fell, through folly and through pride, to fiery depths of flame in hell. They sought another home devoid of light and filled with fire—a mighty flaming death. The fiends perceived that through the might of God, because of their presumptuous hearts and boundless insolence, they had won a measureless woe.

(ll. 337-355) Then spake their haughty king, who formerly was fairest of the angels, most radiant in heaven, beloved of his Leader and dear unto his Lord, until they turned to folly, and Almighty God was moved to anger at their wantonness, and hurled him down to depths of torment on that bed of death. He named him with a name, and said their leader should be called from thenceforth Satan. He bade him rule the black abyss of hell in place of striving against God. Satan spake—who now must needs have charge of hell and dwell in the abyss—in bitterness he spake who once had been God's angel, radiant-hued in heaven, until his pride and boundless arrogance betrayed him, so that he would not do the bidding of the Lord of hosts. Bitterness was welling in his heart; and round him blazed his cruel torment. These words he spake:

(ll. 355-367) "This narrow place is little like those other realms we knew, on high in heaven, allotted by my Lord, though the Almighty hath not granted us to hold our state, or rule our kingdom. He hath done us wrong to hurl us to the fiery depths of hell, and strip us of our heavenly realm. He hath ordained that human kind shall settle there. That is my greatest grief that Adam—wrought of earth—should hold my firm-set throne and live in joy, while we endure this bitter woe in hell.

(ll. 368-388) "Alas! could I but use my hands and have my freedom for an hour, one winter hour, then with this host I would— But bands of iron crush me down, the bondage of my chains is heavy. I am stripped of my dominion. Firmly are hell's fetters forged upon me. Above me and below a blaze of fire! Never have I seen a realm more fatal—flame unassuaged that surges over hell. Ensnaring links and heavy shackles hold me. My ways are trammelled up; my feet are bound; my hands are fastened. Closed are the doors of hell, the way cut off. I may not escape out of my bonds, but mighty gyves of tempered iron, hammered hot, press hard upon me. God hath set His foot upon my neck. So I know the Lord of hosts hath read the purpose of my heart, and knew full well that strife would grow between our host and Adam over the heavenly realm, had I the freedom of my hands.

VIII

(ll. 389-400) "But now we suffer throes of hell, fire and darkness, bottomless and grim. God hath thrust us out into the black mists. He cannot charge upon us any sin or evil wrought against Him in His realm! Yet hath He robbed us of the light and cast us into utter woe. Nor may we take revenge, nor do Him any evil because He stripped us of the light. He hath marked out the borders of the world, and there created man in His own image, with whom He hopes again to people heaven, with pure souls. We needs must ponder earnestly to wreak this grudge on Adam, if we may, and on his children, and thwart His will if so we may devise.

(ll. 401-407) "No longer have I any hope of light wherein He thinketh long to joy, in bliss among His angel hosts; nor may we ever bring this thing to pass, that we should change the purpose of Almighty God. Let us therefore turn the heavenly kingdom from the sons of men, since we may not possess it, cause them to lose His favour and turn aside from the command He laid upon them. Then shall His wrath be kindled, and He shall cast them out from grace. They shall seek out hell and its grim gulf, and in this heavy bondage we may have the sons of men to serve us.

(ll. 408-424) "Begin now and plan this enterprise. If ever in olden days, when happily we dwelt in that good kingdom, and held possession of our thrones, I dealt out princely treasure to any thane, he could not make requital for my gifts at any better time than now, if some one of my thanes would be my helper, escaping outward through these bolted gates, with strength to wing his way on high where, new-created, Adam and Eve, surrounded with abundance, dwell on earth—and we are cast out hither in this deep abyss. They are now much dearer unto God, and own the high estate and rightful realm which we should have in heaven! Good fortune is allotted to mankind.

(ll. 425-437) "My soul is sorrowful within me, my heart is sore, that they should hold the heavenly realm for ever. But if in any wise some one of you could bring them to forsake God's word and teaching, soon would they be less pleasing unto Him! If they break His commandment, then will His wrath be kindled. Their high estate shall vanish; their sin shall have requital, and some grim penalty. Take thought now how ye may ensnare them. I shall rest softly in these chains if they lose heaven. Whoso shall bring this thing to pass shall have reward for ever, of all that we may win to our advantage, amid these flames.


Sigue la tentación de Eva, y la escena de la manzana. El origen del símbolo de Apple. El Satanás del poema anglosajón es un cabecilla rebelde que se ha alzado contra su señor feudal. Pueden compararse los versos del más famoso monólogo de Satanás en el Paríso Perdido de Milton, donde el tono es más subjetivo y existencial, con más énfasis en la interioridad:


Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?
Thou hadst. Whom has thou then, or what, to accuse,
But Heaven's free love dealt equally to all?
Be then his love accursed, since, love or hate,
To me alike it deals eternal woe.
Nay, cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
O, then, at last relent! Is there no place
Left for repentence, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
The Omnipotent. Aye me! they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan.

Y de ahí a James Joyce: "Non serviam!"

Según Michael Alexander, no es imposible que Milton conociese este texto del Génesis B, pues estudió anglosajón y conocía a Junius, el primer editor del manuscrito.
 

Un pájaro en la noche y la destrucción de los altares
  

—oOo—

The Anglo-Saxon Elegiac Poems

NIVEL AVANZADO: David Daiches - The Anglo-Saxon elegiac poems

From the chapter on Anglo-Saxon literature in A Critical History of English Literature, by David Daiches.

Though some of the Anglo-Saxon religious poems, especially some of those by Cynewulfand his school, express a personal devotional feeling, none of them can be said to be really lyrical in character or to have been written primarily for the purpose of exploring personal emotion. Neither the heroic nor the religious poetry of the Anglo-Saxon tends toward the lyric, and though a note of somber elegy is sometimes struck, it is rarely developed for its own sake. There is, however, a group of Anglo-Saxon poems in which a mood of lyrical elegy predominates, and these stand somewhat apart from the poetry we have already discussed. Of these The Wanderer and The Seafarer are the most similar to each other. The Wanderer is the lament of a solitary man who had once been happy in the service of a loved lord but who now, long after his lord's death and the passing away of that earlier time of happiness and friendship, has become a wanderer journeying in the paths of exile across the icy sea. The poem ends with some conventional moralizing, but the main part of the elegy is an impressive lament for departed joys, done with a plangent tone of reminiscence and an effective use of the ubi sunt? theme—"where are the snows of yesteryear?"—that was to become such a favorite in medieval literature. The Seafarer, which has the same melancholy tone, the same mingling of regret and self-pity, is the monologue of an old sailor who recalls the loneliness and hardships of a life at sea while at the same time aware of its fascination. Some critics take it to be a dialogue, in which the old sailor urges the hardships of the seafaring life against the argument of an eager young man anxious to take to the sea and attracted by the difficulties, and the poem can indeed be read in this way; but the fluctuating moods of the poem seem more impressive if taken as the alternation of weariness and fascination in the same person. Whichever way we read it, however, it is the elegiac element that stands out from among the sometimes obscure sequence of moods, which ends, like The Wanderer, with a conventional religious sentiment. The date of both these poems is uncertain: they may be almost as old as Beowulf. Both are found in the Exeter Book.

Another poem in the Exeter Book, which is generally given the title of The Wife's Lament, can also be considered as belonging to this group of elegiac monologues. It is difficult to follow the precise situation the speaker is describing, but apparently the wife has been separated from her husband and forced to dwell in a cave in the forest by the plottings of his kinsmen. In spate of the comparative obscurity of the situation, the central emotion comes through strongly, and the note of personal passion—the love and longing for the absent husband, the curse on the enemy responsible for her present plight—rings out with remarkable clarity. Similar in many ways to this poem is The Husband's Message. Here the speaker is the piece of wood on which the letter is carved: it first tells the wife its own life story and then goes on to speak the message now carved on it. The husband reminds the wife of her earlier vows, tells her that he has been driven from her by a feud, and bids her join him across the sea. Wulf and Eadwacer is another dramatic monologue, existing only in a fragment of nineteen lines in the Exeter Book, which, for all the obscurity of the situation described, expresses and intense romantic passion in a way quite uncharacteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry as it has come down to us. Wulf is the woman's outlawed lover and Eadwacer her hated husband, or at least the man with whom, against her will, she is forced to live. The passionate cry of

Wulf, min Wulf,     wena me þine
seoce gedydon,      þine seldcymas
murnende mod,     nales meteliste—
Wulf, my Wulf, my longings for thee
Have made me sick, thy rare visits,
It was my sorrowful heart, not want of food—

might be Iseult calling for Tristan as conceived by some nineteenth-century romantic poet. The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer represent all we have of Anglo-Saxon love poetry. They have not been tampered with by cleric anxious to give a moral and religious twist to the end, but have survived in all the intensity of their original utterance. How many poems in a similar style may have been lost it is impossible to tell, nor is it easy to see for what kind of an audience this kind of poetry was written. We know to what taste the Anglo-Saxon heroic poet catered, and we can understand the appeal of the religious poetry of the age; but these passionate renderings of personal emotion, devoid of either heroic atmosphere or religious teaching, must have appealed to a taste one is not accustomed to thinking of as at all prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon period of English culture.

There is one other interesting Anglo-Saxon poem with an elegiac tone; it is a description of a ruined city (perhaps Bath) in about fifty lines, found in the Exeter Book. It is a sad picture of desolation and decay set against an account of the earlier prosperity of the place, and, though the text is imperfect, the sense of passionate regret at the passing away of what was once lively and beautiful is conveyed with impressive eloquence. No clerical improve has tagged a religious moral on to it (or, if he has, it has not survived in the incomplete version which alone is extant) and the mood is somberly fatalistic. The Ruin is not incompatible in feeling with much of Beowulf, which has its own stern sense of fate, and we can see from it how in Anglo-Saxon poetry one kind of elegiac mood was the reverse of the medal whose obverse was heroic.

The Exeter book contains nearly a hundred Anglo-Saxon riddles, some of which seem to have been translated from Latin originals composed in England by clerics of the seventh and eighth century and some derived from the fourth- to fifth- century Latin writer Symphosius. This from of literary amusement has little appeal for the modern reader, though many of The Riddles—which are in regular Anglo-Saxon verse form—show considerable literary skill, particularly in descriptive passages. Their chief interest today lies in the incidental glimpses they give us of the daily life of Anglo-Saxon England and the folk beliefs of the time. Similarly, the so-called "Gnomic Verses," some of which are also in the Exeter Book, and some in a British museum manuscript, with their generalizations about morals and experience and the properties of objects encountered in daily living, are of interest to the social historian as the only group of existing Anglo-Saxon poems which are not on the whole aristocratic in origin; they reflect the manners and opinions of the peasantry of the period.

Toward the end of the Anglo-Saxon period the old heroic note, so long unheard, re-emerges finely in two poems dealing with contemporary history. The Battle of Brunanburh appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicleunder the date 937: it celebrates the victory of Aethelstan of Wessex and Eadmund, his brother, against the combined forces of Olaf the Norseman, Constantine, king of Scots, and the Britons of Strathclyde. There is an important difference, however, between the heroic tone of this poem and that of the older Anglo-Saxon poetry. In the older heroic poetry, emphasis was laid on the individual hero, and his national origins were of little importance—he was one of the heroes of Germania and as such claimed the admiration of all the germanic peoples without any national prejudice. But The Battle of Brunanburh shows strong patriotic sentiment. The victory is regarded as a victory of the English forces against Norse, Scots, and Welsh enemies, and though the heroism of Æthelstan and Eadmund is celebrated, the two princes appear not as heroes in their own right so much as champions of their nation. The Battle of Maldon appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the date 991. It deals in the older epic manner with one of the many clashes between English and Danes that resulted from the latter's attacks on England, which culminated in the conquest of the country by Cnut (Canute) in 1012. The older heroic poems did not, of course, deal with historical events that had only just occurred, nor, as we have noted, did they show any trace of national patriotic feeling. Yet The Battle of Maldon is remarkably similar in spirit to the older heroic poetry. It is the story of a disastrous English defeat: Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, who led the English forces, fought and died in a recklessly courageous attempt to stem the Danes. The poem contains nine speeches, mostly of exhortation and encouragement to the English forces, delivered by seven different speakers; many of the English warriors are mentioned by name (though not one of the Danes is so singled out); the passionate loyalty of retainers to their chief is eloquently presented; and the tone of desperate courage against hopeless odds becomes more and more intense as the poem proceeds, to culminate after the death of Byrhtnoth in the final words of his old retainer Byrhtwold.

Hige sceal þe heardra,     heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare,     þe ure mægen lytlað.
Her lið ure ealdor     eall forheawen,
god on greote;     a mæg gnornian
seðe nu fram þis wigplegan     wendan þenceð,
Ic eom frod feores;      fram ic ne wille,
ac ic me be healfe     minum hlaforde,
be swa leofan men,     licgan þence.

Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener,
Courage shall be the more, as our might lessens.
Here lies our lord, all hewn down,
The good man in the dust; ever may he lament
Who now from this war-play thinks to turn.
I am old in years; from here I will not go,
But I by the side of my lord,
By the man so dear, purpose to lie.

And, in this high strain, Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry comes to an end.

In Search of the Dark Ages (Michael Wood)

—oOo—

Around Cynewulf

NIVEL AVANZADO: Around Cynewulf

From the chapter on "Anglo-Saxon Literature" in David Daiches's Critical History of English Literature:

In the same manuscript that contains the two Genesis poems, Exodus and Daniel, there is found also an untitled religious poem which is now generally called Christ and Satan. This shows an Anglo-Saxon poet working not directly from biblical sources but from a variety of Christian traditions. Here we get a picture of Satan in Hell which represents him not as the defiant spirit of Genesis B but as a lost soul lamenting bitterly his exclusion from the joys of Heaven. He is given several speeches, each with considerable elegiac eloquence; the author is clearly concerned to emphasize the difference between Heaven and Hell and the different results of following Christ and following Satan. The latter part of the poem concentrates on Christ, though at the very end, after an account of Satan's temptation of Christ in the wilderness, we return to Satan in his frustration.

Christ and Satan seems to have been influenced by the school of Cynewulf, a poet who may have flourished early in the ninth century and who is the first Anglo-Saxon poet to sign his work (by means of runic letters woven into the poem). Four of Cynewulf's poems are extant, all showing a more self-conscious craftsmanship than is found in the Caedmonian poems and suggesting in style and structure the influence of classical models. The heroic strain, so successfully transplanted from the older poetry in such a poem as Exodus, is lacking in Cynewulf, and in its place we find a more meditative and contemplative tone. The four Anglo-Saxon Christian poems which have the name of Cynewulf worked into them in acrostic form are Christ, Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles. All these poems possess both a high degree of literary craftsmanship and a note of mystical contemplation which sometimes rises to a high level of religious passion. The story of Christ as told in the poem of that title draws on a variety of ecclesiastical and patristic sources, but it handles its subject—the Advent, the Ascension, and the Last Judgment (5) —with an intensity all its own. The dialogue between Mary and Joseph in the first part, brief though it is, shows a real feeling for the dramatic situation, and is, besides, the earliest extant dramatic passage in English literature. Juliana is a more conventional work, a typical saint's life, following its Latin prose source without any significant deviation, while Elene is the story of the discovery of the true cross by St. Helena, mother of Constantine, told with a keen sense of the wonder of it all and a relish for the romantic suggestions of distant scenes and places. The Fates of the Apostles is a short poem of one hundred and twenty-two lines (and may be the concluding part of Andreas,  which it follows in the manuscript: if so, then Andreas, too, is by Cynewulf, for The Fates of the Apostles contains the runic signature). The author is here meditating on the adventures of the various apostles after they dispersed to spread the Gospel, but its interest for the modern reader lies largely in the personal passages. Its opening shows an interesting mutation of the heroic into the personal elegiac strain: "Lo, weary of wandering, sad in spirit, I made this song, gathered it from far and wide, of how the bright and glorious heroes showed forth their courage."

With Cynewulf, Anglo-Saxon religious poetry moves beyond biblical paraphrase into the didactic, the devotional, and the mystical. These qualities are also exhibited by many of the religious poems which seem to have been written under his influence. The most remarkable of these is The Dream of the Rood, fragments of which are to be found inscribed in runic letters on the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, Scotland (probably an early eighth century version, pre-Cynewulf), while the complete poem exists in the Vercelli Book, in a much later version (probably late ninth century). The tone of the complete version as we have it suggests that the earlier version had been afterward adapted by a poet of the school of Cynewulf, perhaps even by Cynewulf himself. It is the oldest surviving English poem in the form of a dream or vision—a form which was later to be used for such a variety of purposes. The dreamer tells how he saw a vision of the bright cross, brilliantly adorned with gems, and goes on to tell the speech that he heard it utter. The speech of the cross, in which it tells of its origin in the forest, its removal to be made into a cross for "The Master of mankind," its horror at the role it had to play but its determination to stand fast because that was God's command, the suffering of "the young Hero" who ascends the cross resolutely in order to redeem mankind—all this is done in verse charged with a simple eloquence and sustaining a high note of religious passion and wonder. The speech ends with an exhortation to each soul to "seek through the cross the kingdom which is far from earth," and the poem then concludes with the dreamer's account of his own religious hopes. Other poems associated with the school of Cynewulf are Andreas, which tells of the adventures, sufferings, and evangelical successes of St. Andrew, with deliberate emphasis on the wonderful and the picturesque, and a perhaps excessive exploitation of the rhetorical devices of Anglo-Saxon poetry (the source of the poem is a Latin rendering of the apocryphal Greek Acts of Andrew and Matthew); two poems on the life of the English hermit St. Guthlac; The Phoenix, of which the first part, deriving from the Latin poem De Ave Phoenice, attributed to Lactantius, describes an earthly paradise in the East, the beauty of the phoenix, its flight to Syria after it has lived for a thousand years to build its nest, die, and be reborn, while the second half takes the phoenix as an allegory both of the life of the virtuous in this world and the next and as a symbol of Christ; and following The Phoenix in the Exeter Book—a poem entitled Physiologus or Bestiary which belongs to the popular medieval literary form of beast allegories, where real or (more often) imaginary qualities of animals are given a moral application. Physiologus, which derives ultimately from a Greek original, is incomplete, and deals with the panther, the whale and, incompletely, the partridge. It has the same lushness of descriptive style that is found in The Phoenix, and its natural history is equally fabulous. The whale is given the charming name of Fastitocalon—a corruption of Aspidochelone, originally applied to the turtle.

Finally, there falls to be mentioned among significant Anglo-Saxon religious poems the fragmentary Judith, of which only the concluding sections survive, in the same manuscript that contains Beowulf. The poem is a version of the Vulgate text of the apocryphal book of Judith, and the extant portion tells in vigorous and rapidly moving verse of Judith's beheading of the drunken Holofernes after his confident feasting, her rallying of the Hebrews to attack the Assyrians, the consternation of the Assyrians on discovering Holofernes' headless body, the rout of the Assyrians by the Hebrews, and Judith's triumph and praise to God. Judith possesses a fierce energy in describing the death of Holofernes and the defeat of the Assyrians, a note of positive jubilation, which is quite different from anything in the older heroic poetry. In fluidity of movement the verse form shows itself to be fairly late, and the poem may date from the end of the ninth century or possibly even later.

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(5). Some scholars maintain that only the second part, to which they give the title of The Ascension (or Christ B) is by Cynewulf, for only this part contains Cynewulf's name in runic characters. The other two parts they consider to be seaparate poems, giving one the title of The Advent (or Natitivy, or Christ A) and the other the title of Doomsday C (or Christ C), grouping it together with two other poems on the Last Judgment which they call Doomsday A and Doomsday B respectively.

The Anglo-Saxon Elegiac Poems

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