NIVEL AVANZADO: The Language of The Canterbury Tales

John Gower (NIVEL AVANZADO)

ROUND ABOUT CHAUCER: JOHN GOWER

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937)

Chaucer to the Renascence. 1. Round about Chaucer: 7) The Dialect of the East Midlands of King's English. John Gower. 

However important literary production, in the dialects we have reviewed, may have been, no one of them triumphed over the others. Victory fell to the speech of the east midlands, the district of London and the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and that in which the king had his residence. For this reason that language has been called the King's English. Its pre-eminence was established once for all in the end of the fourteenth century.

Although to-day this victory seems quite natural, since social forces were already making London the political and social centre, the universities the intellectual centre of the nation, the dialect of the east midlands was perhaps, when it was on the very eve of becoming English like none other, the poorest, the most completely disinherited of literature. Since Anglo-Saxon times, almost all English poetry had been produced apart from it. It could boast of hardly a poem besides the romance of Havelock and Robert Manning's Handlyng Sinne.  Reflection shows that the fact is not astonishing, for it was in the neighbourhood of the court and the universities that the English language was most degraded and existed most precariously, that it was always subordinate either to Latin or to French or rather Anglo-Norman. King, nobles, and clerks despised it. French, long the only tongue of those ouside the vulgar herd, had its natural stronghold in this district, and was more tenacious of life here than elsewhere. Men better endowed than their fellows avoided the common language or had recourse to it only for practical ends. Their literary ambitions did not find scope in a tongue which was so meanly prized.

The case of John Gower (1) is very representative of prevalent conditions. He used Latin and French in turn, and reached the point of writing in English only late, probably under the influence of Chaucer's success. The date of his birth is unknown. Was he, as was long believed, some ten years older than Chaucer, or was his junior? He died eight years after him, in 1408, and was probably his exact contemporary. The works of the two poets grew side by side, and, although Gower is not without merit of his own, he is chiefly valuable because he serves to measure the greatness of his rival.

He was a Kentish man, but this origin had only a slight effect on his language, which is hardly at all different from that of London and the court. He was a gentleman, possibly a clerk who did not take major orders. He was well read, and his library, if the word may be used, seems to have contained much the same French and Latin books as Chaucer's.

Undoubtedly he was once young for he wrote love ballades in English-French, ballades which lack fire but are not without a certain grace. This was a lover on the courtly model, seeking in vain to touch an unfeeling heart:

En le douls temps ma fortune est amière
Le mois de Maij sest en yverne mué;
Lurtie truis si jeo la Rose quière
Vous êtes franche et jeo suis fort lié. (2)

 (Ballade XXXVII.)

The third line at least needs translation—

I find the nettle when I look for the rose—

for its language is not Parisian. He is aware of the fact and excuses himself for it:

Et si je n'ai du français la faconde
Pardonnez-moi que je de ce fors voie, (3)
Je suis Anglais; si quiers par telle voie (4)
Être excusé. . . .

The very rhythm of his French verse tends to be Anglicized, to beat time to the iambic measure. In spite of his effort after correctness, Gower proves better than any one else how artificial was this uprooted language, at once learned and corrupt. He reminds us of Chaucer's Prioress:

And Frensch she spak ful faire and fetysly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hire unknowe.

Gower is the last in date of the Anglo-Norman poets. He deserves to rank among them less by a few little love-pieces than by his long poem or rather his long sermon in verse which is called Speculum Meditantis, or Miroir de l'Homme, and has recently been rediscovered. It is a sermon against the immorality of the age, and it justifies Chaucer's epithet of 'moral Gower' which was to cling to his friend's name for ever. This clerk, concerned especially to note and display the vices of his generation, was indeed much more a moralist than a poet. He is without a trace of that joy in life and pleasure and observing it which are so vivid in Chaucer. He compares what he sees with his ideal, that of a pious clerk and a student, finds all abominable, and condemns unreservedly.

Thus it was with his most remarkable work, Vox Clamantis, which was inspired by the Peasant's Rising of 1381 and which he elected to write in Latin. It is a very substantial poem written by a member of the wealthy class, by a frightened landlord whose misfortune it was to live in Kent, the county in which the formidable rebellion broke out. Gower's terror gives these verse a strength and emphasis which are lacking in his other work.

The rising under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw began near Gower's land, and more than one of his tenants was doubtless among the rebels. It was during the first years of the minority of Richard II. The impoverishment of the Treasury, the levy of new subsidies for an unfortunate war, and the insolence of the farmers of the taxes had provoked popular anger and rebellion. Several tax-collectors were put to death, and after them lawyers, courtiers, and partisans of the real regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The number of the rebels increased. One hundred thousand men marched on London, demanding the abolition of serfdom and the reduction of rents. A true social revolution had been let loose in the country, and for a moment the insurgents were masters of London, where they sacked the palaces of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt. They destroyed but they did not steal: they even hanged a man in their own ranks for theft. Then the king rode out to meet them, and Wat Tyler, while in parley with him, was slain by the mayor. The king procured the dispersal of the rebels by promising redress of their grievances, then revoked his promise, and the rising was ended by cruel repressive measures.

Gower, now in his fifties, was haunted by this rebellion as by a nightmare. His interests were all on the side of the landlords. He had no sympathy with the popular cause, yet considered the ills of society to be the outcome of social vices which were ruining the state. His alarms and his grievances are voiced in the Latin distichs of Vox Clamantis. 

The poet first has a vision of a crowd of members of the populace changed into wild beasts and uncurbed by reason—asses, fierce as lions, who will bear no more burdens, oxen who refuse to draw the plough, dows who bark at huntsmen, cats who have reverted to wildness. A jay, who stands for Wat Tyler, harangues them, to the sound of 'Down with honour! Perish the law!' and at the tail of their company John Ball, an excommunicate priest, preaches on the text: 

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The swarming mass of people lays Troynovant, or London, waste. Its strength is broken by the death of the jay, but the ship of the state is still adrift and puts in at the island of Disorder. Then a voice from heaven advises Gower to write down what he has seen in his nightmare. 

The rest of his poem contains his waking thoughts and is entirely didactic. The misfortunes of the age spring from the general corruption. There are three classes of society, the clerks, the warriors, otherwise knights and nobles, and the third estate, namely the villeins and labourers, the traders and the lawyers. All are riddled with vice. The court is a meeting-place for everything abominable. 

The poem ends with a prayer to the young king, Richard II, to bring virtue back to the court, and with an appeal to all men to mend their ways, remembering how short is earthly life. Gower declares his love for his cournty: he has wished, he says, that men should hear not only what he himself feels to be true, but also the voice of the people which is often the voice of God. 

It is a great pity that this work, into which Gower has put the best of himself, his utmost sincerity of thought, vehemence of satire, and depths of narrow but coherent morality, should have received the dress of a dead language, while on the one occasion when he used the speech of his country he worked against the grain of his temperament and talent, and wrote an entirely artificial poem.

For he did finally make up his mind to write in English, perhaps incited by the growing reputation of Chaucer, who had already produced most of his works and was soon to begin The Canterbury Tales. It was about 1383 or 1384 that Gower composed his single English poem, his Confessio Amantis, an immense compilation of stories extending to forty thousand octosyllabic lines. He tells us he did it at the bidding of King Richard, who charged him that 'some newe thing I shuldë boke,' and thus he excuses his use of the vulgar tongue:

And for that fewë men endite
In oure Enslisshe, I thenkë make
A bok for King Richardës sake.

He has the credit of having sought, a little before Chaucer, a thread on which to string some hundred stories. The idea was not quite new: it had been exemplified in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Sept Sages, to which the Decameron would have to be added, were it not clearly unknown to Gower as to Chaucer. The idea was a happy one, but how awkwardly Gower executed it!

He tells us with a sigh that he is going to sing of love, rather than follow his own taste and write a moral book. Love is the last subject he would choose for himself, but something must be conceded to the reader who prefers amusement to wisdom:

For thilkë cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel wey
And write a boke betwene the twey,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore.

I happens that Venus, who has little fondness for him, advises him one day in May to make his confession to her priest Genius.  The obedient poet goes to the confessional and asks Genius to question him, point by point, thus sounding his conscience in the article of love. Genius consents, but declares that, in order that the confession may be complete, he will be obliged, in the course of the examination, to speak of the different vices. He will explain each of them by means of a story, so that the lover may know whether or not he have the same guilt on his conscience. When the confession has ended, Venus mocks this superannuated lover, who decides to withdraw. 

The device allows the seven deadly sins, subdivided into many secondary sins, to defile thorugh seven books. Genius has received a complete scholastic education, but he ceases to excel when he endeavours to adapt his examples to his precepts. To illustrate hypocrisy he tells the tale of the deceiving Trojan Horse. To show that murder, an effect of anger, is to be condemned, he relates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: Pyramus kills himself out of despair, which is anger, when he believes that Thisbe has been the lion's victim, and the moral is that nothing should be done in a hurry. The proof that carelessness is injurious to love is found in the story of Phaeton, who drove his father's chariot carelessly, freezing and burning the earth by turns, so that Phebus caused him, as a punishment, to fall from the chariot and be drowned.

The connection of these stories with the morality of love is so absurd that, after praising Gower for attempting a unified plan, we are tempted to regret that he did not write his little stories haphazard, without trying to give them a frame. For as a a narrator he is abundant and clear, and since he has read much, he has had no difficulty in finding curious and sometimes attractive studies among his books. Several of his tales recur in Chaucer, who sometimes preceded and sometimes followed him in selecting them. Once or twice Gower was inspired by a better original than Chaucer, as when he took the story of the Knight Florent which corresponds to the tale of the Wife of Bath.

This is as much as can be claimed for Gower. An almost immeasurable distance separates him from Chaucer. He is doing penance when he obliges himself to treat of love, undertaking a task so ungrateful and so contrary to his nature that he could have discharged it well only with the help of the sense of humour he lacked deplorably. Like him, Chaucer posed as despised by Venus and ill-used by Cupid, but—not to speak of his unrivalled and unfailing power to awaken sympathy for lovers—his confession of impotence is delightful because it is wrapped in humour. In Gower, there are, or seem to be, velleities of humour, but they are invariably abortive. There is too much reality in the awkwardness with which this poet resigns himself to his distasteful subject. Once and again, a sigh excapes him because he cannot return to the moral teaching natural to him, and these regrets are the sincerest part of his poem. He is indeed, as Chaucer said, 'moral Gower', and it is unfortunate that he ever forsook his role. Venus was right when she told him:

And tarie thou mi court nomore
but go ther vertu moral dwelleth,
Where ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Which of long time thou hast write.

And we are grateful to Gower for having made the goddess own Chaucer for her true disciple and poet. 

Of dites and songës glad
The which he for my sakë made
The land fulfilled is over al.

Gower, learned, industrious, and copious, is the typical average poet of his century. His writings are what Chaucer's might have been without Chaucer's genius.

Notes

(1). Complete edition in four volumes of his work, ed. by G. C. Macaulay (Clarendon Press, 1899-1902); Confessio Amantis, ed. by Henry Morley (1899).

(2) In the sweet season, my fate is bitter
     The month of May has changed into winter
      I find the nettle when I look for the rose;
     You are free whereas I am fast bound.

(3) I go astray.

(4) And therefore I beg.

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Founder of Our Language

—oOo—

Old English Literature

 

(Chapter 1 of The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote).

 

 

 

OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

 

 I

 

This is a chronicle of how men and women, for more than a thousand years, have expressed themselves in a literature of extraordinary fertility and a language of matchless resource.  

The origins of that language reach back to the remote fifth century when conquering tribes of Jutes, Saxons and Angles first brought to the country the various dialects of a Germanic tongue now called Old English. Many of the words the invaders used survive in our vocabulary today. We have no difficulty recognizing mann, wif and cild. We are familiar with the hus in which they libben or live, the mete they etan and the waeter they drincan. The bok you are reading describes a history almost as old. 

Though pronunciation has changed and modern English has freed itself of nouns that must be declined and adjectives that reflect their gender, Old English had several qualities which uniquely fitted it to survive and grow. Its users were willing to borrow words from the Latin culture of the Christian church and to absorb the Scandinavian vocabulary of later Viking raiders. Old English thus drew on European traditions, while her poets further enriched their 'wordhoard' with an imaginative range of synonyms. These last tell us a great deal about Anglo-Saxon life. In a world of war, gold and honor, the king was the heroes' treasure keeper and 'victory lord'. His warriors were his 'shield bearers' fighting in the 'iron-clad ring.' Over the heaving 'whale's road', riding the 'water's back', sailed the broad-bosomed longships with crews of 'Spear Danes' eager for fame. 

Such fame was a principal preoccupation of the poet or scop, seated at his chieftain's hearth and regaling the company with records of their history. Widsith, in a poem that dates perhaps from the early seventh century, offers a detailed inventory of the men who rose and fell in the great period of warrior migration a hundred years before. While presenting this panorama of the past however, Widsith also portrays himself in the timeless and masculine role of the Old English bard. His name implies that he is the widely travelled one, the man whose albeit imaginary journeys have disciplined him to received wisdom. Suffering, loneliness and the experience of good and evil have made Widsith a man apart and the singer of songs who can reveal to his audience the glory and pathos of their uncertain world. This is the world created again by the stoic author of Deor (?seventh century), and both men look to the lord of the 'mead hall' for generous gifts in return for immortalizing his fame.

The communal and oral nature of such poetry accounts for a number of its characteristic features. All of these made it easier for the bard to improvise his work and his listeners to understand it. For example, each line, divided into halves of two stressed and a varying number of unstressed syllables, is symmetrical and alliterative. Such patterns appeal directly to the ear. Vivid poetic diction and the frequent use of parallel expressions for a single idea set the verse apart from normal speech and mark it out as a special mode of discourse, a means of imagining the world. Lastly, many set-piece passages describing such events as fights or feasts are composed from verbal formulas that were clearly part of a traditional and unwritten inheritance on which all poets could draw.

Such are some of the formal characteristics of this verse, but if Old English poetry is marked by artifice it is also characterized by deep emotion. The following lines from The Battle of Maldon (993) in which a band of warriors face certain defeat suggests these qualities well:

Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will

The heart fiercer, as our force faileth

Here lies our lord levelled in the dust,

the man all marred; he shall mourn to the end

who thinks to wend off from this war-play now.

Though I am white with winters I will not away,

for I think to lodge me alongside my dear one,

lay me down by my lord's right hand.

This passage conveys the ideal of warrior loyalty, the love of fame and honour embodied in the Germanic and originally pagan forms of the warrior life. It also suggests the reverence for conventional wisdom and the recognition of an uncertain and even malign universe which characterize the longest and most famous Old English poem, the epic Beowulf. 

Although composed in a Christian court in seventh- or eight-century Mercia or Northumbria, Beowulf is deeply sympathetic to the heroic tradition, to the culture of the all and that view of human activity characteristic of the pagan world of southern Scandinavia two hundred years earlier. The poem thus reflects a life of fights and feasting, of ceremony, brilliant gold and sudden darkness. Here are pride in birth and physical strength, a world of sacred obligations, feud and vengeance. Beyond this, the forces of wyrd or fate seem to control man's destiny with mysterious omnipotence, while evil itself (personified in the poem by the monstrous Grendel, his dam and the dragon) is both primordial and powerful, something to be outwitted and destroyed by cunning and physical strength. However, while Beowulf contains many scenes of vivid action, it is principally conceived as a meditation on the heroic life, a philosophic vision of warrior man in his splendour and defeat.

The opening lines, for example, portray the funeral of a great king who as a young man crossed the waters to bring glory to an ailing country, just as Beowulf himself will later do. We watch the building of Hrothgar's mighty hall at Heorot, but even as this symbol of heroic society is celebrated, so we know it is waiting for the fire that will one day destroy it. Man's highest achievements are thus set against a background of inexorable change, and man himself is subject to time, weakness and age. Hrothgar has now passed his prime, and creatures of darkness prey on his fading glory.

Grendel and his dam are embodiments of primordial evil, the outcast forces of destruction who hate the order of Heorot with satanic jealousy. Hrothgar can no longer hold them at bay, and Beowulf in his shining 'war-gear' — the young hero from across the sea — is the only figure who can counter their power. When Grendel and his mother have been slain, a period of celebration ensues. There is rejoicing in victory and Beowulf's strength. Treasure is lavished on the hero and he returns home with his fame immeasurably increased. Hrothgar's words in the midst of proud success cannot however be forgotten:

        Put away arrogance,

noble fighter! The noon of your strenght 

shall last for a while now, but in a little time 

sickness of the sword will strip it from you:

either enfolding flame or a flood's billow

or a knife-stab or the stoop of a spear

or the ugliness of age; or your eyes' brightness

lessens and grows dim. Death shall soon 

have beaten you then. O brave warrior!

This speech is the pivot of the poem. It combines a love of heroism and conventional wisdom with a view of man poised between the brightness of youthful achievement and the shadow of death. If the first half of the work is a record of glory, we now move to a more somber view.

The last section of Beowulf describes the ageing hero's defeat in his struggle against the dragon. The whole encounter is suffused with pessimism and the meanness of the man who has stolen the dragon's gold. With his spirit 'gloomy, deah-eager, wandering', Beowulf himself seems to realize there is something fatal in this last encounter, a corrosion of confidence that eats away at the heart of the heroic ideal. In the heat of battle, all his companions save one desert him. As the dying hero offers his kingship to his last loyal retainer, so the glory do a nation withers away. Death and exile wait for all, and heroism passes into poetic legend.

2

 

The anonymous author of Beowulf drew on traditional resources to present an all-involving view of man and the supernatural, war and peace, life and death. This helps give his work its status as a heroic elegy. Great churchmen such as Alcuin of York (735-804) however had long asked what verse fundamentally sympathetic to a pagan culture could have to do with Christian salvation. This was a serious challenge to the older tradition, and a passage from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede (probably 673-735) suggests how it was resolved. 

Bede relates that when the harp was passed to the devout but unlearned Caedmon (late seventh century) he would rise from the company rather han expose his ignorance and distaste for pagan convention. One evening when this had happened and Caedmon had retreated to the cowshed, a figure appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to sing. 'What should I sing about?' the bewildered Caedmon asked. 'Sing about the creation of all things,' the figure replied. Bede says that Caedmon promply improvided the following verses:

Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven's Kingdom,

The Maker's might, and his conception

The deed of the Father of Glory; as He of all wonders

— The Eternal Lord — established the beginning.

He first created for the children of men

Heaven as a roof, the Holy Shaper;

Then Middle Earth did Mankind's Keeper,

The Eternal Lord, afterward ordain,

The earth of men, thee Almighty Lord.

In thse nine lines Caedmon had drawn heavily on the traditional 'wordhoard', but epìthets previously reserved for pagan warriors have now been applied to the Christian God. When Caedmon was taken before St. Hild, Abbess of Whitby, she and her learned advisers were so impressed that Caedmon was made a lay brother and offered instruction in order that he might versify the whole Christian story and so teach the people.

For Bede, concerned above all to show the operation of the divine in English history, Caedmon's discovery of his vocation was an act of God. What his account more certainly shows is how an important cultural problem was exposed and then solved by a creative intuition, an imaginative leap we may well choose to call inspired. In Caedmon's 'Creation-Hymn', two apparently contradictory cultures were reconciled and Old English poetry was joined to the great tradition of European Christianity. An enormous artistic advance had been made, and scholars sometimes refer to this as the Caedmonian revolution. What is less often recognized is the role played in this process by St. Hild. A woman of commanding personality, and respected as such by Bede, the intelligence and foresight with which she used the important place offered her by her society require that she too be seen as a central figure in the making of English literature. 

Though Bede goes on to describe how Caedmon versified a wide range of biblical events, modern scholars suggest that the remaining eighth-century Christian poems in Old English are the work of Caedmon's followers. One such poet is known by name. The verse of Cynewulf (late eight or ninth century) lies firmly within contemporary patterns of Christian devotion and scholarship, motifs to which the poet in such works as Elene brings both his culture's natural regard for able women and an often skiful use of the formulas of Germanic heroic verse. These last were also used by the anonymous author of Genesis who delighted in describing God and the angels in terms of a warlord and his warriors, while heaven itself becomes an image of the earthly mead hall.

In Exodus, the flight of the Israelites and the crossing of the Red Sea are again imagined in terms of epic poetry, but to these effects the poet adds traditions of scriptural interpretation learned from the church fathers. Beneath the adventure there lies a serious spiritual purpose. Just as the Israelites are shown gaining the Promised Land, so Christians may enter the kingdom of God. Events in the Old Testament thus prefigure those in the New and teach all men of their salvation. This method of allegorical interpretation was to be of great importance to writers for many centuries to come, and they applied it not just to the Old and New Testaments. The whole world could be seen as an image of spiritual truth. In The Whale, for example, the great beast represents the Devil who lies in wait for unwary men, swallows them and drags them down to the depths of hell. Even wholly imaginary animals could be made to serve religious instruction. In The Phoenix, the fabulous bird, leaving its earthly paradise to die and be reborn, becomes an image of Christ's passion and resurrection. 

Such works suggest how the church and its poets believed the true function of art was not simply to release feeling but to teach others and enhance devotion. A poem might give pleasure but it should also do something spiritually useful. It should help its hearer to pray and to assist in the most important duty of life—the pursuit of salvation. It is against such a background that we should read the masterpiece of Old English devotional verse, The Dream of the Rood (c. 700).

Rood is Old English for a cross, and this most famous symbol of the Christian faith appears in the narrator's dream encrusted with gold and reaching out over the whole world. At once bleeding and glorious, the cross is an image of shame and redemption—a uniquely powerful fusion of Anglo-Saxon culture with New Testament love. Christ is portrayed as the young warrior standing to embrace death and victory,  while the cross itself takes on the burden of his suffering. When it speaks to the narrator of Christ's eager sacrifice and its own humiliation, the poet's skilful handling of words and emotion—his rhetoric—makes us feel we are present at the Passion itself:

I was reared up, a rood.

    I raised the great King

liege lord of the heavens,

    dared not lean from the true.

They drove me through with dark nails:

    on me are the deep wounds manifest,

wide-mouthed hate-dents.

    I durst not harm any of them.

How they mocked at us both!

    I was all moist with blood

sprung from the Man's side

    after He sent forth His soul.

 

As the poet of The Dream of the Rood obliges us to relive the agony of the Crucifixion, so his art stirs our pity and gratitude. We become ever more conscious of human sin. At the close of the work, when the poet's vision has faded, he offers a final and moving image of himself as devout Christian alone on the worthless earth and longing to be reunited with the cross in heaven.

The heroism, sense of transitoriness and ardour for salvation that characterize The Dream of the Rood are also seen in some of the Elegies, that mighty handful of poems gathered in the Exeter Book, one of four manuscripts dating from about the year 1000 in which the greater part of Old English verse is preserved. The names by which these eighth-century poems have come to be known are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message and Wulf and Eadwacer. Each concerns loss and isolation, and coldly through the greatest of them blows a salt-edged wind and a knowledge of the heaving wastes of the sea. These build to a sense of universal desolation. 

A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be

when all this world's wealth standeth waste,

even as now, in many places, over the earth

walls stand, wind-beaten,

hung with hoar-frost; ruined habitations.

Such pessimism remains profoundly moving, but as we come to know more intimately the rhetorical image of themselves that these poets fashioned, so we can also begin to see how the narrators of The Wanderer and The Seafarer were deeply responsive to the Christian view of existence as this was formulated towards the much feared end of the first millennium. Aware of the anger of God towards the sinful soul, these poets present exemplary Christian images of themselves as strangers and sojourners in a corrupt and corrupting world. The author of The Seafarer in particular suggests that the true image of the righteous man is of a traveller or pilgrim on his way thorugh the snares of mortal life to the eternal and heavenly Jerusalem. Such an image not only underlies some of the finest Old English poetry, but was to be developed by many of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages.

3

It is recorded that Alfred the Great (reigned 871-901) was keenly interested in Old English verse, but Alfred's literary concerns are principally associated with the revival of written prose and hence that crucial cultural achievement: the preservation of a body of advanced thought on which others could draw to describe their world. Books—rare, valuable and open to only the tiny minority of the literate—were now to take on their vital role as the repositories of what is known. 

In Alfred's Wessex, the writing of such books was an urgent matter. Repeated Viking raids, cutting ever deeper into the kingdoms of England, had resulted in the sacking of churches and the burning of libraries. The centres of knowledge were being destroyed. When Alfred had finally forced the Vikings into retreat, he realized that to build his kingdom afresh he would have to develop its language and revive the learning once preserved by churchmen such as Bede. Literacy was clearly essential to this, but since Latin (for centuries the international medium of scholarship) had fallen into decay over most of England, the native tongue would have to serve. Its use in government and the law, in church matters and education, would stretch the resources of Old English to their limit and be a powerful force for national unity. 

When peace was at last assured, Alfred wrote to the bishops saying that it seemed best to him, provided it did so to them, that they now 'turn into the language we all understand certain books most necessary for all men to know'. To revive the tradition of knowledge, Alfred would, with the help of scholars from England and abroad, translate the wisdom of the Latin and Christian classics into the language of his time. These translations include the Dialogues of St Gregory (trans. c. 880), one of the most influential fathers of the church. The fact that Alfred chose to translate this collection of saints' lives suggests he was determined to create for his people—such young men at least as could be spared from the army or the production of food—a literature of exemplary Christian conduct. Alfred's version of Gregory's Pastoral Care further shows how he wanted to place his own rule and that of his senior administrators on a firm intellectual basis, for Pastoral Care describes the moral and spiritual qualities required of those who have the government of others.

To provide his subjects with a sense of historical continuity, Alfred had an edited translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People prepared. This work tells, with a critical concern for accuracy unique in its time, the history of England subsequent to the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury as a missionary in 597. This event had helped establish the Roman Church as the focus of the country's European culture, and Bede's illustration of the then common belief that history is a moral pattern shaped by the hand of God would be a fundamental notion influencing writers for centuries to come. Finally, two further translations by Alfred himself reveal his more personal concerns. His version of the first fifty of the Psalms expresses the emotional side of his piety, while his work on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (the book which, more than any other, handed down the classical inheritance of reason to the Middle Ages) shows Alfred's interest in developing a language for abstract and critical thought. 

Alfred's revival of literacy was sustained by many others. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 871-1154), for example, is a laconic record of contemporary national events and thus an important source of information for Alfred's and subsequent reigns. It survived the Norman Conquest, and entries in the version from Peterborough (one of the seven centres at which the Chronicle was kept) continue into the harrowingly described reign of King Stephen (1135-54). While the narrative rarely rises to the level of literary interest, what is chiefly remarkable about the work is its very simplicity at a time when Latin authors in England and abroad were striving for elaborate rhetorical effect.

Conscious artifice and a concern with style and fluency were clearly of interest among later writers of Old English prose. This is particularly true of those associated with the Benedictine revival which took place during the reign of King Edgar (959-75). In this prolific period, during which many of the manuscripts in which Old English verse survives were written, the learning fostered by Alfred was placed on a firm foundation after the troubles that succeeded his reign.

The importance of Benedictine monasteries as institutions for preserving scholarship can hardly be overemphasized. The value placed on learning by St Benedict himself (the founder of Western monasticism) resulted in the making of digests or florilegia of the classical writers and theologians. These traditions of literacy were then passed on by an educational system based on the trivium or the skills of Latin grammar, rhetoric (the techniques of shaping language into persuasive and effective forms) and logic, the rational ordering of ideas. Such are the foundations of medieval and later scholarship. They were brought to bear on Old English by the ecclesiastical requirement to preach in the native tongue. For many centuries the sermon, educating people in what were held to be their spiritual, social and political duties, was an important force in preserving and developing the language. A quantity of alliterative prose sermons survives from the tenth century. Some of these, forcibly decrying the evils of the age, see further Viking raids as a divine punishment foretelling the end of the world.

It is the particular mark of Old English prose in this last great period however that it proved itself capable of dealing with almost any subject, be it history, romantic adventure such as we find in the translation Apollonius of Tyre (c. 1050), righteous indignation or the subtleties of theological argument. The lucid, powerful homilies of Aelfric (d. 1020) and Wulfstan (d. 1023) reveal a complete mastery of the medium and show how fifty years before the Norman Conquest southern England especially had, along with a remarkable body of poetic achievement, the most advanced prose literature of any region in Europe.

Anglo-Saxon Prose

 

Beowulf, Lesson 4: Literary devices used in the Beowulf poem

Beowulf

An introduction to Beowulf. Basic facts from The Oxford Companion to English Literature, followed by some introductory study guide videos. Plus an account by David Daiches, and other materials.


Beowulf, an Old English poem of 3,182 lines, surviving in a 10th-cent. manuscript. It 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, 50 years later, when Beowulf, who has for a long time been king of the Geats, fights a dragon who has attacked his people, in a combat in which both Beowulf and the dragon are mortally wounded. The historical period of the poem's events can be dated in the 6th cent. from a reference to Beowulf's king Hygelac by the historian Gregory of Tours; but much of the material of the poem is legendary and paralleled in other Germanic historical-mythological literature in Norse, Old English, and German.

Although it has been suggested that the date of the poem may be nearer to that of its manuscript in the 10th cent., the poem is generally dated in the 8th cent., perhaps in its second quarter, at a time 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, seemingly inappropriate to the date of its historical events. The degree of Christian morality inherent in the poem has been one of the two principal critical talking points about Beowulf; the second is the consistency or otherwise of the poem's construction. W. P. Ker (in Epic and Romance, 1896) regarded the monster stories as insignificant and the peripheral historical allusions as weighty and important. This view was most famously opposed by Tolkien in "The Monsters and the Critics" (1936) where he argued that it was precisely the superhuman opposition of the heathen monsters that elevated the poem to heroic stature, and that all the other allusions were related directly to the transient grandeur of Beowulf's life and battles with the monsters.

Beowulf is much the most important poem in Old English and it is the first major poem in a European vernacular language. It is remarkable for its sustained grandeur of tone and for the brilliance of its style, both in its rather baroque diction and in the association of the elements of its plot.


Ed. F. Klaeber (1922), etc.; C. L. Wrenn (1953, rev. W. F. Bolton, 1973); trans. E. T. Donaldson (1966); G. N. Gammonsway and then others in Beowulf and Its Analogues (1968); R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An  Introduction (3rd edn with supplement by C. L. Wrenn, 1959); L. E. Nicholson (ed.), An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (1963). Heaney's new translation appeared in 1999.












Study Guides for Beowulf:


















Lessons on Beowulf  from the University School at Nashville:

Introduction:
    http://youtu.be/wdmtgb4a4q4







 


ADVANCED LEVEL:



Now a longer introduction, from A Critical History of English Literature, by David Daiches (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960). Followed by Michael Wood's documentary In Search of Beowulf.

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Of surviving Anglo-Saxon literature, that which brings us most closely into contact with the Germanic origins of the invaders is the heroic poetry, which still bears traces not only of the pre-Christian heroic society of the continental Saxons and others, but also of that community of subject which linked these early English with the wider civilization of Germania. This is written in the language we know as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which is essentially the English language in an earlier stage of its development, with inflections which have since disappeared, a relatively small vocabulary from which many words have since been lost (though some which are lost to standard English remain in altered from in Scots and in regional English dialects), and significant differences between, for example, the West Saxon dialect of the south and the Anglian dialect of Northumbria. The verse is alliterative and stressed, without rhyme, each line containing four stressed syllables and a varying number unstressed. There is a definite pause (caesura) between the two halves of each line, with two stresses in each half. 

We geascodon   Eormenrices
wylfenne ge þoht;   ahte wide folc
Gotena rices;  þæt wæs grim cyning.
Sæt secg monig   sorgum gebunden,
wean on wenan, wyscte geneahhe
þæt þæs cynerices   ofercumen wære.

To the superficial eye this looks very far removed from modern English; and in a sense it is. (The letter þ—"thorn"—has the sound of "th"). But a literal translation helps to bring out its relation to modern English: 

We have learned of Eormanric's
wolfish disposition; he held wide dominion
in the realm of the Goths. That was a cruel king.
Many a man sat bound in sorrows,
anticipating woe, often wishing
that his kingdom were overcome.

Some thirty thousand lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have survived, nearly all of it contained in four manuscripts (1), and we have no reason to believe that the older, nonreligious poetry that survives is more than a casually preserved fragment of what was written. Specifically religious poetry might be expected to have earned ecclesiastical care and preservation, but the heroic poetry which connects more directly with the Germanic origins of the Anglo-Saxons could not be expected to arouse any special ecclesiastical interest even when it had been superficially purged of its pagan feeling and in some degree Christianized in thought. The conversion of the English peoples began with the arrival of Augustine in Kent in 597; he had been sent by Gregory the Great with a band of monks in order to achieve his missionary task. But, though Æthelbert, king of Kent, was duly converted to Christianity and Augustine was soon able to establish the seat of his bishopric at Canterbury, the permanent establishment of Christianity through England proved to be a much lengthier task and one which required the active intervention of Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland. Differences between the customs and practices of the Irish Church—which had remained somewhat isolated from Rome—and the Roman Church, which had sponsored Augustine's mission, made for certain difficulties between those English ecclesiastics who looked to Rome and those who looked to Iona and to Ireland, and these were not resolved until the Synod of Whitby in 663 (2); but it is sufficient for the student of literature to note that the development of English Christianity was not continuous but sporadic from the first century and more, with certain notable setbacks such as the defeat and death of the Christian Edwin, king of Northumbria, at the hands of the pagan Prenda, king of Mercia, in 632, which meant the disappearance of the Christian Church in Northumbria until its re-establishment by Aidan and his followers from Iona. If even the external ecclesiastical organization was thus unstable in the early centuries, it is not difficult to see how traces of pagan thought in varying kinds of relation to Christianity persisted for some time after the nominal conversion of the English.

Unfortunately, though much is known in general about the mythology of the Germanic and the Norse peoples, we have very little definite information about the heathen background of Old English culture. Though we can drawn analogies between what we know of Scandinavian heathendom and what we surmise of its Old English equivalent, the fact remains that the common origin of the two was was already far in the past by the time we find the Anglo-Saxons in England. Old English place names give some indication of pre-Christian activity associated with certain localities in Anglo-Saxon England, but tell us nothing of the larger patterns of attitude and belief which are of the most relevance for a study of the literature. That Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, even as we have it, is the product of a pagan heroic society and in social tone and general mood bears evidence of its origins, can hardly be disputed. But debate on the degree to which Beowulf, for example, has been modified by a relatively sophisticated Latin culture—not only by Christian sentiment but, as has been claimed, by a Virgilian tradition,—cannot be resolved without knowledge of more details than it seems likely we shall ever possess about primitive Anglo-Saxon beliefs. On the whole, it would seem likely that Beowulf and such other remains of early English heroic poetry as survive are closer to their pagan origins in mood and purpose than is sometimes believed.

Though there are difficulties in placing the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon poetry in its cultural context, we can take some comfort from the knowledge that what has survived of Anglo-Saxon poetry, fragmentary though it is and an arbitrary sample though it may be, is of earlier date than any extant poetry of the other Germanic literatures—of Old High German or Old Norse, for example. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry is the nearest we can get to the oral pagan literature of the Heroic Age of Germania. The stressed alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon poetry is clearly the product of an oral court minstrelsy; it was intended to be recited by the scop, the itinerant minstrel who frequented the halls of kings and chiefs and sometimes found continuous service with one master. One of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems, Widsith, is the autobiographical record of such a scop. The poem as we have it is probably not homogeneous—some of the lines seem to be later interpolations—but the core of the work finely reflects the heroic attitude to the bard's function and gives us a fascinating glimpse of the Germanic world as it appeared to the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons. The text we have of the poem is in the Exeter Book, and is thus tenth-century and in the West Saxon dialect; the poem—which must have been originally composed in Northumbria—dates from the late seventh or early eight century, though parts of it must be older even than that. Widsith, the "far wanderer," tells of his travels throughout the Germanic world and mentions the many rulers he has visited. Many of the characters he mentions figure in other poems—in Beowulf, for example, and in the fragmentary stories of Finn and Waldhere. The princes he claims to have visited cover virtually the whole Germanic world and their lifetimes extend over two hundred years. He was, he tells us, with Eormanric (the Gothic king who died about 370): "likewise I was in Italy with Ælfwine," he tells us elsewhere in the poem, and Ælfwine is Alboin, king of the Lombards, who died about 572 (and who is, incidentally, the latest character to be mentioned in any Germanic heroic poem). The poem thus cannot be true autobiography. It is, however, something much more interesting than that: it is a view of Germanic history and geography as it appeared to a Northumbrian bard of the seventh century drawing on the traditions of his people. What strikes us most forcibly is its catholicity: praise is meted out impartially to Huns, Goths, Burgundians, Franks, Danes, Swedes, Angles, Wends, Saxons, Langobards, and many others. "Ætla [Attila] ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths, Becca the Bannings, Gifica the Burgundians, . . . Theodric ruled the Franks, Thyle the Rondings, Breoca the Brondings, Billing the Wærnas. Oswine ruled the Eowan, and Gefwulf the Jutes, Fin Folcwalding the race of the Frisians.  . . . Offa ruled Angel, Alewih the Danes; he was the most courageous of all these men, but he did not excel Offa in his mighty deeds." We are given here a bird's eye view of the subject matter of Germanic heroic poetry; and we are reminded that the heroes of that poetry were not regional or national but common to all Germania.

Widsith may be primitive stuff as poetry—indeed, the first catalogue of rulers in the poem is cast in the form of a very early early type of genealogical verse and may well date from the beginning of the sixth century or even from before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain—but it is this very primitive quality which is of most interest. In its combination of historical memories and heroic traditions it shows us something of the historical foundations of heroic poetry and reminds us of the nature and extent of that wide world of Germania which the author of Beowulf was equally to take for granted as familiar to his audience and thus as suitable material for allusion and analogy. The whole world of barbarian wanderings and conquests—the world which collided with, in a sense destroyed, and in a sense was absorbed by, the Roman Empire—is here sketched out. And that world provides the orchestration, as it were, for Beowulf.

Beowulf holds a special position in Anglo-Saxon literature—indeed, in older Germanic literature as a whole—because it is the only complete extant epic of its kind in an ancient Germanic language. Nowhere else is a traditional theme handled in a long narrative poem against a background which reveals to us the culture and society of the Heroic Age of the Germanic peoples. Whether there were in fact other Anglo-Saxon epics, which have not survived, is a question which may well be debated forever; but the fact remains that Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, which was damaged by fire before it was ever studied or transcribed. If it is impossible to determine conclusively whether it was the Anglo-Saxon epic or simply an Anglo-Saxon epic (though it should be mentioned  that modern opinion inclines to the belief that it was the only poem of its kind composed in Anglo-Saxon times), it can at least be said that it is a poem technically impressive in its handling of narrative verse, remarkably successful in rendering that combination of heroic idealism and somber fatalism which seems to have been part of the Germanic temper, yet structurally weak and providing insufficient unity of tone or organization to hold together effectively the two central episodes and the many digressions which make up the whole. Though the ultimate origin of the story is folklore (working, as folklore does, on history), and behind the poem probably lies a variety of popular lays, the poem as we have it is generally agreed to be the work of a single author writing in the first half of the eighth century, though a powerful case has been made out for its having been composed orally by a heathen considerably earlier, with the Christian references (of which there are about seventy) representing later revision or interpolations. Future scholars may well return to this latter view.

Beowulf falls into two main parts. The first deals with the visit of Beowulf, nephew of King Hygelac of the Geats (the Geats probably occupied what is now southern Sweden), to the court of King Hrothgar of Denmark. The aging Hrothgar had long been plagued by a man-eating monster, Grendel, who came regularly to the king's great hall of Heorot to prey on his warriors, and it was to slay the monster that Beowulf came to Denmark. He fights with and mortally wounds Grendel in Heorot, and when Grendel's mother comes to take revenge for the death of her son he follows her to her underwater home and after a desperate struggle slays her too. Beowulf and his companions then leave for home, laden with honors and presents from the Danish king. The second part takes place fifty years later, when Beowulf has long been king of the Geats. A dragon, guarding a hoard of treasure, has been disturbed, and has been going out to wreak slaughter throughout the land. Beowulf, to save his country from the dragon's ravages, undertakes to fight it, and though he succeeds in slaying it he is himself mortally wounded in the struggle. The poem ends with an account of Beowulf's funeral: his body is burned on an elaborate funeral pyre, amid the lamentations of his warriors.

There are historical elements in Beowulf, though they are seen through the folk memory and the folk imagination, in combination with a variety of marvelous legends. There are also onumerous digressions and allusions which make it clear that the author is taking for granted among his readers (or auditors) knowledge of a whole body of stories concerning Germanic heroes. In the feast of Heorot celebrating Beowulf's victory over Grendel we are told how the minstrel recited the story of Hnæf's death at the hands of the sons of Finn and the subsequent vengeance taken on Finn by the Danes, whose leader Hnæf had been. Part of the minstrel's recital is given at considerable length in Beowulf, but it can have had little meaning to anyone without a knowledge of the whole story. We can in some degree reconstruct the sequence of events with the help of a fragmentary Anglo-Saxon lay, The Fight at Finnsburh, which appears to deal with other events in the same story, told on a different scale. Other stories are referred to in Beowulf more casually, and part of its interest lies in the thread of Germanic story that runs, through allusions, analogies, and references, through the poem. Though it is an Anglo-Saxon poem, composed in England, it harks back to the period of Germanic history before the Anglo-Saxon invasion and shows no bias toward English heroes. Geats, Danes, and Swedes occupy the foreground of the narrative, and emerging briefly from the background are a number of figures whom we also meet in Scandinavian tradition and in the poetry and legends of a variety of Teutonic peoples.

On the surface, Beowulf is a heroic poem, celebrating the exploits of a great warrior whose character and actions are held up as a model of aristocratic virtue. It reflects the ideals of that state of society we call the Heroic Age, and its resemblance to the Odyssey in this respect has often been noted. The grave courtesy with which men of rank are received and dismissed, the generosity of rulers and the loyalty of retainers, the thirst for fame through the achievement of deeds of courage and endurance, the solemn boasting of warriors before and after performance, the interest in genealogies and pride in a noble heredity—all these things are to be found in both poems. But Beowulf is also a record of marvels rather different in kind from those encountered by Ulysses in his adventures, and, further, its Anglo-Saxon gravity is reinforced by the introduction of Christian elements which do not, however, seriously weaken the pagan atmosphere of the poem, for they are concerned with large elemental facts such as God's creation and governance of the world and such Old Testament stories as that of Cain's murder of Abel. If the general atmosphere of Beowulf can be called seriously pagan, with the seriousness deepened and the pagan heroic ideal enlarged by Christian elements, it is certainly not uncivilized, though the civilization it reflects is primitive enough. There is a genuine ideal of nobility underlying its adventure stories.

It is the splendid gravity of the poem that falls more impressively on modern ears. Sometimes in a single line the poem conveys atmosphere and mood to perfection. We are given an acount of Beowulf's reception at Heorot, and his confident words before his warriors lay themselves down to sleep. Then:

                           Com on warne niht
scrið (3) an sceadu-3en3a.   Sceotend swaefon,
þa þæt horn-reced         healdan scoldon,
ealle buton anum. . . .
    Ða com of more   under mist-hleoþum
3rendel 3on3an, 3odes yrre bær. . . .
                  
                            Came on the dark night
gliding, the shadowy prowler. The warriors slept
who were to hold the antlered hall,
all but one. . . .
    Then from the moor under the misty cliffs
came Grendel marching, he bore God's anger.

The tone is not uniform, but the poem is at its most effective in its moments of slow terror or suspense, and in its more elegiac moods. It has neither the larger epic conception of the Odyssey nor the fine polish of a "secondary" epic such as the Aeneid. But it is an impressive, if uneven, performance, carrying us successfully into the Anglo-Saxon heroic imagination, with its emphasis on solemn courtesy, generosity, fidelity, and sheer endurance. And underlying all is the sense of the shortness of life and the passing away of all things except the fame a man leaves behind.

There is little else surviving of Anglo-Saxon literature which makes direct contact with the older heroic view of life. Deor, an interesting poem of forty-two lines, is the complaint of a minstrel who, after years of service to his lord, has been supplanted by a rival, Heorrenda. He comforts himself by recounting the trials of Germanic heroes, all of which were eventually overcome. After each reference to the troubles of some famous character there occurs the refrain

Þæs ofereode,     þisses swa mæg.
That was surmounted; so may this be

                     
We get fascinating glimpses of figures famous in Germanic legend—Weland the smith, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Eormanric the Goth, and others—and of the troubles they suffered or caused; but the main interest of the poem lies in its combination of this kind of subject matter with a personal, elegiac note, not common in Anglo-Saxon poetry, though found even more intensely in The Wanderer and The Seafarer, to be discussed later.









Notes

(1) These are: (1) MS Cotton Vitellius A XV in the British Museum, which contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose works. (2) The Junius Manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Bodleian Junius 11), which contains Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. (3). The Exeter Book, given by Bishop Leofric to Exeter Cathedral, containing Christ, Juliana, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Widsith, Deor, and many other short pieces. (4). The Vercelli Book, preserved in the cathedral library at Vercelli, in northern Italy, which contains Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Address of the Soul to the Body, The Dream of the Rood, and Elene.

(2) Not 664, as is traditionally held. Bede dates it 664, but he begins his year in September, and as the Synod can be shown to have been held in late September or early October, this would mean 663 in our dating.

(3) ð, like þ, has the sound of "th". Ð is the capital form of ð.



_______

Michael Wood, In Search of Beowulf. A BBC documentary: 

—oOo—

Some additional materials:



"Beowulf the Legendary Geatish Hero" (History Channel - Clash of the Gods series).
 

 
In Search of the Dark Ages. Michael Wood documentary video series.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOXjuzxIKcom1QRkE0y62DyEt_4jkKw4
 

The Wanderer  

—oOo—

Grado en Lenguas Modernas