Anglo-Saxon Prose (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

(from Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature; London: Dent, 1937)

Origins. (12. Anglo-Saxon Prose. Alfred, Aelfric, Wulfstan). (1)

The breach between Anglo-Saxon and English poetry is everywhere apparent, and to pass from Cynewulf to Chaucer is to bridge a deep gulf. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is deliberately archaic. In order to produce a desired emotional state in its hearers, it reverts to traditional turns of expression, to words almost consecrated, as religion works its effects by the constantly recurring use of an ancient liturgy. This poetry is modelled on an earlier age of which the remoteness cannot now be determined. It retains many periphrases and locutions already obsolete, imitates and systematizes the disorder of primitive lyrical construction. The poetic form tends towards the past.

On the other hand, the tendency of the prose is towards observance of the rules of ordinary speech, unless it copies the Latin prose of the clerks. Its object is to instruct and inform, not to move, and since it thus educates the understanding, it necessarily turns to the future. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the prose writings of the Anglo-Saxons, which are much less curious than their poetry, are also much nearer ourselves. No revolution seems to separate Alfred's pages from those of Caxton, Aelfric's from Wyclif's. There is a change but no break. National and linguistic continuity is felt to exist; there almost seems to be a continuity in the thought as it is framed in much the same mould as now. While an Englishman has to make a quite considerable effort in order to read the verse of the Anglo-Saxons, he finds it comparatively easy to understand their prose.

If such facility be not marked in the oldest prose literature, this is because it is either of earlier compilation than any of the poetry extant—like the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, which were promulgated at the end of the seventh century, although our transcription dates only from the time of Alfred—or because some of this prose is more than half poetry and seems to be fragments of old epic tales. This character belongs to many passages of the chronicle usually attributed to the influence of King Alfred, of which we have distinct versions written by the religious of different monasteries, those of Winchester, Canterbury, Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough, the last-named having continued its narrative to the middle of the twelfth century. In this chronicle several references to early times, brief but impressively vehement, are pagan in feeling and emphasis and seem to date from the pre-Christian period. Even in the references to the eighth century there are a suddenness and a roughness in the narrative which betray that mental and grammatical habits were still empirical. It is continually necessary to complete the ellipses and to relate the pronouns to their proper subjects, as with a story told by a small child. For instance, the chronicler relates, as follows, the beginning of the struggle between Cynewulf and Sebright in 755:

This year Cynewulf took from Sebright his kingdom, and the councillors of the West Saxon [did as much], for unrighteous deeds, except Hamptonshire, and he [that is, Sebright] reigned there [that is, in Hampshire] until he slew the alderman who stayed longest with him. Then Cynewulf drove him to the forest of Andred, where he remained until a swain stabbed him at Privett, and he [that is, the swain] revenged the alderman Cambra.

The alderman is not named until he is mentioned for the second time.

This formless prose was succeeded at the end of the ninth century by a regular prose possessed of nearly all its essential parts. Since it is modelled on Latin texts, which are almost literally translated, it is very near English prose, as that was fixed, and also near French prose which was formed under the same masters.

Alfred, the glorious king of Wessex, was the pioneer of the prose-writers. The exclusively poetic or Latin literature which had hitherto flourished had emanated principally from the north-east, the country of the Angles, or from central Mercia. About 800, the supremacy was passing to the south-west, and the king of Wessex was tending toward the sovereignty of all the Germanic groups settled in the island. But the Danish invasions supervened, and with them the destruction of the centres of religion and letters. In the year 878 it seemed as though nothing would escape the invaders. It was then that the young King Alfred withdrew to Athelney in Somerset, formed there a nucleus of resistance, defeated the Danes, and won from them a treaty which left him the south of England while they remained masters of the old country of the Angles and northern Mercia.

After his victory, Alfred set himself to retrieve his country from the barbarism to which it had relapsed. A decadent and demoralized clergy had sunk into depths of ignorance. Alfred did for Wessex what Charlemagne, a hundred years earlier, had done for the country of the Franks: he endeavoured to teach the people, and to re-establish Christian discipline and culture, and to this end he brought foreign monks into his kingdom and reformed education. It was under his influence that the earlier poetic works, which had almost all been written in the Northumbrian dialect, were transcribed into the language of the West Saxons.

The part which the king himself took in this literary movement was considerable. His early education had been much neglected, and he had to learn before he could teach. He surrounded himself with scholars and learned men, learnt Latin after he was grown up, for Saxon had been the only language of his childhood, and had no sooner learnt it than he began to translate the works which seemed to him most apt to civilize his people. It was thus that he became the father of English prose-writers.

Whether in the works he inspired or in those he himself produced, an effort is apparent to regularize the old elliptical, abrupt style, with its obscurity and lack of continuity. Thus the Annals or Chronicles of Winchester, Alfred's capital town, were amplified and given smoothness until they are almost a continuous story, in which, for instance, the history of the king's war against the Danes can be read without any irritating difficulty in following the text.

Alfred himself is credited with a translation of the Universal History of Orosius, the compilation which made antiquity known to the Middle Ages. The task was difficult, for Orosius, a Spanish historian and theologian of the fifth century, writes an obscure, tortured Latin. Sometimes Alfred, as he himself says, translates 'word by word, sometimes meaning by meaning.' Although the literal translation had the most formative influence on prose, it is naturally the free version which most attracts us. Its very weaknesses are characteristic. Alfred, who does not know Latin very well and who has acquired no historical sense, aims at producing a work of pedagogy. The result is that he is often very inexact, and that, as he diverges from his author, he attains to a certain originality. While he deletes what seems to him of little use to his subjects, he also makes additions, especially in the geographical section. One of the stories he adds, that of Ohthere's sail along the shores of Scandinavia, is so simple and elementary in style that its vocabulary differs only slightly from modern English. The conclusion is that the spoken language was almost fixed.

Of Alfred's other translations, either made or ordered by him—Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Angles, the Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great, and the Consolation of Boethius (2)—it is the Boethius which is the most interesting. His choice of this book, which was again translated by Chaucer, is characteristic. Boethius has reproduced the Platonic and Stoic doctrines, coloured by Christianity and at their highest moral level—the distinction between true and false happiness, the lofty discussions on the existence of evil, on human liberty, and on divine prescience. He gives these abstractions a dramatic frame. Philosophy herself appears to him in his prison, and drives away the Muses, those prostitutes who were vainly seeking to console him. Thus he makes use of allegory, and although his style is not always pure and is often mannered, it is full of life and movement. His book could not but suffer gravely when it was translated by Alfred, who mistakes the meaning fairly frequently and is incapable of conveying the fine shades. When he renders the metrical passages, which have a classic elegance, his limitations obtrude themselves. But in nobility of sentiment he is the equal of the Latin author. He explains, as follows, his reasons for undertaking this arduous task:

As I have desired material for the exercise of my faculties that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if wisdom be not in them. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.

This king's literary work was, like his political work, interrupted for almost a century after his death in 901. The sketchy civilization of Wessex was once more scattered to the winds, and the clerks relapsed into ignorance and inertia. They were gradually redeemed thence, during the tenth century, by a reform of the monasteries which was inspired by the similar movement accomplished in France under the influence of the Benedictines. Religious houses were founded and organized in England, on the model of the abbeys of Cluny and Fleury, in which a strict rule enjoined intellectual work. This innovation was led by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his friend Aethelwold, 'the father of the monks.' Secular priests, not bound to celibacy, then abounded in the monasteries. They retained something of the patriarchal constitution which the Church of Ireland had originally given to their communities, and therewith very disorderly morals, much laziness, and gross superstition. The fact is proved by the so-called Blickling Homilies, a medley of canonical and uncanonical legends which swarm with strange arguments and allusions. It is to works of this kind that Aelfric alludes when he says: 'I have seen and heard many heresies in many an English book which unlearned men, in their simplicity, took for great wisdom.' Stories of the saints, replete with the marvellous, and the obsession that the end of the world was at hand, take up most space in this collection.

It was at this time that the strict rule of Saint Benedict was introduced. Morals once more became austere. The lives of the saints did indeed remain the principal subject of study and the marvellous continued to fill a large place in them, but the stories, as compared with their predecessors, were pure and even reasonable. Two men who with Alfred are the best writers of Anglo-Saxon prose are connected with this reform, Aelfric and Wulfstan.

Aelfric was a pupil of the monastic school which Aethelwold founded at Abingdon, and he wrote in the first years of the eleventh century. We owe to him a Colloquium for teaching Latin by conversation, and a vocabulary which was the first Latin-English dictionary. But he made his name by his Homilies, that is, his compilations and translations from the Fathers of the Church which form two series of forty sermons each, and commemorate the various saints venerated by the Anglo-Saxon Church.

Aelfric's prose, unlike that of Alfred, is written not to be read but to be spoken to the people, in the conventional tone of a priest delivering a sermon. It has therefore a rhythm which brings it near to verse: its sentences are divided into sections, more or less equivalent to the metrical line, and it is frequently alliterative. For this reason scholars were long uncertain whether to classify it as verse or prose. It celebrates the saints, as the scops once sang the deeds of warriors. This poetic prose marks a great advance on that of Alfred. It aims at beauty, measure and harmony. It is remarkably clear and finished. There is much less awkwardness and effort in the connection of phrases than in Alfred's writings. In fact, the author is consciously literate, even when he is using the vulgar tongue, and he excuses himself, with some shame, for the popular character of his translation of the Latin homilies, pleading the ignorance of his fellow-countrymen.

Wulfstan, who was Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, was first of all a preacher. The most remarkable of his homilies dates from 1012, the time when the English were suffering the ills of the Danish invasions. With deep feeling the homilist deplores the irreligion and immorality of his people to which he attributes their misfortunes, and he proclaims the near advent of the great chastiser, the Antichrist. Wulfstan is less of a finished artist than Aelfric, but the popular emphasis of his language gives it rich color and lively tones.

After Wulfstan all was over: the Antichrist came indeed. The Danes became masters of the country, and then, after a short interval of independence, the Anglo-Saxons were brought under the Norman yoke. Such prose writings as we have prove, however, that, even without the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose would have taken shape, modelling itself on Latin, and, with the exception of part of its vocabulary, would have become much what it was when in the fourteenth century it regained a place in literature.

It was poetry which was principally affected by the Conquest. The poetic form had outlived its time and had little life left in it. It was conventional and was getting further and further away from the real language of the people. It was fated to be abolished and superseded. The aesthetic ideal was to undergo a change, or rather a revolution. England was to learn to love verse of another kind, other cadences and new subjects. All the rich ornament which profusely decorated verse with a pomp still half barbaric was to go out of fashion. Poets were to shed their periphrases and ejaculations, and gradually to learn sobriety of style and an art almost unknown to them, that of stating facts clearly, grouping them, and inventing stories.




Notes

(1) Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, edited by C. W. M. Grein, R. P. Wülker, and H. Hecht, Leipzig and Hamburg, 1872 et seq. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, edited by J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (Oxford and Cambridge, 1858); Stopford Brooke, King Alfred as Educator of his People and Man of Letters (1901); H. Sweet, Selections from Aelfric's Homilies (Oxford, 1896); A. Napier, Wulfstan's Homilies (Berlin, 1883); B. Thorpe, Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vols. (Aelfric Society, 1844-6); C. L. White, Aelfric, a New Study of his Life and Writings (Yale Studies in English, 1898).

(2) King Alfred, Old English Version of Boethius, ed. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899).

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