Download Anglo-Saxon Literature

NBB AN128 K1 History of English Literature 1
DP
Lecture 2
(2) Anglo-Saxon Literature – Pagan and/or Christian
ca. 449-1066: Anglo-Saxon Period /Old English/. Invasion of Britain by related tribes of
Germanic people – Angles, Saxons, Jutes; pagan and illiterate people, oral culture.
Christianity from the 7th century on, literacy in Latin and in the vernacular, restricted mainly
to servants of the church
Anglo-Saxon Literature: from about the 8th century onwards; perhaps the richest literary
heritage of early medieval Europe
Heroic poetry, religious poetry, prose. Four manuscripts – MS Cotton Vitellius /British
Museum/, Junius Manuscript /Bodleian, Oxford/, Exeter Book /Exeter Cathedral/, Vercelli
Manuscript /Italy/
Reflecting a predominantly harsh world. Main themes: feasting in the mead hall – thinking
of wars, of possible triumph and of more possible failure; the motif of romantic love is totally
missing; praising the glory of God and His champions, lamenting the pain and sorrow of this
world
Style: special vocabulary – synonyms for lord, warrior, spear, shield etc., synecdoche and
metonymy, kenning, irony, negatives, indirection /by apposition/. Alliterative verse – lines of
four stresses and varying number of unstressed syllables, divided into two half-lines of two
stresses by a marked caesura, linked by alliteration of stressed words. Oral origin, the scop,
recorded in writing only later by scribes
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‘Bid man of battle build me a tomb
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fair after fire, on the foreland by the sea
Heroic poetry: closest connection with the Germanic origin of the invaders. Subject matter is
drawn from earlier times, often from the common stock of Germanic heroes. The Germanic
heroic society shows resemblances to the Hellenic world of Homer – nations are seen as
groups of people related by kinship, the tribe is ruled by a chieftain called king, the king leads
his men in battle, rewarding them afterwards, in return the retainers fight for him to the death,
if the lord is slain, avenging him or dying in the attempt; blood vengeance, everlasting shame
for those neglecting it. This society was already distant from Christian Anglo-Saxon England,
and it was difficult to reconcile with Christianity; nevertheless, the Christian poets and scribes
were still fascinated with their pagan ancestors. → Accommodation – preserving aspects not
opposing the Christian ideal, omitting conflicting elements. Cf. ‘The Seafarer’ – result of
good deeds can be good reputation after death (pagan reward) but also attainment of heavenly
glory when the deeds are directed against the devil (Christian)
Beowulf: a/the Germanic epic. The beginning of English literature. Epic, myth, folk tale,
magic, human history, pagan and Christian elements; the frame: reconciliation of pagan and
Christian. Beowulf as English literature – composed in England though the story and the
character are taken from the common stock of Germanic heroes (‘The Fight at Finn’s
Borough’ – a fragmentary account of events also mentioned in Beowulf, events the knowledge
of which was taken for granted by the scop)
‘The Battle of Maldon’: the last great work. Byrthnoth, alderman of the East Saxons,
heroically opposes Viking invaders. The motif of the ‘battle’ is employed as the vehicle for
the presentation of the universal themes of responsibility and loyalty
The elegies: a group of poems employing the heroic tone yet demonstrating a keen awareness
of the transitory nature of this world. ‘The Wanderer’ (seeking a new protector after the death
of the former one), ‘The Seafarer’ (life on the northern seas, fascination and harshness), The
NBB AN128 K1 History of English Literature 1.
DP
Lecture 2
2
Ruin (a ruined city, desolation and decay set against the earlier prosperity of the place,
fatalistic mood – the reverse of the heroic)
Religious poetry: by the 8th century techniques of AS heroic poetry applied to purely
Christian themes, consequently much of it cast in the heroic mood – Anglo-Saxons adapting
themselves to the ideals of Christianity and adapting Christianity to their own heroic ideal.
Examples of such reinterpretations: Christ as a “young hero” (‘The Dream of the Rood’), God
as ‘mankind’s Guardian’ (Caedmon’s ‘Hymn’), St Helena as “battle-queen” (’Elene’). The
significance of religious poetry: it provides a new development in English literature – turning
away from old Germania, turning towards Latin Christianity – Christian Europe and its
connections with classical Greco-Roman world, biblical stories connecting them with the
Hebrew imagination. Caedmon (8th century) and Cynewulf (9th century; first English poet to
sign his work). ‘Hymn’: the story of Creation. ‘Christ and Satan’: Caedmon’s school; a
variety of Christian traditions, representing Satan not as a defiant spirit but as a lost soul
lamenting his exclusion from the eternal joys of Heaven; didactic function – difference
between Heaven and Hell, between the results of following Christ or Satan. ‘The Phoenix’:
Cynewulf’s school; the fabulous bird treated as an allegory of the life of the virtuous in this
world and in the next, the image of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection
Caedmon’s ‘Hymn’
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 roof, the Holy Shaper;
Then Middle Earth did Mankind’s Keeper,
The Eternal Lord, afterward ordain,
The earth of men, the Almighty Lord.
Anglo-Saxon prose: King Alfred: ‘father of English prose’ – yet prose works even before his
time. Before: Bede /The Venerable Bede/: An Ecclesiastical History of the English People –
the history of England after the arrival of St. Augustine in 597; the idea of history as a moral
pattern shaped by the hand of God. Alfred: realising the importance of vernacular
translations, fascination with literature (recounted by Bishop Asser, his Welsh biographer and
friend in his Life of King Alfred). King Alfred himself doing translations /Boethius: De
Consolatione Philosophiae, Augustine: Soliloquies/, ordering the beginnings of The AngloSaxon Chronicle