OLD ENGLISH

LITERATURE
LITERARY BACKGROUND

Introduction:

The Anglo-Saxon or Old English period goes from the invasion of Celtic
England by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the first half of the fifth century up till the
conquest in 1066 by William of Normandy.
Many Anglo-Saxon poems, in the form they are extant, were not written down until
perhaps two and one-half centuries after their compositions, since scribal effort had
been spent on Latin, the new language of culture. This was possible thanks to the
further development of the programs of King Alfred in the late tenth century and the
Benedictine Revival of the early eleventh century. After their conversion to
Christianity in the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons began to develop a written
literature; before that period it had been oral. The Church and the Benedictine
monastic foundations and their Latin culture played an important part in the
development of Anglo-Saxon England cultural life, literacy and learning. No poetry
surely pre-Christian in composition survives. The survival of poetry was due to the
Church: it was the result of the tenth-century monastic revival. The Benedictine
Revival was the crowning of a process that had begun in the sixth century and had
produced a large body of English prose by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Anglo-Saxon England is thought to have been rich in poetry, but very little of it
survives. Most of the available corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, little more than
30,000 lines in all, survives in just four manuscript books.

From the Anglo-Saxon period dates what is known as Old English literature,
composed in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon. It includes early national poetry: Pagan
Epic Poetry and Pagan Elegies, Old English Christian Poetry, Latin Writings and Old
English Prose.

1. Pagan Epic Poetry.

BEOWULF is the chief Anglo-Saxon epic poem. It is wholly mysterious. No one

knows who wrote it, or when, or where, or why. Beowulf is a narrative poem of 3,182
lines, transmitted in a manuscript written between the tenth and the twelfth centuries,
but much older. To some it is the symbol of the antiquity and continuity of English
poetry. But it never mentions people who are known to have lived in Britain. All its
allusions are Continental or Scandinavian. Apart from Beowulf, the only surviving
remains of early national epic poetry are a fragment, Deor's Lament, The
Finnesburgh Fragment, (50 lines), and two short fragments (63 lines together)
of Waldere, The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh.
2. Pagan Lyrical and Elegiac Poems.

There is little else surviving of Anglo-Saxon literature which makes direct contact
with the older heroic view. Deor's Lament, 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. But the main interest of the poem lies
in its combination of this kind of subject matter with a personal, elegiac note.
Together with Deor's Lament, there are other Anglo-Saxon elegies: The
Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, The Husband's
Message, Wulf, and The Ruin
Elegies is no more than a label of convenience applied to a small group of poems not
unlike each other in theme and tone. In Saxon poetry, the lyric mood is always the
elegiac. The so-called elegies are poems where the topic itself is loss: loss of a lord,
loss of a loved one, the loss of fine buildings fallen into decay.

READING:

THE ELEGIAC MOOD

The elegiac mood wells up, then, in a great number of Old English poems. But the six
so-called Elegies are poems where the topic itself is loss - loss of a lord, loss of a
loved one, the loss of fine buildings fallen into decay. They are all to be found in the
Exeter Book, a manuscript now in Exeter Cathedral Library.
At the heart of Anglo-Saxon society laid two key relationships. The first was that
between a lord and his retainers, one of the hallmarks of any heroic society, which
guaranteed the lord military and agricultural service and guaranteed the retainer
protection and land. The second was the relationship, as it is today, between any man
and his loved one, and the family surrounding them. So one of the most unfortunate
members of this world (as for any) was the exile, the man who because of his own
weakness (cowardice, for example) or through no fault of his own, was sentenced to
live out his days wandering from place to place, or anchored in some alien place, far
from the comforts of home. This is the situation underlying four of the elegies.

(Taken from:Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World. An

Anthology,Oxford University Press,1984.)

I. RELIGIOUS POETRY
3. Old English Christian Poetry.

Religious poetry seems to have flourished in northern England-Northumbria-

throughout the eighth century, though most of it has survived only in West Saxon
transcriptions of the late tenth century. Monks produced not only manuscripts,
masonry, sculpture and missionaries but also a lot of Christian poetry. Much of it
consists of retellings of books and episodes from the Old Testament. Much of this
religious poetry is anonymous, but the names of two poets are known: CAEDMON(d.
c. 670), the first English poet known by name, and CYNEWULF(late eighth or early
ninth century). They wrote on biblical and religious themes. According to Bede
Caedmon became the founder of a school of Christian poetry and the he was the first
to use the traditional metre diction for Christian religious poetry. This period of Old
English poetry is called "Caedmonian". All the old religious poems that were not
assigned to Caedmon were invariably given to Cynewulf, the poet of the second phase
of Old English Christian poetry. With Cynewulf, Anglo-Saxon religious poetry moves
beyond biblical paraphrase into the didactic, the devotional, and the mystical. The
four Anglo-Saxon Christian poems which have the name of Cynewulf are Christ,
Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles. All these poems possess both a high
degree of literary craftsmanship and a note of mystical contemplation which
sometimes rises to a high level of religious passion. One of the most remarkable
poems written under the influence of the school of Cynewulf is The Dream of the
Rood,by some it is attributed to the same Cynewulf, Andreas, and The Phoenix.
Another significant Anglo-Saxon religious poem is the fragmentary Judith. The final
part of Guthlac, a poem of 1370 lies, is probably Cynewulf's.

4.Latin Writings: Bede and Alcuin.

The most important Anglo-Saxon Latinist Clerks were the Venerable Bede (673-735)
and Alcuin (735-804); both came out of Northumbria. To them and to those like them
English Literature owes the preservation of the traces of primitive poetry.
The Venerable Bede tells us that he was born in 673 and brought up in Wearmouth
Abbey. A few years later he moved to the monastery of Jarrow where he spent his
whole adult life. He was the most learned theologian and the best historian of
Christianity of his time. He was a teacher and a scholar of Latin and Greek, and he
had many pupils among the monks of Wearmouth and Jarrow. He wrote the Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum"(Ecclesiastical History of the English People) and
finished in 731. By that year he had written nearly 40 works, mostly biblical
commentaries. Bede died in 735.
Alcuin was Charlemagne's collaborator from 790 onwards. He was brought up in
York Alcuin left his country when the earliest civilization of the Angles was about to
be destroyed, because the Danish invasions, which ruined monasteries and centres of
learning, were beginning. He wrote liturgical, grammatical, hagiographical, and
philosophical works, as well as numerous letters and poems in Latin, including an
elegy on the Destruction of Lindsfarne by the Danes.

"I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SING"

Bede's History is the first account of Anglo-Saxon England ever written. Bede was a
monk of Jarrow who worked on this book for several years before completing it in
731. Over the next fifty years it was copied in Northumbria and elsewhere, and it
became widely diffused in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. It was first
printed in 1480. The History is readable and attractive. He writes of the geography of
Britain, the coming of Augustine, the Northumbrian council concerned with the
acceptance of Christianity or the achievements of Abbess Hilda and the poet
Caedmon. The following extract tells the story of how Caedmon discovered he
possessed God's gift for poetry. [A. D. 680].
In this monastery of Streanaeshalch lived a brother singularly gifted by God's grace.
So skilful was he in composing religious and devotional songs that, when any passage
of Scripture was explained to him by interpreters, he could quickly turn it into
delightful and moving poetry in his own English tongue. These verses of his have
stirred the hearts of many folk to despise the world and aspire to heavenly things.
Others after him tried to compose religious poems in English, but none could compare
with him; for he did not acquire the art of poetry from men or through any human
teacher but received it as a free gift from God. For this reason he could never compose
any frivolous or profane verses; but only such as had a religious theme fell fittingly
from his devout lips. He had followed a secular occupation until well advanced in
years without ever learning anything about poetry. Indeed it sometimes happened at a
feast that all the guests in turn would be invited to sing and entertain the company;
then, when he saw the harp coming his way, he would get up from table and go home.
On one such occasion he had left the house in which the entertainment was being held
and went out to the stable where it was his duty that night to look after the beasts.
There when the time came he settled down to sleep. Suddenly in a dream he saw a
man standing beside him who called him by name. "Caedmon", he said, "sing me a
song." "I don't know how to sing," he replied." "It is because I cannot sing that I left
the feast and came here." "What should I sing about?" he replied. "Sing about the
Creation of all things," the other answered. And Caedmon immediately began to sing
verses in praise of God the Creator that he had never heard before[...] When Caedmon
awoke, he remembered everything that he had sung in his dream, and soon added
more verses in the same style to a song truly worthy of God.

(Taken from: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People , Chapter 24,

Translated by Leo Sherley. Price, Penguin Books, 1990.

EXERCISE

1. Read the extract from Bede's History and write a summary of the story of
Caedmon. Paraphrase Caedmon's Dialogue with the man he saw in his vision and use
reporting verbs in the past tenses.