Anglo-Saxon poetry

“ But Anglo-Saxon poetry was impossible without a poetical dictionary. It is very heavily ornamented with words not used in prose, and while there are hardly any similes, the whole tissue of it is figurative, and most things are named two or three times over in different terms. This makes it often very tiresome, when the meaning is so encrusted with splendid words that it can scarcely move; still more, when a poet does not take the trouble to invent his ornaments, and only repeats conventional phrases out of a vocabulary which he has learned by rote. ”

“ This is true at least of the earlier poetry, and the note is rarely absent even in the Christian lyrics. A more cheerful strain is sometimes heard, as in the 'Riddles,' but it is rather the exception; and any alleged humor is scarcely more than a suspicion. Love and sentiment, in the modern sense, are not made the subject of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and this must mean that they did not enter into the Anglo-Saxon life with the same intensity as into modern life. The absence of this beautiful motive has, to some degree, its compensation in the exceeding moral purity of the whole literature. ”

“ Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe; and it is a consequence of this that its relations with Latin literature have been the closest. All the vernacular literatures have been influenced by the Latin, but of Anglo-Saxon literature alone can it be said that it has been subjected to no other influence. This literature was nursed by, and gradually rose out of, Latin culture; and this is true not only of those portions which were translated or otherwise borrowed from the Latin, but also in some degree even of the native elements of poetry and laws. ”

“ When the Saxons once turned their attention to letters, none of the barbarous nations excelled them—the progress made during the reign of Alfred, we again repeat, is marvellous.
Nothing can be more primitive than our Anglo-Saxon poetry. Every line bears the stamp of originality. The praise of brave warriors is ever the subject. ”

“ The difficulties of translating Anglo-Saxon poetry are well known; the attempt to translate the Anglo-Saxon riddles faces several peculiar difficulties. The text is in many places corrupt, and while excellent scholars have worked it over they are often at variance even as to the literal meaning and they have sometimes emended in the interest of a favored solution. The words themselves can be deceptive. ”

“ In Anglo-Saxon poetry we meet a strong man who cherishes his own ideals of honor, in Norman-French poetry a youth eagerly interested in romantic tales gathered from all the world. One represents life as a profound mystery, the other as a happy adventure. ”

“ The two forms of the English language, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and the two periods of medieval English literature, correspond to the two historical periods of which one ends and the other begins about 1100, at the date of the First Crusade. Anglo-Saxon literature belongs to the older world; Anglo-Saxon poetry goes back to very early times and keeps a tradition which had come down from ancient days when the English were still a Continental German tribe. ”

“ THE ANGLO-SAXON VERSE-FORM. The poetic form of 'Béowulf' is that of virtually all Anglo-Saxon poetry down to the tenth century, or indeed to the end, a form which is roughly represented in the present book in a passage of imitative translation two pages below. The verse is unrimed, not arranged in stanzas, and with lines more commonly end-stopped (with distinct pauses at the ends) than is true in good modern poetry. Each line is divided into halves and each half contains two stressed syllables, generally long in quantity. ”

“ The fragments of old poetry enable us to understand the poetic genius of our remote ancestors as it was before they had wholly adopted Christianity, or come under Latin, French, and Norman influences. From the descendants of the Britons whom they had conquered, or who survived as their Welsh neighbours, they seem, at this time, to have borrowed little or nothing in the way of song or story.
Before beginning to try to understand the Anglo-Saxon literature, we ought to set before our minds two or three considerations. ”

“ It was the other great factor of European literature. It had begun to be cultivated later than the Saxon, but then it had ages of culture at its back. The strength of this language was in its poetry—just the element which had stagnated in England. The French taught not only the English but all Europe in poetry. All modern European poetry is after the French model. ”

“ The language is a difficulty. The older English books are written in the language which is commonly called Anglo-Saxon; this is certainly not one of the most difficult, but no language is really easy to learn. Anglo-Saxon poetry, besides, has a peculiar vocabulary and strange forms of expression. The poetical books are not to be read without a great deal of application; they cannot be rushed. ”

“ The pathos of the later Middle Ages is expressed in a different way from the Wanderer and the Ruin. The later religious poetry has little in it to recall the finished art of Cynewulf. Anglo-Saxon poetry, whether derived from heathendom or from the Church, has ideas and manners of its own; it comes to perfection, and then it dies away. The gravity and thought of the heroic poetry, as well as the finer work of the religious poets, are unlike the strength, unlike the graces, of the later time. ”

“ Since we left the primary poetry we have been on the track of a literature whose spring was in book-learning. A foreign erudition had thrown the lore of the native minstrel into the shade. But some relics of domestic material reappear with the new gush of popular song in the 13th century. Among the mass of stories which fill that time, we find here and there an old English tale, and sometimes it is a translation back from the French. The romance of King Horn is one of these. The names of the personages, and the general course of the plot—the Saracens notwithstanding—are essentially Saxon. ”

“ Compare India and England in the Elizabethan period. What a dark age it was for your people, and how enlightened we were even then. The Anglo-Saxon people have always been badly fitted for art. They have good poetry — for instance, how wonderful is the blank verse of Shakespeare! Merely the rhyming of words is not good. It is not the most civilised thing in the world. ”

“ With the prose it is rather different. The prose [17] translations due to King Alfred are preserved; so is the English Chronicle; so are a fair number of religious works, the homilies of Ælfric and others; it does not seem likely from what we know of the conditions of authorship in those times that any prose work of any notable or original value has disappeared. With the poetry, on the other hand, every fresh discovery—like that of the bookbinding fragments already mentioned—makes one feel that the extent of Anglo-Saxon poetry is unknown. ”

“ Accent, alliteration, and an abrupt break in the middle of each line gave their poetry a kind of martial rhythm. In general the poetry is earnest and somber, and pervaded by fatalism and religious feeling. A careful reading of the few remaining fragments of Anglo-Saxon literature reveals five striking characteristics: the love of freedom; responsiveness to nature, especially in her sterner moods; strong religious convictions, and a belief in Wyrd, or Fate; reverence for womanhood ”

“ All national literature everywhere begins with rude songs. From the earliest period at which the English and Saxon people existed as separate tribes at all, we may be sure that they possessed battle-songs, like those common to the whole Aryan stock. But among the Teutonic races poetry was not distinguished by either of the peculiarities—rime or metre—which mark off modern verse from prose, so far as its external form is concerned. Our existing English system of versification is not derived from our old native poetry at all ”

“ There is hardly anything in Anglo-Saxon to be called lyrical. The epic poetry may have grown out of an older lyric type—a song in chorus, with narrative stuff in it, like the later choral ballads. There is one old poem, and a very remarkable one, with a refrain, Deor’s Lament, which may be called a dramatic lyric, the utterance of an imaginary personage, a poet like Widsith, who comforts himself in his sorrow by recalling examples of old distresses. ”

“ While plenty of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry survives, of poetry derived from the heathen times of the Anglo-Saxons there is comparatively little, and much of it has been more or less re-written, and affected by later changes and additions, in early Christian times. ”

“ Our poetry and our ordinary language is tinged with heathen ideas even in modern times.
Still more interesting, however, are those relics of yet earlier social states, which we find amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The production of fire by rubbing together two sticks is a common practice amongst all savages ”

“ It is scarcely open to doubt that a large amount of Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry has perished. Several historical poems and ballads of the tenth and eleventh centuries, now lost, can be traced in texts of the Saxon Chronicle and in Latin works [1] . Attempts have been made also to show that narrative poems were used by the compilers of the early part of the Chronicle and by several Latin histories referring to the same period, but the evidence adduced is very doubtful. ”

“ The Latin literature with which we are best acquainted was the result of study and imitation of Greek literature. But the old vernacular Latin was a homely and simple speech, much more like any modern language in its ways and movements than would be supposed by those who only know classical Latin. The old Latin poetry was rhythmical, and fond of alliteration. Such was the native song of the Italian Camenæ, unlike the æsthetic poetry of the classical age, with its metres borrowed from the Greek Muses. The old Latin poetry was like the Saxon, in so far as it was rhythmical and not metrical ”

“ The earliest Anglo-Saxon literature originated in the conflict of Christianity with Anglo-Saxon paganism, in which not the heathen practices and ceremonies were the most formidable impediments to the progress of the Christian faith, but the kind of heathen poetry still current, by means of which the memory and practice of the ancient rites and ceremonies were kept alive in the songs at wakes and festivals. ”

“ Karinus and Leucius are brought to Jerusalem and led into the temple, where they are adjured to reveal the mysteries they have seen and heard; in compliance they sit down and write.
XX. CÆDMON'S GENESIS: THE OFFERING OF ISAAC. Anglo-Saxon literature first flourished in the Anglian territory (north of the Thames) . In this first period, which culminated about the middle of the eighth century, the greater part of Anglo-Saxon poetry was produced. ”

“ The story is commonplace and the plan is feeble. But there are some qualities in it which make it (accidentally or not, it hardly matters) the best worth studying of all the Anglo-Saxon poems. It is the largest extant piece in any old Teutonic language dealing poetically with native Teutonic subjects. It is the largest and fullest picture of life in the order to which it belongs; the only thing that shows incontestably the power of the old heroic poetry to deal on a fairly large scale with subjects taken from the national tradition. ”

“ A fresh spirit of poetry had risen in the region where Roman and Arabic fancy met, and, after kindling France, was coming to England on the wings of the French language. With the new romances came new models of poetic form. A long struggle ensued between the native garb of English poetry and that of the French. Both lived together until the fourteenth century, when the victory of the French form was finally determined in Chaucer; and France set the fashion in poetry to England, as it did generally to modern Europe. ”

“ If with the above we embrace in our view the Laws of this reign and the evidence of contemporary work in the Chronicles, we must be struck with the extent of this great muster of native literature. But we shall hardly do it justice unless we remember that this is the first national display of the kind in the progress of modern Europe. Native poetry had been cultivated in the Anglian period, and there had been a vernacular apparatus to assist the study of Latin, but of a varied and comprehensive literature in English 206or any other European vernacular, we find no trace until now. ”

“ High-minded and untiring workmen, they have spared no pains to produce a poetry finer than that of any other country in our time. Poetry so full of beauty and feeling, that the study of it is at once an inspiration and a despair to the artist. The Anglo-Saxon of our day has a tendency to think that a fine idea excuses slovenly workmanship. ”

“ It is a perfectly clean style for matter of fact.
The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is in religious instruction. This is various in kind; it includes the translation of Boethius which is philosophy, and fancy as well; it includes the Dialogues of Gregory which are popular stories, the homilies on Saints’ Lives which are often prose romances, and which often are heightened above prose, into a swelling, chanting, alliterative tune, not far from the language of poetry. The great master [42] of prose in all its forms is Ælfric of Eynsham, about the year 1000. ”

“ The Canto in the “Christian Epic” in which the Cynewulf-Runes appear, is on the near approach of Domesday. This piece closes with a prolonged and detailed Simile, such as occurs only in the later poetry. Life is a perilous voyage, but there is a heavenly port and a heavenly pilot:—
The grandest of the allegorical pieces is that on the Phœnix. Of the pedigree of the fable we have already spoken; as also of the Latin poem which the Anglo-Saxon poet followed. It is rather an adaptation than a translation, and it has a second part in which the allegory is explained. ”