Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  That attraction to the epic form has persisted among the English poets. There are of course the great examples of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Hardy’s The Dynasts and the fragment of The Fall of Hyperion by Keats. The epic ambition is to be found in Sidney’s Arcadia, in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, in Tennyson’s Idylls, in Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in Blake’s Jerusalem, in Wordsworth’s Prelude, in Byron’s Don Juan, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. One scholar of the English epic, E. M. W. Tillyard, cites Langland’s Piers the Plowman as a worthy successor of Beowulf but refers to other examples in order to demonstrate “the kinship of them all.”1 He places The Pilgrim’s Progress in this company, but then broadens his theme by arguing for the inclusion of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The case of Gibbon is instructive. In his childhood he had read Pope’s translation of Homer, and Dryden’s translation of Virgil; he was aware of the facility with which English poets could appropriate the epic tradition. In similar fashion he conceived of his History as a didactic and exemplary undertaking, and of himself as the true heir of Spenser and of Milton. The epic strain is deeply rooted.

  One central preoccupation, however, might have been taken from Be owulfitself—that of a national epic celebrating the foundation and development of the race. Milton wished to “rasp out a British tune” or Arthurian epic before he ever contemplated Paradise Lost; Dryden lamented his inability to write an epic upon a national subject, while Pope contemplated a blank verse narrative upon the theme of Brutus and his discovery of Albion. Coleridge had surmised that “I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem,” but then surrendered the idea to Wordsworth, who believed that only epic “can satisfy the vast capacity of the poetic genius.” The epic mood was endemic, therefore. “There is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth,” one contemporary noted, “which acts as a spell upon the hearer.” The ancient chant of Beowulf is heard across the generations.

  There is also a steadiness and intensity of tone which later poets have inherited. Here is a passage translated from the “Battle of Finnsburh”:

  Around him lay many brave men dying. The raven whirled about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There was a sparkling of blades, as if all Finnsburh were on fire. Never have I heard of a more worthy battle in war.

  Here is a passage from Siegfried Sassoon, on another battle, in “Counter Attack”:

  The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud

  There is the same understated vehemence, the same directness and passion. It is reminiscent of Carlyle’s remark that in the obstinacy and stolidity of the nineteenth-century labourer lay the lineaments of the Saxon warrior. When David Jones invoked his own experiences of the First World War, within In Parenthesis, he placed them in the context of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mythology. As Taine puts the question (of the Anglo-Saxons), “Is there any people which has formed so tragic a conception of life? Is there any which has peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams? . . . Energy, tenacious and mournful energy, an ecstasy of energy—such was the chosen condition.”

  The poetic life of approximately four hundred years survives now in only thirty thousand lines, snatched fortuitously from the oblivion of time; they are to be found in four manuscripts, one of them still located in the cathedral library of Vercelli near Milan, where no doubt it was left by a wealthy pilgrim on a journey to Rome. They were transcribed in the latter part of the tenth century, as part of the monastic revival of that period, when the scriptoria of the cathedrals and great monasteries were involved in a programme of educational and administrative reform. It was a question of preserving the inheritance of the race, at a time when its destiny and identity were being threatened by the Norsemen. But if it was a manner of affirming historical identity, it was also an act of piety; the poetic corpus transmitted by the monks was of an overwhelmingly Christian character, thus establishing the visionary religious tradition within all subsequent English poetry. The sacred histories of Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Judith, The Fate of the Apostles, Christ and Satan all furnish the homiletic material of the later English poets.

  The dates for the composition of these Anglo-Saxon poems cannot now be ascertained and we may hazard any period between the sixth and tenth centuries; although most of the extant poetry has been transcribed in the West Saxon tongue, there are dialectical differences in the range of Old English which emphasise the provenance of different kingdoms. From Northumbria come the hymn of Caedmon, The Dream of the Rood and Bede’s verses in the last hours of his life. Bede, who characteristically wrote in Latin, reverted to his native tongue in extremis, just as the scholar Aldhelm sang in the vernacular upon a bridge to attract and edify the English. From Mercia are supposed to spring two long poems on the life of St. Guthlac, the hermit of Crowland among the fens of Lincolnshire, while Beowulf itself contains certain Mercian references. From Kent may derive a version of the “Finnsburh” fragment; from the West Saxons “The Ruin.” In such a sophisticated society there was a range of expressiveness. In the Cynewulf Christ, homage is paid to the singer of “wise poems”; another bard may chant before heroes, while others are concerned with singing of sacred law or of the course of the heavens.

  All employed the alliterative line, that great pounding force which is created by two half-lines divided by a caesura, with two principal stresses or “lifts” in each half-line. It has been well noted that it emphasises the qualities of intense or loudly enunciated speech; it is measured by a firm and heavy beat. It does not run and cannot be rushed; it is intense because it harbours an ecstasy and energy forced to dwell in measure. The pattern of two alliterative words in the first half of the line, followed by one in the second, creates a cadence as if of thought or contemplation. The listener or solitary reader is obliged to pause—as it were—in order to comprehend the meaning. Its syllabic momentum courses so powerfully through the lines of later poets that the beat of the pentameter and the octosyllabic couplet, two of the dominant forms within English verse, can be supposed to spring directly from this oral source. Like English speech, it has a falling rhythm. It is a “high” language, a call or summons like a great bell; the line-break and the pattern of stresses allow for a complete interrelation between parts in a series of oppositions and contrasts. The language employed is, by the tenth century, deliberately archaic and “poetic” with a reliance upon encrusted ornamental diction as well as a repertoire of phrases; the sun is “the candle of the world,” the sea is “the chalice of waves,” the helmet is the “castle of the head.” It is what William of Malmesbury declared to be “English magnificence.”

  One of the most interesting features of these tenth-century recensions is the manner in which they were transcribed; the poetry is written in the long lines of prose, as if no certain or intrinsic difference could be distinguished between verse and prose narrative. In similar fashion the prose homilies preserved in the Vercelli book borrow alliterative and general metrical features from Anglo-Saxon poems; this is of the utmost significance in dealing with examples of English prose and poetry from much later writers where, in many instances, there is again no clear distinction between the forms. The meditations of John Donne or Thomas Browne may best be understood as forms of allusive poetry, while parts of Browning or Clough move towards the dominant nineteenth-century mode of the novel. There is no necessary boundary. There is none, also, between the various genres of Anglo-Saxon poetic activity. Little distinction is made between the poetry of natural observation and of religious narrative, for example, which in turn suggests that there is very little perceived difference between religious and secular poetry. In a society once thoroughly paganised, where ravens spoke and stones moved, how can there be such a difference? And in a society where the values of early Christianity came to prevail over heathen reverence, the w
hole world remains a spiritual force replete with miracles and changed by prayer. It was, and is, an island of visions.

  There was also no distinction between Latin and Christian verse, between classical and religious texts which were studied with equal attention; the eighth century was, in particular, a great age of learning in which the works of Virgil, Statius and Lactantius were inscribed alongside those of St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The monastic system of education trained not only prelates but princes, since both secular and religious leaders were generally interconnected and interrelated. This may account for the “high” and artificial style of a poetry in large part composed for, and addressed to, a sophisticated audience. The pleasure of scop as well as listener lay less in the modern shibboleth of invention than in elaborating upon the impersonal authenticity and authority of ancient texts. We read continually of exile and of transience, of kinship feuds and the necessity of loyalty, of the isolated wanderer; we witness the giving of gifts in the mead hall, the blizzards of winter, the effigy of the boar; we are reminded of fate and of destiny, of the wilderness world, of the strongholds of city dwellers, of the surging salt sea, of the raven, of the eagle and the wolf. It has been suggested that we still dream of dark woods in memory of the Druids; in turn the fascination with old ruined dwellings in writers as disparate as Wordsworth and Dickens may have its deep source in the Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with deserted or empty buildings, all their warmth displaced by “ wintres woma,” or the awful sound of winter.

  The nature of this poetry, then, does not encourage individual utterance; but it does not altogether preclude it. In the late eighth or early ninth century a cleric concealed his name in runes towards the conclusion of four poems. A rune was a symbol of the ancient Germanic alphabet used by the Saxon tribes long before the Romans came, in which each sign represented a letter or an object. Thus the cleric’s name, Cynewulf, becomes in sequence torch, bow, necessity, horse, happiness, man, sea, wealth. His signature was a cryptogram, one of those aenigmata so congenial to the Anglo-Saxon imagination. The works where the runes are inserted are all of a homiletic nature—Elene, Juliana, The Ascension and The Fate of the Apostles—some 2,600 lines altogether, established upon Latin originals or, as Cynewulf puts it, “as I found it in book.” The fact that his own name is distributed among the closing lines suggests that his is a work intended to be read rather than heard and, perhaps, to endure beyond the memory of his own civilisation. In the “faecne hus ,” or treacherous house, of the body he has been wholly intent upon “wordcraeft” or “leothcraeft,” the art of poetry. One great Anglo-Saxon scholar, Kenneth Sisam, has described him as the first English “man of letters . . . whose name and works are known,” 2 and in that there is perhaps some distinction.

  CHAPTER 4

  Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

  It would be profoundly mistaken to underestimate the sophistication of Anglo-Saxon literature; there is no progress in English writing but, rather, a perpetual return to the original sources of inspiration. The ninety-five riddles in the manuscript known as The Exeter Book, for example, composed in the early eighth century, afford direct and unmediated access to a complex and suggestive culture in which elaboration, difficulty and highly wrought obscurity are qualities assiduously to be pursued:

  I stretch beyond the bounds of the world, I’m smaller than a worm, clearer than the moon . . . 1

  The verses contain the occasional refrain that the “wise” or “clever” man will “say what my name is” or “say what I am called”; in this example it is creation itself that is being announced in cryptic and enigmatic form.

  It seems that one of the Anglo-Saxon definitions of intelligence lay precisely in the ability to unravel complex significations. The whole pursuit of art and literature is to find vital formal or spiritual meanings within the disparate array of the material world; the economy of means chosen bears some relation to Anglo-Saxon art, while the abiding interest in paradox and contrast is an aspect of that violence of expression which is also intrinsic to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility. The combination of austerity and brilliant subtlety is one of the profound gifts of that sensibility which subsequent English writers have learned to share. From where else do the Paradoxes and Problems of John Donne, and the riddles of Lewis Carroll, spring? That great elucidator of English literature Jorge Luis Borges was well aware of its Anglo-Saxon derivations—particularly as an intellectual game, or an intricate pattern or puzzle.

  Some of these riddles may be related to folk-charms, but most of them are highly literary and extravagant exercises in word play which are part of the fascination for ornamentation of every kind in runic signatures and gnomic verses. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that there is nothing “naturalistic” about this literary style; the keen curiosity and vivacity of the Anglo-Saxon imagination keep on breaking through. The manuscript volume in which the riddles are inscribed has the stains of daily use upon it; there are the marks of knives and the indentations of cups on the first folio as a fitting accompaniment to verses that celebrate the presence of household objects.

  There are condensed metaphors here for the ink-well and the quill, the onion and the wine cup, the loom and the well-bucket, the bellows and the book-case; here also are lancets and helmets, swords and ploughs, oysters and weathercocks, all of them announcing their identities in the first person—“I travel onward; I have many scars,”2 confesses the plough—as if the whole world were instinct with life. The poem then becomes a magical act of reclamation.

  There is another active principle in these poems, with their propensity for crude or lewd humour; the jokes about male and female pudenda abound. So “I grow very tall, erect in a bed.” When a girl recalls our meeting “Her eye moistens.”3 The answer might be an onion or, on the other hand, it might not. The Anglo-Saxons initiated a tradition of “blue” humour and innuendo which has flourished in England ever since.

  There is another inheritance, by way of English paradox. Although it would be fanciful to suggest any direct connection between the Anglo-Saxon Aldhelm’s Enigmata and Elgar’s Enigma Variations of 1899, other associations may tentatively be made. Certain sixteenth-century epigrams of Thomas Wyatt, such as

  A lady gave me a gift she had not And I received her gift which I took not

  also bear witness to the delight in puzzle and “wit-spell” which continued well into the twentieth century. Musical riddles were also popular devices in the sixteenth century with the fashion for “puzzle canons,” often for three voices; according to one musical historian, they seem “to be a purely English invention.” 4 A Tudor chronicler notes that Henry VIII “made to the Ambassadors a sumpteous banquet with many riddels and much pastyme,” and Jane Austen depicts the early nineteenth-century English delight in anagrams and acrostics. We are not so far from Arthur Bliss’s Knot of Riddles, performed in 1963, nor from the musico-mathematic illogic of Lewis Carroll. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

  The intricacy of Anglo-Saxon verse is suggestive in another sense because it affords access to an entire phase of English culture; it is one of the tenets of this book that no art or activity need be seen in isolation, and that all partake of the same continuum of perception and desire. The structure of Beowulf, for example, is as ornate and intricate as that of the Anglo-Saxon riddle; patterns of repetition and variation, parallel and antithesis, are woven as tightly within the fabric of the poem as the echoes and anticipations of alliterative sound. It represents the fascination with what is difficult, and the resistance to easy interpretation. In the narrative itself the scop, or bard, is reported to “wordum wrixlan,” or vary words, in precisely this sense. The poet Cynewulf describes the same effect with his announcement that “ ic . . . wordcraeftum waef,” or “I wove my word-craft.” In the composition of Beowulf scenes and episodes are similarly “woven” into a pattern of contrast and recapitulation so that the effect is of formal intricacy and immediacy rather than any linear development. The association with the weavin
g of tapestry is apposite here, and the poetic technique has become known as that of “interlace.” The “interlace structure” has thus been defined as expressing “the meaning of coincidence,” the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time5 as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.

  It is not simply a technique, therefore, but a vision of the world. The great stone crosses of Northumberland and Cumberland, hewn in the early eighth century, are carved with abstract interlace patterns in which bands or threads or vines turn back upon themselves to form woven intersections or knots. They may be symbols of eternity, like the spirals upon even more ancient stone, but they seem also to display a delight in intricacy or ornament for its own sake. Ivory caskets, sword-hilts, brooches and rings are emblazoned with the same labyrinthine device; a large gold buckle, discovered during the excavations at Sutton Hoo and dated to the early seventh century, has an interlacing of snakes and birds’ heads wrought upon it. It was what the Beowulf poet described as “hring-boga ,” ring-coiled. The manuscript illuminations from the seventh and eighth centuries are irradiated by interlace; the initial pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels are peculiarly rich in this art, with one page bearing several thousand “intersections” while in another only two threads or bands are employed to create an entire and effortlessly detailed “carpet-page.” The pattern occurs at a later date. When one Middle English poem, known as The Owl and the Nightingale, is depicted in terms of “chain-stitch”6 the relation to the “carpet-page” of the illuminated gospels is reinforced. If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end; there is no sequence and no progress, only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces. Thus “interlace” has variously described Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Langland’s Piers the Plowman and the penitential lyrics of the thirteenth century. The term has been used to define the novels of Charles Dickens.