The Complete Old English Poems
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Our written records of Old English poetry, then, last more than three hundred years, from 1065 back to at least the early 700s. But there can be no doubt that the verse form was old even in Cædmon’s time. We possess a considerable amount of Old Norse poetry, in a language related to Old English but recorded centuries later, much of it produced by professional “skalds” in language and meter comprehensible only to the initiated. Some Old Norse poems, however, are written in the meter they called fornyrðislag, “old-word-meter,” and this is effectively identical to Old English, in meter and often in turns of phrase. Poems have also survived in Old Saxon and Old High German, again with similar meter and phrasing, all of which indicates that the various Germanic peoples at one time, before any records survive, and when their languages were much more similar to each other than they later became, had a shared tradition of poetry. Christopher Tolkien has even pointed out that some names surviving in Old Norse must have originated as Gothic, the stories attached to them going back to the wars of the Goths and Huns in far eastern Europe before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and also remembered by Old English poets (xxiii–xxv). But the reason poetry is preserved much earlier and in much greater quantity in Old English than in its cousin languages must be—apart from a certain dogged conservatism in the English psyche—England’s early conversion to Christianity, with the associated import of writing skills.
THE ADVENT OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE WRITTEN WORD
The Anglo-Saxons, after initial hesitations and some backslidings, accepted Christianity and the literacy which came with the new religion with enthusiasm. Nothing exemplifies the scale of what they then achieved more than the career of the Venerable Bede. He was born in poverty and obscurity somewhere in Northumberland, remote from the intellectual centers and libraries of the Mediterranean world. When he was a young teen in 686, his first monastery at Wearmouth was all but wiped out by plague, so that the boy had to learn to sing antiphonally with his abbot Ceolfrid, there being no choir-monk left to join the service (Bede, 15–16). But by the end of his life he was the most learned man in Europe, author of a shelf of Bible commentaries and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the greatest historical work of the post-Roman period. All were written in impeccable Latin—though at the very end of his life, on his deathbed, he came out with five carefully crafted and enigmatic lines of Old English poetry, Bede’s Death Song (for which see p. 1051).
In his History Bede tells a story to explain the new hope which the pagan Anglo-Saxons saw in Christianity. As the new religion was being debated, a thane of King Edwin said that the life of man was like a sparrow which flies into the king’s hall, from the darkness outside into the light and the warmth, and then flies out again. If the new religion offered knowledge of what was outside the little circle of light and life, the thane said, we should follow it. One of Edwin’s pagan priests agreed with him, rejecting his old faith, ritually destroying his own idols and setting fire to his own temple. The story suggests that the main draw of Christianity was its message of hope and certainty, of a world other than the brief, lit circle surrounded by darkness that was the pagan image of life.
Another element may have been relief from fear: the northern pagan religion, English or Norse, relied on propitiation of its gods by sacrifice, and there is archaeological evidence for ritual killings in early England, some of it gruesome, like a grave excavated in Yorkshire. There the mourners had laid a younger woman out carefully in a closed coffin with her jewelry and expensive grave-goods, including a bronze cauldron. But then they threw an older woman in the grave, threw a rock on top of her to hold her down, fracturing her pelvis, and buried her alive. She was still trying to push herself up on her knees and elbows as she died (Fleming, 139–40, 347–48). Many besides King Edwin’s priest-counselor must have been glad to be released from this kind of ritual behavior: one might note that the Beowulf-poet seems to have heard of sacrificial rites, though he presents them as a desperate emergency measure by the Danes and expresses strong disapproval (ll. 175–88).
As for books, before the conversion century was over, rich Anglo-Saxon churchmen like Benedict Biscop (d. 690) were arriving in Rome like twentieth-century Texas oilmen in Paris, anxious to build up their collections. The libraries of York and Jarrow, while modest by Italian standards, soon became a source of pride (Lapidge), and Anglo-Saxon scholarship began to be respected far afield. Fifty years after Bede’s death, the York deacon Alcuin, or Alhwine, was “headhunted” by Charlemagne to produce, among other tasks, an authoritative text of the Bible (Garrison, Nelson, and Tweddle). One of the most praiseworthy features of this first era of Anglo-Saxon Christianity was the believers’ immediate determination to spread the Gospel to what they recognized as their kin in the still pagan lands across the North Sea. St. Willibrord (d. 739) became the Apostle of the Frisians. St. Boniface, whose birth name was Wynfrith, is known as the Apostle of Germany; he was martyred in 754 at Dokkum in the Netherlands (Talbot). Anglo-Saxon and Irish missionaries were probably the more successful for not always being associated with the Frankish church, seen with some justice as an arm of Frankish imperialism.
The Anglo-Saxon church nevertheless had its own special qualities, one of which was perhaps a certain lack of interest in humility. It did produce “fundamentalists” like Bede, who says nothing about his own birth, but the Anglo-Saxon monasteries that were soon founded—sometimes double foundations for men and women, sometimes ruled by royal-family abbesses like Cædmon’s Hild at Whitby—were aristocratic places, rich and status-conscious (see Wormald). This fact may well explain the survival of Old English poetry, and the kind of poetry that survived. Until late on, the church had an effective monopoly on writing, but aristocratic churchmen did not lose interest in their own traditions, including heroic legends of the past. Some thought they took too much interest in the stories of what must have been pagan heroes. Alcuin wrote angrily to one “Speratus” (an unidentified Mercian bishop; see Bullough) that he had heard a harper was being allowed to sing stories of Ingeld at mealtimes (a character who appears in Beowulf; see ll. 2022–66), instead of a lector reading the word of God; but this only tells us what was actually happening (Garmonsway and Simpson, 242). An evident compromise was to put Christian story into the kind of poetic form Anglo-Saxons were used to, and that is what we often have. Bede tells us that Cædmon, himself illiterate, had the Bible read to him at the command of Abbess Hild so he could turn it into poetry, and we have long poems paraphrasing Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, and the apocryphal book of Judith, though they are not now thought to be by Cædmon. A man called Cynewulf, probably a Mercian monk, added a runic “signature” to four poems, including the female saints’ lives of Elene and Juliana. The long poem Andreas, which translates another apocryphal story of St. Andrew’s conversion of the cannibal Mermedonians, would have made inspiring listening for trainee missionaries, and we have two poems on the life of St. Guthlac, who (like St. Juliana) knew how to deal with demons. A considerable “wisdom literature” also survives in poetry, of which more is said below. Possibly its existence contributed to the remarkably confident and ambitious project (traditionally and still not impossibly ascribed to King Alfred himself) not only of translating, with many changes and additions, Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, the most respected philosophical work in Latin surviving from classical antiquity; but also of rendering even its most challenging passages into Old English verse. As the most recent edition notes, the first poem in this sequence, which was free composition outlining a history of conquest and rebellion rather than translation of stages in an argument, “shows what the versifier was capable of when not constrained by the prose” (Griffith, 2009, 134).
One might add, “or when motivated by legends of the heroic past,” for another interest of Anglo-Saxon aristocrats was their own history. It is surely no coincidence that the three most famous literary works produced by Anglo-Saxons are all in their different ways historical: Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English People in Latin, mentioned several times already and completed by the year 731; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in Old English prose with poetic insertions, first compiled at King Alfred’s instigation in the 890s but kept up at Peterborough monastery till 1154; and the poem Beowulf, whose date is not known, but which gives a surprisingly detailed account of events in south Scandinavia in the early sixth century, a little of which can be confirmed. Portions of two other heroic poems survived up to modern times: The Fight at Finnsburg, which duplicates part of a story told in Beowulf, and Waldere, an epic about events in the fifth century, which was evidently discarded by some hard-line librarian who however used a few scrap pages to reinforce the cover of a book now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Some abbots at least must have given permission for the considerable expenditure of time and vellum needed to write and copy these poems, and we are now grateful for their open-mindedness.
ORALITY, PRE-LITERACY, AND THE “RIDDLIC” MODE
There is no doubt that much of the surviving poetry, and perhaps all of it, was composed and set down by literate poets. Many written sources, usually in Latin, have been identified and are mentioned in the headnotes to individual poems, or groups of poems like The Metrical Psalms of the Paris Psalter and The Meters of Boethius. At the same time, the poems themselves often mention oral performance and hint at oral composition, which must once have been the only method of composing poetry before the missionaries from Rome and Ireland taught the Anglo-Saxons to read and write. In Beowulf, for instance (though this may be deliberate anachronism), the verb writan means “to cut”: King Hrothgar looks at the hilt of the giant’s sword which Beowulf has retrieved from Grendel’s mere, “On which was engraved [writen] in images and runes / The origin of strife, the first feud” (ll. 1686–87). One may wonder whether the delight which Solomon and Saturn both express about books—“Books are bound with glory … Books bring a reward to the righteous” (Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 72, 82)—is the product of a time when literacy was still intimately connected with the promise of salvation and had not dwindled down to being an administrative tool. To these wise men, even the individual letters of the Pater Noster prayer are magically powerful—as perhaps were once the pre-Christian runes listed and described in The Rune Poem and used non-literally by the poet Cynewulf, four times, to sign his own name. One may sum up by saying that Old English poems were produced by literate poets, who nevertheless were living in a largely if decreasingly pre-literate world.
It is vital to realize, however, that pre-literate is not the same as illiterate. In the modern world, illiteracy carries a stigma. In a pre-literate world the wisest of men, and of women, may well be illiterate, with no sense of inferiority attached. Indeed, a corollary of pre-literacy may well be that pre-literates have skills which the modern literate world has lost, and which even early literates still possessed and valued: notably, the ability to speak carefully, and listen hard. This shows up, one might suggest, in a complex attitude toward truth—how it is told and heard, perceived and understood, in all its complexity and ambiguity. For this Craig Williamson has invented the useful neologism “riddlic,” a term with a wider meaning than “riddling” (1982, 25 ff.). Its “riddlic” quality is one of the most pervasive and distinctive features of Old English poetry in general, as discussed extensively below, though in our literate world it has often not been appreciated.
One may add that another distinctive feature of Old English poetry is the prominence it gives to female speakers and female characters. Three of the long poems surviving have heroines rather than heroes, Elene, Juliana, and Judith. The unhappy or unfortunate women—Hildeburh, Wealhtheow, and Freawaru—have important, even pivotal roles in Beowulf. In the epic fragment Waldere, an important speech is assigned to the woman Hildegyth. And female characters—Eve, Sarah, Hagar—speak up prominently in the poems Genesis A and Genesis B. In addition, we have two “dramatic monologues” in the Exeter Book by female speakers, their gender confirmed not only by the content of what they say but by the feminine endings on adjectives the speakers apply to themselves. These two poems also illustrate the power and potential for complexity of riddlic speech; as well as the theme of evanescence, an issue of special importance, one might think, for the pre-literate world.
The two poems are perhaps the most perplexing in the entire Old English corpus, and interpretations of them have varied even more wildly than usual, as the headnotes to them indicate: it is probable that we will never understand in detail the stories that they refer to. Nevertheless, there are some things one can say about their mode of speech and their underlying themes. The first of them (all poem titles are modern) is now called The Wife’s Lament. This appears to be an autobiographical lament by a woman, and what she is lamenting seems to be a separation forced on her and her partner by hostile relatives. The physical scenario, however, is so strange that some have thought that we must be in the presence of an allegory, perhaps of the body’s lament for the soul. For surely even a divorced Anglo-Saxon wife would not be “forced to live in a cold earth-cave, / Under an oak tree” (ll. 32–33)? Meanwhile, the core of the lament is the speaker’s memory of happy times. She declares, “Something now seems as if it never was— / Our friendship together” (ll. 29–30). Note that “friendship” is a much stronger word in Old English (freondscipe) than in modern English, where it excludes romantic love. And in the poem even “our” is stronger than the word we use, for where modern English distinguishes only singular and plural, Old English had a special set of personal pronouns for the “dual” number, used only of two people, here uncer rather than ure. So freondscipe uncer means the “friendship (love) of just us two, the two of us together,” even “together against the world.”
Nevertheless, what makes the thought especially bitter for the speaker are the words, “as if it never was.” Saying something is “as if it never was” does not mean, of course, that it never existed. It did exist. It still exists with painful clarity in the memory. But memory is purely subjective. There is no evidence for the memory in the real world at all. But which world is more real, the internal one or the external one? It is that contrast which creates special grief, special pain for the speaker as she hangs on to the love which now seems to be totally denied by the cold and unfeeling world around her.
The second lament spoken by a woman in the Exeter Book is the poem Wulf and Eadwacer, and this adds yet another twist to the theme of impalpability, the contrast of subjective/objective, the concern with what is there/not there. In this poem, the speaker laments that her lover, Wulf, has been taken from her and cries out at the end of the poem:
It’s easy to rip an unsewn stitch
Or tear the thread of an untold tale—
The song of us two together. (ll. 21–23)
Once again she uses the dual pronoun uncer, and once again what she laments is an abstraction, “The song of us two together.” Nevertheless, and this goes a stage beyond what we heard from the speaker in The Wife’s Lament, what this unhappy woman says is, logically speaking, not true. If it has never been “sewn,” there can be no “stitch” there to rip! If the tale is “untold,” there can be no “thread” to unravel. The “love” of The Wife’s Lament did exist, even if now it is “as if it never was”: when the “wife” of that poem says, “The web of our wedding is unwoven,” she means that she and her lover were married, though now they have been separated. By contrast, the second woman is saying there never was any “stitch,” any “thread,” and so no “[told] tale,” no “song of us two together.” Nevertheless, we may well guess what that second speaker means. What she is saying is that she is desperately regretful for something that never existed, that has been prevented from existing—but is terribly and paradoxically powerful in her mind, in her imagination. To feel the force of what she says—and this is how “riddlic” speech often works—you have to be aware of both the surface literal non-meaning and the underlying emotional meaning: the point is the agonizing contrast, ju
st as the point of a riddle is the contrast between misleading surface and hidden solution.
One may reflect that in a pre-literate world, where there is not even the concept of an authenticating document, subjective memories are especially important, though their fragility is also well understood. One may go on to say that the whole theme of the subjective versus the objective appears powerfully again and again in the Old English corpus. Or, to put it into more appropriate “riddlic” language, the theme of what is that isn’t: which is the way the issue is put in the poem Solomon and Saturn II.
This may be the most complex but neglected dialogue in Old English poetry; it is rarely translated or discussed. Possibly it has been out of favor as being, in some views, not “Anglo-Saxon” enough. The two disputants have names from Jewish and classical tradition, and some of their often-bewildering information exchanges come from a lost world of apocryphal knowledge. Yet the genre of the poem, a wisdom contest, may well have been traditional in the Old Northern world. It is paralleled, for instance, by exchanges in Old Norse, such as The Riddles of Gestumblindi or the Eddic poems, Vafthruthnismál and Grimnismál. Yet one should note that Solomon and Saturn II is not exactly a riddle contest. To use Williamson’s useful neologism once more, it is “riddlic” rather than “riddling.” The two contestants do not behave quite like Tolkien’s Gollum and Bilbo, asking each other defined riddles to which there must be a definite single answer. Sometimes they test each other’s knowledge, rather than their riddle-solving skill. Sometimes they pose existential questions to which there can be no single satisfactory answer. Sometimes they answer question with question, and increasingly they enter into a dialogue on the unstated but recurrent theme of justice: why may two twins have entirely different fates, why must some be saved and some be damned? Yet there is an element of the riddle there. Gollum’s gruesome riddle, “This thing all things devours …,” echoes Saturn’s question in lines 130–37, “What creature walks the world … feasts on ground-walkers, / Sky-floaters, sea-swimmers everywhere.” Bilbo’s fortuitous answer is “Time!” Solomon’s is “Old age,” but in both cases either answer would do.