The Complete Old English Poems

by Craig Williamson

  Shifting and sliding, then, whether from riddling to riddlic, or up and down the “truth-scale” from one kind of statement to another, are part of the skill set of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Nothing said here can quite do justice to the “leaping shackle” of Old English poetic virtuosity, which shows at its most extreme in poems like The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Deor, each of which is built upon the “speech” of a narrator. For many years what drew attention to these poems was their personal quality, which they share with the “women’s songs,” The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, and which is indeed strong and moving. Then slowly it was recognized that unlike Victorian “dramatic monologues” (to which they had been unconsciously assimilated by Victorian readers), these “men’s songs” were impersonal too. The Wanderer uses the words I, me, and my, nine times in its first thirty lines, three times near the middle (ll. 10–29, 63–65), but then never again. The poem is studded with imaginary speakers, who may or may not be the “wanderer” himself: the “wise man,” the “wise warrior,” “the wise man who ponders,” the “man wise in mind.” The Seafarer follows a similar pattern, but with a markedly more Christian conclusion. Deor goes the other way, from the far-distant to the immediately personal, starting with a sequence of “fates worse than death” drawn from old legend—Weland’s torture, Beaduhild’s rape-pregnancy, monstrous love, long exile, impotent despair—generalizing first that that is the way things often go (as said at much greater length in the poem The Fortunes of Men), but then applying it personally, to the harper “Deor” himself. All the “fates worse than death” found some cure or consolation, and for those fully aware of old legends, there may even have been a consolation hidden from the imagined speaker Deor: the fate of Heorrenda of the Heodenings, the harper who displaced him in the poem, was not a lucky one.

  One thing all three poems are certainly saying is that true wisdom comes only from experience, from the heart, not the head: no one without such experience has a right to declare truth. A surprising number of other poems likewise center on the image of the ancient sage, the wise man, the old father, who may also be a wanderer, a seafarer, an exile, one hardened, like the sad women remembering former joys, by bitter experience. It seems to be almost compulsory for an Anglo-Saxon poet to claim moral authority created by age and grief, as Cynewulf does, presenting himself as “World-weary, sick at heart” (Fates of the Apostles, l. 1) or “old and ready / To follow the final road” (Elene, ll. 1233–34). Is this true autobiography, or required stance? One cannot tell. The poets claim the role of “soothsayers,” those who state ultimate truth about reality, but they move easily between riddle-truth, proverb-truth, maxim-truth, charm-truth, felt-truth, and learned-truth, as well perhaps as states which modern people do not readily recognize.

  One must add that it is also highly characteristic that modern editors—conditioned by the need to mark off speeches and speakers by literal devices and print-conventions like quotation marks—are bothered by being unable to know who exactly is speaking or when a perspective has shifted. These are matters easier to convey orally than in print. Detecting and responding to such shifts: what that demands is, above all, hard listening.

  FORGOTTEN SKILLS

  The need for hard listening is made greater by what seems to be a major goal of the Anglo-Saxon poet: to convey maximum change of meaning with minimum change of sound. The simplest way of doing this is to oppose contrastively two words of different meaning but similar sound, as in the Old English proverb, “Works speak louder than naked words” (Ælfric’s Treatise, ll. 1257–58; Crawford, 74). We say “actions speak louder than words,” but the “works/words” opposition packs more punch.

  In this area, Old English had more than one advantage over modern English. The force of the dual pronoun in some circumstances has already been noted in The Wife’s Lament. By contrast, the existence of a subjunctive mood allowed for nuance, especially in conversations. The first words of Unferth in his challenge to Beowulf are, given literally, word-for-word and in the same word order as the Old English, “Art thou the Beowulf, he who with Breca contended?” Only Unferth does not exactly say “contended.” He uses the verb winnan, which was declined like swimman or springan, both of which have survived into modern English as “swim/swam/swum,” or “spring/sprang/sprung.” Its past tense in Old English was wann. But Unferth does not say wann, which would have been the third person past singular indicative. He says wunne, third person past singular subjunctive. The use of the subjunctive indicates something like hypothesis, doubt, not direct information—something other than “Truth-One.” One might get the sense of it by translating the passage as something like, “Are you the Beowulf, who is said to have competed, or anyway, so we hear, with Breca?” But the punch of the insult, for insult it is—hearers would inevitably notice both the word said, wunne, and the word not said, wann—is diminished by being spelled out. It’s hard for any translator to reproduce this! Our language no longer has that capacity.

  Words as simple as “this” and “that” ought to be easier, for they have not changed much—though in Old English ðæt was only the neuter form of “the,” not necessarily directly opposed to “this.” But “this” and “that,” like “here” and “there,” or “then” and “now,” are “deictics,” a deictic word being one whose meaning depends on its relation to the speaker. This means their referents shift. One way we still use “this” is to indicate closeness to the speaker, perhaps to invite a listener to share that closeness—“I met this girl the other day, I saw this bike in the window, etc.”—and Anglo-Saxon poets used it the same way. The “wanderer” is inviting a kind of agreement when he says, “I can’t think why in this uneasy world,” and again “all this world’s wealth,” “this ruin of a life” (ll. 63, 79, 93). Not everyone may agree that “this world” is a ruin, or even uneasy, but “this” is inviting us to share the speaker’s point of view. The “seafarer” does something similar, summing up a whole set of observations as “All this,” and inviting his hearers to share a generalization.

  But, as said above, the referents of deictic words can shift. The poem Deor says seven times, “That passed over—so can this.” The first six times, the referent of “That” is a time of trouble, described in the stanza that precedes the repeated line. Each of those six times also, we do not know what “this” is—only the speaker knows that. But the seventh time, although the words are exactly the same, the meaning of “that” is different, even opposite. For between the sixth and seventh repetition, the speaker has told us what “this” is: it is his own desperate situation, which unlike all the others has not passed over. As for “that,” it no longer identifies a time of trouble, but the speaker’s own previous time of prosperity. It is that time of prosperity which has passed, and the poem says, in effect, “it helps to endure one’s own troubles if you reflect on other peoples’ troubles which they got over.” One has to add that while it is easy enough to say things like that, it takes guts to say them when one is deep in a trouble that shows no sign of passing! And once again, spelling the whole thing out takes away the punch which the Old English poem supplies with marvelous, and once more subtle, economy.

  Another set of words still in the language consists of what we now call the modal verbs—that particular set of auxiliary verbs which takes its place at the start of a complex verb phrase: in modern English, “can/could, may/might, will/would, shall/should,” and “must,” which last is tenseless. Modal verbs are odd in that while the first four pairs all have present/past forms, the past tense is often used not to indicate past time but something further off, less likely. We all know that if someone says, “I might do it,” it is less likely than “I may do it.” In the transit from Old to modern English, these verbs have all also changed places in a kind of square-dance which repeatedly confuses translators. In Old English sceal, pronounced “shall,” means “must.” Moste, a pasttense form, means “might” in the sense of “had permission to.” Mæg, pronounced “may,”
means “can, am physically able to,” and cann … but the grammatical point need not be drawn out. The poetic point, which concerns us here, is that Anglo-Saxon poets seem to have been hypersensitive to the meanings of such words—and to some other verbs of similar meaning which the language has lost—and loved to contrast them. The Beowulf poet (if it was him: Tolkien thought the passage was an interpolation) makes a violent opposition, first between “Woe” and “Well,” but then between sceal and mot, the opposition neatly captured by Williamson’s translation:

  Woe to those who in terrible affliction

  Must offer their souls to the flame’s embrace;

  Well to those who on death’s day

  Can seek their Lord’s protecting power. (ll. 184–87)

  The modal contrast, at least, is similar to the one that occurs when Beowulf responds to Unferth’s accusation that he lost his swimming contest with Breca in the stormy sea, by saying that they stayed together, but for different reasons: he could not outswim me, I would not abandon him. It is always worth noting the way such verbs are used: often they are placed, for emphasis, at the end of a line, with a contrastive modal a few lines away. All of which, once again, offers challenge to a translator, insight to readers as once to listeners.

  One may sum up by saying, “still waters run deep,” or to use an Old English proverb, “still waters break the bank” (Dist. of Cato 62; Cox, 13). The Old English proverb is literally true, as hydraulic engineers know: running water in an aqueduct exerts less pressure and needs thinner walls than static water. But both Old and modern English forms of the proverb mean the same thing metaphorically: very minor ripples on a plain surface may indicate strong pressures and deep passions beneath. But one may well ask at this point what bearing such shifts from “riddling” to “riddlic,” or from “proverbial” to “maximal,” or from one imagined speaker to another, have on what is after all the bulk of the poetry surviving, which consists of narrative, not rumination? And the answer is, the influence is pervasive. It colors the narratives, even the Bible translations (five major ones, Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel, Judith), the saints’ lives (five again, Andreas, Guthlac A and B, Elene, Juliana), and the heroic poems (Beowulf, and the fragments of Maldon, Finnsburg, and Waldere). It especially affects the way characters talk.

  CAREFUL CONVERSATIONS

  A good example of how to use a proverb in a difficult conversational situation occurs at Beowulf, lines 1832–35. Beowulf is saying farewell to the Danish king Hrothgar, having dealt with the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother for him, but for no apparent reason brings up the issue of Hrothgar’s son Hrethric. “If your son Hrethric, / Heir apparent, wants to visit the Geatish court, / He’ll find many friends there.” But why should Hrethric want to make such a visit? Beowulf caps his suggestion with a proverb, “Foreign lands / Are best sought by sons who stay strong!” The remark is so enigmatic that its point has rarely been noted, but it seems very likely (given other events at the Danish court) that Beowulf is delivering a veiled warning: your son, heir apparent though he may be, is not safe. Get him out of here! But you cannot talk like that to kings. And so the proverb. One advantage of proverbs is that, in a way, the speaker does not say them (as noted by Deskis, they can be used to veil truth rather than declare it openly). They are what everyone says, and everyone accepts. If the listener knows how to apply them, well and good; if not, the speaker takes no responsibility. Hrothgar responds to Beowulf, significantly, by a veiled prophecy (all of which in the end comes true) of future problems for Beowulf and his people as well. At this point, one may well think, Beowulf and Hrothgar would each do well to listen to the hidden warning the other has given, but each perceives only the other’s danger. The astute Anglo-Saxon listener could perceive both at once, and also the characters’ matching non-perceptions.

  In a similar though even more complex way, one may well wonder what the queen Wealhtheow is saying in her long speech to Hrothgar, her husband, earlier in the same poem (ll. 1172–85). It took fifty years of scholarship before anyone began to understand it, and many scholars would not believe it once they did—one of them insisted that the ironically unexpected situation revealed was just too difficult for Anglo-Saxon warriors to take in, men “not chosen mainly for intellectual qualities” (Sisam, 1965, 9). The remark is characteristic of the disdain often felt by modern literates for ancient pre-literates. How did Sisam know what qualities were prized by old heroes? Maybe men who could not take a hint did not last long in an Anglo-Saxon war band. Talking tactfully round a subject could be a survival skill, as could recognizing the intention when someone else was doing it.

  Many people would now agree that the queen’s speech is in fact a pivotal one. It changes the note of the poem from triumphal to ominous, for what the queen is saying is that she sees threats to her son Hrethric from both Beowulf (whom Hrothgar has just adopted: this threat turns out to be nugatory) and also from her nephew Hrothulf (who in legend appears to be a threat indeed). But the queen then makes a second speech, in lines 1216–29, in which she gives Beowulf a splendid gold neck-ring—we have just been told there is an unhappy fate upon it—and asks his help and protection for her sons, who, we should just have realized, will need it. She concludes, seemingly looking round the great hall of Heorot (on which there is also an ill fate):

  “Here warriors hold true to each other in the hall,

  Loyal to the lord, devoted to duty,

  Gracious in heart, their minds on mead.

  Downing their drink, they do as I ask.”

  What kind of truth-statement is that? It is presented as flatly true, “Truth-One.” But if we pick up the hints, and indeed the plain statements just made, the air is full of foreboding, which the queen clearly senses. That perceptive critic, the late Ted Irving, saw it as a prayer (1968, 144): and it is true that this is what Wealhtheow desperately wants to be true and to come true. But a prayer ought to be addressed to someone. Is it a charm? In a charm, one says the thing that one wants to happen, in the hope that the words will make it happen. But surely Wealhtheow cannot realistically expect her words in this situation to have magic power. All one can say is that it is certainly a very human response to anxiety to deny one’s fears, but catching the tone of this statement would tax the powers of any actress.

  Wealhtheow’s earlier speech, meanwhile—the one which changes the tone of the whole poem—contains no performatives, but is dominated by what modern philosophers of language have come to call “implicatures,” a major component of the new discipline known as “pragmatic linguistics.” All that one needs to know about pragmatics in this instance is that it is the skill of listening to what people don’t say (like the wann hiding behind wunne as mentioned above). Anglo-Saxon poets seem to have known that their audiences did not need to be taught it. A remarkably powerful “unsaid” occurs in the poem Genesis B. Satan, thrown down from heaven, chained in hell, and in a rage of jealousy against the human beings he fears have been created to supplant him, cries out that if he had his hands free, “For a cold winter’s hour, I could lead my troop—” Then his speech breaks off, resuming, “But these iron chains constrain my freedom” (ll. 395–96). The clash of subjective will and objective realization is rather like the scene of waking from dream in The Wanderer, but no one has ever had any difficulty in understanding the anacoluthon, in hearing what Satan did not manage to say: “I could lead my troop to utterly destroy those wretched human interlopers!”

  Wealhtheow’s “unsaid” is harder to detect, but not so terribly hard—if one remembers, as said above, (a) that her husband has offered to adopt Beowulf a few hundred lines before (though no one apparently took any notice), (b) that she has sons of her own, Hrethric and Hrothmund, (c) that Anglo-Saxon monarchies did not recognize primogeniture, and (d) that her nephew Hrothulf, her son’s first cousin, is acting as co-regent to her husband. Her fourteen-line speech (1172–85) begins with four lines of entirely proper and predictable recommendation for generosity (Beowulf has
just got rid of Grendel for them). The fifth line brings up the matter of adoption, and the next three surely contain a veiled rebuke: give treasures away (unspoken, to strangers like Beowulf), but leave the kingdom itself to your kinsmen (unspoken, not to strangers like Beowulf). And then we have six lines about Hrothulf, who has done and said nothing to motivate them. One has to ask, what is the connection? And the answer has to be, fear: he is another competitor for her sons. The great unsaid, meanwhile—she is talking to a very old man, who just happens to be a king—lurks in “while you may … when you go … if he outlives you.” The word “die” is never used, but Wealhtheow is creeping up to it. The last time she skirts round the idea, “when you die,” she even uses the indicative mood rather than (as she did the first two times) a modal verb in the subjunctive! That may be as bold as it is safe to get when talking to old kings.

  The force of Anglo-Saxon “rules for conversation,” at once more cautious and more assertive, has its effect even on poems which we know are direct translations. Though one can never be 100 percent sure what kind of text an Anglo-Saxon poet had in front of him, in several cases we have Latin texts which correspond so closely to Old English poems that the poet must have been using something very like them. One can nevertheless see what appear to be deliberate changes, motivated by a strong sense of what is/is not right and proper to say.