Their storied power, their primal strength—
The kings and princes whose craft was courage.
The opening word Hwæt is often taken as a call to attention, though it is probably unstressed (on Old English interjections, see Hiltunen, 91 ff.). It is translated variously as “Listen,” “So,” “Indeed,” “Lo,” “What,” “Behold,” “Well,” “Ah,” and “How.” None of these works perfectly well, but “Listen!” seems to me the best alternative in terms of its attention-calling quality and meaning, even though it lacks the sharp sound of “Hwæt” and seems a little like a teacher calling a class to order. I could alliterate “So” or perhaps “Say” with “Spear,” but this seems a weak, informal opening. Or I could keep “Listen” and alliterate “glory” with the second syllable of “bygone,” but this seems unnecessarily archaic. Reluctantly giving up the alliteration in the opening line, I make up for it in the second line by linking “storied” and “strength” with “Spear” in line 1 and by the partial rhyme of “glory” with “storied,” which also picks up the sense of tales heard in days gone by. I also strengthen the second line with a double alliteration which was present in the first line of the original. The use of “primal” picks up the sense of the past. In the third line there is a stress on “princes,” which makes for an alliterative linkage with “power” and “primal” in line 2. For the primary alliteration in line 3, I’ve chosen the unusual “craft” to go with “courage” because it picks up the subtle sense of “accomplishing” or “making” in gefrunon. I’ve kept and even strengthened the technique of apposition with variation in each of the lines. I’ve tried to communicate the sense of difference between the listening or reading audience and the old story that is being retold in the poem (for more on this theme, see Robinson, 1985, 27–28).
Another difficult passage to translate is the Eala cry in The Wanderer (94 ff. in the Old English and 100 ff. in my translation) where the speaker laments the loss of his lord and hall:
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrn-wiga!
Eala þeodnes þrymm! Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære!
Alas the bright (shining, brilliant, beautiful, magnificent) cup (beaker, drinking vessel)! Alas the mailed warrior (fighter with a corselet)!
Alas the glory (power, might, majesty, splendor) of the prince (lord)! How the time (period of time, age, season) has gone (departed, gone out, passed away),
Grown dark (gloomy) under the night-helmet (cover of night, of darkness) as if it were not (had never been)!
Gone is the bright cup. Gone is the mailed warrior.
Gone is the glory of the prince. How the time has slipped
Down under the night-helmet as if it never was.
Eala is a heartfelt cry imbued with longing and a sense of deep and unrecoverable loss. It is usually translated as “Ah,” “Oh,” or “Alas,” none of which seems adequate to catch the power of the soulful lament, and all of which seem archaic and sentimental to a modern ear. One solution might be to say prosaically “I mourn for” or “I lament the loss of” and then list each of these precious and symbolically laden objects, but I’ve chosen to use the word “gone” to carry the sense of loss and to repeat it in the manner of Eala in the original so that it becomes increasingly a ritualized cry. The g of “gone” and “glory” provides the alliteration in the first two lines, and the n of “never” and “night-helmet” in the last line. The passage from “glory” to “gone” helps to strengthen the sense of loss. I keep the compound “night-helmet,” as in the Old English, not only to emphasize the loss of a protecting element but also to pick up the associations of a helmet like the Sutton Hoo helmet, which was once grandly decorated but now has lost most of its bright exterior. The slight enjambment of “slipped / Down” hurries the sense of loss along and makes it seem inevitable.
Finally, there is the mysterious and enigmatic ending of Wulf and Eadwacer, which reads like a miniature riddle. In fact, the entire poem was once thought a riddle but is now generally accepted as a woman’s lament, though it’s never quite clear who either Wulf or Eadwacer is, and the dramatic situation is endlessly debated. The narrator, who is lamenting the loss of her husband or lover or son, cries out, “Wulf, my Wulf,” mourning his infrequent visits, which may be a litotes for his never visiting. The poem concludes with this enigmatic passage:
Þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.
One may easily (readily, lightly) tear apart (sever, rend, wound, break open, destroy) what (that which) was never united (joined, assembled, collected, gathered together),
The song (poem, saying, word, speech, proverb, riddle, tale) of us two together (united).
It’s easy to rip an unsewn stitch
Or tear the thread of an untold tale—
The song of us two together.
This ending is both enormously powerful and endlessly mysterious. Questions abound. What is this enigmatic thing that is easily torn and never really together? Is it the speaker’s unfulfilled or impossible dream of Wulf’s return? Or her long-held but unrealistic romance of reunion with an exiled lover? Why is the storied relationship, their song (or riddle) together, so easily ripped apart? Translators of these last lines must often strain to capture their enigmatic power and meaning in imaginative ways, as I have done here with the image of the unsewn stitch, which draws upon the Anglo-Saxon concept of the woman as friðowebba, “peace-weaver”—the woman who is married not for love but for an impossible peace-weaving between strife-bound families or warring tribes (as is often the case in Beowulf). The word “stitch” makes concrete the final image. Its primary meaning here is “the thread that sews two pieces of fabric together,” as the woman and Wulf may have been metaphorically united or “stitched.” But the stitch also carries hidden connotations of “a sharp pain” (“a stitch in the side”), which catches some of the emotional pain of the narrator’s lament. Incidentally, both of these meanings of “stitch” ultimately derive from Old English stice, “sting, prick, pain in the side.” The word “thread” also has a double meaning which links the image of sewing with that of the story or song (as in the “thread of a plot”). I’ve expanded the line and a half in Old English to three lines in the translation. I’ve used the s alliteration in the first line, which links up with the “song” of the last line. The t alliteration links the last two lines. The use of “un” in “unsewn” and “untold” helps to stitch the lines together in an ironic way. It is important also in that it picks up the sense of difference or undoing in the poem’s refrain, Ungelic is us, “It’s different for us.” The assonant progression from “un” (“unsewn”) to “un” (“untold”) to “us” binds together ironically the two lovers in an undoing way. What they finally share is an unending separation.
CONCLUSION
The act of translation is a mediation, a human dance between two minds, two languages, two literary traditions, two cultures. The Anglo-Saxons, themselves members of a multilingual community, recognized the complexity of translation. Anglo-Saxon churchmen often translated texts from Latin into Old English (of course to them it wasn’t old; it was just Englisc). King Alfred describes the act of translation metaphorically in the preface to his translation of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies:
So I gathered staves and posts and tie-beams for each of the tools I should work with, and building-timbers and beams for each of the structures I should make—as much beautiful wood as I could carry. Each time I shouldered the wood home, I wanted the forest, but it was more than I could carry. In each beam I saw something I needed at home. So I urge those who have knowledge and good wagons to go to the woods where I cut my beams and fetch their own beautiful branches so they can weave lovely walls and shape splendid buildings and bright towns and live there joyfully summer and winter as I have not yet been able to do. (Carnicelli, 47; translation mine)
A good translator must be both ambitious and humble. He needs to carry home as muc
h of the beautiful old wood as possible, but the whole forest is always beyond his reach. In my translations I’ve tried to gather up beams and timbers, posts and staves, from the grand originals and then bring them home to fashion a new building both true to the original form and beautiful in its own right. If this effort succeeds, I hope it will inspire new readers of these poems to think about learning Old English in an effort to return to the originals, where the real source of power and grandeur resides.
THE JUNIUS MANUSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
I am an ark bearing sacred stories,
Biblical tales and liturgical lore,
Sailing across the traces of time.
I bear in my hold a hoard of heroes,
Saints and sinners—Adam and Eve,
Cain and Abel, Noah and his family,
Abraham and Isaac, Daniel and a demon.
I gather glory and unravel evil;
I lift up the legends of faith and feud,
Promise and perdition, covenant and crime.
I celebrate scenes in the holy story,
From Genesis to judgment, beginning to end.
Once men thought I was Cædmon’s creation;
Now they know my songs are separate,
But held together by the script of salvation,
The arc of redemption, the hope of heaven.
Once I was owned by a friend of Milton,
Copied and recreated in old Amsterdam.
Now I sleep soundly in my Oxford bed,
Where you can wake my unbabbled tongue
With a watchful eye and an ancient ear.
Make an exodus to see my drawings,
Decipher my stories, and say who I am.
The Junius Manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11, is one of the four great codices of Old English poetry, along with the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf manuscript. It is a large folio volume containing four poems. The first three, now known as Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, are based on the Old Testament, while the fourth, Christ and Satan, is based on Christological material. The first three poems are written in a single hand; the fourth in three different hands. At the end of Christ and Satan, the words, Finit Liber II: Amen, occur, which appear to indicate that the first three poems may have been considered Book I, but this is impossible to know since the end of the third poem, Daniel, is missing. Lucas notes that “the compilation of the manuscript evidently began about the year 1000, the date given to the handwriting of the major part of it … [and] Christ and Satan was added in the first quarter of the eleventh century” (1). There is great debate about whether the addition of the final poem was made with an eye to completing a sequence extending from the Creation to the Redemption and Last Judgment.
Of the four major Old English codices, this is the only one with extensive illustrations. Numerous spaces for line drawings have been left in the first three poems, but the forty-eight completed drawings have been done only for Genesis. Lucas argues that most of the illustrations date from the early eleventh century, though some date from the second half of the twelfth. He points out that “the principal illustrations, which are ink-drawings (one painted in part, p. 11) by two artists, the second using coloured inks, belong to the ‘Winchester School’ and were formerly thought to have been executed at Canterbury [but] new evidence has now come to light on the basis of which the manuscript may be assigned with some confidence to Malmesbury” (2). Some of the drawings have captions, some of them in meter (these captions are included in the “Additional Poems” section).
The manuscript was probably in the monastery library at Malmesbury until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in 1539. After that there is no record of it for many years. Lucas explains that “some time before 1651 it was acquired by James Ussher (1581–1656), archbishop of Armagh, who early in the century was collecting books for the library of Trinity College, Dublin … and Ussher gave it to his friend [Franciscus] Junius, possibly as a parting gift in 1651” (5). Junius was a Dutch scholar who came to England in 1621 and stayed for thirty years. In 1655 he published an edition of the manuscript in Amsterdam which now bears his name, describing it as a poetic treatment of Genesis and other portions of the scriptures by the Anglo-Saxon monk and poet Cædmon.
This attribution of the poems was based on Bede’s story of Cædmon’s being inspired by a dreamlike, holy voice to sing a song of creation which became Cædmon’s Hymn. The abbess of the abbey where he worked and a number of learned men urged him to develop his talent by studying religious subjects and turning them into poetry. As Bede tells it:
All of them agreed that Cædmon’s gift had been given him by our Lord. And they explained to him a passage of scriptural history or doctrine and asked him to render it into verse if he could. He promised to do this, and returned next morning with excellent verses as they had ordered him. The abbess was delighted that God had given such grace to the man, and advised him to abandon secular life and adopt the monastic state. And when she had admitted him into the Community as a brother, she ordered him to be instructed in the events of sacred history. So Cædmon stored up in his memory all that he learned, and like one of the clean animals chewing the cud, turned it into such melodious verse that his delightful renderings turned his instructors into auditors. He sang of the creation of the world, the origin of the human race, and the whole story of Genesis. He sang of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, the entry into the Promised Land, and many other events of scriptural history. He sang of the Lord’s Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the Apostles. He also made poems on the terrors of the Last Judgement, the horrible pains of Hell, and the joys of the Kingdom of Heaven. In addition to these, he composed several others on the blessings and judgements of God, by which he sought to turn his hearers from delight in wickedness and to inspire them to love and do good. (249–50)
The linguistic and historical evidence now makes it clear to most scholars that the poems in the Junius Manuscript cannot have been written by Cædmon or even by a single author, but Krapp surmises that “it requires no stretching of probability to assume that the example and incentive of Cædmon’s own verse accounts in large measure for the existence of these poems, and in consequence, of this manuscript” (1931, 1).
Debate continues about the possible unity of the manuscript in terms of some Anglo-Saxon scribe’s or compiler’s vision. J. R. Hall argues that “the unitive bibliographic features of Junius 11 invite consideration of the volume as a special collection of scriptural poems which, like the later Middle English plays constituting a biblical cycle, were compiled and organized by an editor or editors according to a definite plan” (2002a, 21). He summarizes the variety of unified readings of the manuscript, noting that most of the previous proposals for unity focused on the Paschal liturgy as a guiding principle (see 22 ff. for a summary of these readings). He argues that the liturgical connections do not explain enough of the biblical and Christological materials in the Junius Manuscript and points to an idea proposed by Craig that the poems follow the pattern of the later medieval Corpus Christi plays from Creation to Judgment, noting Lee’s briefly mentioned idea that the poems “‘set forth the overall biblical structure’ of the story of redemption” (23; the inset citation is from Lee, 20). Hall points out that this pattern is present in Bede’s description of Cædmon’s poetry and in other sources such as Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus and Wulfstan’s Sermo 6. He presents a detailed argument for this pattern and argues that the poems in the Junius Manuscript can be read as “an epic of redemption” (24). In a later article rebutting various critics of his position, he postulates a timetable for the composition of the Junius Manuscript:
Suppose that an editor wanted to assemble a book of salvation history, from Creation to the Last Judgment, and had managed to collect only Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. He would have the three poems copied but could not complete the project until he found an appropriat
e New Testament poem. Some time later (two months? Two years?), he read Christ and Satan, saw that the poem would serve his purpose, and arranged to have scribes copy it into the last quire of the manuscript, allowing spaces for illustrations like those in the Old Testament part of the volume. Using folios the Old Testament scribe had prepared and adding new ones of their own, the scribes copied the poem. Its contents now complete, the manuscript was bound. In this hypothetical reconstruction, Christ and Satan specifically was not in the mind of the editor when he planned the volume, but a New Testament poem was part of his design. In a literal sense Christ and Satan was an after-thought, but in another sense it was a forethought—the final piece needed to complete Junius 11, the manuscript as a whole comprising “The Old English Epic of Redemption.” (2002b, 67)
Hall’s argument here seems both imaginative and compelling, though the question of the unity of the Junius Manuscript and its principles of compilation must probably remain open. It may be that Anglo-Saxon notions of unity were more flexible or open-ended than our own. The balance between ordered connection and apparently arbitrary inclusion of poems in the Exeter Book is a case in point. The juxtaposition of order and arbitrariness can also be seen in individual poems such as the gnomic poems or maxims or even in the principles of connection and disconnection in the Exeter Book riddles.
GENESIS (A AND B)
The OE poetic Genesis (A and B) covers material in the first book of the Bible from the Creation to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) and also draws upon exegetical materials about the angelic rebellion in heaven. It focuses on certain events—the Creation, the rebellion of Lucifer, the casting out of the rebellious angels from heaven to hell, the creation of an earthly paradise and of Adam and Eve, their temptation and fall, Cain’s murder of Abel, the succeeding generations beginning with Seth, Noah’s flood, the story of Lot, and the extended account of Abraham’s life which takes up nearly half of the poem. Many details in the biblical Genesis are omitted, such as the extensive genealogical lists, while others are added, such as the fall of Lucifer and the detailed exploration of the temptation of Adam and Eve—where, as Anlezark notes, “the poem often explains motivation where this is not found in the biblical original” (2011, ix). Some of the added or expanded events, such as the war in heaven and the battle of the kings, are places where “the martial diction of the native verse form is given free rein” (Fulk and Cain, 113). For more on biblical additions and omissions, see Doane, 1978, 62–70; 1991, 93–107; and Remley, 1996, 94–167.
The Complete Old English Poems Page 10
