15 Sep The Anglo-Saxons:  Poetry as Cultural Commentary For this journal, you need to respond, citing textual moments from

Beowulf

Beowulf is often considered the singular, originary, uniquely English epic. The manuscript itself dates from approximately 1000 C. E., but the story has all the earmarks of an older, oral composition that was recorded after a later performance. The historic figures recognizable are from the 7th century C. E. in the area of what is now Denmark. The Old English dialect is fairly regional to the area now known as Essex.

If you look at an image of the manuscript, you will discover that there is no title; the poem was called Beowulf after its central character, even though he doesn’t appear until the story is well under way. Until J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1938 essay, “The Monster and the Critics,” most of the critique of the poem was based on the heroics of Beowulf and the poetics of the poem. Tolkien, a philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon studies at Oxford, made an argument that no had considered before. He posited that the key to understanding the poem was to understand the monsters in it and how they shape the thematic issues of the narrative.

To understand that idea, the first thing you need to look at is the basic structure of the poem. The opening movement, about Schyld Sheffing, is the establishment of the standard of a “good king” – and all other rulers are compared to him. One way the reader knows it significance is the shift in the narrative voice when the commentary “that was a good king” is presented. This is an example of Gnomic Lore. This isn’t about that Travelocity gnome; it’s about gnosis (wisdom). Periodically through the text, moments of gnosis occur, when that same shift in voice occur. These moments help an audience understand the significance of the events that have just occurred in the narrative. If you pay attention to them, you will get a sense of the cultural values promulgated by the poet.

One of those values is the idea of the posse commitatus. This recurs in epic literature. It is the small group of committed followers of the leader – literally, the committed posse (sometimes, Latin is really that straight-forward). Here, the audience witnesses the benefits to the followers when the leader is the right kind of leader. Schyld rewards his followers generously (there was no particular value in hoarding your wealth – the idea was to show it off and be generous with it to gain friends and allies). Later, when Beowulf is rewarded by Hrothgar, he keeps very little for himself; instead of being greedy, he gives his posse some of the gifts and the remainder go to his own dryhten (lord). The benefit the leader has is that the posse wants him to succeed and supports him in his endeavors. It’s when the leader fails in his generosity that the posse fails in its loyalty.

This, of course, is what happened with Hrothgar. He was a successful dryhten when he was younger, but he, instead of distributing his wealth, spent it in building an edifice to himself, Heorot. He also go old (remember, the cultural goal was to die in battle and go to Valhalla). If he had been the “right” kind of king, he would never have built Heorot, which in turn would not have been the source of the “dear din” that disturbed Grendel. And, once Grendel attacked, Hrothgar should have been the one fighting Grendel, not hiring a mercenary. That is NOT “a good king” based on the example given earlier.

So, here the concept of sin enters the story, even if it’s not Sin as you might think of it. Hrothgar, aside from being old and self-serving, is a bad neighbor. This may not seem like much, but its consequences are severe. Grendel attacks Heorot.

Tolkien argued that the three “monsters” each represented a particular cultural issue. Grendel is, here, unmitigated rage. Nothing stops him from killing until he his attacked in turn. His response to the noisy neighbor provocation is so completely extreme that he cannot be reasoned with, apparently. Of course, the noisy neighbors don’t shut up, either.

Beowulf, a young warlord, comes with his posse and establishes himself as a hero (in contrast to both Hrothgar and Unferth, who, effectively, is Beowulf’s literary foil, acting oppositely in the exact same circumstances, something illustrated in the dinner sequence where he accuses Beowulf of being a loser against Brecca. Beowulf’s response is to say that he never heard tales of Unferth’s exploits.). This exchange is typical of epic poetry and is called a “flyting” – a formulaic exchange of credentials establishing the superiority of the hero and the inferiority of the would-be hero.

After Beowulf has defeated Grendel, the second “monster,” Grendel’s mother, comes to take vengeance. This movement is critical for Tolkien as a thematic shift. Unlike her son, who just wants to silence everyone, Mama wants particular revenge on the person she holds responsible for her son’s fate, Hrothgar. She, and the audience, understand that, although Beowulf is the fighter, Hrothgar, as dryhten, is responsible for the actions of all under his command. So, she kills Aescher, Hrothgar’s advisor specifically to punish Hrothgar. This particular act calls for a particular response, and here the audience witnesses the thematic implications of Beowulf’s earlier boasting. He has followed through, to the point that even Unferth is now a believer in his capacity for action and leadership. This is what giving his sword, Hrunting, signifies. A named sword was a sign of its importance to and the relative importance of its wielder. To loan it to someone else was a sign of ultimate respect and honor.

After all this, the story summarizes 50 years, during which Beowulf himself becomes dryhten back home. He is all the things a good king should be – generous, a warlord, a fighter, a general, and a provider for his people. Remember Schyld? Well, he’s got nothing on Beowulf, apparently. The kingdom has expanded, the people are happy, the other kingdoms are subjugated, all is well.

And then the third “monster” is provoked. A thief steals a cup from a dragon’s hoard (yes Tolkien totally ripped this off for Frodo and Smaug in The Hobbit). The sin is, clearly, greed. The thief steals for no other reason than he wants what the dragon has. The dragon’s response is disproportionate to his loss, at least to the audience. He burns all sorts of stuff to punish those who might be the thief’s people.

Now, Beowulf must step up again. Remember, he’s been the Type of a Good King: strong, smart, brave, generous, leaderly, loyal, etc. So, his posse should be all-in fighting the dragon, right?

Well, there’s one problem. He’s OLD. So, even though he has been awesome and awe-inspiring, he’s no longer the exemplar they want to model themselves in relation to. He’s going to fight the dragon. His posse should be right there with him. Instead, all he has is Wiglaf, a very young thane.

They succeed, but Beowulf is mortally wounded in the process. Upon his death, there is a movement of “ubi sunt” when the women mourn the disaster to come with his death.

Remember all that awesome kingness? It comes at the cost of others, so it is, inherently, a redistribution of wealth to the benefit of the particular kingdom. It is, really, greed in action. Thus, the thief / dragon interaction is really a microcosm of the problem of the kingdom.

And, with the death of the dryhten, the kingdom is left unprotected from acts of rage, vengeance, and greed.

One final thing: you should have noticed the Biblical references – Grendel is Cain’s kin (“Cannes kynne”), etc. All of the references are Old Testament. None are critical to the story, but they add a layer of meaning to the text. Scholars argue that the Biblical references were added at a later time to the original, non-Christian story. As manuscripts were composed in monastic scriptora, this seems not unreasonable.

Thematically, however, the story becomes in part an allegory of the need for Jesus’ axiom of “love thy enemy” and “turn the other cheek” – the idea of true forgiveness. Without it, the cycle of vengeance is unending. It is only through the example of the New Testament that there is hope of change and salvation.

And, here in this poem, is what happens unendingly without that optional out of the cycle.

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Anglo-Saxon Poetry

I’ve posted the regularized (edited) Old English poems The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer in this section of your class shell, so that you can look at them to see what I’m discussing in this lecture.

Last time, I discussed the grammatical nature of Old English. Now, looking at the texts, you should be able to see some of those characteristics. If you look at the case endings of words, you’ll see how poets stitched together language. Basically, if Yoda were dubbed in to an inflected language, he would not sound odd at all to that audience.

Because there is no particular value in word order, Old English poetry didn’t rely on rhymes the way you may be used to (you should be really quite familiar with end-rhyme, end-soft-rhyme, blank verse, and free verse from earlier in your educational experience). Here, the Anglo-Saxons used alliteration to create their rhymes. This means that the first sounds of a series of words in a line create the poetic markers that distinguish poetry from prose writing

The Wanderer, line 7:

wraþra wælsleahta,      winemæga hryre: 

— the W sound creates the poetic sensibility). Also, that Alliterative Verse helps distinguish Old English poetry from Middle English poetry (which may use a combination of Alliterative Verse and End-Rhyme). So, meaning is established differently than in Modern English, where word order is key.

That alliteration allowed poets to create imagery that spanned the poem – a sound combination that appears early in the poem might appear later, creating a thread of sound and meaning that ties together the ideas.

It also shows the nature of the poetry’s original composition as an oral text. Dr. Walter J. Ong coined the Oral-Formulaic Theory. He posits that many manuscripts containing early poetry in many cultures are actually from when the poem was finally written down, much later than its origin. He shows how certain textual markers (like repetition, epithets, imagery, and sound patterns) in these poems (like The Iliad or Beowulf) are signals that the performances were oral and the audience was auditory. Think, basically, of public speaking. An effective speaker knows how to move an audience through a variety of linguistic and rhetorical schema. An ineffective speaker does not engage that audience. However, the schema that a speaker uses do not necessarily translate well in to written text. The repetition and epithets that are useful in spoken-word compositions create, in a written composition, potential distractions for the audience. So, the things that might annoy you in reading something like The Iliad, where every time someone is killed, he “falls in a clatter of armor” – and hundreds of fighters die – actually would become an easy marker for a listener to catch up with the poem’s ideas. That repetition would work auditorily in a way it simply cannot visually. It also allows the poet, reciting a composition thousands of lines long, to have a place to mentally “pause” and regroup if the poet forgets part of the story.

Another marker of the poems is the use of a particular kind of epithet called a Kenning. While an epithet is a phrase used to add or illustrate value to a noun (for example, Beowulf, Son of Higelac – Son of Higelac is the epithet), a kenning takes the place of the noun to give the audience some idea of what is valued about that noun. In The Wanderer, there are a series of kennings the narrator uses to show the value of someone like his dryten (his lord) – like ring-giver and loaf-lord. That tells the audience that the value of his lord was not just that he was the ruler, but that he was generous and provided for his thanes. In The Dream of the Rood, the use of kennings gives the audience a sense of the value of the Rood and of the narrator’s place in his monastic society (he works for the monastery; the monks are “speech-bearers” – he does not consider himself one). Part of what kennings do is illustrate cultural values, teaching the audience something about appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.

There are two final poetic strategies present in The Wanderer that recur in Anglo-Saxon poetry: the genre of elegiac poetry and the thematic issue of “ubi sunt.”

Elegiac poetry is the poetry of loss, remembrance, and mourning. If you have experienced personal loss, you know exactly what an elegy is. You remember the thing lost, you mourn its loss, and you fondly recall the proverbial “good old days” of pre-loss. Elegiac poetry does exactly this. As you saw in The Wanderer, the narrator is alone in the world, all the good things in his life gone because he outlived everyone who knew him. This is a poem of mourning.

The “ubi sunt” (Latin for “where are they”) is a particular thematic movement in Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry. When the narrator asks about the things lost, the poet is giving the audience the value system of the culture. The things that make life worth living are not so much the stuff as what they represent: security, safety, belonging, and stability.

For your purposes, these issues of Anglo-Saxon poetry will be particularly found in the next reading, Beowulf. As you read that poem, keep looking for these elements of Anglo-Saxon poetry. There are others, but they’ll be discussed in the next lecture.

Additionally, many of these elements recur when the post-Anglo-Norman English (Middle English) poetic traditions emerge in he 13th and 14th centuries.

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The Anglo-Saxons

You may have run across these people in passing reference in a World History course, but there are facets you need to understand context as you read the texts:

1. History (the only source I’m referencing here is

Cheney, C. R., ed. Handbook of Dates for Students of English

History. London, UK: Offices of the Royal Historical Society,

1978. My particular area of study is in this.)

2. Culture and Language

History

What are now called the British Isles were settled, according to the earliest written (in an alphabet called Ogham) and archaeological records, by the Celts, a Neolithic culture whose archaeological marker is recognized as a particular type of stone-chipped flint axe.

Historically, the Roman Empire invaded and conquered the island known as Britannia, starting in 45 C. E., after Julius Caesar saw it in 44 B. C. E, as he finished the Gallic War and was called back to Rome before he could cross the body of water to get to the land he saw in the distance.

The Romans conquered as far north as the narrowest point of the island, a 72-mile stretch that they fortified by building a wall and fortresses and garrisons across the breadth of the island. This, of course, is Hadrian’s Wall.

As the Roman Empire was falling to the invading Germanic armies, the Empire contracted. Britannia, being on the outermost edge of the Empire, was abandoned by the Romans in, traditionally, 410 C. E.

This left a power disparity and gap that proved the downfall of the southern, Romanized Celtic civilization. They had a booming economy, paved streets (Lt. strata), and, suddenly, no protection from their barbarian cousins in the North. To protect themselves, the Celtic rulers hired mercenaries from the continental region of what is now Frisiand and Denmark. These mercenaries were warriors from the Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes.

This was a bad move.

The three armies not only brought their weapons, they brought their families, invading the unfortified island from the south and the east.

By 450 C. E., the Celts had been pushed to the perimeters of their former lands – what is now Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and, on the continent, Bretagne (the modern French province of Brittany). The conquest was so absolute that even the Celtic languages weren’t spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The only words we have in modern English from this era that are Celtic in origin are “tor” (hill) and “avon” (river, so the River Avon is actually the River River).

The Anglo-Saxons had multiple kingdoms in what is now England at any given time – Kent, Deira, Bernicia, Northumbria, Mercia, Lindsey, East Anglia, South Saxons, East Saxons, and West Saxons. There was not one particular ruler over everyone, and, in the course of almost 300 years, various kingdoms waxed and waned in their significance.

It was the invasion of the Isle by the Norse Vikings (“vik” is the Old Norse word for “bay” – a viking was one who was in a stable, seafaring longship shallow enough to pass through a bay in to a river system) in the early 8th century, that led to the unification of England.

The Vikings, like the earlier Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, were moved to settle in to this island. They came from Norway, and they pushed in to the island from the northeast (what is now Yorkshire). They were fierce enough fighters that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fell, and by 871 C. E., only the young king of the West Saxons, Alfred, was left, and he was hiding in a swamp, burning his breakfast (if you talk to a Brit who went to public school, the thing they always know is “the bloke who burned the bannocks and became king”).

Alfred was the 5th son of the King of the West Saxons and never was intended to inherit the throne. But his father and four older brothers all died fighting the Vikings. It turns out he was a very smart strategist. He fought back the Vikings to the point that he forced them in to the Treaty of Wedmore, establishing the Danelaw (the Viking kingdom, marked on maps as an arching line from the NE corner of Wales to north of London) and England. Alfred is the first King of England.

That era of English history ended with William the Conqueror’s successful invasion in 1066 C. E., when his army defeated King Harold’s at the Battle of Hastings on Saturday 14 October 1066.

Culture and Language

Until Christian missionaries arrived on the island, the Anglo-Saxons were culturally fairly close to the Scandinavian Norse; discussing culture requires and understanding of social structures, religion, and language.

This is the World Tree, Yggdrasil. It is how the universe is organized, according to the religion of the Anglo-Saxons; it is the same religion as that of the Norse, although the language is somewhat different. This religion, as with most cultures, shapes and underlies the culture of the Anglo-Saxons, so being aware of it will help you understand the texts. Even after the Christian missionaries came and converted various kings (the Synod of Whitby, 527 C. E., established Roman Catholicism as the official version of Christianity, the earlier religion remained and influenced the culture.

So, a brief synopsis of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion (really brief; if you know Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, you’ve been exposed to these ideas in the culture of the Rohaninn.):

Humans live in Midgard (literally, Middle-Yard or Middle-Earth); it became habitable after a war between Jotuns (Giants) of Fire and Ice, who battled in to a stalemate and made the world habitable by attaining temperate balance between extremes.

The gods of the Vanir (Odin the All-Father, his wife Freyja, sons Thor and Loki and Baldir [among others]) live in Asgard. They actively engage in the affairs of men pretty much for their own entertainment and to prepare for Ragnarok, the Final Battle between the Giants and the Gods, which the gods will lose, ending life in the world. Loki, the Trickster, and his children (one of which is the wolf Fenrir) will bring about this battle.

So, humans exist during this pause in warfare; when a person dies, they go to the afterlife, either as fallen warriors or as the damned. If you die in battle, you go to Valhalla (Hall of the Fallen) and party until you’re called up to die during Ragnarok at the side of the gods. If you die in any other way, you go to Hel, where you don’t have the chance to die gloriously in battle. The goddess Hela is in charge of Hel, and it’s cold.

Culturally, this means that the Anglo-Saxons valued the virtues (characteristics) of a warrior. The worst thing you could do was behave dishonorably or ignobly. You were supposed to be courageous, a fighter, and willing to die for your hlaford (loaf-giver; this becomes lord, later). If you were in a battle, you stayed and fought and either won or died. Anything else was damnable behavior.

Think about all the ways this would influence what you’re reading, examples of the variety of texts. How does this cultural underpinning impact the ideas presented?

Language

When you look at the PDF of Alfred’s Preface, you will see Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxons) in its Roman alphabet. Prior to trade with the continent and the arrival of the missionaries, the alphabet was runic, referred to as the Elder Futhark (see https://www.vikingrune.com/2008/11/elder-futhark-runes/ if you are curious; the site has some good information and lots of silliness masquerading as good information, but the alphabet is accurate in its letters and in their equivalents). Once the Roman alphabet became the norm, the Anglo-Saxons modified it for sounds that Latin didn’t have (see https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/the-old-english-alphabet-used-to-have-more-than-26-letters/ ). This is one of the reasons that English spelling and pronunciation relationships are so problematic; the French that came in with the Normans took the sounds heard and transcribed them in to the French alphabet, but the French had no way to represent some of the sounds.

Regarding the language itself, it was Germanic. What we speak now is, structurally, strongly structured by later influences that simplified its structure.

Old English was an inflected language; this means that it had case endings for every grammatical function of its nouns and their accompanying adjectives and qualifiers (nominative, genitive, dative, etc.). So, word order was not an issue. No one would mistake the subject of a sentence for the object, simply because case endings, not word order, marked grammatical function.

Verbs were, except for one particular class of verbs, internally changed for tense (the remainders in MnE [Modern English] are the “irregular” verbs – ring, rang, rung, etc.).

English was a compounding language in its structure, like modern Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic (all of which are linguistic cousins of Old English). So, a noun was often a compound of its characteristics – the hlaford earlier is an example of a compound noun; it is the person himself, but it is also a sign of what was valuable about the person (here, it shows that a lord provided for his thanes [warriors]).

Thus, when translating Old English in to Modern English, the shifts are not just linguistic; they are cultural, too. But that’s the subject of the next lecture.