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Old English Poetry

By Paul Bibire
 

A carved stone grave marker outside the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory depicts Viking raiders who devastated the Anglo-Saxon monastery in 793 CE  [©Ted Spiegel/Corbis]

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was the earliest form of English to be written, and so the language of the oldest surviving English texts. These date from roughly between 700 and 1100 CE. Much poetry composed in Old English survives, about 30,000 lines in total. It was mostly collected and preserved in four manuscripts, handwritten books, written just before 1000 CE, though some poems are probably much older. So our perceptions of the poetry are mostly determined by the (largely unknown) purposes, interests and taste of the compilers of these manuscripts.

All this poetry was composed in effectively the same meter. The metrical unit is the rhythmic phrase (half-line), usually of two stresses, linked into pairs by alliteration. End-rhyme is hardly ever used, and the meter is not syllable-counting. Although it is theoretically very different from most later poetry, it feels in most respects natural and immediate to a modern ear when spoken aloud.

Some poems recount or refer to inherited heroic legend. Much else is religious. Some of this is "public" poetry, fairly obviously intended to edify its audience; other religious poems seem rather to be private and personal meditations on the human condition. A few poems deal with events of recent history, whether as propaganda or memorial. Some, such as the Riddles, seem to be primarily intended for entertainment, although they come from a learned, Latin tradition. Not all surviving Old English poetry is particularly good. Some poems, versified saints' lives or versified translations of books of the Bible, have little or no present-day interest other than for specialists. But some poems still speak very directly to modern readers, for instance, "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," often paired and often translated. They give an intense sense of weary longing in the midst of transience, desolation and darkness, transmuted into a hungry quest for enlightenment.


Inherited Tradition

Old English poetry certainly grew out of an inherited tradition: all the ancient Germanic languages in which poetry is recorded (Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German and Old Norse) use more or less the same meter and the same diction, and in some instances very similar subject matter. This poetic tradition must have been brought by the English invaders in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, when they conquered and settled the former Roman province of Britannia. Although there certainly was close later contact between these cultures, they must have inherited this poetic tradition from their common past. Such traditions, of meter, diction and content, must go back far beyond the conversion of the English to Christianity in the seventh century, and long before they learned to write in the Roman alphabet.

The only surviving manuscript of "Beowulf"

The poems themselves report oral performance of oral poetry, recited or improvised, "sung" to the harp at celebratory feasting and drinking, and never read aloud from books. However, most or all of the surviving poems seem to have been composed and transmitted in writing, in some instances for several centuries. For instance, the poems of Cynewulf, who may have been ninth-century, are "signed" by their poet with runic acrostics. The runes are only visible on the page; a hearer would merely hear the rune-names, which make reasonable sense as words within the verse.

Cynewulf is one of only two named poets known from the Old English period. The other is Cædmon, a cowherd, a farmworker attached to the Abbey of Whitby in the mid-seventh century. At communal drinking he would leave the company as he saw the harp being passed toward him, because he could not perform poetry. And one time when this happened, he went to the cowshed to look after the cows, and fell asleep. And in his sleep, he dreamed, and in his dream he saw someone come to him and say, "Cædmon, sing me something!" And he answered, "I don't know how to sing, and that is why I left the company and came here." But the other said, "Yet you have something to sing to me." "What must I sing?" said he. "Sing me Creation," said the other. And with that he began to sing words that he had never heard before. And when he woke up, he could remember all that he had sung. The monks took him to the abbess, and she recognized God's gift in him, and those that had taught him now became his pupils, taking down in writing those sweet words from his mouth.

This gives a clear statement of the relationship between divinely inspired, orally performed poetry composed by an illiterate poet, and the written text. The poem that Bede then quotes, "Cædmon's Hymn" as it is known, may be the beginning of English poetry. Cædmon is depicted as coming from the lowest stratum of society, even though the heroic poems deal solely with a warrior aristocracy and its own poetic traditions, and the Christian religious poetry otherwise mostly seems to show learned, probably monastic composition.


Beowulf

The two poems that stand out beyond all others, and that compare well with anything in European literature of any period, are "The Dream of the Rood" and "Beowulf." They are very different from each other. "The Dream of the Rood" is short, a dream-vision unlike Cædmon's, for the dream is experienced within the poem. The vision has an anguished, ecstatic intensity, but is based upon intellectual, even philosophical, understanding of daring originality. It is one of the finest religious poems in English.

"Beowulf," in contrast, is an epic. As epics go it is short (3,182 lines), but this physical length is misleading: the poetry mostly moves slowly, massively, and with huge momentum. Its experience is that of an entire life-time, from youth to age: it is life-changing. Its content is set against a background of Scandinavian heroic legend of the sixth century, but the primary narratives are far older yet, and go back to myths of immemorial antiquity, functioning as archetypes.

The hero's fatal dragon-fight is cognate with legends of the Greek divine hero Heracles, and with the Hindu myth of the contest between the god Indra and the demon Vritra. But although the poem seems to show awareness of the mythic antiquity of its stories, it views them from a melancholy distance of time. That was then, not now; the glory of men was won, and is lost. This awareness of transience, the passing of human achievement and of life itself, is not despairing--the poem is certainly Christian, and is aware of hope unavailable to its characters--but it constitutes the most acute cumulative expression of a philosophical grief at the passing of things that I have encountered in any literary work.
 

A finely crafted 7th century Anglo-Saxon belt buckle  [©DK Images]

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