Manners of the age of Beowul Episodes in nobles that all fly but one, who succours his lord, and turns the battle in his favour. But the poison has done its work; and Beowulf, seeing himself nigh to death, commands his faithful follower to bring forth the dragon's hoard for him to feast his eyes on, and in dying directs his corpse to be burned on a headland, and a barrow heaped up over the remains— Which may for my folk for remembering of me, Lift its head high on the Hrones-ness; That sea-sailing men, soon in days to be, Call it 'Beowulfs Barrow,' who, their barks afoam, From afar are driving o'er the ocean mists. This is accordingly done, the treasure is interred with the hero, and the poem which had begun with a sea-funeral, when the body of King Scyld is sent adrift to sea with all his wealth, ends like the Iliad with a solemn cremation. Beowulf is not only a fine poem, but a most interesting relic of the ideas and manners of the remote past. It shows that the Northern peoples of its age were by no means barbarous, but that even material civilisation was fairly advanced among them; while, except for the general licence of warring and plundering, their morality was high and pure. Whether a single work or compacted of separate lays, it seems to imply a considerable poetical literature now lost. The authors were men of real poetical genius, who laboured under the disadvantages of paucity of impressions and ideas, diction unrefined by study and practice, and a cramping system of versification. Beowulf has not been without influence on later English poetry, Arnold's description of the funeral of Balder, and Morris's of the combats of Jason and his companions with the "ugly, nameless, dull-scaled things," may be distinctly traced back to it; and the comparison shows that the steady expansion of the human mind by the exercise of thought and the accumulation of knowledge has been hardly less favourable to poetry than to science. Beowulf does not stand quite alone among the Anglo-Saxon poems of the period; enough, indeed, is left to have rendered probable, even had Beowulf been lost, the existence of a considerable romantic and metrical literature which had disappeared in the unheroic atmosphere of later monkish ideals and amid the catastrophe of the Norman Conquest. Among several episodes introduced or alluded to in Beowul in such a way as to suggest that they formed the themes of independent poems, is one "The Fight at Finnsburg"-on the same subject as another poem apparently of the same period, about fifty lines of which have been preserved. The two pieces help to complete each other. The personages are Jutes and Frisians, those of another fragment are Germans. A vellum binding in the Royal Library at Copenhagen has preserved two passages from an Anglo-Saxon version of Walthere, an originally Teutonic romance of the Nibelungen cycle. The German original is lost, but survives in a Latin translation made in the tenth century: the ANGLO-SAXON METRE 17 Anglo-Saxon version, however, is older than this, and direct from the German. These wrecks of a vanished literature, which may have been extensive, show that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen (scôpas) were acquainted with the languages and legends of their neighbours, and justify the conclusion that they had not much invention of their own. As they must have been a numerous body, and their hearers must have required variety, their stock of lays was probably large, much larger than was ever committed to writing. They do not appear to have been organised into a guild, or to have been depositories of ritual or mythic lore like the bards of Wales and Ireland: and the story of Caedmon shows that the guests participated with them in the entertainment of the company. Before proceeding further with the subject of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Anglo-Saxon it will be convenient to give some account of Anglo-Saxon metre, which metre cannot be done better than in the words of Vigfusson and Powell (Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. i. pp. 433, 434). For further details, Schipper's elaborate treatise on English metre may be consulted. Every line of old Teutonic poetry is a blank verse divided into two halves by a line-pause which always comes at the end of a word. "Each half is made up of a fixed number of measures; a measure being a word, or a number of words, of which the first root-syllable is shaped, ie, forcibly pronounced, as one does in speaking when one wishes to draw attention to a particular word or syllable. In every line two stress syllables at least, one in each half line, must begin with a similar consonant or a vowel. "In many lines there occur one or more unstressed syllables, which form, as it were, the elastic unmeasured part of the line; these for want of a better term we call slurred syllables, or collectively a slur. It is not meant that these syllables are gabbled over, they may be spoken fast or slow, but that they are redundant or unimportant for the 'make' or structure of the verse, and that they would be less emphasised, and spoken in a less vigorous tone than the rest of the line. There may be one or more slurs in a line. "When a monosyllabic word is stressed and followed by no enclitic words before the next stress, it is succeeded by a short interval of silence, which we call a rest. Such a monosyllable with its rest is a measure in itself." The of Anglo It appears then that, like almost all the poetry of primitive nations, Difficulties the structure of Anglo-Saxon poetry was trochaic and alliterative. Saxon poets Greeks, the Indians, and in modern times the Italians have been enabled to ascend from this lowly plane to rich complication and voluminous harmony of metre, and less gifted nations have had to learn from these. In so doing they have parted with much of their originality, but have gained immensely in variety and flexibility. In estimating the merits of the Anglo-Saxon poets we must remember that they were hampered no less by the imperfection of their metrical system than by the poverty VOL. I. B Northumbrian school of poetry of their vocabulary. The progress of amendment would have been very tardy if it had not been accelerated by the drastic remedy of subjugation by foreigners on a higher level of culture. If we are correct in our view of the date and locality of Beowulf, which, as regards the first point at least, is that generally accepted by modern criticism, we must be the more impressed by the greatness of a poem which, however glossed or interpolated in parts to suit the new belief, stands out in the main as a relic of the past, a grand rough creation of the heroic age, which might well have been contemporary with the events which it professes to celebrate. It is the more impressive from the contrast it affords to the Biblical school of poetry which had grown up since the conversion of the Saxons, and which represented the dominant taste and prevalent feeling of the period. At first sight Beowulf seems like a Milton writing in the age of Pope; we shall, however, find reason to conclude that the tradition of the past was not in fact so entirely abolished. There were idyllic poets who stood aloof from Christianity, and fervent believers in Christ as heathen in spirit as any Viking. It will nevertheless be best for the present to devote our attention to the two principal literary names which, whether those of individuals or of schools of composition, adorn the seventh and eighth centuries of Saxon England. It is an ordinary phenomenon for literature, especially poetical literature, to be for a considerable time confined in its manifestations to a single nook of an extensive country. Ionian Greece in the days of Homer, Sicily and afterwards Tuscany in the early ages of Italian literature, Massachusetts in modern America, are familiar examples. For all these good reasons can be given; but it is not evident why, although the very earliest post-Christian productions of Anglo-Saxon literature-glossaries of merely linguistic interest-appear to proceed from Kent, Anglo-Saxon poetry should for a long period have been almost restricted to Northumbria. The fact-wheresoever Beowulf may have been written seems indubitable. Of the two representative poets of whom we are now to treat, Caedmon was certainly Northumbrian, and although there is no direct evidence as respects Cynewulf, the maritime descriptions and allusions in the poems written by or ascribed to him almost prove that the author or authors were dwellers by the sea. The most probable explanation of the advanced literary position of Northumbria at the period would seem to be that which connects it with the evangelising exertions of Celtic missionaries. As already remarked, the ancient British churches, estranged by resentment and racial hatred, had done nothing for the conversion of the barbarous invaders before the mission of Augustine. After, however, the example thus shown them, they appear to have discerned where their duty and their interest lay; and the proximity of Northumbria to the great Celtic sanctuary of Iona and the British kingdom of Cumbria, as well as the survival of a Celtic population in some Northumbrian districts, would naturally indicate it as a sphere for missionary effort. It is important to observe STORY OF CAEDMON that the Celtic monks, though employing Latin in the services of the Church, would be much. less Latinised than the Italian missionaries in the south. Comparatively exempt from classical influences, they at the same time were by no means animated by a fraternal spirit towards the Romans, and the flight of the Roman Archbishop Paulinus from York in 633 for long left them a clear field. Celtic clergy came to Northumbria in 634 on the invitation of King Oswald, and it was not until 664 that they finally retreated. Under these circumstances, it is comprehensible that Anglo-Saxon literature might grow up in Northumbria while it was elsewhere repressed by the addiction of the reading and writing classes to Latin literature, and that Anglo-Saxon minstrels would feel at liberty to versify Biblical narrative in their own manner. This would seem to have been the extent of the service rendered to AngloSaxon poetry by the British clergy: nothing of the visionary and delicately fanciful Celtic cast of thought is to be detected in it at any period. If the circumstances related of Caedmon's initiation into the poetic art are mythical, they at least attest the celebrity of the poems which gave birth to the legend; if, on the other hand, they are authentic, they are a poem in themselves. Whichever view is taken, they at all events serve to show the prevalence of minstrelsy at AngloSaxon banquets in the seventh century, and disclose the very interesting fact that the minstrel was not invariably a professional bard, but that music and singing were sufficiently cultivated to warrant the expectation that every guest would be able to bear a part in them. Caedmon, Beda tells us, lived nigh the abbey of Streoneshalch (Whitby) in the time of the Abbess Hilda (658-680). A farm servant in all probability, at all events a simple and unlettered man, he was unable to play or sing, and whenever he saw the harp approaching him at a banquet he was accustomed to withdraw in haste. Having on one of these occasions fled from the banqueting-room to the stable where he was engaged in tending cattle, he fell asleep and dreamed that he heard a voice commanding 19 nuscrlunhqigan“hefaámcaquand maudas maceri &nd his mod gidane uge uuldu Padur Halgrapon-Thamıddun geardmonG.nnas uard &rdpretin aftorðað æfmum Foldprevallmatz jueheuundragihuac &ıdritun orafelide heaquft sœpaeldabarnu hebíallpope primo Cantauit Caedmon Ifad Carmen Caedmon's Hymn, the oldest Christian poem in Anglo-Saxon From an eighth-century MS. in the University of Cambridge Caedmon him to sing. His excuses not being accepted he made the attempt, and to his astonishment found himself hymning the praise of the Creator. On awakening he remembered the verses he had composed, and recited them to the steward under whom he served, who brought him to the Abbess. His poetical gift was duly attested and authenticated, and he spent the remainder of his life in versifying Scripture under the patronage of the abbey. There is really no reason to doubt the substantial veracity of the story; although, were it now possible to investigate the circumstances on the spot, we should probably find that Caedmon was already versed Poems attributed to Caedmon Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise From the Caedmon MS. (tenth century) in the Bodleian Library in the Scriptures as an auditor if not as a reader, and that his reluctance to perform his part as a minstrel was rather the effect of timidity than of absolute inability. The endeavour to make him a mythical personage may safely be dismissed. It would be impossible to find a more trustworthy authority than Beda, who was actually the contemporary of Caedmon's latter years. The poetry attributed entirely or in part to Caedmon has come down to us in a single manuscript, discovered by Archbishop Ussher, and now preserved in the Bodleian Library. It nowhere claims to be the work of Caedmon, and the ascription of a large portion of its contents to him by its original editor, Franciscus Junius, is grounded upon their substantial agreement with the description of Beda, who actually gives the general sense. |