POEMS ASCRIBED TO CAEDMON

25

phrase of Exodus, and it seems scarcely possible that the work of an author of such celebrity should have been extinguished by an anonymous writer. On the whole it appears safest to attribute the poem to him. The Daniel is more dubious.

cribed to

The poems on New Testament history or legend comprised in the Poems erroBodleian MS. are considerably later than the genuine Caedmon, if the neously as paraphrases of Genesis and Exodus are rightly attributed to him. They Caedmon manifest the same independence and invention as the poem on the Fall in the Old Testament series, and may well be attributed to its author. The spirit is totally unlike that which Bede would lead us to ascribe to Caedmon; it is vindictive, unchristian, and far below the substantially heathen Beowulf. They consist of several poems, on the Fall of the Angels, the Temptation of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, and other subjects from the New Testament, welded into one by the transcriber. The Dream of the Holy Rood has been ascribed to Caedmon in consequence of some lines from it being engraved on the Ruthwell Cross with the statement "Cadmon wrought me," but this clearly refers to the sculptor, and the poem is almost certainly by Cynewulf or one of his disciples. There remains a considerable fragment of an elaborate poem on the history of Judith, which has been ingeniously conjectured to have been composed in compliment to Queen Judith, Ethelwulf's wife and Alfred's stepmother, but is more probably a production of one of Caedmon's Northumbrian group some time in the eighth century. Some have deemed the author but mediocre as a poet; others have judged his work more favourably; and their opinion, we think, will be deemed fully confirmed by the brilliant translation of Professor Oliver Elton in the volume of essays published in 1900 in honour of Dr. Furnivall. This, by the favour of Professor Elton and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, we are enabled to cite at full length, and it will be found a perfect specimen of the average style of Anglo-Saxon poetry :—

Large is the face of our world, but she loosed not trust in His gifts,
And sure was the sheltering grace of His hand, in her sharpest call

To the Prince, who presides, far-famed, in the height, to protect her now
From the worst of the Fear; and the Lord of His creatures willed her the boon
For her fulness of faith in the glorious omnipotent Father enskied.
And the heart grew fain, as I heard, within Holofernes the king,

And he sent forth a bidding to wine, a banquet of bravery measureless
For all the eldest of thanes in the orders of shielded fighters,

And the chiefs of the folk came quick to that mighty captain of theirs.

And fourth was the day since the fairily-radiant
Damsel had sought him, the deep-couled Judith ;
And they fared to the feast, his fellows in sorrow,
And with lust of the wine-cup uplifted was every
Breast of the warrior in battle-mail.

And they bore down the benches the beakers lofty

Full cups and flagons for feasting in hall;

And the soldiers seized them, the strong men in bucklers,

Translation of "Juaith"

Who were sealed—and their sovereign saw not-to death.
And the giver of gold was gay with the revel,
Holofernes, the fear and the friend of his earls,
And he laughed aloud, and hallooed and shouted
In fierceness of mood, and far the tempestuous
Clamour was caught by the children of mortals
As mad with the mead-cup he monished them often
To bear themselves bravely at board and be men
Curst was his soul, and his company doughty he
Drowned in their drink while the daylight held,

And he whelmed them in wine, the warriors all,

Till they lay at the last like dead men stricken, in languor lapped,
With good things gorged by their valorous giver of treasure. And he
Saw they were served as they sat in the feast-hall

Till dusk had descended nigh on the world.

And he bade them, that soul of all sins commingled,

To bring to his bed the blest among women,

Bracelet-laden, and lordly with rings.

And swiftly his servants set to the will of

The mailed ones' master, and made in a flash

To the guest-room of Judith, of judgement deep.
And they found her, and fetched the fairest of ladies
To his tall-arched tent, the targeted warriors,
Where the lord Holofernes, the loathed of the Saviour,
Slept through the nights; and encircling the couch
Was a curtain all netted of comeliest gold

For the captain of war and contriver of harms

To watch on the warriors that went to his chamber,
And be noted by none that came near him of mortals
Whom he called not in quest of their counsel himself,
The prince in his pride, from the proven in battle.

And they carried unto his couch the woman whose cunning was sure,
And the mind of the men was o'ercast as they went to their master with word
That the heavenly maid had been brought to the bower; and he, their lord
The leader of cities, the famous, was stirred to laughter of heart,
And was fain to defile the bright one and tarnish her fairness. God,
Wielder of war-men, and Guardian of might, and Awarder of fame,
Kept the king from his deed, and let not the crime betide.

Then his heart was hot with his lust, and he went, the hellish of soul,

Mid the press of his princes, along to his bed, where the pride of his life

Was to finish before the morn; not soft was the fortune here

Of the monarch of many, the puissant of soul, but meet for his works

On earth done under the sky, and his mind was empty of wit

As he stumbled to sleep his fill, the chieftain sodden with wine.

Then strode the soldiers straight from the chamber,

Drenched in their drink; they had drawn the detested one,

False to his faith and fell to his people, the

Last time on earth to his lair, in haste.

And the handmaid of God in her heart took counsel

Swiftly to slay, as he slumbered, the terrible
Lecher unclean, for her Lord; and His maiden
With coiling tresses, caught from its scabbard

A sword that was scoured unto sharpness of temper;
And next she besought by His Name the Redeemer of

THE ANGLO-SAXON JUDITH

Men upon earth by His might in the firmament:
Chief of Thy creatures and Child of Omnipotence,
Spirit of comfort and Star of the Trinity,

Give me Thy grace in my greatness of trouble.

For my heart is afire within, and my soul is heavy, and sore

Sunken in sorrow; be mine of Thy grace, O Sovereign above,

Conquest, and keenness of faith that my sword shall cut him in twain,
Murder's minister yonder! And mighty One, Master of all,

Glory-allotter to men, and great in Thy majesty, now
Favour and save me, of mercy, in this my fulness of need;

Wreak for the wrath and the flame of my soul a repayment. And soon

He in the highest who sits made sharp her heart in its strength,

As He may for us men who entreat Him aright and with meetness of faith;
And the heart of the holy maid was enlarged, and her hope made new.

And hard she haled by the hair the idolater

Deadly and hateful, and dragged him disdainfully

Forth to her featly, to fall at her mercy.

And the sword of the maiden with sinuous tresses

Flickered and fell on the furious-hearted

Bane of his foes, bit into his neck-bone.

And drunken he lay there, drowned in a stupor,

And life in him lingered, though large was his wound.
And she smote with the strength of her soul once more
At the heathenish hound, and the head rolled over

Forth on the floor; and the filthy carrion

Lay on the bed without life; but the spirit had
Fared away far in the fathomless underworld,

To be hampered in hell-pains and humbled eternally,
Wreathen with serpents in regions of torment,
Fettered and fast in the flame of perdition.

He has done with our life; nor dare he have hope

In the heart of the dark habitation of dragons

Thence to depart, but he there must abide

In that dwelling of dimness, undawned on of joy,
Ever and ever for infinite ages.

27

and his school

The other important group of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry, inferior in Poems of antiquity and legendary interest to the Caedmonian collection, but not in Cynewulf poetical merit, is that associated with the name of Cynewulf. The circumstances under which these poems have reached us are analogous to those which have preserved Caedmon. They exist in two manuscripts, the Exeter MS. of Anglo-Saxon poetry given by Bishop Leofric to Exeter Cathedral in 1046, and treasured there ever since, and a similar MS. in the cathedral library at Vercelli, discovered in 1832. The poems in the two MSS. are not the same, and we should have no clue to the authorship of any of them but for the fortunate and simultaneous discovery of Mitchell Kemble and Jacob Grimm, afterwards completed by Professor Napier, that runic letters interwoven with the text of two of the Exeter poems, the Crist and the Juliana, and two of the Vercelli poems, the Elene and the Andreas, more commonly called the Fata Apostolorum, for the poem usually so entitled is in fact but a fragment of it, disclose the name of Cynewulf. A similar cryptogram has been detected by some in a collection of metrical riddles and gnomic verses,

some highly poetical, also preserved in the Exeter book, but this has been disputed by others, and cannot be regarded as fully established. Such of them, nevertheless, as do not too manifestly savour of an earlier age, may

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very well be youthful productions of Cynewulf. He may also be the author of The Dream of the Rood in the Vercelli book, and perhaps of the Phonix, a paraphrase of the poem ascribed to Lactantius, deficient

supplying the

Christian application, and of the long and important

poem on the life of St. Guthlac in the Exeter MS. The Andreas, a long poem on the fabulous adventures of St. Andrew and St. Matthew in Mermedonia, and the other poems in the two MS. books, may be attributed to poets of Cynewulf's school.

In the Elene, which is undoubtedly Cynewulf's,

he has fortunately related. some particulars of himself, enabling us to fill up what would otherwise be the merest outline of a shadowy figure. He had been, he tells us, devoted in his youth to the chase and the banquet and worldly pleasures, but in his old age had become studious, religious, and meditative also, we must suppose, though he does not expressly say so, sufficiently erudite to study ecclesiastical legends at first hand. He had, as a young man, been rewarded with golden gifts for his songs, which we must take to have been his own composition, and whose loss is greatly to be deplored. It would be natural that his serious mood and advanced age should lead him. to the shelter of a monastery; but the Kenulphus, Abbot of Peterborough,

Facsimile of Anglo-Saxon MS. of Eleventh Century
From the Cathedral Library at Vercelli