British literature Chapter 1. Old English Literature

The first Englishmen were foreigners. Those people came to England from abroad when England was already inhabited by a long-settled race. That long-settled race was the British race, and the beginnings of its settlement cannot be traced: they belong to pre-history. That race still exists, to be found mainly in Wales, to the west of England, speaking a language quite unlike English, different in temperament and culture from the English invader. The ancient Romans called them 'Britanni' and their country 'Britannia'. We can call them Britons.

Those Britons were ruled for several centuries by the Roman invaders, and Britannia, or Britain, was the most westerly and northerly province of the Roman Empire. The Romans brought their language and their architects and engineers as well as their garrisons and governors. Britain was given towns, villas with central heating, public baths, theatres, and a system of roads. But by the end of the fifth century the Roman Empire had been weakened for a number of internal and external reasons. The civilisation got under the threat of crash at the downfall of the great Empire and was vulnerable to any invader who cared to cross from Europe. The time of the fall of the Empire was also the time of the migrations of peoples from the East of Europe - the Goths and the Vandals, which added to the fall of the power of Rome.

Some other tribes, poorly developed and uncivilised, were also involved in those movements: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. They, barbarous and ruthless hordes, quickly spread all over the rest of Europe, breaking all what had been created for centuries by the most advanced civilisation. Those tribes (the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes) soon arrived in Britain claiming the best territory for themselves. The new race was formed soon after - the Anglo-Saxon race. Their language, or a group of dialects, we shall call Anglo-Saxon, but in the interest of unity of the nation, we shall keep to the name Old English.

Although it is now believed that in the sixth century, the new masters of England started to accept Christianity, chiefly because of the energy of the Christian evangelists from Ireland, who came over to convert them, it was not till the tenth century when the Anglo-Saxon England became again a Christian country. All the earliest records of Old English literature were written by clerks in monasteries and normally kept stored there.

The earliest records of English that have come down to us are dated in the seventh century and were originally orally composed. They were put down onto paper in a standard written language only some centuries later. Thus we call them masterpieces of English as dated back to the ninth - eleventh centuries. At that time Latin was the language of the church and also the language of writing and teaching in church schools in England. Though Old English gradually began to replace Latin in writing documents. Various agreements, wills, grants, Church records, etc. were written in Old English. Although Old English literature included a number of pieces, they were all oral in form, there were several examples of written literature at the Old English period.

The teutonic invaders spoke different dialects but little by little the dialect of the Angles of Mercia prevailed. Soon after the teutonic invasion, the people living in Britain were referred to as the English after the Angles, and the name England became widely used as the name of the whole country. The Anglo-Saxons were pagans and remained so for some time. Anglo-Saxon folklore, the greatest monument of which is "The Song of Beowulf" created in the seventh century, reflected the life of society and its beliefs.

The Saxon kingdoms warred one against the other, and at the beginning of the 9th century Wessex (western part) became the leading kingdom and united the rest of England in the fight against the Danes and the Northmen from the Scandinavian Peninsula (the Vikings). Due to the clever politics of the king of the Saxons (Alfred) the conquerors from Northern Europe were defeated. Alfred was a progressive monarch whose ruling enhanced the development and fast outspreading of the English language and culture. West Saxon became the most widely used language in England at that time. Therefore the majority of Old English records were composed in that dialect.

Old English literature was oral, passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, its creators for the most part unknown, and only being given a written form long after its composition. This literature is almost exclusively a verse literature. There is also prose, but this is not strictly literature in form and contents.

Most poems of the period were epics and written in the so-called 'Old English elegiac style' (mournful style). The greatest of them included: Widsith or the Traveller's Song, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and others. The Seafarer is considered to be the most original of them all: it gives a mournful picture of the dark northern seas and the torment of the cold, and sings the joy at the return of spring when the seafarer wanders again 'across the seaflood', 'over the whale's land'. In late Old English when the old verse was already declining, some war poems were inserted into the prose chronicles of England, they depict the battles of the Anglo-Saxons with the Scots and Picts and the raiders from Scandinavia. Most of Old English poetry is believed to have originally been written in the Northumbrian and Mercian dialects, but like Beowulf, it has been preserved in West Saxon copies, which often obliterated their early dialectal traits.

We know the names of two Old English poets, Caedmon and Cynewulf. Almost nothing now remains which is certainly Caedmon's work. He was a poor countryman who used to stay apart when his fellows sang songs to God for he was uneducated and could not sing. One night an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him to sing God's praise. When he woke, he was able to sing, and part of his songs remain. This poem is perhaps the first piece of Christian literature to appear in Anglo-Saxon England (c. 670). Cynewulf almost certainly wrote four poems, Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, Christ, and Elene. Cynewulf's poems are religious and were probably written in the second half of the eighth century.

There is an example of a warlike poem in Old English, which sounds like a war chronicle. It is a late poem, called The Battle of Maldon, whose heroic note still rings over the centuries:

Thought shall be braver, the heart bolder,

Mightier the mood,as our might lessens.

The battle masterfully described in the poem was fought against the Danes in 991 and probably the poem was written soon after that. It has been highly praised for the words of courage which the leader uses:

hige sceal the heardra heorte the cenre

mod sceal the mare the ure maegen lytlath

her lith ure ealdor eall forheawen

god on greote a maeg gnornian

se the nu fram this wigplegan wendan thenceth.

The mind must be the firmer, the heart must be the braver, the

courage must be the greater, as our strength grows less. Here lies

our lord all cut to pieces, the good man on the ground. If anyone

thinks now to turn away from this war-play, may he be unhappy

for ever after.

Old English poetry is characterised by a specific system of versification and some peculiar stylistic features. Practically all of it is written in metaphoric alliterative verse ('war-sweat' = blood): the lines are not rhymed and the number of syllables in a line is free, only the number of stressed syllables being fixed.

Literary prose does not really begin until the ninth century (except for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles about the Germanic settlement of Britain), which witnessed flourishing of learning and literature in the kingdom of Wessex during King Alfred's reign. King Alfred (the second half of the ninth century), an erudite himself, translated from Latin books on geography, history, philosophy, popular at the time. One of his contributions was a version of Orosius's history of the world in seven volumes. It abounds in deviations from the original, contractions, expansions and original insertions, which make it more interesting than the original. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum was written in Latin by Bede a hundred years before it was first rendered in Old English in Alfred's time (if not by Alfred himself). The most interesting piece of prose is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an early history of the country. No doubt king Alfred (849-901) had a great influence on this work. He probably brought the different writings into some kind of order. The Chronicle is a record of the main happenings of the Anglo-Saxon country, kept by monks in seven successive monasteries and covering the period from the middle of the ninth century to 1154, when Henry II came to the throne. This is the first history of a Germanic people and represents the most solid and interesting piece of Old English prose we possess. And in it we see Old English moving steadily towards Middle English, that transitional language which is slowly to develop into the tongue of our age.

The two important tenth century writers were Жlfric and Wulfstan; they wrote in Late West Saxon. Жlfric was the most outstanding writer of the late Old English period. He produced a series of homilies (a homily - a discourse on religious themes) to be used by the clergy at the Benedictine monastery where he was appointed as abbot: The Lives of Saints written in the alliterative prose; various translations from Latin (parts of the Bible); physico-astronomical tracts, etc. Of special interest are his textbooks The Colloquium, which is a series of dialogues written as a manual for boys (at a monastic school in Winchester), and a Grammar.

The greatest poem of the period was The Song of Beowulf - an epic of the seventh or the eighth century (epic, as the most popular genre at that time, is a long narrative poem recounting in an elevated style the deeds of a legendary hero, it has its origination in oral folk traditions). It is believed to be originally composed in the Mercian dialect (oral version) but has come down to us in the tenth century West Saxon copy. It is the oldest epic in Germanic literature.

Beowulf was not composed in England, but on the continent of Europe: the new settlers brought it over along with their wives, goods, and chattels. It was not written down till the end of the ninth century. It is a stirring, warlike, violent poem of over three thousand lines. The Anglo-Saxon monks who wrote the poem down had the blood of warriors in them. They were the sons and grandsons of Vikings. Beowulf is essentially a warrior's story. It tells us of the hero who gives his name to the poem and his struggle with a foul monster - half-devil, half-man - called Grendel, who has for a long time been raiding the banqueting-hall of King Hrothgar of Jutland (land of the Jutes) and carrying off and devouring Hrothgar's warriors. Beowulf sails from Sweden and comes to the help of Hrothgar. His fights with Grendel - and Grendel's equally horrific mother - are the subject of the poem, a poem whose grim music is the snapping of fangs, the crunching of bones, and whose colour is the grey of the northern winter, shot by the red of blood. It is strong meat, no work for the squeamish, but it is in no way a crude and primitive composition. It shows great skill in its construction, its imagery and language are sophisticated. It is not a Christian poem - despite the Christian flavour given to it by the monastery scribe - but the product of an advanced pagan civilisation.

Much of the strength and violence of the poem derive from the nature of Old English itself. That was a language rich in consonants, fond of clustering its consonants together, so that the mouth seems to perform a swift act of violence. The following Modern English words are to be found in Old English, and are typical of that language: strength (in which seven muscular consonants strangle a single vowel), breath, quell, drench, crash, etc. Compared with the softer languages of the East and South, Old English seems to be a series of loud noises. And the violence of the language is emphasised in the technique that the Old English poet employs. Here is the line from Beowulf:

Steap stanlitho - stige nearwe

(Steep stone-slopes, paths narrow)

The line is divided into two halves, and each half has two heavy stresses. Three (sometimes four, or two) of the stresses of the whole line are made even more emphatic by the use of head-rhyme. Head-rhyme means making words begin with the same sound (alliteration). Although, since the Norman Conquest, most English verse has traditionally used end-rhyme (or ordinary rhyme, as we may call it) this old head-rhyme has always had some influence on English writers. In the twentieth century some poets abandoned ordinary rhyme and reverted to the Old English practice. Certainly, the use of head-rhyme seems natural to English verse and even it plays a large part in everyday English speech: hale and hearty; fat and forty; time and tide; fit as a fiddle; a pig in a poke, etc. This modern revival was perhaps started by Ezra Pound, an American, who translated the Old English poem The Seafarer into Modern English but retained the technique of the original:

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care's hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round and hunger begot

Mere-weary mood. ...

The Seafarer and The Song of Beowulf are classic examples of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the characteristic features of which are alliteration (a repetition at close intervals of the same consonant in words or syllables, consider the following example from Beowulf:

Then the baleful fiend its fire belched out,

and bright homes burned. The blaze stood high

and landfolk frighting.)

and hyperbaton (an intentional deviation from the normal word order used for emphasis, e.g. 'Arms and the man I sing'.) Another very interesting peculiarity of the poems is the use of picture names that show the subject in a new light. The poets call the sea a 'sail-road' or 'salt-streams', the musical instruments 'joy-wood', 'glee-wood'. These descriptive words together with the subject are called double metaphors (metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action that it does not literally denote in order to imply resemblance, e.g. 'he is a lion in battle').