CHAPTER II EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE UP TO THE E NORMAN CONQUEST NGLAND was the first among civilised Christian nations to produce any literary monuments. France and Germany may possibly have put forward a literature of their own at the same time as their rival, but, taking extant works, we find that, in Germany, Otfried's Evangelienharmonie (Harmony of the Gospels), and in France, the Chanson de Roland are the earliest, and of these the former is two, and the latter four centuries later than the earliest English works. If we leave out Beowulf, as its precise country of origin is uncertain, it would appear that early English literature first reached a high state of development in the north of England, in Northumberland. This northern supremacy lasted till about the ninth century, when the prose literature of Wessex came to the front. Throughout these two or three centuries early English poetry shows not a single trace of foreign literary influences. It was entirely Germanic, with a special colouring of Christian ideas. There is a certain sameness in this literature, which is all in the same key. The characteristics of this period are a solemn earnestness, a deep and steady devotion to the past or the distant future, more suited to a religious ceremony than to a composition of human aim. It needed the Norman Conquest to unlock the doors for all the energies of the nation's mind and to quicken the sluggish flow of early English thought by a wealth of foreign material and forms. The admixture of Norman blood was not without its uses in producing a vein of humour, that gem of later English writings, which we look for in vain for the first few centuries. Nearly all the earliest writings of any value are in lyric form, with the single exception of Beowulf, which has a unique position, and stands by itself in early English poetry. The Biblical paraphrases, such as The Creation, The Fall, The Flight out of Egypt, are chiefly lyric. The reader can best judge of the style of early English poetry from the extract from Beowulf on page 16. We find the line has two half verses with four accents, two in each half verse; the poetical union is attained by the same sound being kept in the first syllable of the accentuated syllables (Alliteration), in which all the vowels are regarded as monophonous. This alliteration died out after the Norman Conquest, when the French rhyme took its place. The tendency in the Germanic languages, and more especially the English, to gravitate towards similarity of sound in the first syllable, is shown by the revival of this form of poetry in the sixteenth century, when Lyly's Euphues owed its popularity in no small degree to the pleasure which English readers found in the similarity of sound in the accentuated words. Even at the present day English authors exhibit a great predilection for alliterative titles. The epic poem of BEOWULF has long held the first place among early English poems, though of late years its position has been challenged by the rival claims of the Song of the Wanderer. After a mass of philological research, we are still as uncertain about its date as about its country of origin. The only existing MS., now in the British Museum, is said to date from the tenth century. As to the country of origin, we can only state with certainty a negative proposition, that no direct mention of England is to be found in the poem. We are just as much in the dark as to whether it is the production of one or of several poets, whether it is the result of a collection of so-called popular ballads, whether it has any historical basis, whether its origin is more pagan or Christian, and so on. However, a poem of the first rank is not written merely to give employment to the philologists, but to delight those who find pleasure in verse, and we may therefore put aside such questions, and the more so as the answers are not forthcoming. We may perhaps, with considerable probability, assign its home to a foreign land (perhaps Jutland or South Sweden), and we shall not do wrong in cheerfully passing over the well-known attempts of certain mythologists, who refer every ancient epic to sun myths, mist or cloud legends, and the like. If we put the date of Beowulf in the ninth century, as its style entitles us to do, we have, at any rate, the earliest independent literary monument of any Germanic language, and this fact alone entitles it to our warmest sympathies. Beowulf consists of 3,183 lines in forty-three sections. Its story is briefly as follows: In Jutland there sits King Rothgar with his men in a splendid castle, Heorot (Hirschburg), sharing with them in the pleasures of a knightly 1 For alliterative purposes, the same consonants had to be used; in the case of the vowels, this was not absolutely necessary, all being considered identical. life. A horrible monster, Grendel, who lives in a neighbouring bog, attacks sleeping knights in the darkness, and wallows in their blood. This dread fate befalls so often, that pleasure is banished from the king's hall, and grim fear enthrals Rothgar's realm. This comes to the ears of Beowulf, a prince of the Geatas (Swedish Gotland), who mans a ship and hastens to the aid of King Rothgar. He wages a terrible combat with the monster Grendel, whom he drives into the bog, where he kills both the monster and his fell mother. Loaded with rich presents by King Rothgar, Beowulf returns to the land of the Goths, and becomes a king himself. After reigning undisturbed for many years, he fights with a dragon, who has wasted his land, and receives a mortal wound, though he first kills the monster. We must not look for a perfect unity of action in Beowulf; the repetition of the dragon-combat weakens the artistic effect of the poem. The writer also occasionally interpolates long digressions, which are entirely unconnected with the action of the story, and, after the style of the Odyssey, are mostly represented as the songs of a minstrel at the court of King Rothgar. The artistic merits of Beowulf cannot be reckoned very high, though it possesses many passages of a certain savage grandeur. The blood-curdling descriptions in the first part are unsurpassed by any heroic poem of this class. When the dragon Grendel tears the bodies of the knights to pieces we are reminded of the passage in the Odyssey, where the Cyclops Polyphemus puts to death the companions of Odysseus : Came then to the house the wight on his ways, Of all joys bereft; and soon sprang the door open, With fire-brands made fast, when with hand he had touch'd it; Brake the bale-heedy, he with wrath bollen, The mouth of the house there, and early thereafter On the shiny-fleck'd floor thereof trod forth the fiend; On went he then mood-wroth, and out from his eyes stood Likest to fire-flame light full unfair. In the high house beheld he a many of warriors, A host of men sib all sleeping together, Of man-warriors a heap; then laugh'd out his mood; In mind deem'd he to sunder, or ever came day, The monster, the fell one, from each of the men there MORRIS and WYATT'S Translation. Not less dreadful is the description of the house of Grendel and his awful mother, though the invention of this incarnate fiend must still be reckoned the poet's masterpiece : They dwell in a dim hidden land, The wolf-bents they bide in, on the nesses the windy, The wood fast by the roots over-helmeth the water. Of the bairns of mankind, that the bottom may know. MORRIS and WYATT'S translation. There is hardly one peaceful interlude in all the wild savagery of the poem with its giant heroes; the presence of the queen at the banquet, given by King Rothgar to Beowulf his guest, is the only ray of light across the dark clouds of this "bog-poetry." The action is quite Homeric in its simplicity, and the curt, savage language more than once reminds us of the Iliad. The rare use of comparisons shows the crudity of the poet's methods, and this finds a parallel in the oldest French epic, the Chanson de Roland, in which scarcely a simile is to be found. The description of the relations of the heroes to one another is worthy of note. The spirit of the old Germanic loyalty to the prince breathes through every line, and the treachery of the Nibelungenlied does not soil their intercourse. Beowulf is thus the earliest authority for old Germanic civilisation and customs. We find in the poem itself mention of earlier epics, and even without this evidence a work of art like Beowulf, whatever its merits or demerits, would imply long years of previous efforts in this direction, before a nation could produce such a work. The same may be said of all the other early English poems, which have accidentally come down to us; their very existence is rather a proof that they are not the only ones or even the oldest of their kind. All the early treasures of literature are the playthings of fortune. For the rest of the most valuable early English writings we have to look to three precious collections of manuscripts: the Bodleian library at Oxford; the library of Exeter Cathedral, which has had the custody of the Exeter book (as it is called) for more than eight centuries; and the library of the church at Vercelli in northern Italy. In the Oxford MS. are the works of Caedmon, of which we shall speak later on in this chapter; in the Vercelli Codex, a collection of sermons, besides some less important compositions; in the Exeter book, a large number of small pieces, some of great poetic merit, amongst them the remarkable Song of the Wanderer. This collection was presented by Bishop Leofric in 1080 to the cathedral at Exeter, and bore the inscription: "I mycel Englisc boc be gehwylcum thingum on leothwisan geworht" (A great English book of divers things written in verse). If Attila, Alboin, Hermanarich, or any of the historical characters mentioned in the Song of the Wanderer (Scopes Widsîth the creator's or poet's far journey) had been actually known to the singer, this short poem of less than a hundred and fifty lines must be assigned to a considerably earlier date than Beowulf, perhaps to the fifth century. However, the uncertainty of the date of all writings prior to the Conquest renders conjecture useless. = An old minstrel has wandered through the world, one of those who sang the praises of the heroes of Germany; he tells the names of countries and peoples he has visited, and we wonder that he is so familiar with many names from the German epics. Gudrun, Hagen, Wate, Rüdiger are all known to him, and also Beowulf. We quote the last stanza of this diary of a wandering minstrel :— Thus wandering, go with their lays over many lands the gleemen of men : their wants they express, their words or thanks they utter: always, south or north, they find one knowing in songs, liberal in gifts, who desires to exalt his greatness, to show his dignity in the presence of his nobles, until all vanishes, life and light together. He who works praise has under heaven enduring glory. (COURTHOPE, History of English Poetry, vol. i. p. 83.) Deor's Lament, a still shorter poem, by a minstrel called Deor, completes the picture of the wandering poet, or Scôp, and presents him to us as a production of the German Middle Ages, resembling the Troubadours and Trouvères of southern and northern France. In reading all such poems, we cannot quite free ourselves from the idea that they may have originally reached England from Germany. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity was followed by the rise of a religious epic and lyric poetry, which is associated with the names of two poets, CAEDMON and CYNEWULF, and thus comes within the range of history. We derive our knowledge of Caedmon from the Venerable BEDE, |