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11178 results in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature

Page 134 of 559

  • The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium): Text and Translation

  • Edited by Kazutomo Karasawa
  • Book:
    The Old English Metrical Calendar (<I>Menologium</I>)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    04 June 2021
    Print publication:
    16 April 2015, pp 73-130

  • Summary

    Notes on the Text

    Italics mark any word which is emended. Editorial additions are marked by [ ]. Abbreviations are expanded without notice. The Tironian sign is expanded as and, since it is used more often (five times) than ond (used twice). Roman numerals in the manuscript are retained. The sectioning is scribal, while the overall layout, word division and punctuation follow modern convention. Capitalisation also follows modern convention except for those at the beginning of the poem, where I have retained scribal capitalisation. On the left hand side of the page, line numbers are inserted, while folio numbers are given on the right hand side. The end of the manuscript page is indicated in the text by |.

    CRIST WÆS ACENNYD, CYNINGA WULdor, 112r

    on midne winter, mære þeoden,

    ece ælmihtig; on þy eahteoðan dæg

    Hælend gehaten, heofonrices weard.

    Swa þa sylfan tiid, side herigeas,

    folc unmæte, habbað foreweard gear,

    for þy se kalend us cymeð geþincged

    on þam ylcan dæge us to tune,

    forma monað. Hine folc mycel

    Ianuarius gerum heton.

    And þæs embe fif niht þætte fulwihttiid

    eces drihtnes to us cymeð,

    þæne twelfta dæg tireadige,

    hæleð heaðurofe, hatað on Brytene,

    in foldan her. Swylce emb feower wucan

    þætte Solmonað sigeð to tune

    butan twam nihtum, swa hit getealdon geo,

    Februarius fær, frode gesiþas,

    ealde ægleawe. And þæs embe ane niht

    þæt we Marian mæssan healdað,

    cyninges modor, forþan heo Crist on þam dæge,

    bearn wealdendes, brohte to temple.

    Ðænne þæs emb fif niht þæt afered byð

    winter of wicum, and se wigend þa

    æfter seofentynum swylt þrowade

    nihtgerimes, nergendes þegen,

    Mathias mære, mine gefræge,

    þæs þe lencten on tun geliden hæfde,

    werum to wicum. Swylce eac is wide cuð

    ymb III | and twa þeodum gewelhwær

    his cyme, kalend, ceorlum and eorlum,

    butan þænne bises geboden weorðe

    feorðan geare; þænne he furðor cymeð

    ufor anre niht us to tune,

    hrime gehyrsted hagolscurum færð

    geond middangeard Martius reðe,

    Hlyda healic. Ðænne se halga þæs

    emb XI niht æþele scynde

    Gregorius in Godes wære,

  • 30 - The Battle of Maldon

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 287-305

  • Summary

    ‘In this year Ipswich was ravaged and quickly after that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was slain at Maldon. And in this year tribute was first paid to the Danes because of the great terror they caused along the coast.’ Thus reports one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annal for 991 (see 8/20–3 for the OE text). This incident at Maldon, in Essex on the east coast of England, might have gone unnoticed in the larger picture of defeat and capitulation which characterised England in the 990s; the Danes were stepping up their attacks, which would continue with little opposition from King Æthelred and his nobles until the Danish Cnut took the throne in 1016. But an anonymous poet ensured that posterity would know a little more about this particular defeat. Indeed, by invoking the old heroic ideals of his countrymen's Germanic past, and using the poetic style associated with the celebration of those ideals, he turned the dire events at Maldon into a sort of moral victory: English heroes died, but they died well.

    How soon after August 991 the poem was written is not known, but nothing in its language or style precludes a more or less contemporary date. Yet its purpose in relation to current events is not clear. Stirring as the defiant speeches of loyal but doomed heroes may be, in practical terms they scarcely constitute an effective national rallying cry, and it may be that the poem had a more parochial aim, to commemorate the English leader Byrhtnoth. By all accounts the elderly ealdorman of Essex was an esteemed figure, and he seems to have been unusual in his willingness to stand up against the enemy. There is a strong possibility that the poem was written in one of the monasteries in eastern England which Byrhtnoth generously supported and where his memory would have been revered. In a Latin ‘Life’ of St Oswald, written a few years after 991 at Ramsey, also in East Anglia, Byrhtnoth figures prominently as a Christian martyr. In the Liber Eliensis (‘the Book of Ely’), moreover, written about 1170 but based on earlier and in some cases oral sources, two battles against the Danes at Maldon are recorded; the first is a triumphant victory for Byrhtnoth and his forces, the second a long and fruitless struggle against overwhelming odds.

  • 36 - Deor

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 365-369

  • Summary

    ‘He who knows many songs sorrows the less’, claims the poet of the OE Maxims I – and Deor seems to confirm this sentiment. It is a poem of consolation which draws on stock characters of Germanic legend to sketch a series of episodes of misfortune. Each episode is followed by a refrain which may be translated loosely as ‘That passed away, so can this’, and thus the philosophical detachment from the original misfortune allowed by the passage of time is transferred to a present calamity – ‘this’. We do not learn what ‘this’ is until the last section of the poem, where the speaker identifies himself as a scop (professional poet) called Deor, who has been expelled from his position with a great lord in favour of a rival called Heorrenda. The diction of Deor (with nouns such as earfoþ, sorg and wræc, compound adjectives such as winterceald and sorgcearig, and verbs such as drēosan and bidǣlan) links it very obviously with the other lyrical or elegiac OE poems given in this section – The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. Like the poet of The Wanderer (in line 30), the Deor-poet uses the image of sorrow as a companion (line 3).

    As a poem in strophic form, with a refrain, Deor is a rarity in OE literature, and the scribe of the Exeter Book has taken note of this, providing a large capital at the start of each section following the refrain. The form is not regular, however. The first five ‘stanzas’ have, respectively, seven, six, four, three and seven lines, including in each case the one-line refrain. Then follow fifteen lines which, though often printed as a complete sixth stanza, are set out below as two stanzas, of seven and eight lines. These two parts seem to be self-contained, though complementary: the first, a philosophical summing up of what has gone before, prepares us for the revelation of the second, namely the misfortune of Deor himself in the loss of his patron. Only the second, therefore, has the refrain.

  • 22 - A Homily for Easter Sunday (from Ælfric's Sermones catholicae)

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 217-227

  • Summary

    Between about 990 and 995, at Cerne Abbas (see p. 40), Ælfric wrote two series of Sermones catholicae (usually called his Catholic Homilies today) which, to judge from the many surviving copies, were immensely popular not only during his lifetime but well into the thirteenth century. Each volume contains forty items, including both homilies and sermons (see section headnote), and also a few saints’ lives. Within each volume the various items are arranged chronologically, according to the use assigned to them at specific times during the church year, though there are a few sermons labelled to be read at any time.

    In the preface to the first volume, Ælfric explains that he has put the homilies into plain speech, both for reading and for hearing, in order to edify ordinary people and thus, he hopes, to effect the salvation of their souls. He claims that he has seen much error in English books, a reference probably to compilations like the anonymous ‘Blickling Homilies’ and ‘Vercelli Homilies’, many of whose texts contain unorthodox material. For his own homilies, Ælfric drew on the work of the established fathers of the church, above all Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great and Bede, along with Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel and Haymo of Auxerre. The two volumes were designed to form the basis of a comprehensive programme of orthodox teaching for Christians. Although the prefatory comments noted above suggest that Ælfric's primary audience was the laity, in which case the sermons and homilies would have been preached in parish churches, they nevertheless contain many passages which appear to be directed specifically at monks or at the secular clergy (see line 69 in the text below). There is evidence also that Ælfric expected private readers for his homilies, as well as auditors in monastic or church settings.

    The fifteenth item in the first series of homilies, headed Dominica Pascae (Easter Sunday), has the typical homiletic structure of gospel extract, specific to the day in question, followed by an interpretation. In a church setting, we may imagine that the gospel reading for Easter Day has already been read from the Latin Vulgate, relating the visit of ‘the three Marys’ to Christ's tomb following his crucifixion and the angel's report of his resurrection (Mk 16.1–7).

  • 18 - The Drowning of Pharaoh's Army (Exodus, lines 447–564)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 174-182

  • Summary

    The story told in Exodus, the second poem of the Junius manuscript (see p. 166), is at the heart of Jewish history, for it tells of the very survival of the race. The biblical version of the events covered in the poem is given very concisely in Ex 13.20–14.31. After a long captivity in Egypt, the Israelites have finally been allowed by Pharaoh to leave and are led away by Moses. But Pharaoh changes his mind and gives chase until he corners the fugitives at the Red Sea, whereupon Moses, at God's command, causes the waters to part so that the Israelites can pass safely across. When Pharaoh and his troops try to follow, the water returns and they are all drowned.

    The extract given here comes from the dramatic climax of the poem. The terrified Egyptians have tried to follow the Israelites, only to find the sea overwhelming them. With impressive verbal virtuosity, the poet presents their destruction in a repetitive pattern of visual images of almost cinematographic intensity – using fourfold variation, for instance, to tell how the walls of water have come crashing down on the doomed army. There is an apocalyptic tone to all this, a clear allusion to the terrors of Judgement Day for the unrighteous. God's adversary, the poet declares, has found that God is greater than he is; the pride of the Egyptians has been smashed and such is the completeness of their annihilation that there is not even a messenger left to take the news of defeat back home.

    After the action, Moses spells out to the Israelites the nature of God's covenant with them (lines 108–18), but first there is a homiletic digression apparently by the poet himself, who is clearly well versed in biblical exegesis (lines 77–102). He exhorts his audience to be open to the lessons of scripture, to recognise the ephemeral nature of life on earth, and to prepare for Judgement Day. Deliverance from this exile on earth will be the reward of the righteous.

    Syntactically, Exodus presents the modern reader with special challenges. It is not always clear, for instance, whether certain half-lines complement the previous half-line (or even the one before that) or anticipate the next, and the interpretations and punctuation given below are necessarily subjective.

The Cambridge Old English Reader
  • 2nd edition
  • Richard Marsden
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015
  • This reader remains the only major new reader of Old English prose and verse in the past forty years. The second edition is extensively revised throughout, with the addition of a new 'Beginning Old English' section for newcomers to the Old English language, along with a new extract from Beowulf. The fifty-seven individual texts include established favourites such as The Battle of Maldon and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf, as well as others not otherwise readily available, such as an extract from Apollonius of Tyre. Modern English glosses for every prose-passage and poem are provided on the same page as the text, along with extensive notes. A succinct reference grammar is appended, along with guides to pronunciation and to grammatical terminology. A comprehensive glossary lists and analyses all the Old English words that occur in the book. Headnotes to each of the six text sections, and to every individual text, establish their literary and historical contexts, and illustrate the rich cultural variety of Anglo-Saxon England. This second edition is an accessible and scholarly introduction to Old English.

  • The writing and pronunciation of Old English

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 403-408

  • Summary

    WRITING

    The Latin alphabet was introduced for the writing of OE by Christian monks soon after AD 600. It had twenty-three letters, lacking v (whose function was shared with u), j (which was not distinguished from i), and w. Of the twenty-three, q was used rarely; z occurred in biblical names and occasionally elsewhere for ‘ts’; x could be used to represent ‘ks’; and k was little used until towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period (c being written instead).

    The letters of Latin were augmented by four further characters – either invented, or borrowed from the runic alphabet, which had long been in use among the Germanic peoples, mainly for inscriptions. They are (with ‘capital’ forms in brackets):

  • þ (Þ) for ‘th’, a runic character with the name þorn (‘thorn’);

  • ð (Đ) also for ‘th’, formed by adding a cross-stroke to a d written in the Irish way, with a round back, and known by the Anglo-Saxons as ðæt, but today as ‘eth’. Thorn and eth were used without distinction, though individual scribes had their own preferences: a word such as siþþan might also be written siððan or even siþðan or siðþan.

  • æ (Æ) for a ‘fronted’ a-sound (see below); known by the Anglo-Saxons as æsc (‘ash’).

  • ƿ (Ƿ) for ‘w’, a runic character with the name wynn (‘joy’). In most modern printing of OE, as in this book, wynn is replaced by w.

    • These new characters were not in full use among the Anglo-Saxons until the end of the seventh century. Until then, th or d may be found instead of ð or þ (the latter taking longer to become established than ð), ae or e for æ, and uu or u for w. For examples, see Text 20a. In manuscripts written at the close of the Anglo-Saxon period, under Norman French influence, the digraph th is increasingly found again.

    The letter-shapes in the manuscripts are mostly those that we recognise today, though the handwriting used by Anglo-Saxons was continuously evolving over the centuries. This often enables palaeographers to date manuscripts with a fair degree of precision.

  • I - Teaching and learning

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 37-39

  • Summary

    Centuries before their continental neighbours, for whom Latin long remained the major language of writing, the Anglo-Saxons had an extensive literature in their own vernacular – Old English. The opportunity for widespread literacy had come to them with their conversion to Christianity, which began with St Augustine's mission to Canterbury in 597. Within only a few years, the lawcode of the kingdom of Kent had been put into English, the first vernacular document that we know of (see Section II), and by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 there was no area of written discourse not represented by works in OE, whether as translations or original compositions.

    Nevertheless, it was Latin which remained the official language of the church throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and far beyond it. Key theological texts and the Bible were all in Latin, and so were divine services, and therefore would-be monks and priests among the native population (whose mother tongue was OE in its various dialectal varieties) had to learn it. A priority for the missionaries at Canterbury, and their successors throughout the group of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which would eventually become England, was thus the setting up of schools. All monasteries and cathedrals of any size needed one, and naturally the medium of instruction, to begin with at least, would have to be the vernacular. OE ‘glosses’ to Latin school-texts from Canterbury have been preserved, and Bede tells us (in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: see p. 105) how he used English in order to teach novice monks the Creed and other essential elements of the Christian faith.

    This bilingual process of teaching and learning persisted throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, as surviving teaching materials show. Some of these are the work of the monk and scholar Ælfric, who was in charge of the monastic school at Cerne Abbas in Dorset during the closing years of the tenth century. He was the product of a great revival in learning that had taken place in the wake of the important mid-century reform and expansion of the Benedictine monastic system in England. He devised his own teaching materials for the novice monks, including very young boys, in his charge.

  • 32 - The Fight at Finnsburh

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 334-340

  • Summary

    By a rare chance, one of the most prominent episodes in Beowulf – the tale of the tragedy at Finnsburh, in which a marriage alliance is shattered by fighting between ostensible allies (Text 31b) – has come down to us in a second version, albeit fragmentarily. A single sheet of parchment containing forty-seven lines from an apparent ‘lay’ about the incident (i.e. a simple narrative poem or ballad) survived at least until the early eighteenth century, when the antiquarian George Hickes found it in a manuscript codex in the library of Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishops of Canterbury. The fragment has since disappeared and we must rely for the text on the version printed by Hickes, among other old items, in 1705.

    Even from the few preserved lines, it is clear that the lay had a different purpose from the Finnsburh episode as told by the poet of Beowulf. For him it is an exemplum, reminding the revelling Danes (and us) that the cycle of victory and defeat is relentless in the feud-driven heroic world. His concern is with the social and ethical dimensions of the episode, and with the personal tragedy of the Danish princess Hildeburh, who loses brother, son and husband (Finn) in the feud. Furthermore, he is addressing an audience to whom the details are already well known, for he gives none of them.

    In the fragment, however, we have a detailed account of one part of the fighting between Frisians and Danes in Finnsburh, the citadel of the Frisian leader, Finn. It is a fast-moving narrative in which the focus is on the individual warriors, who are named. The poet marshals all the rhetorical devices of heroic war poetry, including vaunting speeches, the sounds of weapons clashing, and the gathering of the beasts of battle. A lay would have been comparatively short, perhaps two or three hundred lines. Among surviving OE poems, only The Battle of Maldon is comparable (Text 30); there also the fate of individual warriors is traced within the framework of a code of loyalty based on hall-companionship and the obligations due to a gift-giving lord.

  • 25 - The Sermon of the Wolf (Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi)

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 245-256

  • Summary

    Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York (see 24/headnote), appears to have been using the pen-name Lupus (‘wolf’) throughout his public life, but the name is memorialised most firmly in the Latin title given to a sermon in OE which we can pinpoint, in one of its versions at least, to the year 1014. This was only one bad year among many for the English during the last decade of the long reign of King Æthelred (978–1016; see p. 98). England had never been free from Danish attacks once they had restarted in earnest in about 980, despite the payment of ever increasing sums of money to the aggressors – £10,000 in 991, £24,000 in 1002 and £48,000 in 1012. Sporadic raids were replaced by major invasions, and that of 1013, led by the king of Denmark, Svein Forkbeard, threatened complete military defeat. After Christmas, Æthelred fled into exile in Normandy. The people of England acknowledged Svein as king and only the latter's fortuitous death in 1014 allowed Æthelred to return. He was to spend two years in hostilities against Svein's son Cnut until his own death in 1016, which brought Cnut to the throne. It is against this background of national humiliation, low morale and the pusillanimous behaviour of England's leaders that Wulfstan composed his Sermo Lupi.

    The sermon is a direct warning to the English people to mend their ways and follow God's laws, or risk even worse disasters. It is meant to shock and is full of the emotive imagery of apocalypse, associating the nation's afflictions with the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. This was a sermon to be performed. The rhetoric is that of the pulpit preacher and so the themes are as much enacted in the style and syntax as developed by careful argument. Nevertheless, some thematic structuring may be discerned.

    A warning of approaching apocalypse is the point from which Wulfstan starts. The problems of England are going to be seen in terms of the simple polarisation of good and evil: ‘we’ have let the devil guide us too long and must pull our socks up before it is too late; while we despise God's laws, ‘they’ (the invaders), heathens though they may be, at least have the virtue that they are obedient to their deities.

  • 40 - The Wife's Lament

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 387-392

  • Summary

    Like Wulf and Eadwacer (Text 39), The Wife's Lament is a lyric of complaint sung by a female voice; and it, too, has an enigmatic and allusive narrative which defies complete elucidation. Nevertheless, in many ways The Wife's Lament fits into a pattern familiar from other OE lyrical poems. The opening declaration by the first-person speaker of her ability to tell the true story of herself is remarkably like the opening of The Seafarer, and an inventory of key words reveals the unmistakable kinship of the poem with the OE lyrics of lament, especially The Wanderer. There is the diction of sadness and mental anguish (geōmorre, 1, geōmormōd, 42, ūhtceare, 7, mōdceare, 40 and 51, brēostceare, 44), of physical hardship (yrmþa, 3, earfoþa, 39), and of exile and the landscape of exile (wræcsīþa, 5 and 38, winelēas wræcca, 10, eorðsele, 29, storme behrīmed, 48).

    We may deduce that the narrator is a woman exiled from her husband's tribe (which is presumably not her own), probably during his absence, though he seems to have been instrumental in forcing her to live as she does. Some sort of feud is perhaps operating and there appear to be references to hidden enmities or betrayals. The woman's lament is that of a rejected or separated lover, and perhaps another man is involved as well; that could explain the ‘very suitable man’ referred to in line 18. The density of personal reference in the poem is remarkable. There are thirty-five first-person pronouns in all (fifteen of them the nominative ic) and five dual pronouns, which of course include the speaker in their reference (unc, ‘us two’, wit, ‘we two’, etc). Although the poem's concluding lines are ostensibly more objective, including a final aphorism, their subject is still ‘my lover’. There is no resolution, no release from sorrow.

    Supplying modern punctuation for a poem whose narrative detail is so elusive presents great problems. At the end of line 10, for instance, a full stop dictates the translation ‘then’ for Đā in line 9, but if a comma were used, Đā would be the conjunction ‘when’. Again, in lines 20–1, several sequences of punctuation are syntactically possible, and they may give radically different results.

  • 33 - Truth is Trickiest (Maxims II)

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 344-349

  • Summary

    The poem known as Maxims II is found in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, fol. 115r–v), where it is sandwiched between a metrical calendar, recording liturgical feasts and saints’ days of the church year, and a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The OE maxims present an intimate view of the world in literal terms. Indeed, on the face of it, they may seem to state the obvious (‘a king must rule his kingdom’), but that is the point. Their effect derives from their economy of expression, pared down to the simple unqualified statement of fact, which allows no escape into metaphorical interpretation, and so they demand a direct confrontation with meaning. There are numerous references in Maxims II to the Germanic ‘heroic’ culture out of which the Anglo-Saxons came: a king sharing out treasures, young men being exhorted to battle, the dragon guarding its hoard. The sense of order which the maxims cumulatively promote reflects and reinforces the divinely ordained laws of the natural world and the laws (by implication no less divinely inspired) of social hierarchy.

    The essential simplicity of gnomic utterance in OE literature does not lead to ease of translation into ModE. Two main verbal formulae are used to present the maxims. The first one uses byð (or bið), ‘is’ (from bēon), known as the ‘gnomic’ present tense and in general expressing universal, unchanging truths, but used also to indicate future action (‘will be’). Mostly, byð is used for the more abstract or unchanging truths (‘winter is coldest’). The other formula uses sceal (present tense of sculan), which is more problematical. The essential meaning of OE sculan is ‘must’, but is it ‘must be’ in the sense of moral duty and obligation, or ‘must needs be’ in the sense of something customary or simply unavoidable? Perhaps, in a social context, there can be no essential difference, and the Anglo-Saxon poet and his audience were no doubt well aware of the ambiguities. Although translation of OE sceal as the future auxiliary ‘shall’ is usually to be avoided, in the case of maxims it may be a good choice, for even today the verb retains some of its sense of both obligation and necessity.

  • 37 - The Ruin

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 370-374

  • Summary

    p>There is a nice irony in the fact that the poem we know as The Ruin is itself in such a state of disrepair. It comes near the end of the Exeter Book, where fire damage has left two sections of it, including the final lines, largely irrecoverable. The poem is a meditation on the remains of a Roman city and is decidedly elegiac in tone, though lacking the first-person viewpoint adopted in other OE elegiac verse. The voice is not apparently that of an actual victim of decay but a detached observer of it. The poem echoes a classical Latin tradition of lament on the fall of great cities and the celebration of their splendours, but there are many precedents for the theme among church writings also. Indeed, although the text (as we have it) is purely descriptive, and specific to a single place, we are bound to see it in the context of overtly didactic poems such as The Wanderer, where the ruin of great buildings is symbolic of the disintegration of the human world in general (see 38/73–9; also 26/80–90).

    The first twenty lines of The Ruin describe in remarkable detail the decayed state of wondrously made structures which have long outlasted the lives of their boldly creative builders, and we are left with a sense of admiration for the achievements of the past. The theme is then given a distinctly Germanic gloss with an evocation of the revelry of the splendid warriors who once occupied the stronghold, but soon the focus turns again to the buildings and to a detailed description of the baths within them, including the very plumbing of the hot-water system. But at this point fate intervenes and the text itself finally disintegrates. It is possible that the closing lines established a clear moral, and probably Christian, viewpoint for the poem.

    The city itself has been identified convincingly as Bath in Somerset, the Roman city of Aquae Sulis, celebrated for its temple and the hot springs around which elaborate bathing facilities were built. The earliest recorded use of the name Bath is in 796, in the dative plural form Bathum, ‘(place) at the (Roman) baths’ (see 11/13n). From 675 onwards the town was an important monastic centre, first for nuns but later for monks, and it played a frequent role in Anglo-Saxon history.

  • 26 - The Seafarer

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 257-266

  • Summary

    Interpretations of The Seafarer have suffered much from its being pigeon-holed almost invariably with The Wanderer (Text 38), a near-neighbour in the anthology of secular and religious poetry known as the Exeter Book (see below), as an ‘elegy’. There is in fact little that is elegiac about it. Rather, it is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian, who perceives the spiritual emptiness of an easy life on ‘dry land’ and actively seeks to earn future heavenly bliss by embracing a rigorous exile from that life. This creates the crucial paradox of the poem, which is exposed in line 33: seafaring is a wretched business – as the speaker has firmly persuaded us with his own ‘true story’ – and therefore (OE forþon) he must embrace it all the more.

    The more uncompromisingly realistic the opening account of seafaring, the more disturbing – and therefore effective – the paradox. This has been resisted by those readers of The Seafarer who have sought a smooth passage through the poem, yet the wilful desire of the seafarer to embrace the very hardship which he has just so graphically evoked is at its heart. At a literal level the message is harshly ascetic, but it is predicated unambiguously on hope and the (metaphorical) seafarer will not therefore have regrets, though the allure of the life on land may still have its effects.

    The theology underlying The Seafarer is unmistakably that of the most influential of all Christian writers, St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), reflecting his concept of two ‘cities’ – the earthly city of fallen humankind, who are preoccupied with ephemeral concerns, and the heavenly city of God, where an eternity of bliss awaits those exiles who have waited patiently for salvation, distancing themselves from ungodly distractions as they live the life of peregrini (‘pilgrims’), wanderers and exiles from the ancestral heavenly home (see Augustine's De ciuitate Dei, ‘On the City of God’, bk. 15, ch. 1). Anglo-Saxon Christians will have been familiar with the pilgrim-hermits who put into literal practice the idea of peregrinatio pro amore Dei, ‘pilgrimage for the love of God’.

  • 28 - The Trees of the Sun and the Moon (from the Letter of Alexander)

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 275-280

  • Summary

    Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the renowned king of Macedonia, educated by Aristotle, who led the Greeks to victory over Darius of Persia and then extended his conquests to Egypt and India. He died of fever at the age of thirty-two and thereafter became the subject of many legends. One of the most popular vehicles for these in the medieval period was the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem – ‘the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’ – supposedly an account, sent to his tutor, of Alexander's military campaigns in India and some of his adventures by the way.

    The letter circulated in England in both Latin and OE versions and Alexander is mentioned in two other Anglo-Saxon ‘travel’ texts, the OE Orosius (a much modified version of a world history by Paulus Orosius, made in the time of King Alfred) and Marvels of the East (see below). Alexander is also among the legendary characters listed by the narrator of the OE poem Widsith, who alludes to him as a fine prince, ‘the most powerful among all of humankind’. This reflects an admiration for Alexander that was widespread in the Middle Ages, but there was another view, too, a less favourable one promoted especially by Christian writers. They tended to play down Alexander's positive characteristics and to emphasise instead his over-weening pride, and it is this line which the OE version of the Letter follows. There are considerable departures from the Latin original, apparently designed to produce an exemplum about the pride of earthly rulers, with the spotlight on Alexander's egotism and belligerence. This Alexander, it has been suggested, might be interpreted as a monster-killer who is himself monstrous in his pride and whose Letter is thus a suitable companion piece for Beowulf, which follows it in the Beowulf-manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fols. 126r–129v). Before it were copied two other prose texts which deal with forms of the monstrous: a version of a work known as Marvels of the East, deriving from a tradition of Latin texts describing bizarre men and animals purportedly seen in eastern parts of the world, and an account of the life of the dog-headed St Christopher.

  • 23 - The Dream of the Rood

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 228-238

  • Summary

    Since early in the fourth century, the cult of the cross has provided Christianity with its most powerful image – an enduring reminder of the sacrifice whereby Christ, through his crucifixion, offered redemption to fallen humankind. The Dream of the Rood presents an intense and original treatment of this theme. The full 156-line poem occurs only on fols. 104–6 of the ‘Vercelli Book’, a manuscript written in England in the later tenth century but now in the Biblioteca Capitolare at Vercelli in Italy. There are three other poems and eighteen prose homilies in the volume, which seems to have been compiled as a source of meditative and penitential reading for the faithful.

    A variant text of several lines of The Dream of the Rood appears also on a twenty-two-foot high Anglo-Saxon stone cross which was extensively damaged during the Reformation but is now restored and on display at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. The lines are inscribed in runic characters, which were used regularly by the Anglo-Saxons before they learned the Roman alphabet from Christian monks and thereafter continued in use for decorative purposes. Traditionally, the inscription on the cross, which accompanies carved scenes of biblical and other events, has been dated to the eighth century, though this view has been challenged. In addition, two lines echoing the speech of the cross in the poem are engraved on a small silver reliquary cross, known as the Brussels Cross, dating from the end of the tenth century. These various occurrences are enough to suggest that our poem, in whole or in part, was known widely.

    Meticulously structured, the poem is framed by the first-person testimony of the narrator (lines 1–27 and 122–56), to whom the vision of a speaking cross has been granted, apparently in a dream. Within this frame, the long central section is another first-person narrative, that of the cross itself on which Christ was crucified, which tells how, as a tree, it was torn from its roots and, initially against its will, became a participant in the events on Calvary.

  • 27 - Falling in Love (from Apollonius of Tyre)

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 269-274

  • Summary

    The story of Apollonius of Tyre started life as a Greek popular narrative, probably in the second or third century BC. It was translated into Latin a number of times and subsequently found its way into most of the European vernaculars, but the OE version is the earliest of these known. The popularity of this somewhat gaudy and gory tale, with its successive themes of incest, deception, murder and enforced prostitution, was as long-lasting as it was widespread: in the late sixth century a celebrated poet and man of letters, the bishop Venantius Fortunatus, could allude almost casually to Apollonius as a renowned figure of exile, and the fourteenth-century poet Gower devoted an entire book of his Confessio Amantis to retelling the tale. Chaucer, however, was less approving, characterising it in the introduction to his Man of Law's Tale (lines 81–5) as ‘so horrible a tale for to rede’. Shakespeare used it for his Pericles Prince of Tyre.

    The OE version is markedly less spectacular than some of the later retellings, thanks in part to its evidently pedestrian rendering of a now-lost Latin source, including what appear to be a number of simple blunders, but mostly because that part of the tale which contains the most salacious elements is absent from the extant text. This was probably a deliberate omission by the translator, but the loss of some pages from the only extant version, in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 (B), makes it impossible to be certain. The manuscript was copied in the early or middle eleventh century and mainly consists of legal, juridical and homiletic texts associated with Archbishop Wulfstan of York (see Texts 24 and 25). The explanation for the tale's inclusion might be that Apollonius was seen as having saintly qualities, in view of his many stoically borne sufferings.

    A nobleman from Tyre, Apollonius has been shipwrecked in Cyrenaica (part of present-day Libya) while on the run from the king of Antioch, after discovering the latter's incestuous relationship with his daughter. The Cyrenaican king, Arcestrates, has observed the ragged and destitute Apollonius taking part in a ball game and has been so impressed with his nobility that he has invited him to a feast.

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