Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Poetry

English literature began with oral songs and heroic poems, which were passed on by minstrels, or scops, who also composed poems of their own and sang them to a harp accompaniment. In this way common people learned of the major battles and the tribe's heroes.

All of the earliest English literature is found in four manuscripts written probably in the 10^th century and their poems go back to the 7^th and 8^th centuries: the Beowulf manuscript, the Bodleian manuscript of biblical poems, the Vercelli manuscript containing The Dream of the Rood, and the Exeter manuscript, which includes the Advent and love lyrics, such as Husband's Message, Wife's Lament, as well as collections of aphorisms, elegies and riddles. The most important Anglo-Saxon poetic work is Beowulf, an epic poem, telling the story of a Danish hero who saves the neighbouring people from a terrible monster.

According to the Germanic poetic tradition, the language in verse was archaic, with frequently used phrases or formulae, developed to help the scops fill out their lines spontaneously, in order to enjoy such poetry we must learn to ignore the fixed number of syllables in verse lines, the regular patterns of stress (iambic or trochaic feet), and rhyme. The essential poetic unit was the four-stress line, divided by a caesura across which stress-syllables alliterated. Alliteration (or head rhyme) was the only requirement. Old English poetic language, which knew no rhyme, stanzas, or refrains, was built out of a special formulaic vocabulary providing several terms for lord (master, king, leader, liege, commander), spear (lance, pike) and so on. Synecdoche and metonymy are common figures of speech as when keel is used for a ship, or iron for a sword or mead-hall for a palace. A particularly impressive effect is achieved by the kenning, a compound of two words denoting one object as when earl's raiment means armor, peace-weaver means wife, or ring-giver — chieftain. The dignified poetic speech of Old English poetry always kept afar from everyday language and remained remarkably stable from Caedmon's Hymn up to The Battle of Maldon.

Spoken English is still rich with two-stress phrase rhythms, and the Anglo-Saxon verse line closer approaches conversational English than does the later iambic pentameter. After the Norman Conquest, two poems of the early 12^,h century, Durham, praising the city's cathedral and its relics, and Instructions for Christians, a didactic work, show that alliterative verse could be composed well after 1066. Such verse survived into the Middle Ages; it has also been revived in modern times.

Old English was an inflected language with five grammatical cases, regular and dual plural forms, gender distinction to all nouns, e.g. seo sunne (the Sun) feminine, se mona (the Moon) masculine. As many educated people were good at Latin, the European lingua franca at that time, Old English further moved away from its first runic alphabet, or futhorc, to the Latin. Another major influence on Old English were the Viking invasions in the 9^th and 10^th centuries, which brought in many Scandinavian words, such as sky, leg, they, ship, fellow, and gradually simplified the case endings of Old English.

In the early days, only the servants of the church could read and write, and most of Old English literature concerns religious subjects and borrows much from Latin sources. One of such learned churchmen writing in Latin was Venerable Bede (ca 673-735), whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) is a rich source about the period. The library at the monasteries of Wearmouth-Jarrow, where Bede spent his life, had between 300-500 books, making it one of the largest in England.

From Bede's History we also learn of the first English religious poet Caedmon, a simple country cowman who composed a story of the creation in his dream, a short Hymn of 18 half-lines. It testifies to the early interaction between Christianity and traditional heroic poetry in England, and shows how the formulaic element of Germanic verse was adopted by Christian poetry: eight lines of the poem contain various epithets of God: He is Weard (Guardian), Meotod (Measurer), Wuldor- Fazder (Glory-Father), Drihten (Lord), Scyppend (Creator), and Frea (Master). Such style is rich in texture and difficult to translate. Bede said about his own Latin paraphrase of the Hymn, that no translation of poetry from one language to another was possible without some poetic sacrifice.

Hymn

Now we must praise heaven-kingdom's Guardian,

The Measurer's might and his mind-plans,

The work of the Glory-Father, when he of wonders of every one,

Eternal Lord, the beginning established.

He first created for men's sons

Heaven as a roof, holy Creator;

Then middle-earth mankind's Guardian,

Eternal Lord, afterwards made —

For men earth, Master almighty. (2)

The religious narratives of Cynewulf (late 8^th century), such as Elene and Juliana, are in contrast to the heroic and Biblical epics. Among shorter religious poems, The Dream of the Rood is the most prominent. It describes a vision of the Cross, covered both in blood and jewels, a vision of Christ's Crucifixion, and promises a final triumph to the miserable narrator. Lines from this poem are carved on the surviving Ruthwell Cross in runes.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-04