The elfin world of anglo-saxon literature

(600 – 1066)

1.1. Периодизация литературы. конецформыначалоформыВозникновение и распространение христианства, его доминирующая роль в жизни средневекового общества. конецформыначалоформыЛирика англосаксов. Гимн Кэдмона как образец древнеанглийской поэзии.

One can hardly dismiss the history of a nation altogether when dealing with works of literature. The period under discussion is really very long, about a half a millennium. The most ancient inhabitants on the British Isles, the Celts, had settled there in times immemorial. Their beginnings belong to pre-history, and nothing much remained of their civilization. The descendants of those people live in Wales today, and are called the Welsh. It is ironical that the word means 'foreigners' in Old English. Though the Welsh are much less foreigners than the English. The people of Wales are still cultivating a literature which has never influenced – nor been much influenced by – the literature we are going to study.

The ancient Britons were ruled for a few centuries by the Romans. The system of roads they built is still more or less in existence, as well as the place names in which one can trace the Roman presence. Many English words of today, as you might remember, are ancient borrowings from Latin. Britain came under full Roman political and military domination in AD 43, but in AD 410 Roman forces were withdrawn. Exactly 1550 years ago, in AD 449, the tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes descended on Britain. One history teacher born in Ukraine who later turned a great Russian writer said of them in his article:

"Они были вольны и не хотели никакой иметь над собой власти. Правления у них почти не было. Они собирались на народные собрания, стекавшиеся при новолунии и полнолунии каждого месяца, а в случаях чрезвычайных и во всякое время. На эти собрания они приходили лениво и медленно, желая показать, что делают это по своей воле;несколько дней протекало, покамест могло составиться нужное число для совещания. Они сидели в полном вооружении; одни только жрецы могли приказать наблюдать молчание; председательствовали старейшины семейств, седовласые (grawion), после изменившие это название в графов; говорили князья и прославившиеся в битвах;речи их были просты,но исполнены того сильного и сжатого лаконизма, которым отличается бесхитростное красноречие народов свежих".

(Н. В. Гоголь. О движении народов в конце V века.)

The tribes worshipped the old Germanic gods who still give their names to the days of the week – Thor and Woden and Tiw and Freia. But they had some civilisation. They were farmers and seamen, they knew something of law and the art of government. It also seems that they brought a literature with them from the Continent to England. The language they spoke can be roughly called Old English.

By the end of the sixth century, the new masters of England had become a Christian people. It was chiefly due to the energy of the Christian evangelists from Ireland, who came over to convert them. That is why all the records of the early literature of the Anglo-Saxons belong to a Christian England. It was written by clerks in monasteries, kept stored in monasteries, and came to light only at the time of the Reformation, at the end of the period under discussion. For many a century this literature was quite obscure.

Probably, the first memorable piece of Christian literature to appear in the Anglo-Saxon England was Caedmon’s Hymn. Caedmon (650? - 680?) is considered to be the earliest of the Anglo-Saxon Christian poets. The only information concerning Caedmon is in the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (731), by the English theologian Saint Bede the Venerable. According to Bede, Caedmon was an illiterate herdsmаn who had a vision one night and heard a voice commanding him to sing of “the beginning of created things.” Later Caedmon supposedly wrote the poem about the creation known as Caedmon's Hymn, which Bede recorded in prose. Bede further states that Saint Hilda, the abbess of a nearby monastery (now called Whitby), recognized Caedmon's poetic ability and invited him to enter the monastery as a lay brother. Caedmon spent the rest of his life at the monastery writing poetry on biblical themes. The only work that can be attributed to Caedmon is “Hymn of Creation,” which Saint Bede quoted. It survives in several manuscripts of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and contains several dialects. Here comes the modern English translation.

Now let me praise the Keeper of Heaven's kingdom,

the might of the Creator, and his thought,

the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders

the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.

He first created for the sons of men

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,

then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,

the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,

the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

1.2. “Битва при Мэлдоне” – первая подлинно англосаксонская эпическая поэма. Понятие об аллитерационном стихе древнеанглийской поэзии.

A later but already genuinely Anglo-Saxon example of that 'violent' language is the poem entitled Battle of Maldon. It is one thousand years old. The poem has been called the greatest battle poem in English. Written by an unknown poet, it describes a battle between the English and Viking warriors from Denmark in AD 991 at Maldon in Essex on the River Blackwater, called the River Pantan in those times. The Danish invaders are on an island at the mouth of the river waiting for the tide to go out. Byrhtnoth, the earl of Essex, is at the head of the English warriors on the mainland. A messenger from the Danes offers peace if they pay a sum of money. Byrhtnoth rejects the offer. He is far too confident and is tricked into letting the enemy cross to the mainland. And the battle begins, in which the earl perishes, and many of his men run away. But a brave few continue to fight...

The wolves of war advanced, the viking troop,

Unmoved by water, westward over Pante,

Over the gleaming water bore their shields.

The seamen brought their linden-shields to land.

There Byrthnoth and his warriors stood ready

To meet their enemies. He told his troops

To make a shield-wall and to hold it fast

Against their foes. So battle with its glory

Drew near. The time had come for fated men

To perish in that place. A cry went up.

The ravens wheeled above...

Стая волчья / стала переправляться,

войско викингов / -- воды Панты их не пугали --

через потоки светлые со щитами / на восточный берег

вышли и вынесли / боевые доспехи;

Бюрхтнот же к бою / с ратоборцами изготовился,

сторожил кровожадных, / и сложить повелел,

собрать из щитов ограду,/ чтобы ратовать стойко

дружине в сраженье: / приближалась битва,

слава близилась, / время пришло

пасть избранникам израненным / на поле брани.

Вот взволновалось войско,/ вороны кружат...

(Перевод В.Г.Тихомирова)

What do we understand about the nature of Old English poetry? No doubt, it was essentially an oral phenomenon, to be accompanied by harp music. Each line is divided into two halves, and each half has two heavy stresses. And the so-called head-rhyme is used. Head-rhyme means making words begin with the same sound (i.e. it is not exactly what alliteration – beginning with the same letter – seems to be). It appears to be quite congenial with the nature of the language. Though later poetry has been traditionally using end-rhyme, this old head-rhyme has always had some influence on English writing. It can be easily traced in everyday speech in expressions from the good old days like 'a pig in a poke' or 'fit as a fiddle'. In this light, the Russian translation of Battle of Maldon does convey the spirit of the language.

Perhaps, this sort of voice magic was common for all the ancient bards who used to make those great poems public. A translation of a very famous Old Russian epic poem made in 1930 by an aging Russian exile testifies to this very fact. The poem has had many translators. Better known in this country is the rhymed translation made by Nikolai Zabolotsky. But the music of Konstantin Balmont's translation is different and – shall we say?—more authentic.

Нам начать не б лаго ль, б ратья, песню с тарыми с ловами,

Песнь, как полк в поход повел он, славный Игроь Святославич?

По былинам лет тех бывших, не по замыслу Баяна,

Эту песнь зачнем мы, братья...

In the Old English tradition, using head-rhymes was a device that needed a lot of imagination on the part of the poet. Those people often had to call common things by uncommon names just inventing a head-rhyme for an immediate purpose. Thus, the sea becomes the swan's way or the whale's road or the sail-path. The Old English was well fitted for playing this sort of game, because its normal way of creating new words was to take two old ones and join them together. English words thus had the quality of riddles. It is not surprising that riddling was a favourite Old English pursuit. By the way, some of the shorter poems were called riddles, too. The elfin quality of Old English poetry is obvious. In fact, it is even reflected in the names of some great learned people.

Alfred, called The Great (849-899), king of the West Saxons (871-899), and one of the outstanding figures of English history. Born in Wantage in southern England, Alfred was the youngest of five sons of King Ethelwulf. On the death of his brother Ethelred Alfred became king, coming to the throne during a Danish invasion. Although he succeeded in making peace with the Danes, they resumed their marauding expeditions five years later, and by early 878 they were successful almost everywhere. About Easter of 878, however, Alfred established himself at Athelney and began assembling an army. In the middle of that year he defeated the Danes and captured their stronghold. During the following 14 years Alfred was able to devote himself to the internal affairs of his kingdom. By 886 he had captured the city of London, and soon afterward he was recognized as the king of all England.

In 893 the Danes invaded England again, and the following four years were marked by warfare; eventually, the Danes were forced to withdraw from Alfred's domain. The only ruler to resist Danish invasions successfully, Alfred made his kingdom the rallying point for all Saxons, thus laying the foundation for the unification of England. Alfred was a patron of learning and did much for the education of his people. He began a court school and invited British and foreign scholars to come there. Alfred translated such works as The Consolation of Philosophy by the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius, The History of the World by the Spanish priest Paulus Orosius, and Pastoral Care by Pope Gregory.

1.3. “Песнь о конецформыначалоформыБеовульфе” как героический эпос, объединяющий различные проявления англо-саксонской эпической традиции. Сюжет и композиция поэмы. Роль сказочного и мифологического элементов.

Most of Old English poetry survived in one single manuscript called the Exeter Book. It was presented by a bishop to Exeter cathedral library in 1072, and is still kept there today. It survived chiefly because its uses were other than reading: the first pages of the manuscript are stained by wine, and criss-crossed by kitchen knives. It is in this manuscript that the oldest poem in the English language was found. This poem is named Beowulf.

It is the most important work of Old English literature. Beowulf is generally considered to be the work of an anonymous 8th-century Anglian poet who fused Scandinavian history and pagan mythology with Christian elements. The poem consists of 3182 lines, each line with four accents marked by alliteration and divided into two parts by a caesura The structure of the typical Beowulf line comes through in modern translation:

Then from the moorland, by misty crags,

with God's wrath laden, Grendel came.

The monster was minded of mankind now

sundry to seize in the stately house.

Under welkin he walked, till the wine-palace there,

gold-hall of men, he gladly discerned,

flashing with fretwork. Not first time, this,

that he the home of Hrothgar sought, --

yet ne'er in his life-day, late or early,

such hardy heroes, such hall-thanes, found!

To the house the warrior walked apace,

parted from peace; the portal opened,

though with forged bolts fast, when his fists had struck it,

and baleful he burst in his blatant rage,

the house's mouth. All hastily, then,

o'er fair-paved floor the fiend trod on,

ireful he strode; there streamed from his eyes

fearful flashes, like flame to see.

He spied in hall the hero-band,

kin and clansmen clustered asleep,

hardy liegemen. Then laughed his heart;

for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn,

savage, to sever the soul of each,

life from body, since lusty banquet

waited his will! But Wyrd forbade him

to seize any more of men on earth

after that evening. Eagerly watched

Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe,

how he would fare in fell attack.

Not that the monster was minded to pause!

Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior

for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder,

the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams,

swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus

the lifeless corpse was clear devoured,

e'en feet and hands…

The somber story is told in vigorous, picturesque language, with heavy use of metaphor; a famous example is the term “whale-road” for sea. The poem tells of a hero, a Scandinavian prince named Beowulf, who rids the Danes of the monster Grendel, half man and half fiend, and Grendel's mother, who comes that evening to avenge Grendel's death.

Fifty years later Beowulf, now king of his native land, fights a dragon who has devastated his people. Both Beowulf and the dragon are mortally wounded in the fight. The poem ends with Beowulf's funeral as his mourners chant his epitaph. In these sequences Beowulf is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a savior of the people. The Old Germanic virtue of mutual loyalty between leader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the aged Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert him in this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry with which fragments of other heroic tales are incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized.

Another feature of Beowulf is the weakening of the sense of the ultimate power of arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities. In fact, much of the strength and violence of Beowulf derive from the nature of Old English itself. That was the language rich in consonants, fond of clustering its consonants together. Take the Old English word strength, in which seven muscular consonants strangle a single vowel. That was the language's nature.

1.4. Исторический аспект фольклорной детской литературы.

Nursery Rhymes, simple verses, often accompanied by a simple tune, have long been used for the entertainment and education of small children. Most nursery rhymes have been handed down from one generation to another. Among the oldest are those related to telling time, counting, or learning the alphabet. The rhyme beginning “Thirty days hath September,” for example, has its origins in a medieval French poem. The origins of many others, however, such as “Humpty-Dumpty” or “Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home,” are open to conjecture; some theorists think that a number of seemingly naive nursery rhymes have concealed political or topical significance.

* * * ТРИ МУДРЕЦА

Three wise men of Gotham, Три мудреца в одном тазу

They went to sea in a bowl, Пустились по морю в грозу.

And if the bowl had been stronger Будь попрочнее / Старый таз,

My song would have been longer. Длиннее / Был бы мой рассказ.

Gotham is a real place name of a village near Nottingham. The villagers had a weird reputation for doing all sorts of nonsensical things like catching the moon in the lake with their nets, etc. The explanation makes sense though. The legend has it that once King John the Lackland (1167-1216) planned to pass through their fields. If he had done that,the royal road would have become a public one. To prevent the King from doing so, the villagers pretended they were all weird if not feeble-minded. The King thought it better not to consort with fools. The property remained intact.

ADDITIONAL READING

Cædmon's story has one source – Book IV, Chapter 24, of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (finished in 731) by the Venerable Bede (673-735), a monk of Jarrow in Northumbria. The following excerpt is rendered into modern English from A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Shirley-Price (Penguin Books, 1955): 245-47:

In this monastery of Whitby there lived a brother whom God's grace made remarkable. So skilful was he in composing religious and devotional songs, that he could quickly turn whatever passages of Scripture were explained to him into delightful and moving poetry in his own English tongue. These verses of his stirred the hearts of many folk to despise the world and aspire to heavenly things.... And although he followed a secular occupation until well advanced in years, he had never learned anything about poetry: indeed, whenever all those present at a feast took it in turns to sing and entertain the company, he would get up from table and go home directly he saw the harp approaching him.

On one such occasion he had left the house in which the entertainment was being held and went out to the stable, where it was his duty to look after the beasts that night. He lay down there at the appointed time and fell asleep, and in a dream he saw a man standing beside him who called him by name. "Cædmon," he said, "sing me a song." "I don't know how to sing," he replied. "It is because I cannot sing that I left the feast and came here." The man who addressed him then said: "But you shall sing to me." "What should I sing about?" he replied. "Sing about the Creation of all things," the other answered. And Cædmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator that he had never heard before, and their theme ran thus: "Let us praise the Maker of the kingdom of heaven, the power and purpose of our Creator, and the acts of the Father of glory. Let us sing how the eternal God, the author of all marvels, first created the heavens for the sons of men as a roof to cover them, and how their almighty Protector gave them the earth for their dwelling place." This is the general sense, but not the actual words that Cædmon sang in his dream; for however excellent the verses, it is impossible to translate them from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity. When Cædmon awoke, he remembered everything that he had sung in his dream, and soon added more verses in the same style to the glory of God.

Early in the morning he went to his superior the reeve, and told him about this gift that he had received. The reeve took him before the abbess, who ordered him to give an account of his dream and repeat the verses in the presence of many learned men, so that they might decide their quality and origin. All of them agreed that Cædmon's gift had been given him by our Lord, and when they had explained to him a passage of scriptural history or doctrine, they asked him to render it into verse if he could. He promised to do this, and returned next morning with excellent verses as they had ordered him. The abbess was delighted that God had given such grace to the man, and advised him to abandon secular life and adopt the monastic state, and when she had admitted him into the Community as a brother, she ordered him to be instructed in the events of sacred history. So Cædmon stored up in his memory all that he learned, and after meditating on it, turned it into such melodious verse that delightful renderings turned his instructors into his audience. He sang of the creation of the world, the origin of the human race, and the whole story of Genesis. He sang of Israel's departure from Egypt, their entry into the land of promise, and many other events of scriptural history. He sang of the Lord's Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the Apostles. He also made many poems on the terrors of the Last Judgment, the horrible pains of Hell, and the joys of the kingdom of heaven. In addition to these, he composed several others on the blessings and judgments of God, by which he sought to turn his hearers from delight into wickedness, and to inspire them to love and do good. For Cædmon was a deeply religious man, who humbly submitted to regular discipline, and firmly resisted all who tried to do evil, thus winning a happy death."

Commentary by Ian Lancashire

Caedmon gives hope to all would-be poets. For most of his life, he worked in animal husbandry for a monastery, living with the non-religious, and reporting to the reeve, a steward who superintended the abbess' estates. When the workers routinely ate together in the hall at a table, they entertained each other by singing lyrics to a hand-held harp, passed around. Surviving Old English poetry hints at what they sang about: historical battles like Maldon, mythic heroes like Beowulf, lonely wanderers by land and sea such as Widsith, and riddles. Before Caedmon's turn to sing came, he left for home or for the stable where he kept the livestock overnight. One time, when his turn came to sleep with the animals, he had a dream. In it a man called him by name and told him to sing. When Caedmon explained that he could not sing to the others, the man asked him to sing to him instead. When Caedmon said that he did not know what to sing about, the man told him, "the Creation of all things." In the dream, Caedmon did so, with verses he had never heard before. Awaking, he remembered his dream and the song, and added more to it.

The religious for whom Caedmon performed his song later attributed his singing as a gift by God's grace. He must have seemed to them like one of the disciples in the gospels whom Jesus had called by name to God's service. Creativity in making songs, to them, happened when a greater power took over the poet and made him its voice. John Milton also attributed his poems to a "Heavenly Muse." Late in life, and blind, like Homer, he composed Paradise Lost in his mind early in the morning and waited until his daughters arrived to "milk" him, that is, take dictation. However, the monastic brothers were wrong about Caedmon's "gift." The man in his dream gave him, not the verses, as a Muse might, but the subject matter. Like a teacher, this man only set the topic. Caedmon, and only he, composed the verses. What astounded the monastery's scholars was the immediacy of his composition. The verses came out without work or prompting of memory.

Caedmon's account of what happened to him is cognitively true. When people speak, they seldom rely on a mental script that they copy in uttering. Our words emerge unselfconsciously, spontaneously. Our language process relies on a form of memory termed implicit or procedural. We cannot search for how to compose an utterance, as we do in trying to remember a name or a date, some part of our knowledge of the world which we have stored in long-term memory. All we can do is to want to say something and then "recall the procedure" of making language by actually doing it. We may sense, mentally, a welling up of a need to utter something on a topic at hand. The uttering then is a relief. Often it comes in words that we have never before used in that combination before. We can be surprised by what happens to us in speaking. If we stand before a crowd, charged with speaking off-the-cuff, we can become conscious of our state of unknowing, and it can unnerve us. It is like standing before a cliff and jumping out into thin air, in the belief that we will fly. That fright leads to stuttering, blocking, silence, and sometimes escape. Caedmon experienced this very same "stage fright" when the harp approached him. His dream released this damming up of his power to utter. Surprised, given no time to worry, Caedmon just obeyed the man's command. That Caedmon was unselfconscious of how he managed to sing what he did wonderfully captures the reality of language cognition. We may often not know what we are going to say until we have said it. That he had something to say on the topic, on the other hand, is obvious. No one worked for a monastery without repeatedly hearing the story of Genesis or the duty of man to praise God for it.

Caedmon does not say that he penned his song after waking up, but that he remembered it. Bede clearly explains that one of Caedmon's abilities was to store up what he was taught in his memory. He wrote down nothing, as far as we can tell, and he was likely illiterate. Reading and writing then were technical skills, needed by few, and so taught to few. Herdsmen would not have been among that number. The astonishment with which Caedmon's song-making skills were met by learned people reflects the skepticism that they feel in hearing of an undereducated person composing expertly. (For centuries, Shakespeare has borne the brunt of such disbelief; he was the son of a glover and had a grammar school education, good for its times, but comparable to leaving school after grade eight.)

The text of Caedmon's hymn of the Creation also perfectly satisfies the cognitive needs of an utterance that, once generated, must be memorizable so that it can later be recalled by rote. Each Old English line has two balanced phrases with four stressed syllables, three of which alliterate. Each half-line, if uttered musically, in time to the plucking of a harp, would fit nicely into our phonological working (short-term) memory, which can accept two seconds of speech only before recycling. The poet phonologically encodes each first half-line to make recall of the closing half-line easy. For example, "hergan" (`praise') alliteratively -- that is, musically -- calls up "hefaenricæs" (`Heaven's kingdom'), as "metudæs maecti" (`the creator's might') does "modgidanc" (`thought'). Half-lines often are formulas, common fixed phrases that repeat themselves, such as "eci dryctin" (`the Eternal Lord'). The same word often begins different half-lines, such as "hefaenricæs" (1) and "hefen to hrofæ" (6), or ends such lines, like "uard" (1, 7) and "mehti" (2, 9). For such reasons, literary historians term Old English poetry as " oral formulaic ": meant for publishing only as speech, and so not available in written form, poets filled their works with formulas, easily re-used and remembered building blocks. Caedmon's hymn has just two sentences, which can be summarized: "Let me now praise God the Creator" (1-4), and "God created Heaven, earth, and man" (5-9). The assertion itself has a simple logic that ensures Caedmon can link together, in memory, the larger units, the full lines, into a verse paragraph. Its length may also reflect a common cognitive upper-limit on large text segments…

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P.S. So, why are Milton and Shakespeare mentioned by the scholar?

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