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NOTES AND
COMMENTARY
Adapted and much enlarged by
Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al.,
Teaching
British Literature
(New York: Longman, 2003)
See
British Literature Timeline
Age of Giants 3000 - 1500 BCE (megaliths)
Age of Celts 1500 BCE - 54 CE (continuing in Ireland, Wales, Scotland)
Roman Occupation 54 - 410 (sack of Rome by Goths 410)
Age of Anglo-Saxons 410 -600 (fall of Rome 475)
Dark Age catastrophe, famines, extreme weather 535-536
Romans Part 2 600 - 800 (Rome this time as Roman Church).
Scands Part 2 800 - 1066 (Vikings, Danes, Norse)
Early Irish Narrative
Early Irish
literature is as full of marvelous fantasy as Beowulf, but
its tones range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
 In
the Irish national epic known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley or
The
Táin Bó Cúailnge, broad humor, zany exaggeration and grotesque parody are
mixed into the tragic
conflict of heroic narrative. Distinct from the Christian- and largely male-dominated world of Beowulf,
The Tain celebrates preChristian society often governed or
misgoverned by queens, wise women and goddesses. Like Beowulf,
however, The Tain appears to us only in late and heavily revised
form; its story is ancient, but the manuscripts date back only to the
12th century. What was the original story like?
Hero of The Tain is
Cú Chulainn who, like
bee-wolf and the incredible Hulk, transforms to a monstrous "distorted one" in his battle rages.
Cú Chulainn's
exaggerated
 powers in fighting are often compared to those of Homer's
Achilles, but he has a social dimension which Achilles lacks. He exemplifies a heroic
military code of fair fighting and
proper motivation. Fairness means single-combat. His enemy the greedy
Queen Medb is unfair in sending groups and teams of fighters against
him--and they always lose, no matter how many of them gang up. Medb
lures warriors to her cause of stealing cattle from neighbors by
promising all of them the hand of the beautiful young
Finnabair.
To win her, they must killl Cú Chulainn; many are motivated by this
promise, but they all fail. Unlike his opponents, Cú Chulainn is driven only by the doglike desire to protect his master's
herd. He is a show-off and braggart, a glory-seeker, but these qualities
like a dog's bark are virtues in defending his group from exploitation.
On balance, he's a good fellow to have on your side.
Cú Chulainn was reborn in twentieth century Irish resistance to British
colonialism. He appears in retellings of ancient legend produced
during the Irish
Renaissance (by
Lady
Gregory and
W. B. Yeats,
for instance). This adoption of an Ulster hero by the entire Irish
Republic is reflected in the statue of Cú Chulainn, commemorating the
Easter Uprising of
1916, now in the General Post Office in Dublin.
The late
Frank McCourt
treats Cú Chulainn worship whimsically in Angela's Ashes (1996).
 Early Irish Verse
Early medieval Irish poems speak to us today in very direct ways in
their wit, affection, and rueful longing for times and people lost. Some
are elegies for the dead:"Findabair Remembers Fróech" speaking
for romantic tragedy (and the sheer beauty of Fróech),
and "A Grave Marked with Ogam" coming from the tradition of
heroic lament. Stating the theme in more direct and general way, "The
Old Woman of Beare" is an unflinching picture of old age, when the
hope of Christian salvation is not enough to overcome depression for
lost youth. At the same time the old woman is
Beira, Queen of
Winter, whose rule begins with the end of harvest season and extends to
spring, when the goddess Brigit returns to power for the summer. The wise old woman is a stock type in medieval
literature: we will see her again in the speaker of the Anglo-Saxon "The
Wife's Lament," in Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and in Morgan the witch encountered in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
Riddling is as
important in Celtic literature as it is in Angle-Saxon. "To Crinog"
turns out to be not only the poet's former lover, and a wise crone,
but an old book returned to the poet after many years in other's
readers' hands. She is his teacher, perhaps a prayer book that he sleeps
with, and he wishes he could be as pure as she, but she is mortal and
will fall apart like the author. Here is a wonderfully concise
expression of the life of the monk, replacing sex with study.
"A Grave
Marked with Ogam" and "Writing in the Wood" feature two kinds
of writing, in stone and on parchment. "Pangur
the Cat" written by an Irish monk in a German monastery, plays on the delights of the difficult, the skill of
hunting down a textual problem, like Pangur hunts mice. All of these poems take
pleasure in indirection and riddling. (For similar Saxon riddles, see
Damrosch 1A pages 159-160.)
 Immigrations
of Irish to the New World may have started long before the potato famine with
St. Brendan and
other monks of the Dark Age searching the seas for supernatural wonders. The
uncanny encounters in "The
Voyage of Máel Dúin" compare with those in later Celtic
works to be covered in later lessons, especially Marie de France's "Lanval," which Marie
explicitly claims to have come from the Celtic world of the
Breton lai, and
the mysterious quest of Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
Judith
To convert the Saxons, Christian monks and missionaries translated and
paraphrased the Bible into Old English. Vengeance-seeking militancy in
the Hebrew scriptures seems to have translated most easily. For a rape victim to stand up and defend
herself occurs in the classical British story of
Boudicca (whose
daughters' rapes ignite the uprising against
Nero), but following the
Hebrew story of
Judith, the poem's heroine easily rids the land of foreign
occupiers, wining her opponent's arms and the glory of a united
community. It is the Lord's power to defend weak and oppressed
civilians that the poem
celebrates. He is the hero who defends the cult when called upon.
"Judith" may have historical as well as religious significance.
The poem may reflect the resistance of Christian
Anglo-Saxons to invading pagan Danes in the tenth century. Possibly the
poem was written to inspire rebellion against them. The same theme is more literally expressed in Anglo-Saxon "The
Battle of Maldon," the poetic account of the doomed struggle of a
band of Anglo-Saxons against an army of Danes. While Christianity
introduced a new peace ethic into Germanic civilization, it also
provided justification and inspiration for war against "enemies of God."
The Dream of the Rood
 Following
Beowulf and "Judith," "The
Dream of the Rood" effectively rounds out a first view of Old
English heroic poetry. In perhaps the most original poem on the
crucifixion in English, the dreamer sees Christ as a bold
Germanic hero who girds himself for battle (like Beowulf). Heaven is as a feast in a mead hall. The
talking cross appears "as a loyal retainer in the epic mode, with the ironic reversal
that it must acquiesce and even assist in its Lord's death, unable
through its own command to aid or avenge him" (Stanley B. Greenfield and
Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature,
[1986], 196).
This poem is elegiac like Beowulf and other melancholy Old English
poems like "The
Wanderer," "Wulf
and Eadwacer," and "The
Wife's Lament." The dreamer presents himself as an exile longing to
join his friends in the home of "the high Father." The early English
Christians seem to have carried over tragic sense of life modeled in
earlier heroic literature.
This poem also maintains surreal dream qualities of traditional heroic
fantasy.
In Old English inanimate objects frequently are granted speech. the
talking Cross recalls the speaking objects in Old English and
Anglo-Latin and Celtic riddles, several of which also recount their origin as
plants or trees. Here is where Tolkien's Ents were born.
Ethnic and Religious Encounters
This perspectives section of the anthology is meant to illustrate the
emergence of the idea of Englishness, an English people, an English
nation. Who are these people? Or who do they think they are? Do the
early texts give any hint that great nationhood and empire are in store
for the future? Who are the enemies or outsiders who get excluded from
this community? How are they different? Why are they excluded? According
to our editor Damrosch, these
sources seem to approach communal identity through language, ethnicity
and religion. To belong, must one speak Anglo-Saxon? be Christian? be
native to the isles (that is, descended from a historic Anglo-Saxon
invader who drove out the Britons, Romans and Celts)?
Bede
Bede (a
Christian monk writing in Latin from the north country near York, a land
settled primarily by Angles) is the
first historian of the English people.
 His
"ecclesiastical" approach makes for unreliable history, but his
writing shows an
imaginative flair and reveals how churchmen used stories of miracles to
win followers. The key moment in cultural transformation occurs when
King Edwin
is converted to Christianity, which Bede dates 180 years after the
English arrived in Britain. The story of Imma's loosened bonds is a good
example of a conversion tale designed to convince nonbelievers of the
power of the Christian religion. The Christian prayer amazes the pagans
whose "loosening magic" is nowhere near as effective on bonds!
Caedmon's story is
another on the power of Christian words: here the story-teller derives
his gifts of expression from Christ. For Bede, an English person speaks
English; if he is wise, he is also Christian.
Bishop Asser
A Welshman writing in Latin,
Asser was a serious
biographer who used written sources like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for Alfred's earlier years, and he knew continental models of laudatory
biography like Einhard's
Life of Charlemagne. (Alfred himself was connected to
Carolingian
kingdoms through his mother.) At moments, though, he is more a
courtly praise poet in the tradition of
Taliesin, whose work may have
been circulating in those days in Asser's native tongue.
Asser marks Alfred as a king by a series of more or less conventional
attributes: his good looks and the universal affection he gained as a
boy, his love of books and wish to overcome illiteracy (very like
Einhard's Charlemagne), his hunting skills, patronage of craftsmen, and
support of religion. Notwithstanding all of these polite refinements,
Alfred establishes kingship as a warrior in a series of conflicts and
triumphs against the Viking invaders, which culminate in their
conversion and expulsion into the
Danelaw in the
northeast of Britain.
For Asser, religious practice becomes the fundamental ethnic divide; his
Alfred makes a nation against "assaults of the heathen." Compare this to
Bede where complex religious differences seem not to have affected other
kinds of ethnic coherence between Imma and his imprisoner. Further,
Asser implies a royal court that embraces many races, even beyond those
of the court scholars, and thus probably many languages. He sees
Alfred's vernacular reading as specific to his Saxon race, but not as
part of a boundary of participation in the state. Asser even aligns
literacy and faith. It was the heathen invaders that prevented young
Alfred from getting a better education, although Alfred's love of "Saxon
poems" is a key sign of his youthful promise.
The story of Alfred memorizing poems in exchange for the promise of a
book locates him in a crossing place of oral and written culture
comparable to Caedmon and the mixed linguistic heritage of vernacular
poetry and Latin literacy. Alfred desires the book as an icon, not for
its words but the beauty of its decorated initial.
King Alfred, Preface to Pastoral Care
Asser's preoccupations, especially his elision of Christianity
and ethnicity, contrast significantly with Alfred's own justification in
translating Pastoral Care. Alfred constructs his alignment of
ethnicity and kingdom from two perspectives, history and language.
First, he invokes a nostalgic regard for the glories of an unspecified
past he wants to emulate. (Compare the nostalgia theme so prevalent in
Anglo-Saxon poetry.) Second, he wants to restore learning to a people
among whom Latin has steeply declined, through the medium of
Anglo-Saxon, "the language which we can all understand." Who make up
that "all," at a court populated by many nations, as Asser describes?
This evocation of a somewhat homogenized "Anglo-Saxon" people is echoed
in charters of about the same time, in which Alfred is styled "king of
the Anglo-Saxons."
At the same time, the idea of translation links Alfred's realm to other
great nations of the past, moving in a roughly westward direction. This
movement of learning and power, with its implications of a chosen people
and justification of empire, will be very important in the more secular
history writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and throughout Arthurian
tradition, especially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Ironically, it will be invoked by the spokesmen of the Anglo-Saxons'
conquerors, the Normans.
Ohthere
The report of
Ohthere's
journeys records a rather different encounter, not only with the
"exotic" peoples of northern Scandinavia, but also between Alfred's
Anglo-Saxons and their own geographical past. Even while he was fighting
Viking insurgents, Alfred also maintained trade ties with other
Scandinavians, and brought some to his court. Ohthere is one of these,
and his travels are introduced almost like a report on tribal groups of
varying levels of primitiveness. There is little concern with
religious practice here, but with the geography of far northern
Scandinavia and with the region's languages, social habits, settlement
patterns, and trade. Ohthere's own society is an object of curiosity,
too, and his story includes details about farming and the measure of
wealth in his own country. The emphasis on deer herds suggests the
difficulty Ohthere had in explaining concepts of wealth based primarily
on moveable possessions, not land. Alfred also seems interested in
aspects of his people's historical identity and their origins around the
Baltic, accessible through the memory of a Norwegian trader, an interest
consistent with the intense, even elegiac nostalgia of Beowulf.
The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
If King Alfred promoted the idea of a language to link all Anglo-Saxons,
the Chronicle helped that occur. Initially distributed to a
number of monasteries (as were some of Alfred's translations), the
Chronicle was extended at some of them, right up to the
Norman Conquest
in 1066, and in a few cases even beyond that date. This passage
reflects an achieved sense of ethnic nationhood in its uncomplicated
assumption of the "English people" who oppose
Harold of
Norway and
William of
Normandy. Nowhere is the tone of loss and lamentation at the fall of
Anglo-Saxon kingship more acute than here. The Chronicle depicts
English King
Harold
moving feverishly between an old enemy, the Norwegians (who had
maintained close relations between their own country and the Danelaw),
and the new invaders, the Normans. Yet the Chronicle, especially
in these passages, also adopts a much wider perspective of divine
disfavor, cosmic signs, and punishment for "the sins of the people." It
sees the Normans as an alien invading force,  but even more as God's
punishment for Anglo-Saxon corruption. The latter notion echoes historiographical
ideas developed out of biblical narrative, where prophets said that
Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians because of the Jews' faithlessness.
These spiritual interpretations had been used more recently by
Welsh historians explaining the triumphant incursions of the
Anglo-Saxons themselves. The excerpt of the Chronicle in our
anthology ends with an appeal not to nationhood but to the will of God.
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Left: Death of Cú Chulainn in
the General Post Office in Dublin. At last, the hero found a stone
pillar and chained himself to it, so that he would not fall but die
standing on his feet. None of his enemies dared approach, for Morrigan
[the goddess of war] transformed herself into a raven and perched on his
shoulder as long as he remained alive.
"Cu Chulainn's Stone" in County Louth, Ireland, where legend says
CuChulainn died. In one important aspect of its meaning the Cattle Raid
of Cooley (aka Tain) is an imaginary geography of ancient Ulster. The
tale describes how the mountains, stones, rivers and other
geographical features were created or named. In this view of events, Cu
Chulainn is the creator of the world.
Left: a stone marked with
Ogam script
Where was Mael Duin? Several early
Irish texts treat of long, fantastical sea voyages long before Columbus!
The Ruthwell cross in Northumbria
has some of the poem engraved on it.
Left: Alfred the Great.
Left: tapestry representation
of Harold Godwinson, last of
the Saxon kings |