The Complete Old English Poems Read online

  More indirectly, Solomon at one point (ll. 213–14) asks, “Are you wise enough to say / What things were and what things were not?” Saturn replies, as often, with a question, not an answer, but the answer is in the question: “Why does [the sun] cast shadows?” (l. 218). For something which is both a visible presence and a visible absence is, of course, shadow. (Tolkien did not forget this question either, or the sinister nature of shadow-shapes elsewhere in Old English). But the question of items which are at once there and not-there is widespread in the Old English corpus.

  One item in this limited set, besides “shadows,” must, for instance, be “ruins.” A ruin is certainly there, physically. It may weigh many tons, like the ruined Roman stone buildings and stone walls which the Anglo-Saxons encountered for the first time on their arrival in what was once Britannia. They seem to have made a great impression on the newcomers. To the poet of Maxims II, they were “the cunning work of giants” (l. 2). In The Wanderer, the speaker moralizes on “the old works of giants” (l. 91), and the same phrase comes up in the poem now called The Ruin, which, from its mention of “stone buildings and hot springs” (l. 39), is thought to be a meditation on the Roman ruins (now restored) at Bath. The point about a ruin, though, is that while it exists physically, by its very existence it testifies to the nonexistence of something else: whatever it is a ruin of. It is there, in the present. It proves that something else, in the past, is no longer there. Ruins, then, are a central image in The Wanderer, another of the Exeter Book’s “dramatic monologues,” this time spoken by a male persona (or possibly several of them, “wanderer,” “wise man,” or “man wise in mind”). There the ruins act as a physical proof of evanescence (see ll. 78–108). And the thought they generate, directly parallel to that of the “wife” in The Wife’s Lament, is “How the time has slipped / Down under the night-helmet as if it never was” (ll. 101–2).

  But it may be there in memory. And memories are also in a sense there/not there. They may be immensely powerful, stirring thoughts too deep for tears, as they do for the two female speakers discussed above. But they are also utterly subjective. No two people remember the same thing the same way. Nor can the grief they bring ever be fully felt or fully communicated. And “the wanderer” adds a further twist to the “as if it never was” situation, just as the woman of Wulf and Eadwacer did. For the pain of memory may be especially great if the memories come to us in dreams, which can be blocked out by no effort of self-control. That is what happens to “the wanderer,” who in his dream remembers the happy time when he had a lord, a place, a home. Then he wakes up to the bitter landscape of later reality, where even the seabirds seem to mock him, for they are at home in the freezing sea as he is not. Rightly does he say, if with Anglo-Saxon understatement, “Then the wounds of the heart are heavier” (l. 53). Nessun maggior dolore, wrote Dante, “There is no greater sorrow than to remember, in misery, the happy time” (Inferno V, ll. 121–23). But the Anglo-Saxon poet dramatized the thought centuries before him.

  Shadows, ruins, memories, dreams, “our friendship,” and “The song of us two together.” To the list of things that are and are not, or are now as if they had never been, one could well add the human counterparts of stone ruins: last survivors. They exist, and like the ruins, they bear testimony to what has vanished, through their memory. This does not have to be mute testimony, for last survivors can at least talk. But in Anglo-Saxon culture even that consolation is doubtful, for “A noble man / Must seal up his heart’s thoughts” (The Wanderer, ll. 13–14). Of all the virtues, stoicism was perhaps the one most prized by Anglo-Saxons (as by many of their cultural descendants). There is a last survivor in Beowulf (ll. 2230–67) who makes a speech over the treasure he is hiding, or depositing—curiously, he leaves it “open” for the dragon to find. But his speech is a soliloquy, with no one to hear it. Beowulf too is very nearly a last survivor, though he has one person left to speak to, his relative (nephew?) Wiglaf. His last four-line speech, however, and typically, conceals grief by flat statement. Does talking soothe “the wounds of the heart”? Possibly poetry does.

  POLYMORPHS OF TRUTH

  Another way to bring out the pervasive “riddlic” quality of Old English poetry is to borrow a rhetorical trope from Kurt Vonnegut. His novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) rests on the science-fictional idea of “Ice-Nine,” a form of water which acts like a seed crystal to turn everything it contacts into ice. Just as Vonnegut plays with the idea of different “polymorphs” of water, so one may “riddlically” play with the idea of different forms of truth, as they appear again and again in the Old English corpus.

  In this imaginary scenario, “Truth-One” in Old English would be soð, or “sooth”—a word derived, though it does not look like it, from the verb “to be.” “Sooth” is things as they are, and one of the jobs of a “soothsayer” is to tell it the way it is. The Old English metrical psalms are full of such truths. In Psalm 134, for example, the poet says:

  [God] alone made the world’s glorious wonders.

  He created heaven for the understanding of man.

  He first made the earth after the waters.

  He made the great lights for the children of men.

  He made the bright sun to rule the day

  And the moon and stars to rule the night.

  He slew the Egyptians and their firstborn children

  And led the Israelites unharmed out of Egypt

  With a mighty hand and powerful arm.

  He parted the great Red Sea in an instant

  And led the Israelites right through the middle. (ll. 9–19)

  This is a biblical truth that does not seem open to debate (though there are certainly debatable truths elsewhere in the psalms, and the literal truth of this is certainly debatable). Here we see both a cosmological and a historical truth combined in a description of God’s ongoing creation in the world, what is called elsewhere forðgesceaft. And heavenly Wisdom in the Old English translation of the Boethian meters often speaks such undeniable truths, for example, telling Boethius that “if you want to gaze on the radiant truth, / You must renounce and relinquish all idle joys, / Imperfect goods and pointless pleasures” in favor of a gift that will make Boethius “eternally glad” (Poem 5, ll. 20–25).

  Riddles, on the other hand, do not offer an unquestioned truth. They depend on a kind of doubling, “Truth-Two.” Every statement in a riddle must be both eventually true (or it is not a fair riddle) and potentially misleading (or it is not a good and testing riddle). We cannot tell before solving a riddle which clues are meant to be literal, which metaphoric. As Williamson notes: “Each riddle creature takes on the disguise of another: the bagpipe is a bird that sings through its foot; the rake scruffs like a dog along walls; the butter churn is engaged in a bawdy bit of bouncing to produce its baby butter, and the bookworm is a plundering beast that wolfs down a tribal heritage” (2011, 163–64). Some of the most sophisticated riddles use this metaphoric/literal ambiguity to point to a double solution, one plain and the other bawdy. So the riddler says:

  I heard of something rising in a corner,

  Swelling and standing up, lifting its cover.

  The proud-hearted bride grabbed at that boneless

  Wonder with her hands; the prince’s daughter

  Covered that swelling thing with a swirl of cloth. (Riddle 43)

  Here the corner, the bride, and her hands turn out to be literal truths, but the rising “something” (nathwæt, literally, “I know not what”), the “boneless wonder,” has a doubled metaphoric meaning, both bread dough and phallus. The thing that covers this swelling creature, hrægl in Old English, can be either a cloth or a dress. The ambiguity of riddles makes them delightful to solve, but it also challenges the reader to see below the surface meaning of words and concepts in order to reconceive the world in its many hidden connections. Williamson describes the process:

  The riddlers taunt and cajole, they admit and deny, they peddle false hopes and paradoxes, they lead th
e reader down dark roads with glints of light. And in the end they never confess except to flatter, “Say what I mean.” What they mean is that reality exists and is at the same time a mosaic of man’s perception. What they mean is that man’s measure of the world is in words, that perceptual categories are built on verbal foundations, and that by withholding the key to the categorical house (the entitling solution), the riddlers may force the riddle-solver to restructure his own perceptual blocks in order to gain entry to a metaphorical truth. In short the solver must imagine himself a door and open in. (1977, 25)

  Nevertheless, with a good riddle there ought at least to be a single correct solution (even if, as is sometimes the case with the Old English riddles, no one is sure what it is). This is not always the case with other forms of “riddlic” language.

  Old English maxims offer another sort of truth that mediates between the two truths above, the unassailable truth and the riddle-truth, which we may call “Truth-Three” in the polymorphic system. The poet of Maxims II says, for example, “A king shall rule a kingdom” and “Wind is the swiftest creature in air,” but also admits that “Truth is the trickiest” (ll. 1, 3, 10). Some editors emend OE swicolost, “trickiest,” to switolost or swutolost, “clearest,” in order to sustain the fiction of “Truth-One,” things as they are, but the Maxims II poet constantly indulges in using the verbs byð (is, is always, will be) and sceal (shall be, should be, must be, ought to be, is typically), verbs notoriously difficult to translate. With respect to kingly behavior, for example, Williamson argues that “beneath the apparently straightforward gnomic half-line, the poem points to a wide variety of possible kingly behaviors,” noting that “what is slides into what should be or might be [and] the possibility of ‘might not’ lurks beneath the surface [so that] the ideal is haunted by the shadow of real-world kingly faults and failures” (2011, 179–80). He also contends that sometimes beneath a series of apparently unrelated truthful maxims, there is an implicit riddle. So the poet of Maxims II says: “The dragon shall dwell in a barrow, / Old and treasure-proud. The fish must spawn / Its kin in water. The king must give out / Rings in the hall” (ll. 26–29). But what does the dragon or the fish have to do with the king? “Perhaps a generous king is like the fish spawning peace in the hall, while the greedy king is like a dragon, hoarding his treasure (as Heremod does in Beowulf) so that he has no loyal thanes and spawns only strife” (Williamson, 2011, 180).

  On the other hand, some maxims scattered throughout the Old English poems appear to articulate a plain truth, which is not only expressed in the maxim but which also has maximum force. These maxims remain (in a sense) true, even when mere facts appear to deny them. Near the start of Beowulf, for example, the poet rounds off a gnomic, and rather practical, statement about buying loyalty in advance with the words: “A warrior thrives / Through glorious deeds and generous gifts” (ll. 26–27). The established pattern of treachery and ingratitude in Anglo-Saxon history, and in everyone else’s history, proves the statement factually untrue. Nevertheless, it ought to be true, and the ideal or desirable rule is not invalidated by mere exceptions. Even more pointedly, Byrhtwold, the old retainer in The Battle of Maldon, says as he prepares to die with his lord on a lost battlefield, “Ever may a man mourn / Who thinks to flee …” (ll. 319–20). What he says is not factually true: one can easily imagine someone running away from a lost battle, and congratulating himself on his own good sense later on every time he thought of it! But once again we know what Byrhtwold means. He means no one ought to feel like that, has any right to feel like that. What he says is not soð-true, it is super-true, a cultural imperative. Maxims often express cultural imperatives even in the face of a history or a reality which denies them.

  Another form of truth, “Truth-Four,” might be proverbs. Many Old English proverbs survive and are often fairly clear, such as A Proverb from Winfred’s Time, which says: “The sluggard delays striving for glory / Never dreams of daring victories, / Or successful ventures. He dies alone.” Other proverbs, especially those in prose, remain thoroughly enigmatic. They must have been accepted as true, but we do not have the key to their coding. Often it can be guessed: “He who wishes to run down the hart must not care about his horse” (Durham Proverb 41; Arngart, 294) means something like “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Both ancient and modern proverbs have (one may well suppose, though it has to be a guess) the same meta-meaning: you cannot achieve your goal without paying the price for it. Other Anglo-Saxon sayings remain incomprehensible to this day: “The fuller the cup, the fairer you must bear it” (Durham Proverb 42; Arngart, 295). All the words are easy enough, but the truth behind them …? And it is by no means the most challenging proverb to survive.

  On another front, modern philosophers of language take particular interest in “speech-acts,” such as “performatives”—when you utter a performative you are in fact doing the deed you name. One significant example still recognized in our society is to say, “I bet you ….” Probably someone who refused to pay up on a bet made orally would get away with it in our courts, for we all know that something is not legal till you have a written contract, an invoice, a receipt, and so on. Nevertheless, the words, “I bet you …,” especially if made before witnesses and ratified with a handshake, would be accepted as binding in honor by many people. In a pre-literate society such deals have even more backing, and there is one particular kind of public statement which has special importance. This is the promise or, in Old English, the beot. This word is often translated as “boast” (Anglo-Saxons did not have the same inhibitions about immodesty that we do), but it derives from the verb behatan, “to promise,” and that is what the speaker of a beot is doing. He may back it up by stating previous achievements, but the main point of a beot is to promise an undertaking—typically, to stand by one’s lord in battle, to conquer or die. The status of a promise is, however, intrinsically uncertain, in abeyance. One cannot tell whether it is true or not till it is fulfilled, or of course, not fulfilled. So the moment when a promise is made/was made, “then,” is inevitably linked to a “now,” when the promise comes due.

  So Wiglaf says to the warriors hanging back from the dragon, “Now the day has come / When the Lord needs the might of warriors” (Beowulf, ll. 2645–46), the woman Hildegyth calls to her lover Waldere, “The time has come when you must choose” (Waldere, l. 12), and even the author of the apparently un-heroic poem on The Seasons for Fasting (pure information, one might have thought) adds urgency to his regulations with the words, “The time has come! / We know in this hour that we need to pray” (ll. 134–35). The whole promise-complex animates the speeches of the retainers in the second half of Maldon. Leofsunu calls out, “I promise not to flee one foot” (l. 246), the poet says of Eadweard the Tall, “He vowed he’d never flee” (l. 276), Ælfwine says, “Now we’ll see who’s worthy of his vow” (l. 214), the poet notes of Offa, lying dead by his lord, “he had kept both his courage and his vow” (l. 293). The negative side gets just as much weight. Leofsunu imagines it when he says that the warriors back home “will have no reason to reproach me” (l. 249), and we are reminded that Offa had said, correctly, back in the “then” which is irreversibly connected to “now,” “That many who spoke boldly there in the hall / Would never make good on the field of battle” (ll. 199–200). And in Beowulf, Wiglaf says, “I remember well” the time when promises were made (l. 2631), and closes his speech of threat and reproach to the defaulters with a line that verges on maxim, “Death is better for you than a life of shame” (l. 2890).

  Promises, then, are betwixt-and-between on the truth scale. They ought to be “performatives,” but may not turn out so. Charms, meanwhile, of which we have a dozen in this collection, aim to alter facts by words, so functioning even more strongly as “performatives.” When a healer tells her tale of how “the mighty women stole strength,” the tale is true only in some non-physical sphere, but when she says, “Get out, little spear, if you are in here,” that is sure
ly meant to be true, and to work, in a severely practical way (Metrical Charm 12, second stanza and refrain). One might call promises “Truth-Five,” and charms “Truth-Six.” And let us not forget allegory, riddle-become-story, as “Truth-Seven”: for Anglo-Saxon poets readily saw the point of the Phoenix rising from the flames as ascending from its earthly nest to immortal life, or the whale in Physiologus II seducing the careless sailors to camp out on its back and drown when it submerged, as images of the saved and the damned. But it is perhaps time to abandon Vonnegut’s idea of numbering polymorphs: for one of the characteristic errors of the literate mind confronting the pre-literate is to try, as our education has conditioned us to, to fix boundaries, make distinctions, reduce reality to bullet points.

  In fact, if one looks at poems such as Maxims I (in its three different sections), or Maxims II, one cannot help noticing—it is what makes the poems bewildering—the way they slide in and out of levels of obliqueness. What could be plainer (or more useless) than “Frost shall freeze” (Maxims IB, l. 1)? What more culturally imperative (if questionable) than “The lasting memory / Of an honorable man is always best” (ll. 12–13)? The end of Maxims IC moves from history, “Enmity has ruled the earth since Cain’s / Crime against his brother Abel,” to what seems like a stern corollary, “for the man without courage, without spirit, / The least of treasures: no glory for the knave” (ll. 67–68, 79–80). But is that a fact, just the way things are in a world of strife? Or a recommendation, the way things should be? Do we need to make the distinction? Rightly, then, does the poet of Maxims II comment, “Truth is the trickiest” (l. 10). Sometimes (it is another thought repeated in several poems) one has to feel the truth to know it. Maxims II also declares, “Woe is wondrously clinging” (l. 13), and perhaps only someone who has been told, deep in grief, “Cheer up, don’t take it so hard,” can appreciate the truth of that.