The Complete Old English Poems Read online

  One such example is a conversation from the poem Andreas, based on a Latin text which must have been closely similar to the one now known as the Codex Casanatensis (for a translation of which, see Calder and Allen, 14–34). This is a missionary story, very suitable, one might think, for the Anglo-Saxon missionary milieu of St. Willibrord or St. Boniface. The poem tells how Andreas—that is to say, St. Andrew—was sent to the city of the cannibal Mermedonians to rescue his colleague St. Matthew, and how he converted the heathen by a display of courage and then of power. In order to get to the city, though, he has to hitch a ride on a boat, and what Andreas does not know is that the skipper of the boat is in fact his Lord Jesus, in disguise. The conversation between Andreas and his disguised Lord is accordingly a complex and teasing one, for Andreas is at once asking a favor (which puts him in an inferior position), very conscious of his mission (which puts him in a morally superior position), but not aware of whom he is talking to (which puts him in a false position). Latin and Anglo-Saxon views of how this should be presented are markedly different. Summarizing the difference, in the Old English poem both characters remain on their dignity. Both seem conscious of the requirements of what we have learned to call “face.”

  A fourteen-speech interchange in the Latin version is accordingly cut down to eleven in Old English (see ll. 267–358). One vital alteration is this. In both versions, Andreas has no money: he and his companions are hitchhikers. In the Latin, he conceals this fact until they are on the boat. When he does come out with it, the skipper says, very reasonably, “Why did you board then?” Andreas is then in a thoroughly humiliating position—like going into a restaurant, taking a table, and suddenly realizing you can’t afford the prices and will have to slink out again: avoiding customers’ fear of this is why restaurants (except the most prestigious) put their prices on the menu outside. In order to persuade the skipper to take him, Andreas accordingly has to explain his apostolic mission. The Anglo-Saxon poet clearly did not like this image of his hero on the defensive. In his version the saint says clearly, “I have no wealth” (l. 282), “I have no precious treasure” (l. 312), and he does so before they all “boarded the ship” (l. 357). The skipper still questions him, with a hint of surprise:

  “How, dearest friend, has it come about

  That you intended without any treasure

  To secure a ship to cross the sea

  With its deep currents and high mountains,

  The cold cliffs of ocean waves?

  Have you no precious bread or pure water

  To nourish your body and sustain your spirit?

  Hard is the lot of the poor man who must wander

  Over the dangerous waves of the ocean road.” (ll. 319–27)

  But the situation is defused, first, by the careful assertion of friendship, and more significantly—as tricky situations in this culture often are—by the skipper reverting to quasi-proverbial mode (which one might call, by analogy with “riddlic,” the “proverbious mode”). The last two lines are a general statement which everyone can agree with (compare, for instance, The Seafarer, ll. 55–57), so in a sense the speaker has not said them: he is just repeating what people say. The issue of how Andreas should apply this general statement to his own situation is left to him, with the implied question—“what in the world did you think you were doing?”—left in the realm of “implicature.”

  Andreas still replies to the implied reproof with stiff dignity, quite unlike his counterpart in the Latin text:

  “It is not proper for a prosperous man

  To whom God has given such worldly wealth

  To speak proudly to a poor man who owns nothing.” (ll. 330–32)

  One notes that he too is moving in the direction of the maxim, stating a rule of propriety. In this complex negotiation, one may conclude, both speakers, human and divine, have to show at once their own self-respect, not to be offended by impertinent questions or assumptions of superiority, and their understanding of the other speaker’s limits. In a heavily armed heroic culture, one may well conclude, even monks and missionaries needed to learn how to tread the borderline between aggression and weakness, how to think ahead in a conversation, and when to shift “proverbiously” in and out of impersonal modes.

  Other conversations within the corpus could be analyzed similarly, and again with comparison to their originals, even originals of such particular authority as the Bible. A good example is the story of Abraham, his wife Sarah and concubine Hagar, and their two children, the half-brothers Ishmael and Isaac, told episodically in Genesis, chapters 16 to 21. The poet of Genesis A follows the story closely, for the most part, keeping the narrative order of the different subplots of Abraham’s life as they are told in the Bible. But the Hagar/Sarah story has some especially sensitive moments. Both Abraham and Sarah laugh at God’s promise (Genesis 17:16) that Sarah will bear him a son in advanced old age. Abraham’s laughter is retained, but Sarah’s sarcastic inner laughter (18:12) has been muted into indirect narration (ll. 2408–16), and her later lie (18:15) has been cut out entirely. Also sensitive, one might think, is the whole issue of Sarah offering her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abraham as a sexual substitute for herself. The Anglo-Saxon poet seems, however, relatively untroubled by this, reproducing her two speeches at 16:2 and 16:5 in lines 2254–62 and 2275–84. But Sarah’s later demand that Abraham should send away Hagar and her son gets more careful handling. (One might note that the habit of Anglo-Saxon kings of practicing “serial monogamy” gave rise to repeated trouble between stepmothers and half-brothers, like, for instance, the flight of Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold to the Vikings in 899, or the murder of Edward King and Martyr at Corfe Castle in 978.)

  Whatever anxiety was riding the poet of Genesis A, he makes Sarah speak to Abraham much more carefully, in the speech at lines 2816–25, than she does in the Bible at Genesis 21:10. In the latter she even uses an imperative: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son.” Wealhtheow had used imperatives too, but to begin with only to urge King Hrothgar to do what he was ready and eager to do already, the vital one—the one with an implied but unstated “don’t” in it (see above)—embedded in formal politenesses. In Genesis A the imperative has vanished altogether, replaced by a much more tactful and submissive approach:

  “Forgive me, my dear lord and husband,

  Giver of rings, keeper of the household treasure,

  For what I must ask. I beg you to order Hagar …” (ll. 2816–18)

  She follows it up not with a flat declaration, “the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir,” but with a rather careful explanation (as if one were needed) of the disadvantages of contending heirs. One interesting addition is the last line of the speech (2825), “When your life departs at last from your body.” Sarah does not say that in the Bible, but the Anglo-Saxon poet picked up the implication, and has Sarah voice it in words quite similar to Wealhtheow’s final and most outspoken allusion.

  THE FORCE OF THE TOKEN

  Later and more orthodox Anglo-Saxons like the homilist Ælfric of Cerne were unhappy about what adaptations were being made to sacred texts. In the case of Genesis A, probably Exodus, and quite certainly Genesis B, he might well have censored his bolder predecessors: which only goes to show how powerfully Anglo-Saxon ideas of tact and propriety could override even sacred authority. One must however move on from the details of “riddlic” or “polymorphic” language, “deictics” and “modalities,” “implicatures” and evasions, to the broader question of structure. Can anything be said—remembering that most of the surviving narrative poems are retellings of an established story—about the way Anglo-Saxons liked to construct narrative, and what kind of narrative drew their attention?

  The question needs to be asked. The poem Exodus in particular (based, of course, on the Bible narrative of Exodus, chs. 12–14) has long puzzled even its admirers. Like other Old English poems, it takes every opportunity of converting what is in fact flight into a display of heroic courage. At the start of Andreas,
the twelve apostles were pictured as thanes defending their lord, like Offa or the heroes of Maldon:

  These were great men, well-known warriors,

  Brave and bold leaders of the people,

  When hands and shields guarded the helmets

  On the full plain of battle, that fateful field. (ll. 8–11)

  Scholars have commented uneasily that of course this is an allegory of the warfare of the spirit. It is generally conceded that the author of Exodus was well aware of the familiar allegory by which the Children of Israel, leaving captivity across the Red Sea and into the Promised Land, represent all Christian souls passing from bondage to Satan through the waters of baptism to salvation. This may justify the poet’s description of the Israelites as people of the sea, contrasted with the earth-bound Egyptians. But seeing “the sons of Reuben [as] / A horde of sea-raiders hungry for victory” (ll. 351–52; and in the original the word is sæ-wicingas, “sea-Vikings”)? The enthusiasm with which the poet dismisses from the Israelite battle-line all those too young or too old for “the grim game of war” (l. 253) also does not seem to match an allegory of universal salvation. But there is one particular narrative issue which deserves close attention. The poet seems to have broken a basic rule of narrative by missing out his big scene (Cecil B. de Mille did not make the same mistake in the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments). Williamson declares in his headnote that he believes “the essential (dis)order of the poem … was altogether intended.” What then was the intention?

  The crux comes between lines 290 and 295. The Israelites are waiting on the shore of the Red Sea when the “war-crier” (l. 267) calls them to attention: the “shepherd of the people” (who must be Moses; l. 271) will address them. He tells them not to fear in a speech which runs to line 293. And then he speaks again, in a speech beginning just two lines later, to say a miracle has happened:

  “I have struck the waters and separated the sea

  With this vital rod, this green branch,

  This vibrant token of times to come.” (ll. 297–99)

  The natural thing to do, surely, was to describe the miracle happening as it happened. Indeed one might well think that the story was better told the Bible’s way, in Exodus 14:10–22. There the fleeing Israelites, seeing the Egyptian pursuit, cry out against Moses in despair, saying they should have remained in slavery, verses 10–12 (the Anglo-Saxon poet will have none of that!). Moses tells them, “Fear not” (vv. 13–14; extended into lines 275–93 of the poem). The Lord tells Moses what to do (vv. 15–18), and the angel of the Lord shields the Israelites temporarily (vv. 15–20; not in the poem). Then Moses stretches out his hand, and the Lord parts the waters of the Red Sea (vv. 21–22; in the poem, told only in flashback, ll. 295 ff.). Why change the satisfactory and very-much-authorized order of the Bible?

  The answer may lie in the word “token.” It has already been pointed out that in the warlike culture of Anglo-Saxon England, the beot, the promise, remained, so to speak, in limbo, till the moment came when it was or was not fulfilled, which one might well call the moment of ðearf, or necessity: for thane to endure (ðolian) in the ðearf of his lord or ðeoden was a set of alliterative connections on which several Anglo-Saxon poets rang changes. The “then” of the promise is inevitably connected with the “now” of its redemption. But there is another moment which is connected, and that is the retrospective moment when all has been made clear, when the promise emerges from its ambiguous state, and even onlookers can see the result. One might call this the moment of soð or “sooth.” And the sign of that moment, one could say, is the tacen or “token.” In the poem Judith, the heroine pulls the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes out of a bag, as she also does in the Apocryphal book of Judith, which is the poem’s source, but only the Anglo-Saxon author flags the head as the “victory-token” (l. 196).

  In the same way Beowulf’s fight with Grendel is definitely over when Beowulf shows the monster’s arm—it is the first moment we realize that the hero has actually pulled it off—as “a plain sign” (tacen sweotol) to be nailed up “Under the eaves of Heorot’s roof” (ll. 831, 833). Later on in the poem, King Hrothgar meditates with the hilt of the giant’s sword in his hand, for it too is a token, a visible sign—or even more convincingly, a tactile memory, subjective made objective—of God’s power over the monster race drowned in the flood. Andreas makes his promise to God, undergoes his ðearf by torment in the cannibals’ prison, is released and vindicated by the flood which comes to drown the Mermedonian city, but the story is not over until the moment of soð—at line 1596, when a cannibal admits, as he does not in the Latin text, “Now in our terror we can see the truth.” But the clearest example of the sequence, promise–trial–revelation, as presented by Anglo-Saxons is the story of the Cross. In The Dream of the Rood, the Cross itself describes its own time of torment, but then says, “The time is come,” the truth has been revealed. This adds a special significance to the story of the Cross’s literal unearthing in Elene, for the Cross itself is the greatest of all victory-tokens, “A token of glory, a symbol of victory” (Elene, l. 89).

  More could be said about this Anglo-Saxon complex of emotions, and perhaps of ideology. One could say it rests on an attitude to time: past-looking-forward (then) moving to present (now) to perfect (has happened, future-looking-back). Decision is sometimes marked even by a pluperfect: the Beowulf-poet declares firmly, “The leader of the Geats had made good his boast” (l. 827), the Judith-poet that his heroine “had gathered glory” (l. 149). The modern proverb says, “It’s not over till the fat lady sings” (how obscure will this be in a thousand years?), but the Anglo-Saxon might say, “it’s not over till you can look back and see a token.” One could also say that the whole complex rests on a sense of the uncertainty of words and promises and memories and prophecies, all of them subjective: they need to be translated into a thing, something you can hold and look at, like an arm, a head, a cross. Or something undeniable, like the flood that drowns Andreas’s tormentors, or the flood that drowned the giants—or in the case of Exodus, the flood-in-reverse, the parting of the waters.

  Going back to the narrative hiatus in that poem, what it tells us is that the poet and, one may assume, his audience were not as interested in the drama of events, what was actually happening, as in the moment of revelation, or confirmation, when one, in Ted Irving’s term, “comes at last, as the old Quakers used to say, upon a knowing” (1968, 105). Not our way of looking at things, but a characteristic way. One born, perhaps, from the grained-in uncertainty of life in a heroic age not yet over as the poets were writing. One, furthermore, which perhaps helped to determine the scenes from the Christian myth which Anglo-Saxon poets chose to focus on and repeatedly retell.

  UNIVERSAL HISTORY, PERSONAL CHOICE

  Despite the assurance given by Christian faith, a sense of the unknown and the inscrutable runs through the poetry, in poems like The Gifts of Men and The Fortunes of Men, in the dialogue between Solomon and Saturn on the mystery of why one twin thrives and another does not (Solomon and Saturn II, ll. 254–86), in Cynewulf’s image of life as “a hard and harrowing voyage, / Sailing our ships across cold waters” (Christ II, ll. 488–89). The poetry also expresses a consistent sense of “the order of the world” (to name another poem), in its selection of Christian themes and answers. It is markedly different from the favored themes of modern preaching—little in it of grace, mercy, forgiveness, penitence, or humility, all concepts for which Old English had slowly to develop a vocabulary—but expressed with power and sincerity. It is worth seeing the universe as Bede and his successors saw it.

  One religious concern which recurs again and again is the origin of sin. This was firmly rooted in the Fall of the Angels, which led directly to the Fall of Man, and we have accounts of both most notably in Genesis B, a poem translated from Old Saxon and surely brought back from the Anglo-Saxon missions. The combined story is told also in Genesis A, in Guthlac B, lines 149–77, in the verses recovered from Vercelli H
omily XXI (here at the very end of the section of “Additional Poems” not printed in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records). But another thought also recurs. Beowulf locates the origins of the race of monsters, the enemies of God, in the race of Cain, and at the end of Maxims IC, the poet says ruefully that ever since then, humanity has lived in a state of war:

  Enmity has ruled the earth since Cain’s

  Crime against his brother Abel.

  That was no one-day feud! Wickedness thrust

  Its way into the world from that first blood.

  Cain’s killing was mankind’s primal murder.

  Afterwards feud flourished, and endless hatred

  Plagued people, so the inhabitants of earth

  Invented hard spears and tempered swords,

  Endured the savage clash and claw of weapons. (ll. 67–75)

  With another strange shift, he goes on directly from this to say in effect, “and that is what we must be ready for”—acquiescing? Recommending?

  The shield should be ready, the spear on its haft,

  The blade on the sword, the arrow on its shaft,

  Courage in a warrior’s heart, a helmet on the brave. (ll. 76–78)

  As remarked above, the last two lines of the poem move to a stern corollary:

  But for the man without courage, without spirit,

  The least of treasures: no glory for the knave. (ll. 79–80)

  As often, the tone of this is hard to catch. Christian regret moves to ferocity expressed determinedly as a maxim, super-true, not to be denied.

  The tone of Genesis B has also bothered scholars, for there are several departures from the way one might expect the story to be treated. Whatever one thinks of his motives, it cannot be denied that the subordinate devil whom Satan sends from Hell to tempt Adam and Eve shows loyalty (can that be praiseworthy loyalty?) to his satanic lord, and returns to him, shackled though he is “in black hell in a clutch of fire” (l. 842). There are a string of differences from the biblical account of the Fall (see the list in the headnote to the poem). The poet even seems (but how are we to take the tone of his remark?) to express surprise at God’s (dare one say?) negligence in allowing the Fall to take place: