The Complete Old English Poems Page 6
It’s a great wonder that eternal God,
The Prince of peace, would endure such enmity,
And suffer his servants to be led astray
By that subtle demon who seduced Eve,
Marking mankind for endless suffering. (ll. 655–69)
One’s doubts are not entirely cleared up by the poet’s resort to maxim (a maxim found in similar words in Old Norse, suggesting that it was widespread in the northern world), “Woe to the one / Who doesn’t hear or heed this lesson, / Who still has a chance to make a choice” (ll. 703–5). What this says is that Adam and Eve were warned, and if you won’t take a warning … you should have listened harder.
At the other end of universal history lies Doomsday, another favored theme, expressed in the two poems on Judgment Day, in Christ III, again in the verses in Vercelli Homily XXI, and in another verse rescued from homilies on The Judgment of the Damned. Associated with the theme of fear are the grim poems on the fate, not of the soul, but of the body, delivered over to corruption and in both Soul and Body poems reproached bitterly by the soul from leading it astray (the longer Exeter version balances this with a passage of praise for the virtuous body by its soul). The same theme is picked up in Azarias and in Guthlac B, and recurs in the post-Conquest poems from Worcester Cathedral Library, in The Soul’s Address to the Body (From the Worcester Fragments), and in The Grave. By contrast, the joy of Paradise, and the beauty of Creation itself, are described in The Phoenix and in passages from Daniel, Azarias, and Guthlac A, as well as in the song of Creation sung in King Hrothgar’s hall of Heorot (Beowulf, ll. 89–98), and in Cædmon’s Hymn.
It is undeniable, though, that the image of life collectively presented is a dark one, in which humanity is under continual siege from the devils, as it was from the monster-races of the pre-Christian mythology. In every one of the five saints’ lives surviving in the poetic corpus, the saint confronts and overcomes diabolic assault. Andreas has to cope not only with the cannibals, but with the “prince of hell” and his subordinates, who come to taunt and threaten him in his prison. The same is true of Juliana, and in Elene the repentant sinner Judas also faces down a demon enraged by his recovery of the True Cross. St. Guthlac takes an even more proactive line with the devils who haunt the wastelands of the Fens, moving into their territory to take it over, unmoved by the vision of hell that they show him. Nor are the devils like, for instance, C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape and Wormwood, subtle tempters who put thoughts into the mind and slowly lead vulnerable souls down the primrose path to Hell. The nearest they come to this is when, in Guthlac A, they try to shake the saint’s confidence by showing him the bad behavior of young men in monasteries (to which the saint replies, in effect, “Boys will be boys,” an echo, perhaps, of some long-forgotten dispute about monastic governance). But for the most part the devils work by fear, and are vanquished by superior courage, confidence, and above all, power.
At bottom, one may conclude, the main appeal of the new religion was the assurance—and see what was said above about the force of the pluperfect—that victory over Satan and his minions had already been won. And the sign of that, the physical “token” demanded, was the Cross itself. In the Vercelli version of The Dream of the Rood the Cross is a “radiant sign,” a victory-beam,” a “tree of victory.” In Elene, Cynewulf calls it “a radiant sign, / A token of glory, a symbol of victory” (ll. 88–89), and it is the sign which brings Emperor Constantine victory in battle. The word used for “sign” is in both poems and more than once, beacen, which means more than “beacon” (“sign, token, portent”). It is striking that there is another long runic inscription, on another cross not far away from the Ruthwell Cross, where as noted above, lines from The Dream of the Rood are carved in runes, in a dialect older and more northern than that of the Vercelli poem. This second runic inscription is on the Bew-castle Cross, which stands within the walls of the old Roman fort on Bew-castle Waste, overlooking the Debatable Land between England and Scotland, site of many battles. Its inscription has been declared unreadable (though one would like to see what computer enhancement would do), but its first words are perfectly clear: they read, in runes: Þis sigebecn …, “this sign of victory.” What forgotten battle the inscription commemorates we do not know, but the inscription proves that calling the Cross a “victory-token” was felt to have more than symbolic meaning.
As for the moment of victory, that is described in the poem The Descent into Hell and again in Christ and Satan. The moment on which the world turns comes when the two Marys go to wrap the dead Christ’s body. They expect to find him on a cold bed, “the old earth-grave,” so often described in the “Soul and Body” theme. But they are wrong—as wrong as the Assyrians in Judith who expected to find their general Holofernes resting from his debauching of Judith. The Marys discover an unexpected and miraculous truth:
They thought that [Christ] would have to remain alone
On Easter eve. They surely had other ideas
When they turned back from the tomb! (ll. 17–19)
This surprising truth which reshapes both history and eschatology is articulated in a typically understated way reserved for transitions of great moment in Old English poetry. King Hrothgar in Beowulf also has a strong sense of “fate’s twists and turns” (l. 1772), but in his case it is from prosperity to woe. For the two Marys, the moment is what J. R. R. Tolkien called “eucatastrophe,” the moment when everything turns from bad to good (1966, 85–87). The great reward of it, furthermore, is not just the Resurrection but the Descent into Hell itself, when Christ invades the realm of Satan and releases his prisoners, who have lived their lives since the Fall without a chance of salvation. (The thought that such souls could be released must have had special power for recent converts who remembered their pagan ancestors with affection: early missionaries record this as a concern.) Fall, Harrowing, and Doomsday: these are the three critical elements of the Christian story as we read it in Old English, clearly set out in Christ and Satan.
In this schema the vital thing is to choose one’s side: winners or losers. But in “this ruin of a life,” as the “wanderer” calls it, the sides may not be so clear. That, at least, was the thought which Bede expressed on his death bed, in the poem we now call Bede’s Death Song:
Before he departs on that inescapable journey
Down death’s road, no man is so wise
That he knows his own end, so clever or unconstrained
That he need not contemplate the coming judgment,
Consider what good or evil resides in his soul,
What rich reward or bounty of unblessings
Will be offered in eternity when his time runs out.
The poem, a mere five lines in the original, has been hailed as showing through its complex syntax what Anglo-Saxons could do after a lifetime of studying Latin, but this view could not be more false. The saying is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon thought, and Old English poetry, on multiple levels. If not proverbial, it is “proverbious.” It is a speech act as well, but once more what kind of speech act has not been clear to everyone. It has been taken as a promise, a reassurance. In fact, it is a threat. It has the characteristic Anglo-Saxon understatement: when Bede says “no man is so wise,” he means, by implication, “many men are not wise enough.” The force of it in the original is multiplied by the stealthy repetition of the same verb at the end of first and last lines: but one is in the indicative, the other in the subjunctive. Fail to note the difference at your peril! For the threat lies also in the contrast of the two times, the “now,” “Before [you] depart,” while you are alive and can choose, and the “then” when “[your] time runs out”—when it will be too late to choose. Bede’s last words were grave, ominous, a touch sardonic, and above all, as has confused so many, they were “riddlic.”
THE END AND THE AFTERMATH
Anglo-Saxon England went down to defeat on 14 October 1066, when Duke William overcame King Harold. Soon all Anglo-Saxon bishops had been replaced b
y Normans, except Wulfstan of Worcester, too popular and too saintly to be removed: he never made the slightest effort to learn French, and since Duke William had no success at learning Old English, the two could only communicate through Latin translators. Anglo-Saxon royalty and gentry had likewise been muzzled, like Edgar Ætheling; executed, like St. Waltheof; or dispossessed, like almost everyone. Incoming bishops and abbots with no knowledge of Old English saw no point in composing or even preserving poems in what soon became, almost everywhere, the peasant language. The last Old English poem in strict meter is, fittingly, the poem from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of Edward (the Confessor), which must have been written in 1065 or 1066. Holdouts nevertheless remained, as we can see from the poems in the section, “The Minor Poems,” in this collection from Wulfstan’s Worcester, and the poem on Durham. Nor may that have been the end of the tradition, for almost three centuries later poems again began to be recorded in an alliterative meter, which, while different from Old English—for by then the language had changed to Middle English—nevertheless retain much of the rules, the traditional language, and even the spirit of pre-Conquest poetry. Even that resurgence, however, was to last not quite into the era of modern English.
One has to concede, though, that poetry in Old English had a long run. The question of which is the oldest of our surviving poems has been discussed above, but whichever it was, a late seventh-century date is not improbable. The poem Widsith, a compendium of heroic names and legends, many of them now forgotten, has also been declared recently and persuasively to be another poem of the seventh century (Neidorf). Meanwhile, poems like Maldon and those from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle must be later than the events they commemorate, which, as said just above, takes us all the way to 1066. Although scholars have become increasingly cautious, or timid, in their opinions—one may note that the editor of Genesis A offers a full 250-year span of possibility for that poem, 650–900 (see the headnote to the poem)—there is a case for saying that this poetic tradition held its devotees for four centuries before violent suppression: a good claim on anyone’s attention.
There is one final thought, signaled in these sections by the riddle which Craig Williamson has prefixed to each section, a riddle in which the manuscript, or the poems in the manuscript, speak for themselves—as objects do in many riddles, and in other poems too, including The Dream of the Rood, where the rood itself speaks; The Husband’s Message, where what speaks is a runic inscription; and even the Franks Casket, which describes itself riddlically and runically, and for once also adds its own answer, “whale’s bone.”
The final thought is this. The poems we have are also, in their way, almost all “last survivors”: only three of them, apart from the Chronicle poems and the poems ascribed to Cædmon and Bede, and found in many manuscripts, duplicate each other. Some of the poems are, furthermore, fragments, including the Maldon and Finnsburg poems and Judith. As for the corpus itself, it now is a ruin. Certainly it exists. But its existence is at least a reminder of what no longer exists, a whole tradition of which we can hear only, here and there, murmurs and echoes. The poems are in many ways like the buried lyre unearthed in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Snape, like the treasures dug up at Sutton Hoo and restored, like the stone walls of Bath remembered and celebrated in the poem, The Ruin. The poems exist, often in fragmentary form, and like the old ruins, they bear testimony to all that they remember, even if it has vanished. Nor is their testimony mute, for last survivors can at least talk and pass their tales on. The “book-moth” riddle laments the fact that the songs of the tribe, once transferred from the wordhord, the word-hoard of the mind, of memory, to the written vellum page, are susceptible to the ravenous appetite of the devouring worm. The word wyrm in Old English also means “dragon,” like the one that destroys Beowulf in the end. But both the riddle and the poem Beowulf reaffirm that the wisdom of old, the stories of heroes, the marauding of monsters, the complicated forms of speaking and listening, the types of truth, can live on as they are both written down and retold. The worm may devour the manuscript page, but we remember the song-bright wisdom and reshape it into a riddle of that stæl-giest or “thief-guest,” the ravenous worm. The dragon of the world, that inexorable, devouring movement of time itself, may destroy us all, but it cannot touch the tales that we deem worth saving, worth remembering.
Many modern students, scholars, and poets have found inspiration, insight, even comfort in individual poems. Strange and challenging as they are, they are still capable of speaking to us over the centuries. The entire corpus, however, over 31,000 lines, has never before been translated in a collected edition by a single scholar and poet, as it has here. It deserves to be read in its entirety, for the poems illuminate each other, create a priceless example of cultural diversity which at the same time retains haunting familiarity. Craig Williamson’s offering here has become both the true echo of the old songs, and a new poetic reshaping of them for a modern world. In them the dead “warrior-poet” of Grave 32 can be heard again, like his lovingly buried and now painstakingly reconstructed harp.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS, TITLES, AND ORGANIZATION OF THE POEMS
This book contains modern alliterative, strong-stress poetic translations of all of the Old English (OE) poems in the six volumes of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR), edited by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (1931–1953), plus additional OE poems identified or discovered after the publication of ASPR. The entire corpus of OE poetry, a little over 31,000 lines, has never before been translated into modern poetry. The most comprehensive translations heretofore have typically been in prose and have included somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 lines. When I had finished translating the OE poems included in my previous editions of A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs and Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, I began to realize that no selective anthology of OE translations, my own included, could hope to accurately represent the whole corpus, and so I set out to remedy this situation by translating all of the poems. This was perhaps an act of what the Anglo-Saxon poets might have called ofermod, or “overweening ambition,” but I felt it was an important task that needed doing. I hope the results here will strike scholars, students, and general readers interested in the period and its poetry as a worthy endeavor.
The book is organized into sections that correspond to the individual books of ASPR (The Junius Manuscript, The Vercelli Book, The Exeter Book, Beowulf and Judith, The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius, and The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems) plus a number of additional poems and poetic fragments not included in ASPR, which were identified as OE poetry later. After the introductory materials, each section of the book corresponds to a volume of ASPR, with a final section devoted to the additional non-ASPR poems. In each section I have given a brief introduction to the manuscript or volume in question and have taken the poetic license of offering a modern riddle, written in the style of the OE Exeter Book riddles, to celebrate it.
The order of poems in the book is exactly that of ASPR, except for the additional uncollected poems at the end, which are arranged alphabetically by title. The individual poem titles, which are almost never in the original manuscripts, have occasionally been changed in various ways by editors and scholars over the years since ASPR. The titles here sometimes reflect these editorial changes or my own reading of the poems, but I have been careful to keep some element of the ASPR title in place or to indicate it in the headnote to the poem.
The demarcation of the poems (where one poem ends and another begins) has also been the subject of occasional debate among editors and scholars. My demarcations are meant to take into consideration scholarship since ASPR, and I have tried to indicate in the individual headnotes where this change has been argued and what the alternate demarcations are in the old and new readings. Where there is a significant loss of text either because of damage to the manuscript or a break in the sense of the narrative or meaning, this is indicated by three asterisks. Where I have added a brief passag
e to bridge the gap indicated by a loss in the manuscript, this added text is enclosed in brackets. The line spaces between sections of the various poems are not in the manuscript; these spaces are provided to demarcate sections of the poems for the modern reader.
In making these translations, I began with the ASPR texts and then consulted more recent editions. I have not followed a single edited text but have made use of multiple texts and the long history of scholarly commentary on the poems. My translations are based on these combined readings; in any case, they are not literal translations, either word for word or line for line, but an attempt to bring the meaning and majesty of the originals into modern poetry, trying, as St. Jerome suggested, to capture the grace and glory of the originals by translating sense for sense. For more on my method of translation, see the introductory essay, “On Translating Old English Poetry.”
In the course of my work I have consulted not only the various editions of the Old English texts but also occasional prose translations of the poems, including most notably the following (in approximate chronological order): The Exeter Book by Israel Gollancz and W. S. Mackie, The Poems of Cynewulf and The Cædmon Poems by Charles W. Kennedy, Genesis A by Laurence Mason, Anglo-Saxon Poetry by R. K. Gordon, Beowulf: A New Prose Translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English by T. A. Shippey, Anglo-Saxon Poetry by S. A. J. Bradley, Old and Middle English c. 890–c. 1400 by Elaine Treharne, The Old English Boethius by Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, The Beowulf Manuscript by R. D. Fulk, Old Testament Narratives and The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn by Daniel Anlezark, Old English Shorter Poems: Religious and Didactic by Christopher A. Jones, The Old English Poems of Cynewulf and Old English Shorter Poems: Wisdom and Lyric by Robert E. Bjork, Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints by Mary Clayton, and Old English Psalms by Patrick O’Neill. Other prose translations are noted in the headnotes to the individual poems.