Old English Literature
THE term ‘Old English’ was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The more familiar term ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ has a far older pedigree. ‘Old English’ implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the
sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that
there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and
‘Modern’). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had, on the other hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England,
one which might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), a word long thrown back by angry
Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In 1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and
Anglicist, insisted in his edition of one of King Alfred’s translations that he was going to use ‘Old English’ to denote
‘the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the barbarous and unmeaning title of
“Anglo-Saxon”’. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in
which he wrote as ‘englisc’. It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed part of
a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable land in the southern part of the island
of Britain, was united by its Christian religion, by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional
varieties of dialect, was already distinct from the ‘Saxon’ of the continental Germans. From the thirteenth century
onwards, however, Alfred’s ‘English’ gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the Englishspeaking
descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived
interest in the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England had traditions in Church and State
which distinguished it from the rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may have helped to lay
the foundations of all modern textual and linguistic research, and most British students of English literature may have
been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language,
but
there remains a general and almost ineradicable prejudice that the culture of early England was severed from all that
came after it by the Norman Conquest of 1066. 1066 is still the most familiar date in the history of the island of
Britain, and, despite Henry Sweet’s Victorian protest, many latter-day ‘barbarians’ have persisted in seeing pre-
Conquest England, and its wide and complex civilization, as somehow that of a lost tribe of ‘Anglo-Saxons’.
The Germanic peoples known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, who had successfully invaded the former
Roman colony of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought with them their language, their paganism, and their
distinctive warrior traditions. They had also driven the Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain westwards to the
confines of Wales and Cornwall and northwards into the Highlands of Scotland. The radical success of their
colonization is evident in the new place-names that they imposed on their areas of settlement, emphatically English
place-names which proclaim their ownership of homesteads and cultivated land (the main exceptions to this
nomenclature generally pertain to the residually Celtic names of rivers, hills, and forests or to the remains of fortified
Roman towns which were delineated by the Latin-derived suffixes -chester and -cester). The fate of the old Celtic
inhabitants who were not able to remove themselves is announced in the English word Wealh (from which the term
‘Welsh’ is derived), a word once applied both to a native Briton and to a slave. The old Roman order had utterly
disintegrated under pressure from the new invaders, though stories of determined Celtic resistance to the Saxons in
the sixth century, a resistance directed by a prince claiming imperial authority, were later associated with the largely
mythological exploits of the fabled King Arthur.
The process of re-Christianization began in the late sixth century. The missionary work was undertaken in the
north and in Scotland by Celtic monks, but in the south the mission was entrusted to a group of Benedictines sent
from Rome in AD 596 by Pope Gregory the Great. This mission, led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of
Canterbury, was of incalculable importance to the future development of English culture. The organizational zeal of
the Benedictines and the chain of monasteries eventually established by them served to link Britain both to the Latin
civilization of the Roman Church and to the newly germinating Christian national cultures of Western Europe. By the
end of the seventh century all the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England had accepted the discipline and order of Roman
Christianity. A century after Augustine’s arrival from Rome, the English Church had confidently begun to send out its
own missionaries in order to convert its pagan kinsmen on the Continent. The most spectacularly successful of these
missionaries were the Northumbrian priest, Willibrord (658-739), the founder of the Dutch see of Utrecht and of the
great abbey at Echternach, and Boniface (680-754), the so-called ‘Apostle of Germany’, who famously felled the oak
tree sacred to the god Thor at Geismar, who was consecrated as the first Archbishop of Mainz in 747 and who, having
enthusiastically returned to the mission field, met a martyr’s death in Frisia.
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According to Bede (673-735), the first great English historian, Augustine’s mission to England was reinforced,
four years after his arrival, by new clergy from Rome bringing with them ‘everything necessary for the worship and
service of the Church’. Bede stresses that these pastoral requisites included ‘many books’. The written word was of
crucial importance to the Church, for its services depended upon the reading of the Holy Scriptures and its spirituality
steadily drew on glosses on those Scriptures, on sermons, and on meditations. This emphasis on the written and read
word must, however, have been a considerable novelty to the generally unlettered new converts. The old runic
alphabet of the Germanic tribes, which seems to have been used largely for inscriptions, was gradually replaced by
Roman letters (though, as certain distinctly Christian artefacts show, both alphabets coexisted until well into the
eighth century, and in some parts of the country runes were used for inscriptions until the twelfth century). All this
newly imposed written literature was in Latin, the language that the Roman Church had directly inherited from the
defunct Roman imperium. England was thus brought into the mainstream of Western European culture, a Christian
culture which tenaciously clung to its roots in the fragmented ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Israel, while
proclaiming the advent of its own new age. It was through the medium of Latin that a highly distinguished pattern of
teaching and scholarship was steadily developed at English monastic and cathedral schools, an intellectual discipline
which fostered the achievements of such men as Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne (c. 639-709) (the master of an ornate,
and once much admired, Latin style in both verse and prose) and Alcuin (c. 735-8o4), the most respected and widely
accomplished scholar at the influential court of Charlemagne. It was in Latin, and for an international audience, that
Bede wrote his great Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People,
completed in 731). Bede’s History, of which more than 150 medieval manuscripts survive, remains an indispensable
record of the advance of Christianity in England. It is also a work which bears the imprint of the distinctive
intellectual energy, the scholarly coherence, and the wide-ranging sympathies of its author.
Literacy in early England may well have been limited to those in holy orders, but literature in a broader, oral form
appears to have remained a more general possession. In this, the first of the Germanic lands to have been brought into
the sphere of the Western Church, Latin never seems to have precluded the survival and development of a vigorous,
vernacular literary tradition. Certain aspects of religious instruction, notably those based on the sermon and the
homily, naturally used English. The most important of the surviving sermons date from late in the Anglo-Saxon era.
The great monastery of Winchester in the royal capital of Wessex (and later of all England) is credited with a series of
educational reforms in the late tenth century which may have influenced the lucid, alliterative prose written for the
benefit of the faithful by clerics such as Wulfstan (d. 1023), Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York (the author
of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, ‘Wolf’s Sermon to the English’), and Ælfric (c. 955-
[p. 19]
c. 1010), formerly a monk at Winchester and later Abbot of Eynsham (whose two series Catholic Homilies and Lives
of the Saints suggest a familiarity with the idioms of Old English poetry). The Scriptures, generally available only in
St Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation (the so-called Vulgate version), were also subject to determined attempts
to render them into English for the benefit of those who were deficient in Latin. Bede was engaged on an English
translation of the Gospel of St John at the time of his death and a vernacular gloss in Northumbrian English was
added in the tenth century to the superbly illuminated seventh-century manuscript known as the Lindisfarne Gospels.
A West Saxon version of the four Gospels has survived in six manuscripts, the formal, expressive, liturgical rhythms
of which found a muted echo in every subsequent translation until superseded by the flat, functional English of the
mid-twentieth century.
The religious and cultural life of the great, and increasingly well-endowed, Anglo-Saxon abbeys did not remain
settled. In 793 - some sixty-two years after Bede had concluded his History at the monastery at Jarrow with the
optimistic sentiment that ‘peace and prosperity’ blessed the English Church and people - the neighbouring abbey at
Lindisfarne was sacked and devastated by Viking sea-raiders. A similar fate befell Jarrow in the following year. For a
century the ordered and influential culture fostered by the English monasteries was severely disrupted, even
extinguished. Libraries were scattered or destroyed and monastic schools deserted. It was not until the reign of the
determined and cultured Alfred, King of Wessex (848-99), that English learning was again purposefully encouraged.
A thorough revival of the monasteries took place in the tenth century under the aegis of Dunstan, Archbishop of
Canterbury (c. 910-88), Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester (?908-84), and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester (d. 992). From
this period date the four most significant surviving volumes of Old English verse, the so-called Junius manuscript, the
Beowulf manuscript, the Vercelli Book, and the Exeter Book. These collections were almost certainly the products of
monastic scriptoria (writing-rooms) although the anonymous authors of the poems may not necessarily have been
monks themselves. Many of the poems are presumed to date from a much earlier period, but their presence in these
tenth-century anthologies indicates not just the survival, acceptability, and consistency of an older tradition; it also
amply suggests how wide-ranging, complex, and sophisticated the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period was. While
allowing that the surviving poems are representative of the tradition, many modern scholars none the less allow that
what has survived was probably subject to two distinct processes of selection: one an arbitrary selection imposed by
time, by casual destruction, or by the natural decay of written records; the other a process of editing, exclusion,
excision, or suppression by monastic scribes. This latter process of anonymous censorship has left us with a generally
elevated, elevating, and male-centred literature, one which lays a stress on the virtues of a tribal community, on the
ties of loyalty between lord and liegeman, on the significance of individual heroism, and on the powerful sway of
wyrd, or fate. The
[p. 20]
earliest dated poem that we have is ascribed by Bede to a writer named Cædmon, an unskilled servant employed at the
monastery at Whitby in the late seventh century. Cædmon, who had once been afraid to take the harp and sing to its
accompaniment at secular feasts, as divinely granted the gift of poetry in a dream and, on waking, composed a short
hymn to God the Creator. Such was the quality of his divine inspiration that the new poet was admitted to the
monastic community and is said to have written a series of now lost poems on Scriptural subjects, including accounts
of Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection. Bede’s mention of Cædmon’s early fear of being a guest ‘invited to
sing and entertain the company’ at a feast suggests something of the extent to which poetry was a public and
communal art. It also suggests that a specifically religious poetry both derived from, and could be distinct from,
established secular modes of composition. Bede’s story clearly indicates that the poetry of his day followed rules of
diction and versification which were readily recognized by its audience. That audience, it is also implied, accepted
that poetry was designed for public repetition, recitation and, indeed, artful improvisation. The elaborate,
conventional language of Old English poetry probably derived from a Germanic bardic tradition which also accepted
the vital initiatory role of a professional poet, or scop, the original improviser ofa song on heroic themes. This scop,
drawing from a ‘word-hoard’ of elevated language and terminology, would be expected to perform his verses at
celebratory gatherings in the royal, lordly, and even monastic halls which figure so prominently in the literature of the
period. The writer of Beowulf speaks, for example, of ‘the clear song of the scop’ (’swutol sang scopes’) (l. 90) and of
a poet, ‘a thane of the king’s ... who remembered many traditional stories and improvised new verses’ (ll. 867-71).
The vitality of the relationship of a scop to his lord, and the dire social misfortune attendant on the loss of such
patronage, also feature in the elegiac poem known as Deor, a poem which dwells purposefully, and somewhat
mournfully, on the importance of the poet’s memorializing. The scop’s inherited pattern of poetry-making derived
from an art which was essentially oral in its origins and development. Old English verse uses a complex pattern of
alliteration as the basis of its form. Elaborately constructed sentences, and interweaving words and phrases are shaped
into two-stressed half lines of a varying number of syllables; the half lines are then linked into full-lines by means of
alliteration borne on the first stress of the second half line. The dying speech of Beowulf, commanding the
construction ofa barrow to his memory, suggests something of the steady majesty this verse can carry:
HataD heaDomære hlæw gewyrcean
beorhtne æfter bæle æt brimes nosan;
se scel to gemyndum minum leodum
heah hlifian on Hronesnæsse,
þæt hit sæDliend syDDan hatan
Biowulfes biorh, Da De brentingas
ofer floda genipu feorran drifaD.
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(Command the warriors famed in battle build a bright mound after my burning at the sea headland. It shall tower high
on Whale Ness, a reminder to my people, so that seafarers may afterwards call it Beowulf’s barrow when they drive
their ships from afar over the dark waves.)
Beowulf
It was long held that the most substantial surviving Old English poem, Beowulf, was a pre-Christian composition
which had somehow been tampered with by monastic scribes in order to give it an acceptably Christian frame of
reference. This argument is no longer tenable, though some scholars hold that the tenth-century manuscript of the
poem may postdate its composition by as much as three or even four hundred years. The anonymous poet-narrator
recognizes that his story is a pagan one and that his characters hold to pagan virtues and to a pre-Christian worldview,
but he is also aware that older concepts of heroism and heroic action can be viewed as compatible with his own
religious and moral values. Beowulf refers back to an age of monster slayings in Scandinavia, but it interprets them as
struggles between good and evil, between humanity and the destructive forces which undo human order. Grendel, the
first monster of the poem, is seen as ‘Godes andsaca’, the enemy of God (l. 1682) and as a descendant of the biblical
Cain, the first murderer (l. 107). The poem’s original audience must have shared this mixed culture, one which
readily responded to references to an ancestral world and one which also recognized the relevance of primitive
heroism to a Christian society. As other surviving Old English poems suggest, Christ’s acts in redeeming the world,
and the missions and martyrdoms of his saints, could be interpreted according to supra-biblical concepts of the hero.
In a sense, a poem like Beowulf mediates between a settled and an unsettled culture, between one which enjoys the
benefits of a stable, ordered, agricultural society and one which relished the restlessness of the wandering warrior
hero. Despite the fact that the bards of the royal hall at Heorot sing of God’s Creation much as Cædmon sang of it,
Beowulf springs from a religious culture which saw infinite mystery in the natural world, and the world itself as if
hidden by a veil. It saw in nature a mass of confused signs, portents, and meanings. Marvels and horrors, such as
Grendel, his kin, and the dragon, suggested that there was a multiplicity in divine purposes. By properly
understanding God’s marvels, his will could also be understood; by battling against manifestations of evil, his
purposes could be realized.
Beowulf can properly be called an ‘epic’ poem in the sense that it celebrates the achievements of a hero in
narrative verse. Although it may strike some readers as casually episodic when compared to the ostensibly tighter
narrative structures of Homer or Virgil, the poem is in fact constructed around three encounters with the otherworldly,
with monsters who seem to interrupt the narrative by literally intruding themselves into accounts of human
celebration
[p. 22]
and community. Around these stories others are woven, stories which serve to broaden the context to a larger
civilization and tradition. While the humans gather in the warmth and comradeship of the mead-hall, the monsters
come from a bleak and unfriendly outside, contrasts which suggest starkly alternating phases of the social and the
alien. Human society is seen as being bound together by ties of loyalty-the lord providing protection, nourishment, and
a place in an accepted hierarchy for which his warriors return service. The lord is the bountiful ‘ring-giver’, the ‘goldfriend’,
the rewarder of Beowulf’s bravery, and the founder of feasts. Beyond this predominantly masculine hierarchy
of acknowledged ties and obligations, centred at the beginning of the poem on King Hrothgar’s court at Heorot, there
lies another order, or rather disorder, of creatures intent on destroying both king and court. Grendel the predator
stalks at night, dwelling apart from men and from faith. It is Beowulf who challenges the intruder, who drives the
wounded monster back to his lair in the wilderness and kills him. When Grendel’s enraged mother mounts a new
attack on Heorot, and Beowulf and his companions pursue her to her watery retreat, there follows a further evocation
of uninhabitable deserts, of empty fens and bleak sea-cliffs. It is in such passages that the poet suggests the gulf still
fixed between the social world of humankind and the insecure, cold, untamed world of the beasts, the inheritance of
the outcast, the exile, and the outsider.
Beowulf’s victory over Grendel in the wastes of Denmark is compared by King Hrothgar’s scop to those of the
great dragon-slayer of Teutonic legend, Sigemund. To the poem’s original audience such a comparison would
probably have suggested that Beowulf’s heroic progress would lead, just as inexorably as Sigemund's, to new
encounters with monsters and, ultimately, to his undoing by death. The parallel carried with it a grand and tragic
irony appropriate to epic. When Beowulf enters what will prove to be his final struggle with a dragon, he seems to be
a more troubled man, one haunted by an awareness of fate, the looming sense of destiny that the Anglo-Saxons
referred to as wyrd. He who has lived by his determining ancestral inheritance, the sword, must now die by it.
Beowulf, betrayed by those of his liegemen who have feared the fight, leaves a realm threatened by neighbouring
princes anxious to exploit the political vacuum left by the death of so effective a hero. The poem ends in mourning
and with the hero’s ashes paganly interred in a barrow surrounded by splendidly wrought treasures of the kind that
were discovered at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. The last lines of Beowulf evoke a pre-Christian spectacle, but the
poem’s insistent stress on mortality and on the determining nature of wyrd might equally have conveyed to a
Christian audience a message of heroic submission to the just commands of a benevolent but almighty God
The Biblical Poems and The Dream of the Rood
A substantial body of Old English religious poetry is based directly on Scriptural sources and on Latin saints’ lives.
We know from Bede’s History that Cædmon is supposed to have written verses with subjects drawn from Genesis,
Exodus, and the Gospels, but none of the surviving poems on these subjects can now be safely ascribed to a named
poet. The verses known as Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Judith are much more than straightforward paraphrases of
Scripture. Genesis, for example, opens with a grand justification of the propriety of praising the Lord of Hosts and
moves to a lengthy, and non-Scriptural, account of the fall of the angels. Much of the poem is framed around the idea
of a vast struggle between the principles of good and evil. The most effective sections of the interpolation (known
awkwardly as Genesis B) treat the fall of Adam as a betrayal of the trust of his Almighty liege-lord, a betrayal
punished by exile from the benevolent protection of his Creator. Military metaphors also run through Exodus which
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