Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Old English poetry

bernard o’donoghue
Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era

when formal study of classical literature and even the study of modern
languages have been in decline in England. The most prominent success
was Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf in 1999, a volume which
won prizes in competition not only with other poetry books but with books in
all literary categories. Important as the positive reception of Heaney’s marvel-
lous translation was, it was not a sole cause of the new popularity of Old
English poetry. His book was also a confirmation of the popularity of this
poetry with English poets dating back to the Victorian period and strengthen-
ing amongst Modernist poets in the earlier twentieth century.1 Heaney’s
predecessors here include Longfellow, Hopkins, Auden, Pound and Edwin
Morgan. Some Old English poems, such as The Wanderer,2 The Seafarer and
Wulf and Eadwacer are amongst the most widely translated items in the
twentieth century. There have been a number of attempts to identify what
quality it was that commended these poems so much to the modern taste, in
particular to that of the Modernists; a recurrent phrase is ‘the power of the
half-stated’. Auden’s enthusiasm is much quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This
poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish . . . Anglo-Saxon and Middle
English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’3 In
the main part of this essay I want to concentrate on what Auden might mean
by ‘influences’, trying to describe what qualities in Old English poetry were
found useful and expressive for writers in English of later periods.
Hopkins had famously said in 1882 that the Anglo-Saxon language ‘is a
vastly superior thing to what we have now’, and another crucial part of my
intention here will be to suggest what it was in the poetry that Hopkins
thought was superior.4 The popularity of the poetry amongst modern writers
is all the more notable when we recall how precarious its survival was.
Chaucer could not read Old English; when the language and literature
began to be studied again in the late sixteenth century, it all had to be done
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more or less from scratch.5 The first attested reference to Beowulf, by George
Hickes in 1700, is to tell his collaborator Humfrey Wanley that he can’t find
any trace of it.6 It would be hard to exaggerate how precarious this survival
was, and how spectacular its scholarly recuperation. One of the most effective
introductions to the condition of that literature bears the ominous title ‘The
Lost Literature of Medieval England’,7 in which R. W. Chambers argued that
the relative lack of overlap in the surviving texts (very little of the poetry is
attested in more than one manuscript) suggests that what we have is the tip of
a generic iceberg.
Yet, despite this paucity (there are only about 30,000 lines of Old English
poetry altogether: some single Middle English poems have as many) and the
precariousness of its survival, in one of the most authoritative accounts of
the literature Stanley Greenfield says, ‘Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry are the
major literary achievement of the early Middle Ages. In no other medieval
vernacular language does such a hoard of verbal treasures exist for such an
extended period (c.700–1100) . . . If we had more of what must have been an
even greater original creation, our wonder would grow in proportion.’8
Naturally, in this chapter my attention will be on the principal surviving
texts, but the fact that they occur in a major literary and cultural corpus
must be emphasised first, if only because of the discredited but not quite
forgotten notion of ‘the Dark Ages’.9 Greenfield’s grand claim is even more
remarkable in view of the late development of scholarly attention to the
literature after its beginnings in the late sixteenth century. Tom Shippey’s
authoritative introduction to the Critical Heritage volume on Beowulf gives
striking evidence of the late development of any kind of understanding of even
this most canonical of Old English poetic works.10
The survival of Old English poetry, precarious as it was, is mostly owed to
its preservation in four great manuscript collections (for which the neutral
word ‘codex’ is usually used because at least some of them are gatherings of
separate materials). When the general project of editing the poetry was
undertaken for Columbia University Press by G. P. Krapp and E. V. Dobbie
in the 1930s, these four codices were supplemented by two other volumes,
The Paris Psalter and The Meters of Boethius, as Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records
(hereafter ASPR) volume v, and a sixth volume of The Anglo-Saxon Minor
Poems, containing items (including the historically based poems The Battle of
Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon) which did not occur in the four principal
codices.11 Outside of the four major volumes of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic
Records then, there are some poems, including Maldon, whose survival was
even more fortuitous. The major four codices are the Junius manuscript

Old English poetry
(ASPR 1 – sometimes called ‘the Caedmon manuscript’), the Vercelli Book

(ASPR 2), the Exeter Book (ASPR 3) and Beowulf and Judith (ASPR 4 – some-
times called ‘the Beowulf manuscript’ or ‘the Judith manuscript’). The six
monumental editions of the ASPR, published between 1931 and 1953, are
beyond the scholarly and economic compass of general poetry readers, but
as a method of referencing the major manuscripts and their contents they
remain definitive, so I will begin by describing their contents, as an intro-
duction to the subjects and themes of the poetry, and as a way of embracing
the principal texts. After using these major collections as an introduction to
the poetry, I will end by summarising briefly the texts and techniques which
led modern writers like Hopkins and Auden to make such high claims for
this poetry and its language.
Considering the contents of the first four codices one by one is not an
entirely satisfactory way of introducing their poetic materials; it will become
obvious that there are more logical thematic and generic ways of looking at
them. For example, Greenfield and Calder (A New Critical History of Old English
Literature) have separate chapters devoted to poems dealing with Christ and to
those dealing with Old Testament subjects, though this cuts across the four
collections. Godden and Lapidge12 assign chapters to their contributors along
the same lines. Wrenn13 gives prominence to the one named poet, Cynewulf,
and thereafter organises the poems on thematic and generic grounds: lyric,
heroic, elegiac. Alexander14 does something similar, foregrounding what he
sees (not unpersuasively) as the most attractive genres for the modern reader:
riddle, elegy and heroic poetry – the last category in order to accommodate
Beowulf and Maldon. Swanton,15 in the rather quaint fashion of his era, uses
impressionistic rather than descriptive chapter titles: ‘Until the Dragon
Comes’, and ‘The Ruin of Time’, for example. O’Brien O’Keeffe16 breaks
away from both the codex-defined corpus and the attempts to define by
subject or theme, by assigning to her contributors a series of critical
approaches. Pulsiano and Treharne17 and their team of contributors organise
the material on grounds of theme and provenance. Shippey remains a good,
critically alert introduction to the poetic corpus as a whole.
Before outlining the contents of the four codices, one wider general issue of
categorisation should be raised. There has been some vigorous debate as to
whether the corpus of Old English poetry is entirely religious. An important,
and unusual, feature of the history of Old English poetry and its survival arises
here. If any of the surviving poetry can be seen as secular and pre-Christian, its
distant historical content is ‘the fund of common narrative material associated
with the Teutonic Migration Period (fourth to sixth centuries)’.18 The

complicating factor is that all the major surviving manuscript evidence dates
from around the year 1000, long after the events (if we can call them anything
so concrete) they deal with. It goes without saying that any poetry worthy of
the name, religious or not, will draw on the natural world for its imagery, and
Old English poetry often does so with unforgettable success. But was the
objective of this poetry invariably to promote religious – and therefore, in its
era, Christian – feeling and understanding? The question is pointedly raised by
the different emphases in two major discussions: Greenfield’s chapter 6 is
called ‘Secular Heroic Poetry’, but in his important book The Search for Anglo-
Saxon Paganism (1975), Eric Stanley argued that the corpus’s only religious or
ethical perspective is Christian. The poems which are solely heroic (Deor
andWidsith for example) are not founded on some alternative ‘pagan’ mor-
ality. Stanley suggests that the old view that there was some pre-Christian
secular heroic ethic in the literature was largely attributable to nineteenth-
century German antiquaries, intent on constructing textual evidence for a
distinctive Germanic-Teutonic past.
But to return to the corpus as included in the first four ASPR volumes: the
first is an edition of Oxford Bodleian Library, Junius 11, assembled in the 1650s
by the German-Dutch antiquary Franciscus Junius and given by him to the
Bodleian Library in Oxford, where it still is. The principal poetic items in that
manuscript are Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan. The Old
Testament predominance is evident and earlier scholars thought – and
hoped – that these poems might be the very poems written by the first attested
English poet, the monk Caedmon, whose miraculous receiving of the poetic
vocation was so spellbindingly described by Bede in his History of the English
Church and People. After an angel had prompted this Whitby cowherd to sing,
‘he sang of the creation of the world and of the origin of the human race and
the whole narrative of Genesis, concerning the going out from Egypt of the
Israelites and their entry into the land of promise’.19 In fact the poems in the
manuscript are very different both from each other and from the suggestion
of Biblical paraphrase in this story. Although Exodus has attracted a good deal
of modern scholarly attention, prompted by an impressive modern edition
by Peter Lucas (1994), the subject of most critical discussion here has been
Genesis B, lines 235–851 of the original poem traditionally called Genesis.20 This
section, dated to the mid ninth century rather than the (speculative) date of
700 for the rest of the poem (thereafter called Genesis A), is thought to be based
on a Continental Saxon original. Most strikingly it features a vivid presentation
of Satan which has provoked comparison with Book 1 of Paradise Lost, a
comparison which was reinforced by the speculation that Milton might have
10

Old English poetry
been in contact with Junius, the owner of the codex, in London. The idea that
the Bible-based poems of the Junius Manuscript are the work of Caedmon and
that Genesis B might warrant the title ‘Caedmonian Genesis’ has long been
abandoned; nowadays it is believed that the only thing that can be assigned to
Caedmon is the nine-line ‘Hymn’ of creation, interpolated by Bede into his
Latin Historia. Still, ‘The Fall of the Angels’ was one of the pieces of Old
English found most exciting by Auden, and its figure of Satan, ‘se ofermoda
cyning, þe ær wæs engla scynost’ (‘the over-proud king who formerly was the
brightest of angels’) retains its compulsion for the modern reader.
ASPR 2, the Vercelli Book, has the most curious history of the great Old
English codices. Discovered in Vercelli in North Italy in 1822 by a German
lawyer, Friedrich Blume, criticism of it, as with the Junius Manuscript, has
traditionally been dominated by attention to a single poem, The Dream of the
Rood, a poem that has been greeted (by Helen Gardner, for example) as one of
the greatest religious poems in the English language. The poem has a significant
interest too in terms of its textual history. Though, as I have said, most of the
surviving Old English poetry was written down around the year 1000, even
when it is concerned with events several centuries earlier, a passage correspond-
ing closely to a section of The Dream of the Rood is found in runes on the Ruthwell
Cross in southern Scotland, a monument conjecturally dated to the period 670–
750 (though to somewhat later dates too). The Vercelli Book as a whole is
lacking in thematic coherence compared to the other codices. I will return later
(in connection with the Exeter Book Riddles) to describe the imaginative
brilliance of the verbal symbolism in The Dream of the Rood. For the poetry
reader, the other significant contents in the book are Andreas and two poems by
Cynewulf, the only known named poet in Old English, genuinely identified by
his signature in runes at the end of four poems. The two poems by him here are
The Fates of the Apostles and Elene. The latter, dealing with the finding of the Cross
by St Helena, is related to The Dream of the Rood by the centrality of the Cross.21
The quality which made Hopkins think Old English poetry was a vastly
superior thing to what we have now was its language: not surprising from a
poet whose poetic language is seen as a crucial factor in his distinction. This
linguistic excellence can be illustrated from many places in Old English poetry:
from Beowulf or The Dream of the Rood, for example. But when we turn to the
third of the four major volumes in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, the Exeter
Book, we encounter strikingly the quality that has principally appealed to the
twentieth century from the Modernists onwards. This is a thematic rather
than a linguistic feature: the wonderfully evoked elegiac note which has been
so valued and practised in twentieth-century poetry.22 This theme is most
11

celebratedly prominent in the Exeter Book, the ‘micela boc’ already present in
Exeter in the eleventh century in the time of Bishop Leofric, and dated on
codicological and literary evidence to the decade 965–75.23 And, although
Auden famously responded too to the heroic-laconic spirit in Old English
and Old Norse writings, it is also the elegiac note that made him confident that
this poetry would be his ‘dish’. The note is also prominent in Beowulf, of
course: Tolkien memorably called the bulk of the great poem ‘in a sense . . .
the prelude to a dirge’.24 In describing the great so-called ‘elegies’ of the Exeter
Book – The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer,
all of which are among the texts most commonly translated into modern
English poetry – some caution is called for. Since the early nineteenth century,
when the poems were first named by their editors of the Romantic period,
modern concerns and preferences were found mirror-imaged in the early
poetry, and sometimes they sound like items in a Schubert song-cycle.25 To
take the most obvious example, The Wanderer, the title translates the word
‘eardstapa’ (line 6) aptly enough; but the first word used to refer to the poem’s
protagonist in the opening line is ‘anhaga’, the ‘sole-thinker’. The poem
therefore might have more naturally been called ‘The Recluse’, a title which
would take the poem’s subject nearer to the religious canon rather than to a
secular one for which there is little evidence.
There has been a good deal of inconclusive debate about which poems
precisely can be included in the category of elegy, or indeed whether it
constitutes a category at all. However, this is no more true of this category
than at the borders of any genre as discussed, say, by Todorov: the medieval
romance is an obvious parallel. There are at least four poems in the Exeter
Book which are universally agreed to have enough in common for them to be
regarded as part of the genre of elegy: pre-eminent amongst them are
The Wanderer and The Seafarer, the pairing that first came to major notice in
the nineteenth century and which since then has been a standard presence in
the canon of English poetry.26 Increasingly, The Ruin and The Wife’s Lament
have been seen as central members of the elegiac group (nowadays Wulf and
Eadwacer has been an equally common inclusion in the group, though perhaps
with less justification, I will suggest). Other poems and parts of poems, both in
the Exeter Book and outside it, are generically similar too, principally in their
shared concern with transience. Two famous episodes from Beowulf fit here:
the celebrated ‘Lay of the Last Retainer’ (again, also known by less lyrically
romantic titles such as ‘The Lament of the Last Survivor’), lines 2244–70 of the
poem, and Beowulf’s account of the misery of King Hrethel, one of whose
sons killed another, an ‘offence . . . beyond redress, a wrongfooting / of the
12

Old English poetry
heart’s affections’.27 The Hrethel passage is followed by one of the great set-
piece elegies in the poem, the comparison with ‘the misery felt by an old man
/ who has lived to see his son’s body / swing on the gallows’.28 Within the
Exeter Book itself, the poems Deor and The Husband’s Message are often added
to the group of elegies, though there are other genres (heroic poem and riddle
respectively) to which they might equally well be assigned.29 Stanley
Greenfield extended the group to ‘nine (ten?)’ by adding further items from
The Exeter Book: The Riming Poem and the poem or poems – one or two,
according to editorial division – which have been titled Resignation (A and B)30
or The Exile’s Prayer.31 Muir, somewhat unhelpfully, calls the poem Contrition
(A and B) without cross-reference in his contents, though his notes are the best
succinct account of the poem’s critical treatment in the modern era.32
The order in which Greenfield considers the poems is a useful guide both to
their prominence in the modern era and to their degree of Christianisation.
The Ruin is an eloquent reflection – the term for it since the early nineteenth
century would be ‘gothic’ – on transience, prompted by the state of a decayed
city, probably Bath. We might borrow the terminology once used for the
chronological categorisation of epic (though of course we have no textual
evidence for this periodisation): we could call The Ruin primary elegy, as an
unadorned reflection on the tragedy of transience; The Wanderer would be
secondary elegy, centring on the same tragedy but with book-ends of
Christian consolation at the start and end of the poem; and The Seafarer
would be tertiary, or applied elegy, where, despite the powerful evocativeness
of the description of nature and of the desolation of life at sea, the argument is
always under the control of a Christian allegorist from the moment that it
is declared that everyone has to be concerned for his seafaring (‘his saefore’)
as to ‘what his lord will do to him’ (lines 42–3).
But this is to push categorisation too far, failing to allow these great poems
their independence or to acknowledge their difference from each other. As all
commentators have noted, what the poems do have in common is a pattern
well described by Shippey as ‘Wisdom and Experience’. The poems’ opening
sections are typically powerful descriptions of worldly hardship:
Hægl scurum fleag –
þær ic ne hyrde butan hlimman sæ,
iscaldne wæg. Hwilum ylfete song
dyde ic me to gomene ganetes hleoþor
ond huilpan sweg fore hleahtor wera,
mæw singende fore medodrince.
(The Seafarer, lines 17–22)
13

(Hail flew in showers. There I heard nothing but the sea booming, the ice-
cold wave. At times I took my pleasure in the swan’s song, the gannet’s
scream and the curlew’s music rather than the laughter of people, the gull’s
singing in place of mead-drinking.)33
I will return to the poetic felicities of this – the contrastive echo of ‘hleoþor/
hleahtor’ (scream/laughter), for example – at the end of the chapter, when I
consider Old English poetics in general. What we might note for now is that
this passage, which to us tends to read as a romantic or ‘sublime’ evocation of
nature, in its era is an evocation of the misery of exclusion from the society of
the hall-gathering: one of the most powerful recurrent themes of the culture.
By the end of the poem, the wisdom of Christian consolation is totally
vindicated, expressed through a paraphrase of the Beatitudes of the Sermon
on the Mount (lines 106–7) and ending with the wording of the Gloria Patri
(‘thanks be to the holy one . . . the eternal lord, for ever and ever. Amen’).
To the modern taste, the less reconciled consolatory conclusion of The
Wanderer is more powerful. True, the poem also moves to its conclusion with
the Beatitudes again (‘it is well for him who seeks favour and comfort from the
father in the heavens’), but what stays with the reader is the magnificent
rhetoric of the ubi sunt passage, which equals Villon:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære! (lines 92–6)
(Where has the steed gone? Where the rider? Where has the treasure-giver
gone? Where the place of feasting? Where are the joys of hall? Alas the bright
cup! Alas the armoured warrior! Alas the lord’s power! How the time has
passed, grown dark under the cover of night as if it had never been!)
It should be said that, even if it is this dark note that has been found so
appealing in the era of the elegy of the past 200 years, part of the satisfaction of
reading these poems lies in the elegant balance of story and moral.
I have mentioned already how the power of the half-stated in these poems
was found so appealing to the early twentieth-century Modernists, with their
mystique of doubt and fragmentation. Two poems manifest this particularly.
The first is The Wife’s Lament, a poem which is again founded on the
experience–wisdom model, but in which the experience is so cryptically
expressed and in such a compressed form that it is not clear exactly what
the consolation is for. The poem begins almost identically to The Seafarer with
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Old English poetry
the protagonist’s claim that they (in this case she) are recounting their own
experience and exploiting the common figure of journey (‘siþ’) as experience:
Ic þis giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre,
minre sylfre siþ.
(I compose this song about myself in my sorrow, of my own experience.)
This woman’s lament – possibly a voice from the grave and thus a ‘revenant’
of the kind much favoured by the Modernists – also ends with a Sermon on the
Mount motif, ‘Woe is he who . . .’ But here the separation from ‘min freond’
retains its unconsoled power to the end. This ‘friend’ or ‘lord’ seems somehow
to be implicated in responsibility for the woman’s isolation and his own,
where he sits ‘under stanhlifle storme behrimed’ (‘under a stone cliff, frosted
by the storm’, line 48; a location which we know from a famous passage in
Beowulf has an infernal association).
Even more mysterious is the situation so memorably evoked in the poem
traditionally named Wulf and Eadwacer. This also seems to be a woman’s
poem – the category of medieval poems referred to as frauenlieder in German,
so not unparalleled – and a narrative can be speculatively constructed from its
hauntingly baffling opening line:
Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife.
(It is as if someone should give a commemorative gift to my people),
to its equally evocative but uncertain moralising end:

Þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs –
uncer giedd geador.
(That can easily be separated which was never joined together – the song of
the two of us together.)
The romantic story that has been speculatively constructed is that the woman
speaker is the wife of one Eadwacer, addressed in the lines before the
concluding moral, and that her lover is Wulf, addressed in a remarkable
apostrophe at the mid-point of the poem, ‘Wulf, min Wulf!’ Of the poems
called elegy, this is the one that has least in common formally or thematically
with the others, and indeed has the least claim to be termed an ‘elegy’ at all.34
It has, like Deor, a refrain (‘Ungelic is us ’: ‘it is not like that for us’), and no
suggestion of a transience theme or any religious interpretation. Its closest
connection is with The Wife’s Lament, through the woman speaker and the
suggestion of enforced separation and isolation.
15

Like another of the poems in the expanded elegy group, The Husband’s
Message (so called out of an excessive desire for balance on the part of the early
editors, who wanted to link it with the very dissimilar Wife’s Lament), the
poems in the Exeter Book with which Wulf and Eadwacer has most in common
are the groups of Riddles. The domination of the critical discussion of the
‘micela boc’ by the elegies has to some extent recently been modified by
interest in these accomplished poems, with their significant classical parallels.35
There is a significant overlap between the two categories, in fact; Greenfield
and Calder’s chapter before the one on elegy is entitled ‘Lore and Wisdom’,
and, as Shippey’s chapter title of his elegy discussion ‘Wisdom and
Experience’ suggests, parts of the elegies might well be included under that
heading. Greenfield and Calder deal with the Riddles in that chapter, as well as
with several other varieties of ‘wisdom literature’: three series of Maxims,
Precepts, a Homiletic Fragment and so on.
I am directing attention to the Riddles, though, not only because of their
modern popularity. They are also one of the fundamental poetic genres in Old
English, employing a kind of word-play that also underlies, as we will see, The
Dream of the Rood. Furthermore, they represent an undeniable connection with
classical literature and with the Latin writing of Aldhelm in the Anglo-Saxon
period itself. Above all, they have a wit and verbal ingenuity which represent a
major achievement in their own right. Their subjects cover a wide range of
subjects, both religious and profane (to the point of indecency); often the wit
consists precisely in the gap between the two. One of the most often-quoted of
them, ‘Moððe word fræt’, is a good example of the operation of metaphorical
style and resonance in these poems:
Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte

wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.
(Riddle 47, lines 1–6)
(A moth ate words. That seemed to me an amazing event when I heard of that
marvel, that the worm – a thief in the darkness – swallowed the poem of one
of mankind, his powerful saying and its strong subject. The thieving visitor
was not the least the wiser for swallowing the words.)
First of all, this works excellently as a riddle; the curious story fills with
meaning when the reader realises the solution: a bookworm. The way the
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Old English poetry
poem moves from the literal operation of the noted event (a bookworm eating
a manuscript: itself, of course, a minor crisis in the era when expensive vellum
was the material of books) to the metaphorical reflection that this consuming
of text does not lead to any increase in wisdom, sophisticated enough as that is,
is only the beginning of the poem’s meaning. It is also about reading: an
inattentive reader, whether reading aloud or to themselves, may take the
words on board without registering the meaning. This reader-theory inter-
pretation reminds us to be cautious about patronising the works that develop
from an oral tradition. It is not only the verbal form of the poem that is
sophisticated; the understanding of literature here is also advanced.
Of the Old English poems that draw on the riddling tradition (I have already
noted the links with it in the crypticism of Wulf and Eadwacer and possibly The
Husband’s Message), the most impressive is The Dream of the Rood, in the
Vercelli Book. The poem begins with the report of a visionary dream,
experienced in the middle of the night when ‘reordberend’ (‘voice-bearers’)
are asleep and silent. The object seen is a wonderful tree, the ‘brightest of
beams’. We know from the Exeter Book that there was a tradition of Cross-
riddles,36 so the identity of this tree is not in doubt well before it is identified as
the ‘rood’ (the specifically theological word for Christ’s Cross) at line 44 (‘Rod
wæs ic aræred’: ‘as a cross I was raised up’). But the more important and
poetically productive quality of the riddles that the poem draws on is the
dazzling and profound use of imagery.
There is a striking use of this characteristic play of imagery early in the
poem. The Cross of the vision is described as ‘beama beorhtost’ (‘brightest of
beams’): already in Old English the word ‘beam’ has a secondary sense of ‘ray
of light’ as well as the primary ‘plank of wood’, so a constructive choice of
interpretation is already offered.37 The vision is then described in a strange
conceit: ‘Eall þæt beacen wæs / begoten mid golde’ (‘All that sign/beacon
was suffused/soaked through with gold’, lines 6–7). The word ‘begoten’
seems to belong particularly to contexts of suffusion by liquid (as in the
later sense of begetting), so it seems mysterious to apply it to the appearance
of the Cross. Can something look soaked through with gold: with a metal
which can only be laid on its surface? But this metaphysical mystery is
resolved forty lines later when the speaking Cross says that it was all soaked
with blood, ‘begoten of þæs guman sidan’ (‘shed from the man’s side’, line
49). This more idiomatic, liquid-related application of the participle ‘shed/
poured/suffused’ is a retrospective identification and explanation of why the
surface of the Cross was soaked with gold: the gold is a symbolic represen-
tation of the blood of Christ.
17

By an identical process of metaphorical substitution, in lines 13–14 of the

poem the dreamer describes himself as ‘synnum fah, / forwundod mid
wommum’ (‘guilty/stained/adorned with sins, / wounded/pierced through
with stains/blemishes’). How can a blemish – a word that means a superficial
mark on the skin – wound or pierce through? Again, much later in the poem,
the answer is provided by the repetition of the descriptive participle: the Cross
describes itself as ‘mid strælum forwundod’ (‘wounded or pierced through
with shafts/arrows’, line 62). The literal description again comes later to
explain the puzzle of the earlier conceit, this time to make the symbolic
identification of arrows and sins.
There is not room here to develop the extraordinary web of symbolism on
which The Dream of the Rood is constructed, to show how the complex of
meanings all serve the same dualist theological paradox. A non-speaking
thing – the Cross – is endowed with the power of speech while ‘reordberend’
(‘voice-bearers’) are asleep and therefore speechless. The poem is a classic
instance of the impossibility of translation (suggested by the need to give
alternatives in the translations) because so much of its terminology is founded
on contradictions and paradoxes, representing the triumph and tragedy of the
crucifixion. The word ‘fah’ (quoted from line 14 above) recurs in the poem, to
exploit its homonymic possibilities; helplessly but accurately, Mitchell and
Robinson gloss the word as ‘stained, guilty, outcast’, but in brackets as
‘decorated’. This is entirely in keeping with the paradoxical status of the
event as tragic but also a cause for rejoicing; but what single modern
English word can express that? At a famous point in the poem the Cross
says that after the death of Christ the men began to make a tomb, ‘beornas on
banan gesyhðe’ (‘men in the sight of the slayer’, line 66). When the Cross refers
to itself as Christ’s killer (the modern descendant of ‘bana’ is ‘bane’, and the
Old English term seems no less pejorative), how can we represent the word?
If it is difficult to suggest in a brief essay how the dualist complexities of this
poem operate, it is even more difficult to give a short account of Beowulf,
incomparably the largest achievement in Old English poetry, in a satisfactory
way.38 It shares the fourth of the ASPR volumes with the poem Judith (itself
perhaps the greatest of the Biblical-heroic poems in Old English)39 and some
lesser items. A consideration of Beowulf amongst the poems in Old English
might start with thematic links to other texts: of things I have mentioned
already, Tolkien’s observation that it is ‘a long prelude to a dirge’ clearly links
it with the elegiac, as do the passages on ‘the last retainer’ and the tragically
bereaved father. The ‘power of the half-stated’ admired in the elegies is
nowhere more impressive than in the mysterious and tragic opening of the
18

Old English poetry
poem’s Finnsburh’s episode (whose independence Heaney aptly acknowledges

by using a different verse form for it in his translation). Without preamble King
Hroþgar’s ‘scop’, his court-poet, launches into the story of Hildeburh, the queen
at the tragic centre of the war between her husband and brother:
Nalles holinga Hoces dohtor
meotodsceaft bemearn, syþþan morgen com,
ða heo under swegle geseon meahte
morþor-bealo maga, þær heo ær mæste heold
worolde wynne.40
(By no means without cause did the daughter of Hoc lament her fate, when
morning came and she could see under the sky the murder-feud of kinsmen,
where before she had most enjoyed joy in the world.)
Although its manuscript dates, like the other major codices, from about the
year 1000, Beowulf is the foundational case of Old English poetic style, for the
same kinds of reason that Homer’s work became the foundation-stone of
Greek poetic rhetoric, which in turn became the model for Western poetics in
general. Even in a short extract like the one I have just quoted, the principal
poetic features are evident: the alliterative scheme on dominant word-roots
with its ringing consonants (‘meotod-’, ‘-mearn’, ‘morgen’ in line 1077), which
was what Hopkins admired so much in his definition of ‘sprung rhythm’; the
noun–noun compounds which give such solidity to the word-formation
(‘meotodsceaft’, ‘morþor-bealo’); the figure of variation which has been seen
as the essential device in the stately narrative pacing of Old English, by which –
as most famously in the terms for God in Caedmon’s Hymn – different terms
are used to refer to the same subject (here ‘Hildeburh’ in the previous
sentence, line 1071, ‘Hoces dohtor’, ‘heo’, in apposition to each other). One
of the best books on the poetics of Beowulf sees apposition and duality as the
founding principle of Old English poetic language: the morphological units
build into compound words, the words into half-lines, the half-lines into full
lines and the lines into units of sense.41 This structuring principle has been
taken a stage further, to demonstrate that the units of narrative – what might
by analogy be called verse paragraphs – often start and end with the same
details. For example, the Finnsburh episode just quoted begins by saying that
there was a ‘gid oft wrecen’ (‘a recitation often performed’, line 1065) and ends
‘Leoð wæs oft asungen / gleo-mannes gyd’ (‘A song was often sung, a glee-
man’s recitation’, lines 1159–60). Similarly, the arming of Beowulf before his
encounter with Grendel’s mother begins ‘Gyrede hine Beowulf / eorl-
gewædum’ (‘Beowulf dressed himself in nobleman-arms’, lines 1441–2), and
19

ends ‘syþþan he hine to guðe gegyred hæfde’(‘when he had dressed himself for
battle’, line 1472).
This concentration on the poetics of the poem, brief as it is, is guilty of a
further inadequacy in failing to deal both with the overall design of Beowulf
and with the powerful set-pieces of epic-heroic literature throughout, from
the opening description of Scyld Scefing’s ship-burial42 to the Wagnerian
conclusion with Beowulf’s own immolation. Neither is there room to describe
in detail Hroþgar’s account of the infernal landscape by Grendel’s mere with
its Tartarean iconography, reported by the locals, the ‘londbuende’:
Hie dygel lond
warigeað, wulf-hleoþu, windige næssas,
frecne fen-gelad, ðær fyrgen-stream
under næssa genipu niþer gewiteð,
flod under foldan. (lines 1357–61)
(They [the Grendel family] occupy a hidden land, wolf-slopes and windblown
crags, a dangerous fen-path, where the mountain-stream travels downwards
under the darkness of the cliffs, a river under the ground.)
Other great moments are the Song of Creation, the ‘swutol song scopes’ (‘the
clear song of the court-poet’, lines 90ff.), translated separately by Heaney as
‘The Fragment’.43
Beowulf of course also connects with the tradition of heroic poetry in Old
English, mostly but not entirely Biblical. The most celebrated of the heroic
poems (if it really is that) is The Battle of Maldon, edited in ASPR 6, whose
preservation is even more precarious than the Beowulf manuscript’s survival of
the Cotton Fire at Ashburnham House in 1731. The manuscript containing
Maldon was burned, so the poem’s survival is owed to a transcript made by
one David Casley a few years before the fire. The poem is famous for its
ringing voicing of the spirit of heroic loyalty by Byrhtwold (not otherwise
known), after the death of his leader Byrhtnoð in this tactically disastrous
defeat of the English by the Vikings in 991:
Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.44
(Spirit must be the harder, heart the braver, determination must be the more,
as our number lessens.)
Maldon was probably written soon after the event, though of course we can’t
know, in the case of a poem surviving from an early eighteenth-century copy. In
20

Old English poetry
poetic terms, it is far from the finest example of Old English poetics, marked by
a rather prosaic style, despite the interest of its subject which has caused it to be
read as a – perhaps artificial – last rallying cry of the English in the generation
before the Scandinavian domination of the country became complete.
With Old English poetry we are not just encountering a new poetic,
founded on an unfamiliar version of the elegiac (Beowulf as Tolkien’s ‘prelude
to a dirge’), or a set of formalities which are strikingly new to us: variation,
alliterative patterns and the rest, forcefully effective as those are. Neither is it
just a matter of Hopkins’s ‘vastly superior thing’: the monosyllabic and
consonantal force of the language, so brilliantly and unliterally captured in
Pound’s Seafarer: ‘siþas secgan’, ‘speak of journeys’, represented as ‘journey’s
jargon’. Perhaps more important than any of these are the ways in which this
poetry is familiar:45 the Metaphysical figure for hailstones in The Seafarer as
‘corna caldast’, ‘coldest of corn’; the Villonesque wistfulness in The Wanderer’s
apostrophe to the ‘bright cup’: ‘Eala beorht bune!’; above all the intricate
dualist symbolism of The Dream of the Rood. Through these qualities Old
English poetry has a place in a tradition of verbal wit and poetic imagination
that is familiar to readers of poetry from the fourteenth century to the
seventeenth and the twentieth, and for which no special pleading or allow-
ances have to be made. It is probably futile to propose some enduring spirit in
English poetry that survived the huge change in the language after the
Conquest, as James Fenton says. But it is tempting to claim, after all, a
continuity greater than that controversially proposed by Thomas Kinsella
for Irish literature in the modern period: a continuity that witnesses ‘a notable
and venerable literary tradition . . . as it survives a change of vernacular’.46
Notes
1. See Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Throughout the chapter, I will italicise the titles of the individual poems for
consistency. Many of them have been edited separately in the Methuen series of
Old English texts, several later published by Exeter University Press.
3. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1963), pp. 41–2.
4. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford University
Press, 1935), p. 163.
5. For a discussion of when Old English was intelligible or otherwise, see R. D. Fulk
and Christopher Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
‘Conclusion’, pp. 225ff.
6. Kenneth Sisam, ‘Humfrey Wanley’, in Studies in the History of Old English
Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 276.
21

7. R. W. Chambers, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval England’, originally pub-

lished in The Library, Fourth Series, 5:4 (March 1925). Reprinted in J. B. Bessinger
and S. J. Kahrl (eds.), Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry (Hamden,
CT: Archon Books, 1968), pp. 3–26.
8. Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English
Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 1. First edition by
Greenfield alone, containing this passage, 1965.
9. ‘The Dark Ages’ received their literary death-blow from the great work of Ernst
R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask
(New York: Pantheon Books; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; origi-
nally published in German in 1948). Curtius established the unsurprising truth
that medieval literature, far from being a new start ex nihilo, was firmly rooted in
the late Latin classics. Peter Dronke has built powerfully in several books on
Curtius’s foundations. Also see Michael Lapidge, ‘The Anglo-Latin
Background’, in Greenfield and Calder, New Critical History, pp. 5–37. It is
worth remembering too, when stressing the paucity of Old English poetry,
that it comprised less than 9 per cent of the surviving written corpus; there is a
large volume of Old English prose which survived in the literary history more
successfully than the poetry.
10. T. A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1972).
A useful brief outline of the history of the poetry in its own time is the
Introduction to Fulk and Cain (eds.), History of Old English Literature.
11. G. P. Krapp and E. V. Dobbie (eds.), The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53).
12. M. Godden and M. Lapidge (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Old English
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
13. C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London: Harrap, 1967).
14. Michael Alexander, The First Poems in English (London: Penguin, 2008).
15. Michael Swanton, English Literature before Chaucer (London: Longman, 1987).
16. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Reading Old English Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
17. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds.), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon
Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
18. Greenfield and Calder, New Critical History, p. 134.
19. Translation quoted from Wrenn, Study of Old English Literature, p. 94.
20. ‘The Fall of the Angels’ was the very successful title given by Henry Sweet to
the extract he included in his Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1876, much revised and reprinted). The often inspired titles
given by Sweet are hardly less important than the names devised by the editors
of the Romantic period. See, for example, Geoffrey Hill’s adoption of one of
Sweet’s headings for his celebrated poetry collection Mercian Hymns.
21. The short discussion of the relations between the two versions in the 1934
Methuen edition of The Dream of the Rood by Dickins and Ross remains a good
statement of the case (The Dream of the Rood, eds. Bruce Dickins and Alan S. C.
22

Old English poetry
Ross, London: Methuen, 1963, pp. 1–19). The authoritative modern commenta-
tor is Éamon Ó Carragáin: see his Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the
Old English Poems of The ‘Dream of the Rood’ Tradition (London: The British
Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
22. See for example Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to
Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Jahan Ramazani, Poetry
of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
23. Bernard J. Muir (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of
Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), vol. i,
p. 1.
24. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’. This was the Sir Israel
Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy in 1936, but it remains much
the most suggestive and thought-provoking short introduction to Beowulf.
Quoted here from The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed.
Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 31.
25. This also applies to the familiar but, when we think about it, strange title, The
Dream of the Rood, which might more neutrally but less evocatively be called – as
it was for some time – ‘The Vision of the Cross’.
26. It is a pity, and surprising, that James Fenton in his admirable Introduction to
English Poetry (London: Penguin, 2002) excludes this poetry on the grounds that
he finds no ‘continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those
established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare’ (p. 1). This is
regrettable both because it excludes from his consideration some unquestion-
ably inspiring poems in English and because it blurs the connections between
the poetics of Old English and some modern practitioners who drew directly on
it, like Auden and Pound.
27. Beowulf, lines 2441–2, in Seamus Heaney’s version (London: Faber and Faber,
1999). Like a few other passages from Beowulf, Heaney has also drawn on this for
a section in a separate poem (Electric Light, London: Faber, 2001), pp. 62–3.
28. Heaney, Beowulf, lines 2444–6.
29. There are several excellent brief accounts of the elegies: for example Shippey,
Old English Verse, ch. 3; Christine Fell’s ‘Perceptions of Transience’ (ch. 10 in
Godden and Lapidge, Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature); and ch. 12,
‘Elegiac Poetry’, in Greenfield and Calder, New Critical History.
30. Greenfield and Calder, New Critical History, p. 280.
31. Fell, ‘Perceptions of Transience’, p. 172.
32. Muir (ed.), Exeter Anthology, vol. i, pp. 339–43; vol. ii, pp. 630–5.
33. The extracts from the Exeter Book here are mostly taken from Muir’s edition,
with occasional modified punctuation; the plain translations are mine. There are,
however, excellent, readily available translations of Old English poetry, both
into plain modern prose (R. K. Gordon, Anglo Saxon Verse (London: Everyman,
1926); S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Everyman, 1982)), and into
verse (Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo Saxon Verse (London: Faber and Faber,
23

1970), Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999) and Alexander, The First Poems in English). Gordon
has particular significance for the subject of this chapter as the version of the
poetry with which Auden seems to have been most familiar. See John Fuller, A
Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970).
34. The Exeter Book’s first modern editor and translator B. L. Thorpe (London,
1842) called it Riddle 1, famously saying ‘Of this I can make no sense, nor am I
able to arrange the verses’ (p. 527).
35. A convenient modern translation is Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book
Riddles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised edition 1993). A full edition is Craig
Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1977). It should be noted of course that as well as the
various shorter poems, the Exeter Book also contains several significant longer
religious works which bring its contents closer to the first two ASPR volumes:
The Passion of St Juliana, the two lives of St Guthlac (A and B) and two major
poems about Christ, Christ in Judgement and The Ascension.
36. See especially number 55 (Muir (ed.), Exeter Anthology, p. 327). For a translation,
see Crossley-Holland, Anglo-Saxon World, p. 59. Alexander, who is the best
translator of the Riddles, has not included this in First Poems in English, though
it is in his full translation in Old English Riddles: From the Exeter Book, revised
edition (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2007).
37. I am quoting from the version of the poem in Bruce Mitchell and Fred C.
Robinson, A Guide to Old English, seventh edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007),
pp. 268–75, because some of their restoration of manuscript readings seem
preferable to the emendations made in some earlier editions.
38. There are some good brief introductions: Tolkien, ‘The Monsters and the
Critics’; Shippey’s Old English Verse; Heather O’Donoghue’s introduction to
Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Anglo-Saxon World. Heaney’s introduction to his trans-
lation is, amongst other things, a moving reading of the poem’s tragic politics for
the modern age. There are many crucial critical treatments of Beowulf since the
late nineteenth century: Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to ‘Beowulf’
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2003); T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, Beowulf: The
Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1998); R. E. Bjork and J. D. Niles (eds.), A
‘Beowulf’ Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). The time-
honoured edition is by Fr. Klaeber (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1922); there is
an excellent modern working edition by George Jack (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994) which glosses all the main words in the margin. The
most attractive unannotated way of encountering the poem is the Norton 2000
text of Heaney’s translation, set parallel to the Wrenn and Bolton original
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1988).
39. Judith also deserves far more extensive treatment than is possible here. Like
Maldon, it is truncated at the start and there has been some inconclusive debate
about how much is missing. It has a vivid and ironic style, and its treatment of
Holofernes has been seen as part of a ‘monsters’ theme which was proposed
24

Old English poetry
(not very persuasively) as a common element in the items in the manuscript.

There is an excellent modern edition by Mark Griffiths (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 1997).
40. ‘Beowulf’ and ‘The Fight at Finnsburgh’, ed. Fr. Klaeber, third edition (Lexington,
MA: Heath, 1950), lines 1076–80.
41. F. C. Robinson,‘Beowulf’ and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1985). Other good accounts of the poetics of Beowulf and
other Old English poetry are B. C. Raw, The Art and Background of Old English
Poetry (London: Arnold, 1978); Bruce Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and
Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); G. A. Lester, The Language of Old
and Middle English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1996), chs. 4 and 5. I have not
discussed the ancient matter of the ‘oral-formulaic’ nature of the poetry, believ-
ing that in the restricted space available it was more constructive to deal with its
distinction as major written material.
42. See Heaney, ‘A Ship of Death’, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987), p. 20.
43. Heaney, ‘The Fragment’, Electric Light, p. 57.
44. The Battle of Maldon, ed. E. V. Gordon (London: Methuen, 1949), lines 312–13.
45. For a model for the simultaneous appreciation of the familiar and ‘alterity’ in
medieval literature, cf. H. R. Jauss, ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval
Literature’, New Literary History, 10:2 (Winter 1979), pp. 181–227. Though he is
writing about the later medieval period, Jauss’s essay is an immensely enlight-
ening introduction to the reading process for earlier European literature.
46. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, ed. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), p. xxvii.
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Old English poetry

Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era

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(ASPR 1 – sometimes called ‘the Caedmon manuscript’), the Vercelli Book

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to its equally evocative but uncertain moralising end:

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Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte

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By an identical process of metaphorical substitution, in lines 13–14 of the

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poem’s Finnsburh’s episode (whose independence Heaney aptly acknowledges

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

7. R. W. Chambers, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval England’, originally pub-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

1970), Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford:

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

(not very persuasively) as a common element in the items in the manuscript.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011

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