Name: The Earliest English Poems
ISBN: 9780140445947

Michael Alexander

An anthology of the best of Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Wisdith, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, together with passages from Beowulf.

The Earliest English Poems

Tim Pendry

Michael Alexander drew into one volume a wide selection of the best of English Anglo-Saxon poetry in this scholarly volume for Penguin Classics back in 1966. The works (which include only small sections of 'Beowulf') were translated by the Editor. It remains an excellent guide to a lost culture shattered by the Norman occupation, England's cultural 'naqba'. Much of the work is necessarily fragmentary, lucky to survive at all. That survival relied on Christian tolerance of some pagan texts which were 'adapted' accordingly. Alexander's commentary is helpful in positioning what survives as best he can at the point where an older pagan warrior culture was coming to terms with Christian culture and then having to face, as Christian warriors, new waves of incoming Viking pagan threats. The harshness of old English life in a cold climate facing a colder North Sea and the importance of having (as a 'scop' or poet) a hearth-lord or gift-giver is only mitigated by the ability of the nearest thing to an intellectual of that period finding an alternative home in a monastery. The pagan poet is part of a warrior aristocracy whose ethos is perhaps to seek plunder to bind his hearth together but also (well expressed in 'The Battle of Maldon') to seek honour in service to the lord who gives treasure to his warriors in return for their pledge of death in his defence if necessary. As an ethos, it has not died even today. It is accepted in Hollywood accounts of military honour and implicit in the 'ethics' of organised crime. The 'band of brothers' stories of the Second World War (or no doubt Ukraine on both sides) is the ethos of honour where Lord has become State or Crown. Christianity changes little other than to de-emphasise plundering and raiding for treasure in favour of social order and settled land-holding. God becomes Lord of Lords and guarantor of a reward not here on earth as treasure but as the treasure of everlasting life in heaven. The transfer of one world to another across Europe might be considered as (in essence) the change in the meaning of the word from 'treasure' as gold and symbol of kin and war band relations to 'treasure' as something 'spiritual' to be interpreted by priests and to be found outside time and space. Yet the old ways remained powerful. There is awe at past glories built by giants ('The Ruin'), remembrances of Germanic continental struggles including with the Huns, Tolkienesque tropes and swords with names and, of course, dealings with Grendel, his mother and dragons. What comes across in this selection is that pre-Norman England was not isolated but was part of an extended Germano-Nordic culture with common myths and legends even if the old gods are not really part of the picture. This culture was set over and against 'Rome' and Huns alike. As Peter Ackroyd has noted in his own comments on the grounding of the English imagination in Anglo-Saxon culture and, indeed, in Catholic Christianity (noting that Anglo-Saxon culture never denies the Christian even when most aware of its Germanic origins), some attitudes survive today. Perhaps it is the climate but the modern English person will recognise a tendency to gloom and 'The Battle of Maldon' heroises defeat on a blunder as much as Tennyson did the Charge of the Light Brigade or we have done more recently with Dunkirk. Bryhtnorth, Ealdorman of Essex, is a complete idiot when it comes to dealing with the Viking array on Northey Island but we are not supposed to notice that. We are only supposed to note his heroic death, the quasi-suicidal courage of his retainers and the contempt for the scuttling Odda and his kin. Heroic stupidity seems to be as honoured today in English culture as then, alongside the sense of solitariness and loss of the Englishman who is detached from his society and up against the weather - as in 'The Wanderer' or 'The Seafarer'. There are also the difficult riddles which sit alongside runes as a reminder that the English have always liked puzzles (as we know from our crime fiction). Anglo-Saxon literature was always primarily oral and social with poetry an advanced rhetorical art for firesides and halls. There is probably no image more affecting to the English than that of the pagan priest turning to Christianity in the Northumbrian legend because he recognised that we were like sparrows coming from the dark and flying into the dark through the warmth of the Great Hall. Anglo-Saxons seem to have been readied for Christianity by their very condition as denizens of Great Halls in inclement weather. The vulnerabilities of such an existence drew the Anglo-Saxon (it would seem) towards the question of what happened to the sparrow when it had flown out of the hall. This leads us to the major Christian poem in the collection - the profoundly pious 'The Dream of the Rood' which, as Alexander points out, deploys riddling tropes to have the Cross of Christ be dreamed and then speak for itself as if it had a consciousness of its own. This is the very heart of future weird fiction - the inanimate having an imagined life of its own. Things that be. This takes an animist view of the world drawn from the pagan and applies it anew to a poetic glorification of the Christian message of sacrifice. It is not hard to see that the Christ's sacrifice on the Cross for man is a subtle inversion of something every educated Anglo-Saxon would recognise - the sacrifice of a man for his Lord. Christ was thus made truly heroic in the Anglo-Saxon mind and humanity thus both honoured and humbled. All in all, a still useful collection that might be regarded as a puzzle in itself. It is quite a small amount of information on which to build a picture of a whole and long departed culture but Alexander does sterling work in at least giving us some chance of understanding the mind of the Anglo-Saxon.

The Earliest English Poems

Reviews

Highlights