Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte

THE ANGLO-SAXON
PERIOD

Prof. Ms. Emílio Soares Ribeiro

 THE BRITONS. The present English race has
gradually shaped itself out of several distinct
peoples which successively occupied or
conquered the island of Great Britain. The
earliest one of these peoples which need here be
mentioned belonged to the Celtic family and was
itself divided into two branches. The Goidels or
Gaels were settled in the northern part of the
island, which is now Scotland, and were the
ancestors of the present Highland Scots.
 On English literature they exerted little or no
influence until a late period. The Britons, from
whom the present Welsh are descended, inhabited
what is now England and Wales; and they were
still further subdivided, like most barbarous
peoples, into many tribes which were often at war
with one another. Though the Britons were
conquered and chiefly supplanted later on by the
Anglo-Saxons, enough of them, as we shall see,
were spared and intermarried with the victors to
transmit something of their racial qualities to the
English nation and literature.
 The characteristics of the Britons, which are those
of the Celtic family as a whole, appear in their
history and in the scanty late remains of their
literature. Two main traits include or suggest all the
others: first, a vigorous but fitful emotionalism
which rendered them vivacious, lovers of novelty,
and brave, but ineffective in practical affairs;
second, a somewhat fantastic but sincere and
delicate sensitiveness to beauty. Into impetuous
action they were easily hurried; but their momentary
ardor easily cooled into fatalistic despondency.
 To the mysterious charm of Nature—of hills and
forests and pleasant breezes; to the loveliness and
grace of meadow-flowers or of a young man or a
girl; to the varied sheen of rich colors--to all
attractive objects of sight and sound and motion
their fancy responded keenly and joyfully; but they
preferred chiefly to weave these things into stories
and verse of supernatural romance or vague
suggestiveness; for substantial work of solider
structure either in life or in literature they possessed
comparatively little faculty. Here is a description
(exceptionally beautiful, to be sure) from the story
'Kilhwch and Olwen‘ (Culhwch and Olwen):
'The maid was clothed in a robe of flame-colored silk,
and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which
were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her
head than the flowers of the broom, and her skin was
whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her
hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood
anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The
eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed
falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more
snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheeks were
redder than the reddest roses. Who beheld her was filled
with her love. Pour white trefoils sprang up wherever
she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen.'
 This charming fancifulness and delicacy of
feeling is apparently the great contribution of the
Britons to English literature; from it may
perhaps be descended the fairy scenes of
Shakespere and possibly to some extent the
lyrical music of Tennyson.
 THE ROMAN OCCUPATION. Of the
Roman conquest and occupation of Britain
(England and Wales) we need only make brief
mention, since it produced virtually no effect on
English literature. The fact should not be
forgotten that for over three hundred years, from
the first century A. D. to the beginning of the
fifth, the island was a Roman province, with
Latin as the language of the ruling class of
Roman immigrants, who introduced Roman
civilization and later on Christianity, to the
Britons of the towns and plains.
 But the interest of the Romans in the island
was centered on other things than writing, and
the great bulk of the Britons themselves seem to
have been only superficially affected by the
Roman supremacy. At the end of the Roman
rule, as at its beginning, they appear divided into
mutually jealous tribes, still largely barbarous
and primitive.
 The Anglo-Saxons. Meanwhile across the North
Sea the three Germanic tribes which were destined
to form the main element in the English race were
multiplying and unconsciously preparing to swarm
to their new home. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
occupied territories in the region which includes
parts of the present Holland, of Germany about the
mouth of the Elbe, and of Denmark.
 They were barbarians, living partly from piratical
expeditions against the northern and eastern coasts
of Europe, partly from their flocks and herds, and
partly from a rude sort of agriculture.
 At home they seem to have sheltered themselves
chiefly in unsubstantial wooden villages, easily
destroyed and easily abandoned; For the able-
bodied freemen among them the chief occupation,
as a matter of course, was war. Strength, courage,
and loyalty to king and comrades were the chief
virtues that they admired; ferocity and cruelty,
especially to other peoples, were necessarily
among their prominent traits when their blood was
up; though among themselves there was no doubt
plenty of rough and ready companionable good-
humor.
 Their bleak country, where the foggy and
unhealthy marshes of the coast gave way further
inland to vast and somber forests, developed in them
during their long inactive winters a sluggish and
gloomy mood, in which, however, the alternating
spirit of aggressive enterprise was never quenched.
 In religion they had reached a moderately advanced
state of heathenism, worshipping especially, it seems,
Woden, a 'furious' god as well as a wise and crafty
one; the warrior Tiu; and the strong-armed Thunor
(the Scandinavian Thor); but together with these some
milder deities like the goddess of spring, Éostre, from
whom our Easter is named.
 For the people on whom they fell these
barbarians were a pitiless and terrible scourge;
yet they possessed in undeveloped form the
intelligence, the energy, the strength--most of the
qualities of head and heart and body--which
were to make of them one of the great world-
races.
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST AND
SETTLEMENT. The process by which Britain
became England was a part of the long agony
which transformed the Roman Empire into
modern Europe.

 In the fourth century A. D. the Angles,

Saxons, and Jutes began to harry the southern
and eastern shores of Britain, where the Romans
were obliged to maintain a special military
establishment against them.
 But early in the fifth century the Romans, hard-
pressed even in Italy by other barbarian invaders,
withdrew all their troops and completely
abandoned Britain. Not long thereafter, and
probably before the traditional date of 449, the
Jutes, Angles, and Saxons began to come in large
bands with the deliberate purpose of permanent
settlement. Their conquest, very different in its
methods and results from that of the Romans,
may roughly be said to have occupied a hundred
and fifty or two hundred years.
 The earlier invading hordes fixed themselves
at various points on the eastern and southern
shore and gradually fought their way inland, and
they were constantly augmented by new arrivals.

 In general the Angles settled in the east and

north and the Saxons in the south, while the less
numerous Jutes, the first to come, in Kent, soon
ceased to count in the movement.
 In this way there naturally came into existence a
group of separate and rival kingdoms, which when
they were not busy with the Britons were often at
war with each other. Their number varied
somewhat from time to time as they were united or
divided; but on the whole, seven figured most
prominently, whence comes the traditional name
'The Saxon Heptarchy‘ (Seven Kingdoms).
 The resistance of the Britons to the Anglo-
Saxon advance was often brave and sometimes
temporarily successful. Early in the sixth century,
for example, they won at Mount Badon in the
south a great victory, later connected in tradition
with the legendary name of King Arthur, which for
many years gave them security from further
aggressions.
 But in the long run their racial defects proved
fatal; they were unable to combine in permanent
and steady union, and tribe by tribe the
newcomers drove them slowly back; until early
in the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons were in
possession of nearly all of what is now England,
the exceptions being the regions all along the
west coast, including what has ever since been,
known as Wales.
 Of the Roman and British civilization the
Anglo-Saxons were ruthless destroyers, exulting,
like other barbarians, in the wanton annihilation
of things which they did not understand.
 Every city, or nearly every one, which they
took, they burned, slaughtering the inhabitants.
They themselves occupied the land chiefly as
masters of scattered farms, each warrior
established in a large rude house surrounded by
its various outbuildings and the huts of the British
slaves and the Saxon and British bondmen.
 Just how largely the Britons were
exterminated and how largely they were kept
alive as slaves and wives, is uncertain; but it is
evident that at least a considerable number were
spared; to this the British names of many of our
objects of humble use, for example mattoc and
basket, testify.
 In the natural course of events, however, no
sooner had the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the
(imperfect and partial) civilization of their
predecessors than they began to rebuild one for
themselves; possessors of a fertile land, they
settled down to develop it, and from tribes of
lawless fighters were before long transformed
into a race of farmer-citizens. Gradually trade
with the Continent, also, was reestablished and
grew; but perhaps the most important humanizing
influence was the reintroduction of Christianity.
 The story is famous of how Pope Gregory the
Great, struck by the beauty of certain Angle slave-
boys at Rome, declared that they ought to be called
not Angli but Angeli (angels) and forthwith, in 597,
sent to Britain St. Augustine (not the famous
African saint of that name), who landed in Kent
and converted that kingdom. Within the next two
generations, and after much fierce fighting between
the adherents of the two religions, all the other
kingdoms as well had been christianized.
 It was only the southern half of the island, however,
that was won by the Roman missionaries; in the north
the work was done independently by preachers from
Ireland, where, in spite of much anarchy, a certain
degree of civilization had been preserved. These two
types of Christianity, those of Ireland and of Rome,
were largely different in spirit. The Irish missionaries
were simple and loving men and won converts by the
beauty of their lives; the Romans brought with them
the architecture, music, and learning of their imperial
city and the aggressive energy which in the following
centuries was to make their Church supreme
throughout the Western world.
 When the inevitable clash for supremacy came,
the king of the then-dominant Anglian kingdom,
Northumbria, made choice of the Roman as against
the Irish Church, a choice which proved decisive for
the entire island. And though our personal
sympathies may well go to the finer-spirited Irish,
this outcome was on the whole fortunate; for only
through religious union with Rome during the slow
centuries of medieval rebirth could England be
bound to the rest of Europe as one of the family of
coöperating Christian states; and outside that family
she would have been isolated and spiritually starved.
 One of the greatest gifts of Christianity, it
should be observed, and one of the most
important influences in medieval civilization,
was the network of monasteries which were now
gradually established and became centers of
active hospitality and the chief homes of such
learning as was possible to the time.
 This is a map showing Europe nowadays:
 The Angles,
Saxons and Jutes
came to Britain
around 450 A.D.
Some Franks and
Frisians also came,
as well as some
smaller tribes.
 The people already living in Britain were called
the Britons. They were a Celtic people, like many
of the Scots, Irish and Welsh today. The Anglo-
Saxon invaders drove most of the Britons back
until they lived only in the areas now called
Cornwall, Wales and Scotland.
 This map shows where different tribes from
Europe settled in Britain:
 It is from the names of these
tribes that we get some of the
names of parts of Britain that
we still use today.
Eg.
East Angles - East Anglia
East Saxons - Essex
South Saxons - Sussex

Even the word England comes

from Angle-land.
 ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. THE EARLY
PAGAN POETRY AND BEOWULF. 'The
Anglo-Saxons doubtless brought with them from
the Continent the rude beginnings of poetry, such
as come first in the literature of every people and
consist largely of brief magical charms and of
rough 'popular ballads' (ballads of the people).
 The charms explain themselves as an inevitable
product of primitive superstition; the ballads
probably first sprang up and developed, among all
races, in much the following way.
 At the very beginning of human society, long
before the commencement of history, the Primitive
groups of savages who then constituted mankind
were instinctively led to express their emotions
together, communally, in rhythmical fashion.
 Perhaps after an achievement in hunting or war
the village-group would mechanically fall into a
dance, sometimes, it might be, about their village
fire. Suddenly from among the inarticulate cries of
the crowd some one excited individual would shout
out a fairly distinct rhythmical expression.
 This expression, which may be called a line, was
taken up and repeated by the crowd; others might be
added to it, and thus gradually, in the course of
generations, arose the regular habit of communal
composition, composition of something like
complete ballads by the throng as a whole. This
procedure ceased to be important everywhere long
before the literary period, but it led to the frequent
composition by humble versifiers of more deliberate
poems which were still 'popular' because they
circulated by word of mouth, only, from generation
to generation, among the common people, and
formed one of the best expressions of their feeling.
 At an early period also professional minstrels,
called by the Anglo-Saxons scops or gleemen,
disengaged themselves from the crowd and began to
gain their living by wandering from village to village
or tribe to tribe chanting to the harp either the popular
ballads or more formal poetry of their own
composition. Among all races when a certain stage of
social development is reached at least one such
minstrel is to be found as a regular retainer at the
court of every barbarous chief or king, ready to
entertain the warriors at their feasts, with chants of
heroes and battles and of the exploits of their present
lord.
 All the earliest products of these processes of
'popular' and minstrel composition are
everywhere lost long before recorded literature
begins, but the processes themselves in their less
formal stages continue among uneducated people
(whose mental life always remains more or less
primitive) even down to the present time.
 Out of the popular ballads, or, chiefly, of the
minstrel poetry which is partly based on them,
regularly develops epic poetry. Perhaps a
minstrel finds a number of ballads which deal
with the exploits of a single hero or with a single
event. He combines them as best he can into a
unified story and recites this on important and
stately occasions.
 As his work passes into general circulation
other minstrels add other ballads, until at last,
very likely after many generations, a complete
epic is formed, outwardly continuous and whole,
but generally more or less clearly separable on
analysis into its original parts. Or, on the other
hand, the combination may be mostly performed
all at once at a comparatively late period by a
single great poet, who with conscious art weaves
together a great mass of separate materials into
the nearly finished epic.
 Probably the most accomplished of the lyric
poem is “The Seafarer”. The poem falls into two
halves, and features a speaker who relates the
hardship and isolation of a life at sea, at the same
time lamenting the life of shore he has known and
of which he is no longer a part; there is,
paradoxically, both nostalgia for the past and a
deep love of the sea despite its loneliness:
 Just as the tradition of epic informs Beowulf, so
“The Seafarer” also draws upon a poetic tradition.
Like the other notable Old English poem “The
Wanderer”, “The Seafarer” is an elegy: a complaint
in the first-person on the hardships of separation
and isolation. In “The Wanderer” the speaker is an
exile seeking a new lord and the protection of a
new mead-hall. The poem conveys his sense of
despair and fatigue. Like “The Seafarer”, the poem
employs see imagery to convey na idea of exile and
loneliness, of a hostile universe where human
beings are battered and tossed about aimlessly.
 Both poems are elegies dwelling on death, war
and loss. By the mid-seventeenth century, the
term “elegy” starts to acquire a more precise
meaning, as a poem of mourning for an individual
or a lament over a specific tragic event. In “The
Seafarer”, as in “The Wanderer”, however, there
is a more general perception of life as a struggle,
though one rooted in the poem’s culture: the
speaker is bereft of friends, but also lordless and
so forced to live alone in exile from the comforts
and protection of the mead-hall.
 Like Beowulf, “The Seafarer” conveys a
characteristic Anglo-Saxon view of life. There is
a sense of melancholy that suffuses the poem, a
sense of life as difficult and subject to suffering;
and that, however much one displays strengh,
courage and fortitude, time passes and one grows
old.
 THE YOUTH

Oh wildly my heart
Beats in my bosom and bids me to try
The tumble and surge of seas tumultuous,
Breeze and brine and the breakers' roar.
Daily, hourly, drives me my spirit
Outward to sail, far countries to see.
Liveth no man so large in his soul,
So gracious in giving, so gay in his youth,
In deeds so daring, so dear to his lord,
But frets his soul for his sea-adventure,
Fain to try what fortune shall send.
Harping he heeds not, nor hoarding of treasure;
Nor woman can win him, nor joys of the world.
Nothing doth please but the plunging billows;
Ever he longs, who is lured by the sea.
Woods are abloom, the wide world awakens,
Gay are the mansions, the meadows most fair;
These are but warnings, that haste on his journey
Him whose heart is hungry to taste
The perils and pleasures of the pathless deep.
 THE OLD SAILOR

True is the tale that I tell of my travels

Sing of my seafaring sorrows and woes;
Hunger and hardship's heaviest burdens,
Tempest and terrible toil of the deep,
Daily I've borne on the deck of my boat
Fearful the welter of waves that encompassed me,
Watching at night on the narrow bow,
As she drove by the rocks, and drenched me with
spray.
Fast to the deck my feet were frozen,
Gripped by the cold, while care's hot surges
My heart o'erwhelmed, and hunger's pangs
Sapped the strength of my sea-weary spirit.

Little he knows whose lot is happy,

Who lives at ease in the lap of the earth,
How, sick at heart, o'er icy seas,
Wretched I ranged the winter through,
Bare of joys, and banished from friends,
Hung with icicles, stung by hail-stones.
Nought I heard but the hollow boom
Of wintry waves, or the wild swan's whoop.
 Not much Anglo-Saxon poetry of the pagan
period has come down to us. By far the most
important remaining example is the epic Béowulf,
of about three thousand lines.
 This poem seems to have originated on the
Continent, but when and where are not now to be
known. It may have been carried to England in
the form of ballads by the Anglo-Saxons; or it
may be Scandinavian material, later brought in
by Danish or Norwegian pirates.
 At any rate it seems to have taken on its
present form in England during the seventh and
eighth centuries. It relates, with the usual terse
and unadorned power of really primitive poetry,
how the hero Beowulf, coming over the sea to
the relief of King Hrothgar, delivers him from a
monster, Grendel, and then from the vengeance
of Grendel's only less formidable mother.
 Returned home in triumph, Beowulf much later
receives the due reward of his valor by being made king
of his own tribe, and meets his death while killing a fire-
breathing dragon which has become a scourge to his
people. As he appears in the poem, Béowulf is an
idealized Anglo-Saxon hero, but in origin he may have
been any one of several other different things. Perhaps
he was the old Germanic god Béowa, and his exploits
originally allegories, like some of those in the Greek
mythology, of his services to man; he may, for instance,
first have been the sun, driving away the mists and cold
of winter and of the swamps, hostile forces personified
in Grendel and his mother.
 Or, Béowulf may really have been a great
human fighter who actually killed some
especially formidable wild beasts, and whose
superhuman strength in the poem results,
through the similarity of names, from his being
confused with Béowa. This is the more likely
because there is in the poem a slight trace of
authentic history. (See below, under the
assignments for study.)
 'Béowulf' presents an interesting though very
incomplete picture of the life of the upper,
warrior, caste among the northern Germanic
tribes during their later period of barbarism on the
Continent and in England, a life more highly
developed than that of the Anglo-Saxons before
their conquest of the island.
 About King Hrothgar are grouped his
immediate retainers, the warriors, with whom he
shares his wealth; it is a part of the character, of
a good king to be generous in the distribution of
gifts of gold and weapons.
 Somewhere in the background there must be a
village, where the bondmen and slaves provide
the daily necessaries of life and where some of
the warriors may have houses and families; but
all this is beneath the notice of the courtly poet.
The center of the warriors' life is the great hall of
the king, built chiefly of timber. Inside, there are
benches and tables for feasting, and the walls are
perhaps adorned with tapestries. Near the center
is the hearth, whence the smoke must escape, if
it escapes at all, through a hole in the roof.
 In the hall the warriors banquet, sometimes in
the company of their wives, but the women retire
before the later revelry which often leaves the
men drunk on the floor. Sometimes, it seems,
there are sleeping-rooms or niches about the
sides of the hall, but in 'Béowulf' Hrothgar and
his followers retire to other quarters. War,
feasting, and hunting are the only occupations in
which the warriors care to be thought to take an
interest.
 The spirit of the poem is somber and grim.
There is no unqualified happiness of mood, and
only brief hints of delight in the beauty and joy
of the world.

 Rather, there is stern satisfaction in the

performance of the warrior's and the sea-king's
task, the determination of a strong-willed
race to assert itself, and do, with much barbarian
boasting, what its hand finds to do in the midst
of a difficult life and a hostile nature.
 For the ultimate force in the universe of these
fighters and their poets (in spite of certain
Christian touches inserted by later poetic editors
before the poem crystallized into its present
form) is Wyrd, the Fate of the Germanic peoples,
cold as their own winters and the bleak northern
sea, irresistible, despotic, and unmoved by
sympathy for man. Great as the differences are,
very much of this Anglo-Saxon pagan spirit
persists centuries later in the English Puritans.
 For the finer artistic graces, also, and the structural
subtilties of a more developed literary period, we
must not, of course, look in Béowulf. The narrative
is often more dramatic than clear, and there is no
thought of any minuteness of characterization. A few
typical characters stand out clearly, and they were all
that the poet's turbulent and not very attentive
audience could understand. But the barbaric
vividness and power of the poem give it much more
than a merely historical interest; and the careful
reader cannot fail to realize that it is after all the
product of a long period of poetic development.
The first page of the
Beowulf manuscript
 THE ANGLO-SAXON VERSE-FORM. The
poetic form of Béowulf is that of virtually all
Anglo-Saxon poetry down to the tenth century,
or indeed to the end, a form which is roughly
represented in the present book in a passage of
imitative translation two pages below.
 The verse is unrimed, not arranged in stanzas,
and with lines more commonly end-stopped (with
distinct pauses at the ends) than is true in good
modern poetry. Each line is divided into halves
and each half contains two stressed syllables,
generally long in quantity.
 The number of unstressed syllables appears to
a modern eye or ear irregular and actually is very
unequal, but they are really combined with the
stressed ones into 'feet' in accordance with certain
definite principles. At least one of the stressed
syllables in each half-line must be in alliteration
with one in the other half-line; and most often the
alliteration includes both stressed syllables in the
first halfline and the first stressed syllable in the
second, occasionally all four stressed syllables.
(All vowels are held to alliterate with each other.)
 It will be seen therefore that (1) emphatic stress and
(2) alliteration are the basal principles of the system.
To a present-day reader the verse sounds crude, the
more so because of the harshly consonantal character
of the Anglo-Saxon language; and in comparison with
modern poetry it is undoubtedly unmelodious. But it
was worked out on conscious artistic principles,
carefully followed; and when chanted, as it was meant
to be, to the harp it possessed much power and even
beauty of a vigorous sort, to which the pictorial and
metaphorical wealth of the Anglo-Saxon poetic
vocabulary largely contributed.
 This last-named quality, the use of metaphors,
is perhaps the most conspicuous one in the style,
of the Anglo-Saxon poetry.

 The language, compared to that of our own

vastly more complex time, was undeveloped; but
for use in poetry, especially, there were a great
number of periphrastic but vividly picturesque
metaphorical synonyms (technically called
kennings).
 Thus the spear becomes 'the slaughter-shaft';
fighting 'hand-play'; the sword 'the leavings of
the hammer' (or 'of the anvil'); and a ship 'the
foamy-necked floater.' These kennings add much
imaginative suggestiveness to the otherwise
over-terse style, and often contribute to the grim
irony which is another outstanding trait.
 ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. THE
NORTHUMBRIAN PERIOD. The Anglo-Saxons were
for a long time fully occupied with the work of conquest
and settlement, and their first literature of any
importance, aside from 'Beowulf,' appears at about the
time when 'Beowulf' was being put into its present form,
namely in the seventh century. This was in the Northern,
Anglian, kingdom of Northumbria (Yorkshire and
Southern Scotland), which, as we have already said, had
then won the political supremacy, and whose
monasteries and capital city, York, thanks to the Irish
missionaries, had become the chief centers of learning
and culture in Western Christian Europe.
 Still pagan in spirit are certain obscure but,
ingenious and skillfully developed riddles in
verse, representatives of one form of popular
literature only less early than the ballads and
charms. There remain also a few pagan lyric
poems, which are all not only somber like
'Beowulf' but distinctly elegiac, that is pensively
melancholy. They deal with the hard and tragic
things in life, the terrible power of ocean and
storm, or the inexorableness and dreariness of
death, banishment, and the separation of friends.
 In addition to Beowulf – and there were probably
other epic poems – there was a considerable body of
lyric poetry. Most of this is anonymous, although we do
know the names of two poets, Caedmon and Cynewulf
(the former from the 7th, the latter from the 9th
century), both of whom focused on biblical and
religious themes.
 In their frequent tender notes of pathos there
may be some influence from the Celtic spirit. The
greater part of the literature of the period, however,
was Christian, produced in the monasteries or
under their influence. The first Christian writer
was Caedmon (pronounced Kadmon), who toward
the end of the seventh century paraphrased in
Anglo-Saxon verse some portions of the Bible.
The legend of his divine call is famous. [Footnote:
It may be found in Garnett and Gosse, I, 19-20.]
The following is a modern rendering of the hymn
which is said to have been his first work:
Now must we worship the heaven-realm's Warder,
The Maker's might and his mind's thought,
The glory-father's work as he every wonder,
Lord everlasting, of old established.
He first fashioned the firmament for mortals,
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator.
Then the midearth mankind's Warder,
Lord everlasting, afterwards wrought,
For men a garden, God almighty.
 Bede’s account indicates that Cædmon was
responsible for the composition of a large oeuvre of
vernacular religious poetry. In contrast to Saints
Aldhelm and Dunstan, Cædmon’s poetry is said to have
been exclusively religious. Bede reports that Cædmon
“could never compose any foolish or trivial poem, but
only those which were concerned with devotion” and his
list of Cædmon’s output includes work on religious
subjects only: accounts of creation, translations from the
Old and New Testaments, and songs about the “terrors of
future judgment, horrors of hell, … joys of the heavenly
kingdom, … and divine mercies and judgments.” Of this
corpus, only the opening lines of his first poem survive.
 The only known survivor from Cædmon’s
oeuvre is his Hymn. The poem is known from
twenty-one manuscript copies, making it the best-
attested Old English poem after Bede’s Death
Song and the best attested in the poetic corpus in
manuscripts copied or owned in the British Isles
during the Anglo-Saxon period. The Hymn also
has by far the most complicated known textual
history of any surviving Anglo-Saxon poem. All
copies of Hymn are found in manuscripts of the
Historia ecclesiastica or its translation
One of two candidates for the earliest surviving
copy of Cædmon's Hymn (known as “M”) is
found in "The Moore Bede" which is held by the
Cambridge University Library. The other
candidate is St. Petersburg, National Library of
Russia.
 The following text has been transcribed from
“M” (mid-8th century; Northumbria). The text
has been normalised to show a line-break between
each half-line and modern word-division. A
transcription of the likely pronunciation of the
text in the early eighth-century Northumbrian
dialect in which the text is written is included,
along with a modern English translation. Bede's
Latin version is added for comparison:
37. This is the traditional translation of these lines. An alternate translation of the eorðan and aelda texts, however,
understands weorc as the subject: "Now the works of the father of glory must honour the guardian of heaven, the might of the
architect, and his mind's purpose".
38. This is the reading of the West-Saxon ylda and Northumbrian aelda recensions. The West-Saxon eorðan, Northumbrian
eordu, and with some corruption, the West-Saxon eorðe recensions would be translated "for the children of earth".
 The ruins of
Whitby Abbey, in
North Yorkshire,
England, where
Cædmon is said to
have lived and
composed.

 Founded in 657 by St. Hilda, the abbey fell to a

viking attack in 867 and was abandoned. It was re-
built in 1078 and flourished until 1540 when it was
destroyed by Henry VIII.
 After Caedmon
comes Bede, not a poet
but a monk of strong
and beautiful character,
a profound scholar
who in nearly forty
Latin prose works
summarized most of
the knowledge of his
time.
 Bede (also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede
(672/673–May 26, 735) was a monk at the
Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at
Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland,
Engalnd, and of its companion monastery, Saint
Paul's, in modern Jarrow, both in the Kingdom of
Northumbria. He is well known as an author and
scholar, and his most famous work, Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical
History of the English People) gained him the title
"The Father of English History".
 The other name to be remembered is that of
Cynewulf (pronounced Kinnywulf), the author
of some noble religious poetry (in Anglo-
Saxon), especially narratives dealing with Christ
and Christian Apostles and heroes.

 There is still other Anglo-Saxon Christian

poetry, generally akin in subjects to Cynewulf's,
but in most of the poetry of the whole period the
excellence results chiefly from the survival of
the old pagan spirit which distinguishes
'Beowulf'.
 Where the poet writes for edification he is
likely to be dull, but when his story provides him
with sea-voyages, with battles, chances for
dramatic dialogue, or any incidents of vigorous
action or of passion, the zest for adventure and
war rekindles, and we have descriptions and
narratives of picturesque color and stern force.
 Sometimes there is real religious yearning, and
indeed the heroes of these poems are partly
medieval hermits and ascetics as well as quick-
striking fighters; but for the most part the
Christian Providence is really only the heathen
Wyrd under another name, and God and Christ
are viewed in much the same way as the Anglo-
Saxon kings, the objects of feudal allegiance
which is sincere but rather self-assertive and
worldly than humble or consecrated.
 On the whole, then, Anglo-Saxon poetry
exhibits the limitations of a culturally early age,
but it manifests also a degree of power which
gives to Anglo-Saxon literature unquestionable
superiority over that of any other European
country of the same period.
 THE WEST-SAXON, PROSE. The horrors
which the Anglo-Saxons had inflicted on the Britons
they themselves were now to suffer from their still
heathen and piratical kinsmen the 'Danes' or
Northmen, inhabitants or the candinavian peninsula
and the neighboring coasts. For a hundred years,
throughout the ninth century, the Danes, appearing
with unwearied persistence, repeatedly ravaged and
plundered England, and they finally made complete
conquest of Northumbria, destroyed all the churches
and monasteries, and almost completely
extinguished learning.
 It is a familiar story how Alfred, king from 871 to
901 of the southern kingdom of Wessex (the land of the
West Saxons), which had now taken first place among
the Anglo-Saxon states, stemmed the tide of invasion
and by ceding to the 'Danes' the whole northeastern half
of the island obtained for the remainder the peace which
was the first essential for the reestablishment of
civilization. Peace secured, Alfred, who was one of the
greatest of all English kings, labored unremittingly for
learning, as for everything else that was useful, and he
himself translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxon half a
dozen of the best informational manuals of his time,
manuals of history, philosophy, and religion.
 His most enduring literary work, however, was the
inspiration and possibly partial authorship of the 'Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle,‘ a series of annals beginning with the
Christian era, kept at various monasteries, and recording
year by year (down to two centuries and a half after
Alfred's own death), the most important events of history,
chiefly that of England. Most of the entries in the
'Chronicle' are bare and brief, but sometimes, especially
in the accounts of Alfred's own splendid exploits, a writer
is roused to spirited narrative, occasionally in verse; and
in the tenth century two great battles against invading
Northmen, at Brunanburh and Maldon, produced the only
important extant pieces of Anglo-Saxon poetry which
certainly belong to the West Saxon period.
 For literature, indeed, the West-Saxon period has
very little permanent significance. Plenty of its
other writing remains in the shape of religious
prose--sermons, lives and legends of saints, biblical
paraphrases, and similar work in which the
monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but which
is generally dull with the dulness of medieval
commonplace didacticism and fantastic symbolism.
The country, too, was still distracted with wars.
 Within fifty years after Alfred's death, to be
sure, his descendants had won back the whole of
England from 'Danish' rule (though the 'Danes,'
then constituting half the population of the north
and east, have remained to the present day a large
element in the English race).
 But near the end of the tenth century new
swarms of 'Danes' reappeared from the Baltic
lands, once more slaughtering and devastating,
until at last in the eleventh century the 'Danish'
though Christian Canute ruled for twenty years
over all England.
 In such a time there could be little intellectual
or literary life. But the decline of the Anglo-
Saxon literature speaks also partly of stagnation
in the race itself.

 The people, though still sturdy, seem to have

become somewhat dull from inbreeding and to
have required an infusion of altogether different
blood from without.
 This necessary renovation was to be violently
forced upon them, for in 1066 Duke William of
Normandy landed at Pevensey with his army of
adventurers and his ill-founded claim to the
crown, and before him at Hastings fell the
gallant Harold and his nobles.

 By the fortune of this single fight, followed

only by stern suppression of spasmodic
outbreaks, William established himself and his
vassals as masters of the land.
 England ceased to be Anglo-Saxon and
became, altogether politically, and partly in race,
Norman-French, a change more radical and far-
reaching than any which it has since undergone.
 Danish settlement
in the 9th century