Medieval English Literature.
by William Paton Ker.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Readers are drawn to medieval literature in many different ways, and it is hardly possible to describe all the attractions and all the approaches by which they enter on this ground. Students of history have to learn the languages of the nations with whose history they are concerned, and to read the chief books in those languages, if they wish to understand rightly the ideas, purposes and temper of the past ages. Sometimes the study of early literature has been instigated by religious or controversial motives, as when the Anglo-Saxon homilies were taken up and edited and interpreted in support of the Reformation. Sometimes it is mere curiosity that leads to investigation of old literature-a wish to find out the meaning of what looks at first difficult and mysterious.
Curiosity of this sort, however, is seldom found unmixed; there are generally all sorts of vague a.s.sociations and interests combining to lead the explorer on. It has often been observed that a love of Gothic architecture, or of medieval art in general, goes along with, and helps, the study of medieval poetry. Chatterton"s old English reading and his imitations of old English verse were inspired by the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. The lives of Horace Walpole, of Thomas Warton, of Sir Walter Scott, and many others show how medieval literary studies may be nourished along with other kindred antiquarian tastes.
Sometimes, instead of beginning in historical or antiquarian interests, or in a liking for the fashions of the Middle Ages in general, it happens that a love of medieval literature has its rise in one particular author, e.g. Dante or Sir Thomas Malory. The book, the _Divina Commedia_ or _Le Morte d"Arthur_, is taken up, it may be, casually, with no very distinct idea or purpose, and then it is found to be engrossing and captivating-what is often rightly called "a revelation of a new world".
For a long time this is enough in itself; the reader is content with Dante or with the _Morte d"Arthur_. But it may occur to him to ask about "the French book" from which Malory got his adventures of the Knights of King Arthur; he may want to know how the legend of the Grail came to be mixed up with the romances of the Round Table; and so he will be drawn on, trying to find out as much as possible and plunging deeper and deeper into the Middle Ages. The same kind of thing happens to the reader of Dante; Dante is found all through his poem acknowledging obligations to earlier writers; he is not alone or independent in his thought and his poetry; and so it becomes an interesting thing to go further back and to know something about the older poets and moralists, and the earlier medieval world in general, before it was all summed up and recorded in the imagination of the Divine Comedy. Examples of this way of reading may be found in the works of Ruskin and in Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold, rather late in his life (in the introductory essay to T. H. Ward"s _English Poets_), shows that he has been reading some old French authors.
He does not begin with old French when he is young; evidently he was brought to it in working back from the better known poets, Dante and Chaucer. Ruskin"s old French quotations are also rather late in the series of his writings; it was in his Oxford lectures, partly published in _Fors Clavigera_, that he dealt with _The Romance of the Rose_, and used it to ill.u.s.trate whatever else was in his mind at the time.
Thus it is obvious that any one who sets out to write about English literature in the Middle Ages will find himself addressing an audience which is not at all in agreement with regard to the subject. Some will probably be historical in their tastes, and will seek, in literature, for information about manners and customs, fashions of opinion, "typical developments" in the history of culture or education. Others may be on the look-out for stories, for the charm of romance which is sometimes thought to belong peculiarly to the Middle Ages, and some, with ambitions of their own, may ask for themes that can be used and adapted in modern forms, as the Nibelung story has been used by Wagner and William Morris and many others; perhaps for mere suggestions of plots and scenery, to be employed more freely, as in Morris"s prose romances, for example. Others, starting from one favourite author-Dante or Chaucer or Malory-will try to place what they already know in its right relation to all its surroundings-by working, for instance, at the history of religious poetry, or the different kinds of story-telling. It is not easy to write for all these and for other different tastes as well. But it is not a hopeless business, so long as there is some sort of interest to begin with, even if it be only a general vague curiosity about an unknown subject.
There are many prejudices against the Middle Ages; the name itself was originally an expression of contempt; it means the interval of darkness between the ruin of ancient cla.s.sical culture and the modern revival of learning-a time supposed to be full of ignorance, superst.i.tion and bad taste, an object of loathing to well-educated persons. As an example of this sort of opinion about the Middle Ages, one may take what Bentham says of our "barbarian ancestors"-"few of whom could so much as read, and those few had nothing before them that was worth the reading". "When from their ordinary occupation, their order of the day, the cutting of one another"s throats, or those of Welshmen, Scotchmen or Irishmen, they could steal now and then a holiday, how did they employ it? In cutting Frenchmen"s throats in order to get their money: this was active virtue:-leaving Frenchmen"s throats uncut was indolence, slumber, inglorious ease."
On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been glorified by many writers; "the Age of Chivalry", the "Ages of Faith" have often been contrasted with the hardness of the age of enlightenment, rationalism, and material progress; they are thought of as full of colour, variety, romance of all sorts, while modern civilization is represented as comparatively dull, monotonous and unpicturesque. This kind of view has so far prevailed, even among people who do not go to any extremes, and who are not excessively enthusiastic or romantic, that the term "Gothic", which used to be a term of contempt for the Middle Ages, has entirely lost its scornful a.s.sociations. "Gothic" was originally an abusive name, like "Vandalism"; it meant the same thing as "barbarian". But while "Vandalism" has kept its bad meaning, "Gothic" has lost it. It does not now mean "barbarous", and if it still means "uncla.s.sical" it does not imply that what is "uncla.s.sical" must be wrong. It is possible now to think of the Middle Ages and their literature without prejudice on the one side or the other. As no one now thinks of despising Gothic architecture simply because it is not Greek, so the books of the Middle Ages may be read in a spirit of fairness by those who will take the trouble to understand their language; they may be appreciated for what they really are; their goodness or badness is not now determined merely by comparison with the work of other times in which the standards and ideals of excellence were not the same.
The language is a difficulty. The older English books are written in the language which is commonly called Anglo-Saxon; this is certainly not one of the most difficult, but no language is really easy to learn.
Anglo-Saxon poetry, besides, has a peculiar vocabulary and strange forms of expression. The poetical books are not to be read without a great deal of application; they cannot be rushed.
Later, when the language has changed into what is technically called Middle English-say, in the thirteenth century-things are in many ways no better. It is true that the language is nearer to modern English; it is true also that the language of the poetical books is generally much simpler and nearer that of ordinary prose than was the language of the Anglo-Saxon poets. But on the other hand, while Anglo-Saxon literature is practically all in one language, Middle English is really not a language at all, but a great number of different tongues, belonging to different parts of the country. And not only does the language of Yorkshire differ from that of Kent, or Dorset, or London, or Lancashire, but within the same district each author spells as he pleases, and the man who makes a copy of his book also spells as he pleases, and mixes up his own local and personal varieties with those of the original author. There is besides an enormously greater amount of written matter extant in Middle English than in Anglo-Saxon, and this, coming from all parts of the country, is full of all varieties of odd words. The vocabulary of Middle English, with its many French and Danish words, its many words belonging to one region and not to another, is, in some ways, more difficult than that of Anglo-Saxon.
But luckily it is not hard, in spite of all these hindrances, to make a fair beginning with the old languages-in Anglo-Saxon, for example, with Sweet"s _Primer_ and _Reader_, in Middle English with Chaucer or _Piers Plowman_.
The difference in language between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English corresponds to a division in the history of literature. Anglo-Saxon literature is different from that which follows it, not merely in its grammar and dictionary, but in many of its ideas and fashions, particularly in its fashion of poetry. The difference may be expressed in this way, that while the older English literature is mainly English, the literature after the eleventh century is largely dependent on France; France from 1100 to 1400 is the chief source of ideas, culture, imagination, stories, and forms of verse. It is sometimes thought that this was the result of the Norman Conquest, but that is not the proper explanation of what happened, either in language or in literature. For the same kind of thing happened in other countries which were not conquered by the Normans or by any other people speaking French. The history of the German language and of German literature in the Middle Ages corresponds in many things to the history of English. The name Middle English was invented by a German philologist (Grimm), who found in English the same stages of development as in German; Anglo-Saxon corresponds to Old German in its inflexions; Middle English is like Middle German. The change, in both languages, is a change from one kind of inflexion to another. In the "Old" stage (say, about the year 900) the inflexions have various clearly p.r.o.nounced vowels in them; in the "Middle" stage (about 1200) the terminations of words have come to be p.r.o.nounced less distinctly, and where there is inflexion it shows most commonly one vowel, written _e_, where the "Old" form might have _a_ or _o_ or _u_. Changes of this kind had begun in England before the Norman Conquest, and would have gone on as they did in Germany if there had been no Norman Conquest at all. The French and the French language had nothing to do with it.
Where the French were really important was in their ideas and in the forms of their poetry; they made their influence felt through these in all Western Christendom, in Italy, in Denmark, and even more strongly in Germany than in England. Indeed it might be said that the Norman Conquest made it less easy for the English than it was for the Germans to employ the French ideas when they were writing books of their own in their own language. The French influence was too strong in England; the native language was discouraged; many Englishmen wrote their books in French, instead of making English adaptations from the French. The Germans, who were independent politically, were not tempted in the same way as the English, and in many respects they were more successful than the English as translators from the French, as adapters of French "motives" and ideas. But whatever the differences might be between one nation and another, it is certain that after 1100 French ideas were appreciated in all the countries of Europe, in such a way as to make France the princ.i.p.al source of enlightenment and entertainment everywhere; and the intellectual predominance of France is what most of all distinguishes the later medieval from the earlier, that is, from the Anglo-Saxon period, in the history of English literature.
The leadership of France in the literature of Europe may be dated as beginning about 1100, which is the time of the First Crusade and of many great changes in the life of Christendom. About 1100 there is an end of one great historical period, which began with what is called the Wandering of the German nations, and their settlement in various parts of the world. The Norman Conquest of England, it has been said, is the last of the movements in the wandering of the nations. Goths and Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, Angles, Jutes and Saxons, Danes and Northmen, had all had their times of adventure, exploration, conquest and settlement. One great event in this wandering was the establishment of the Norwegian settlers in France, the foundation of Normandy; and the expeditions of the Normans-to Italy as well as to England-were nearly the last which were conducted in the old style. After the Norman Conquest there are new sorts of adventure, which are represented in Chaucer"s Knight and Squire-the one a Crusader, or Knight errant, the other (his son) engaged in a more modern sort of warfare, England against France, nation against nation.
The two forms of the English language, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and the two periods of medieval English literature, correspond to the two historical periods of which one ends and the other begins about 1100, at the date of the First Crusade. Anglo-Saxon literature belongs to the older world; Anglo-Saxon poetry goes back to very early times and keeps a tradition which had come down from ancient days when the English were still a Continental German tribe. Middle English literature is cut off from Anglo-Saxon, the Anglo-Saxon stories are forgotten, and though the old alliterative verse is kept, as late as the sixteenth century, it is in a new form with a new tune in it; while instead of being the one great instrument of poetry it has to compete with rhyming couplets and stanzas of different measure; it is hard put to it by the rhymes of France.
CHAPTER II THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD
In dealing with Anglo-Saxon literature it is well to remember first of all that comparatively little of it has been preserved; we cannot be sure, either, that the best things have been preserved, in the poetry especially. Anglo-Saxon poetry was being made, we know, for at least five hundred years. What now exists is found, chiefly, in four ma.n.u.script volumes,[1] which have been saved, more or less accidentally, from all sorts of dangers. No one can say what has been lost. Many ma.n.u.scripts, as good as any of these, may have been sold as old parchment, or given to the children to cut up into tails for kites. One Anglo-Saxon poem, _Waldere_, is known from two fragments of it which were discovered in the binding of a book in Copenhagen. Two other poems were fortunately copied and published about two hundred years ago by two famous antiquaries; the original ma.n.u.scripts have disappeared since then. Who can tell how many ma.n.u.scripts have disappeared without being copied? The obvious conclusion is that we can speak about what we know, but not as if we knew everything about Anglo-Saxon poetry.
With the prose it is rather different. The prose translations due to King Alfred are preserved; so is the English Chronicle; so are a fair number of religious works, the homilies of aelfric and others; it does not seem likely from what we know of the conditions of authorship in those times that any prose work of any notable or original value has disappeared.
With the poetry, on the other hand, every fresh discovery-like that of the bookbinding fragments already mentioned-makes one feel that the extent of Anglo-Saxon poetry is unknown. Anything may turn up. We cannot say what subjects were not treated by Anglo-Saxon poets. It is certain that many good stories were known to them which are not found in any of the extant ma.n.u.scripts.
The contents of Anglo-Saxon literature may be divided into two sections, one belonging to the English as a Teutonic people who inherited along with their language a form of poetry and a number of stories which have nothing to do with Roman civilization; the other derived from Latin and turning into English the knowledge which was common to the whole of Europe.
The English in the beginning-Angles and Saxons-were heathen Germans who took part in the great movement called the Wandering of the Nations-who left their homes and emigrated to lands belonging to the Roman empire, and made slaves of the people they found there. They were barbarians; the civilized inhabitants of Britain, when the English appeared there, thought of them as horrible savages. They were as bad and detestable as the Red Indians were to the Colonists in America long afterwards.
But we know that the early English are not to be judged entirely by the popular opinion of the Britons whom they harried and enslaved, any more than the English of Queen Elizabeth"s time are to be thought of simply according to the Spanish ideas about Sir Francis Drake. There were centuries of an old civilization behind them when they settled in Britain; what it was like is shown partially in the work of the Bronze and the early Iron Age in the countries from which the English came. The _Germania_ of Tacitus tells more, and more still is to be learned from the remains of the old poetry.
Tacitus was not quite impartial in his account of the Germans; he used them as examples to point a moral against the vices of Rome; the German, in his account, is something like the "n.o.ble savage" who was idealized by later philosophers in order to chastise the faults of sophisticated modern life. But Tacitus, though he might have been rather inclined to favour the Germans, was mainly a scientific observer who wished to find out the truth about them, and to write a clear description of their manners and customs. One of the proofs of his success is the agreement between his _Germania_ and the pictures of life composed by the people of that race themselves in their epic poetry.
The case of the early English is very like that of the Danes and Northmen four or five hundred years later. The Anglo-Saxons thought and wrote of the Danes almost exactly as the Britons had thought of their Saxon enemies. The English had to suffer from the Danish pirates what the Britons had suffered from the English; they cursed the Danes as their own ancestors had been cursed by the Britons; the invaders were utterly detestable and fiendish men of blood. But luckily we have some other information about those pirates. From the Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic historians, and from some parts of the old Northern poetry, there may be formed a different idea about the character and domestic manners of the men who made themselves so unpleasant in their visits to the English and the neighbouring coasts. The pirates at home were peaceful country gentlemen, leading respectable and beneficent lives among their poorer neighbours. The Icelandic histories-including the history of Norway for three or four centuries-may be consulted for the domestic life of the people who made so bad a name for themselves as plunderers abroad. They appear there, several varieties of them, as members of a reasonable, honourable community, which could have given many lessons of civilization to England or France many centuries later. But the strangest and most convincing evidence about the domestic manners of the Northmen is found in English, and is written by King Alfred himself. King Alfred had many foreigners in his service, and one of them was a Norwegian gentleman from the far North, named Ohthere (or Ottarr, as it would be in the Norse tongue rather later than King Alfred"s time). How he came into the King"s service is not known, but there are other accounts of similar cases which show how easy it was for Northmen of ability to make their way in the world through the patronage of kings. Ohthere belonged exactly to the cla.s.s from which the most daring and successful rovers came. He was a gentleman of good position at home in Halogaland (now called Helgeland in the north of Norway), a landowner with various interests, attending to his crops, making a good deal out of trade with the Finns and Lapps; and besides that a navigator, the first who rounded the North Cape and sailed into the White Sea. His narrative, which is given by Alfred as an addition to his translation of Orosius, makes a pleasant and amusing contrast to the history of the Danish wars, which also may have been partly written by King Alfred himself for their proper place in the English Chronicle.
As the Icelandic sagas and Ohthere"s narrative and other doc.u.ments make it easy to correct the prejudiced and partial opinions of the English about the Danes, so the opinions of the Britons about the Saxons are corrected, though the evidence is not by any means so clear. The Angles and Saxons, like the Danes and Northmen later-like Sir Francis Drake, or like Ulysses, we might say-were occasionally pirates, but not restricted to that profession. They had many other things to do and think about.
Before everything, they belonged to the great national system which Tacitus calls _Germania_-which was never politically united, even in the loosest way, but which nevertheless was a unity, conscious of its separation from all the foreigners whom it called, in a comprehensive manner, Welsh. In England the Welsh are the Cambro-Britons; in Germany Welsh means sometimes French, sometimes Italian-a meaning preserved in the name "walnut" (or "walsh-note", as it is in Chaucer)-the "Italian nut". Those who are not Welsh are "Teutonic"-which is not a mere modern pedantic name, but is used by old writers in the same way as by modern philologists, and applied to High or Low Dutch indifferently, and also to English. But the unity of _Germania_-the community of sentiment among the early German nations-does not need to be proved by such philological notes as the opposition of "Dutch" and "Welsh". It is proved by its own most valuable results, by its own "poetical works"-the heroic legends which were held in common by all the nations of _Germania_. If any one were to ask, "What does the old English literature _prove_?" the answer would be ready enough. It proves that the Germanic nations had a reciprocal free trade in subjects for epic poems. They were generally free from local jealousy about heroes. Instead of a natural rivalry among Goths, Burgundians and the rest, the early poets seem to have had a liking for heroes not of their own nation, so long as they were members of one of the German tribes. (The Huns, it may be here remarked, are counted as Germans; Attila is not thought of as a barbarian.) The great example of this common right in heroes is Sigfred, Sigurd the Volsung, Siegfried of the _Nibelungenlied_. His original stock and race is of no particular interest to any one; he is a hero everywhere, and everywhere he is thought of as belonging, in some way or other, to the people who sing about him. This glory of Sigurd or Siegfried is different from the later popularity of King Arthur or of Charlemagne in countries outside of Britain or France. Arthur and Charlemagne are adopted in many places as favourite heroes without any particular thought of their nationality, in much the same way as Alexander the Great was celebrated everywhere from pure love of adventurous stories. But Siegfried or Sigurd, whether in High or Low Germany, or Norway or Iceland, is always at home. He is not indeed a national champion, like the Cid in Spain or the Wallace in Scotland, but everywhere he is thought of, apart from any local attachment, as the hero of the race.
One of the old English poems called _Widsith_ (the Far Traveller) is an epitome of the heroic poetry of _Germania_, and a clear proof of the common interest taken in all the heroes. The theme of the poem is the wandering of a poet, who makes his way to the courts of the most famous kings: Ermanaric the Goth, Gundahari the Burgundian, Alboin the Lombard, and many more. The poem is a kind of _fantasia_, intended to call up, by allusion, the personages of the most famous stories; it is not an epic poem, but it plays with some of the plots of heroic poetry familiar throughout the whole Teutonic region. Ermanaric and Gundahari, here called Eormanric and Guthhere, are renowned in the old Scandinavian poetry, and the old High German. Guthhere is one of the personages in the poem of _Waldere_; what is Guthhere in English is Gunnar in Norse, Gunther in German-the Gunther of the _Nibelungenlied_. Offa comes into Widsith"s record, an English king; but he has no particular mark or eminence or attraction to distinguish him in the poet"s favour from the Goth or the Lombard; he is king of "Ongle", the original Anglia to the south of Jutland, and there is no room for doubt that the English when they lived there and when they invaded Britain had the stories of all the Teutonic heroes at their command to occupy their minds, if they chose to listen to the lay of the minstrel. What they got from their minstrels was a number of stories about all the famous men of the Teutonic race-stories chanted in rhythmical verse and n.o.ble diction, presenting tragic themes and pointing the moral of heroism.
Of this old poetry there remains one work nearly complete. _Beowulf_, because it is extant, has sometimes been over-valued, as if it were the work of an English Homer. But it was not preserved as the _Iliad_ was, by the unanimous judgement of all the people through successive generations.
It must have been of some importance at one time, or it would not have been copied out fair as a handsome book for the library of some gentleman. But many trashy things have been equally honoured in gentlemen"s libraries, and it cannot be shown that _Beowulf_ was nearly the best of its cla.s.s. It was preserved by an accident; it has no right to the place of the most ill.u.s.trious Anglo-Saxon epic poem. The story is commonplace and the plan is feeble. But there are some qualities in it which make it (accidentally or not, it hardly matters) the best worth studying of all the Anglo-Saxon poems. It is the largest extant piece in any old Teutonic language dealing poetically with native Teutonic subjects. It is the largest and fullest picture of life in the order to which it belongs; the only thing that shows incontestably the power of the old heroic poetry to deal on a fairly large scale with subjects taken from the national tradition. The impression left by _Beowulf_, when the carping critic has done his worst, is that of a n.o.ble manner of life, of courtesy and freedom, with the dignity of tragedy attending it, even though the poet fails, or does not attempt, to work out fully any proper tragic theme of his own.
There is a very curious likeness in many details between _Beowulf_ and the _Odyssey_; but quite apart from the details there is a real likeness between them in their "criticism of life"-i.e. in their exhibition of human motives and their implied or expressed opinions about human conduct. There is the same likeness between the _Odyssey_ and the best of the Icelandic Sagas-particularly the _Story of Burnt Njal_; and the lasting virtue of _Beowulf_ is that it is bred in the same sort of world as theirs. It is not so much the valour and devotion of the hero; it is the conversation of the hosts and guests in the King"s hall, the play of serious and gentle moods in the minds of the freeborn, that gives its character to the poem. _Beowulf_, through its rendering of n.o.ble manners, its picture of good society, adds something distinct and unforgettable to the records of the past. There is life in it, and a sort of life which would be impossible without centuries of training, of what Spenser called "vertuous and gentle discipline".
_Beowulf_ is worth studying, among other reasons, because it brings out one great difference between the earlier and later medieval poetry, between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English taste in fiction. _Beowulf_ is a tale of adventure; the incidents in it are such as may be found in hundreds of other stories. Beowulf himself, the hero, is a champion and a slayer of monsters. He hears that the King of the Danes is plagued in his house by the visits of an ogre, who night after night comes and carries off one of the King"s men. He goes on a visit to Denmark, sits up for the ogre, fights with him and mortally wounds him. That does not end the business, for the ogre"s mother comes to revenge her son, and Beowulf has a second fight and kills her too, and is thanked and goes home again.
Many years afterwards when he is king in his own country, Gautland (which is part of modern Sweden), a fiery dragon is accidentally stirred up from a long sleep and makes itself a pest to the country. Beowulf goes to attack the dragon, fights and wins, but is himself killed by the poison of the dragon. The poem ends with his funeral. So told, in abstract, it is not a particularly interesting story. Told in the same bald way, the story of Theseus or of Hercules would still have much more in it; there are many more adventures than this in later romances like _Sir Bevis of Southampton_ or _Sir Huon of Bordeaux_. What makes the poem of _Beowulf_ really interesting, and different from the later romances, is that it is full of all sorts of references and allusions to great events, to the fortunes of kings and nations, which seem to come in naturally, as if the author had in his mind the whole history of all the people who were in any way connected with Beowulf, and could not keep his knowledge from showing itself. There is an historical background. In romances, and also in popular tales, you may get the same sort of adventures as in _Beowulf_, but they are told in quite a different way. They have nothing to do with reality. In _Beowulf_, the historical allusions are so many, and given with such a conviction of their importance and their truth, that they draw away the attention from the main events of the story-the fights with the ogre Grendel and his mother, and the killing of the dragon. This is one of the faults of the poem. The story is rather thin and poor. But in another way those distracting allusions to things apart from the chief story make up for their want of proportion. They give the impression of reality and weight; the story is not in the air, or in a fabulous country like that of Spenser"s _Faerie Queene_; it is part of the solid world. It would be difficult to find anything like this in later medieval romance. It is this, chiefly, that makes _Beowulf_ a true _epic_ poem-that is, a narrative poem of the most stately and serious kind.
The history in it is not English history; the personages in it are Danes, Gauts, and Swedes. One of them, Hygelac, the king whom Beowulf succeeded, is identified with a king named by the Frankish historian Gregory of Tours; the date is about A.D. 515. The epic poem of _Beowulf_ has its source pretty far back, in the history of countries not very closely related to England. Yet the English hearers of the poem were expected to follow the allusions, and to be interested in the names and histories of Swedish, Gautish, and Danish kings. As if that was not enough, there is a story within the story-a poem of adventure is chanted by a minstrel at the Danish Court, and the scene of this poem is in Friesland. There is no doubt that it was a favourite subject, for the Frisian story is mentioned in the poem of Widsith, the Traveller; and more than that, there is an independent version of it among the few remains of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry-_The Fight at Finnesburh_. Those who listened to heroic songs in England seem to have had no peculiar liking for English subjects. Their heroes belong to _Germania_. The same thing is found in Norway and Iceland, where the favourite hero is Sigurd. His story, the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, comes from Germany. In _Beowulf_ there is a reference to it-not to Sigfred himself, but to his father Sigemund.
Everywhere and in every possible way the old heroic poets seem to escape from the particular nation to which they belong, and to look for their subjects in some other part of the Teutonic system. In some cases, doubtless, this might be due to the same kind of romantic taste as led later authors to place their stories in Greece, or Babylon, or anywhere far from home. But it can scarcely have been so with _Beowulf_; for the author of _Beowulf_ does not try to get away from reality; on the contrary, he b.u.t.tresses his story all round with historical tradition and references to historical fact; he will not let it go forth as pure romance.
The solid foundation and epic weight of _Beowulf_ are not exceptional among the Anglo-Saxon poems. There are not many other poems extant of the same cla.s.s, but there is enough to show that _Beowulf_ is not alone. It is a representative work; there were others of the same type; and it is this order of epic poetry which makes the great literary distinction of the Anglo-Saxon period.
It is always necessary to remember how little we know of Anglo-Saxon poetry and generally of the ideas and imaginations of the early English.
The gravity and dignity of most of their poetical works are unquestionable; but one ought not to suppose that we know all the varieties of their poetical taste.
It is probable that in the earlier Middle Ages, and in the Teutonic countries, there was a good deal of the fanciful and also of the comic literature which is so frequent in the later Middle Ages (after 1100) and especially in France. One proof of this, for the fanciful and romantic sort of story-telling, will be found in the earlier part of the Danish history written by Saxo Grammaticus. He collected an immense number of stories from Danes and Icelanders-one of them being the story of Hamlet-and although he was comparatively late (writing at the end of the twelfth century), still we know that his stories belong to the North and are unaffected by anything French; they form a body of Northern romance, independent of the French fashions, of King Arthur and Charlemagne. The English historians-William of Malmesbury, e.g.-have collected many things of the same sort. As for comic stories, there are one or two in careful Latin verse, composed in Germany in the tenth century, which show that the same kind of jests were current then as in the later comic poetry of France, in the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio, and in the _Canterbury Tales_.
The earlier Middle Ages were more like the later Middle Ages than one would think, judging merely from the extant literature of the Anglo-Saxon period on the one hand and of the Plantagenet times on the other. But the differences are there, and one of the greatest is between the Anglo-Saxon fashion of epic poetry and the popular romances of the time of Edward I or Edward III.
The difference is brought out in many ways. There is a different choice of subject; the earlier poetry, by preference, is concentrated on one great battle or combat-generally in a place where there is little or no chance of escape-inside a hall, as in _The Fight at Finnesburh_, and in the slaughter "grim and great" at the end of the _Nibelungenlied_; or, it may be, in a narrow place among rocks, as in the story of Walter of Aquitaine, which is the old English _Waldere_. This is the favourite sort of subject, and it is so because the poets were able thus to hit their audience again and again with increasing force; the effect they aimed at was a crushing impression of strife and danger, and courage growing as the danger grew and the strength lessened. In _Beowulf_ the subjects are different, but in _Beowulf_ a subject of this sort is introduced, by way of interlude, in the minstrel"s song of _Finnesburh_; and also _Beowulf_, with a rather inferior plot, still manages to give the effect and to bring out the spirit of deliberate heroic valour.
Quite late in the Anglo-Saxon period-about the year 1000-there is a poem on an English subject in which this heroic spirit is most thoroughly displayed: the poem on the Battle of Maldon which was fought on the Ess.e.x sh.o.r.e in 993 between Byrhtnoth, alderman of East Anglia, and a host of vikings whose leader (though he is not mentioned in the poem) is known as Olaf Tryggvason. By the end of the tenth century Anglo-Saxon poetry had begun to decay. Yet the Maldon poem shows that it was not only still alive, but that in some respects it had made very remarkable progress.
There are few examples anywhere of poetry which can deal in a satisfactory way with contemporary heroes. In the Maldon poem, very shortly after the battle, the facts are turned into poetry-into poetry which keeps the form of the older epic, and which in the old manner works up a stronger and stronger swell of courage against the overwhelming ruin. The last word of the heroic age is spoken, five hundred years after the death of Hygelac (above, p. 26), by the old warrior who, like the trusty companion of Beowulf, refused to turn and run when his lord was cut down in the battle:
Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, Mood the more, as our might lessens.
It is one of the strange things in the history of poetry that in another five hundred years an old fashion of poetry, near akin to the Anglo-Saxon, comes to an end in a poem on a contemporary battle The last poem in the Middle English alliterative verse, which was used for so many subjects in the fourteenth century-for the stories of Arthur and Alexander and Troy, and for the Vision of Piers Plowman-is the poem of _Scottish Field_ A.D. 1513, on the battle of Flodden.
This alliterative verse, which has a history of more than a thousand years, is one of the things that are carried over in some mysterious way from the Anglo-Saxon to the later medieval period. But though it survives the great change in the language, it has a different sound in the fourteenth century from what it has in _Beowulf_; the older verse has a manner of its own.
The Anglo-Saxon poetical forms are difficult at first to understand. The princ.i.p.al rule of the verse is indeed easy enough; it is the same as in the verse of _Piers Plowman_; there is a long line divided in the middle; in each line there are _four_ strong syllables; the first _three_ of these are generally made alliterative; i.e. they begin with the same consonant-
Waes se grimma gaest Grendel haten maere mearcstapa, se the moras heold fen and faesten.
Was the grievous guest Grendel named mighty mark-stalker, and the moors his home fen and fastness.