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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 manuscript volumes,^[1] which have been saved, more or less accidentally, from all sorts of dangers. No one can say what has been lost. Many manuscripts, 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 manuscripts have disappeared since then. Who can tell how many manuscripts 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 [17] translations due to King Alfred are preserved; so is the English Chronicle; so are a fair number of religious works, the homilies of Ælfric 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 manuscripts.

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 ‘noble 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 [19] 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 Ottárr, 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 class from which the most daring and successful rovers came. He was a gentleman [20] 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 documents 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 [21] 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 [22] 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 [23] 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 noble 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 class. It was preserved by an accident; it has no right to the place of the most illustrious 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 noble manner of life, of courtesy and freedom, with [24] 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 noble 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 [25] 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 [26] 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 [27] 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 buttresses 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 class, 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; [28] 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 Essex shore 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 [30] 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 [31] first to understand. The principal 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—

Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten

mære mearcstapa, se the móras heold

fen and fæsten.

Was the grievous guest Grendel namèd

mighty mark-stalker, and the moors his home

fen and fastness.

or they all begin with different vowels—

Eotenas and ylfe and orcneas.

Etins and elves and ogres too.

But there is a variety and subtilty in the Anglo-Saxon measure which is not found in the Middle English, and which is much more definitely under metrical rules. And apart from the metre of the single line, there is in the older alliterative poetry a skill in composing long passages, best described in the terms which Milton used about his own blank verse: ‘the sense variously drawn out from one line to another’. The Anglo-Saxon poets, at their best, are eloquent, and able to carry on for long periods without monotony. Their verse does not fall into detached and separate lines. This habit is another evidence of long culture; Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as we know it, is at the end of its progress; already mature, and with little prospect in front of it except decay.

The diction of Anglo-Saxon poetry is a subject of [32] study by itself. Here again there is a great difference between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry. Middle English poetry borrows greatly from French. Now in all the best French poetry, with very few exceptions, the language is the same as that of prose; and even if there happen to be a few poetical words (as in Racine, for example, flammes and transports and hymenée) they do not interfere with the sense. Middle English generally copies French, and is generally unpretentious in its vocabulary. But Anglo-Saxon poetry was impossible without a poetical dictionary. It is very heavily ornamented with words not used in prose, and while there are hardly any similes, the whole tissue of it is figurative, and most things are named two or three times over in different terms. This makes it often very tiresome, when the meaning is so encrusted with splendid words that it can scarcely move; still more, when a poet does not take the trouble to invent his ornaments, and only repeats conventional phrases out of a vocabulary which he has learned by rote. But those extravagances of the Anglo-Saxon poetry make it all the more interesting historically; they show that there must have been a general love and appreciation of fine language, such as is not commonly found in England now, and also a technical skill in verse, something like that which is encouraged in Wales at the modern poetical competitions, though certainly far less elaborate. Further, these curiosities of old English verse make it all the more wonderful and admirable that the epic poets should have succeeded as they did with their stories of heroic resistance and the repeated waves of battle and death-agony. Tremendous subjects [33] are easily spoilt when the literary vogue is all for ornament and fine language. Yet the Anglo-Saxon poets seldom seem to feel the encumbrances of their poetic language when they are really possessed with their subject. The eloquence of their verse then gets the better of their ornamental diction.

The subjects of Anglo-Saxon poetry were taken from many different sources besides the heroic legend which is summarized by Widsith, or contemporary actions like the battle of Maldon.

The conversion of the English to Christianity brought with it of course a great deal of Latin literature. The new ideas were adopted very readily by the English, and a hundred years after the coming of the first missionary the Northumbrian schools and teachers were more than equal to the best in any part of Europe.

The new learning did not always discourage the old native kind of poetry. Had that been the case, we should hardly have had anything like Beowulf; we should not have had the poem of Maldon. Christianity and Christian literature did not always banish the old-fashioned heroes. Tastes varied in this respect. The Frankish Emperor Lewis the Pious is said to have taken a disgust at the heathen poetry which he had learned when he was young. But there were greater kings who were less delicate in their religion. Charles the Great made a collection of ‘the barbarous ancient poems which sung the wars and exploits of the olden time’. Alfred the Great, his Welsh biographer tells us, was always ready to listen to Saxon poems when he was a boy, and when he was older was fond of learning poetry by heart. That the poems were not all of them [34] religious, we may see from some things in Alfred’s own writings. He was bold enough to bring in a Northern hero in his translation of the Latin philosophical book of Boethius. Boethius asks, ‘Where are the bones of Fabricius the true-hearted?’ In place of the name Fabricius, Alfred writes, ‘Where are now the bones of Wayland, and who knows where they be?’ Wayland Smith, who thus appears, oddly, in the translation of Boethius, is one of the best-known heroes of the Teutonic mythology. He is the original craftsman (like Daedalus in Greece), the brother of the mythical archer Egil and the harper Slagfinn—the hero of one of the finest of the old Scandinavian poems, and of many another song and story.

The royal genealogies in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are an example of the conservative process that went on with regard to many of the old beliefs and fancies—a process that may be clearly traced in the poem of Beowulf—by means of which pre-Christian ideas were annexed to Christianity. The royal house of England, the house of Cerdic, still traces its descent from Woden; and Woden is thirteenth in descent from Noah. Woden is kept as a king and a hero, when he has ceased to be a god. This was kindlier and more charitable than the alternative view, that the gods of the heathen were living devils.

There was no destruction of the heroic poetry through the conversion of the English, but new themes were at once brought in, to compete with the old ones. Bede was born (672) within fifty years of the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria (625), and Bede is able to tell of the poet Cædmon of Whitby who [35] belonged to the time of the abbess Hild, between 658 and 670, and who put large portions of the Bible history into verse.

Cædmon the herdsman, turning poet late in life by a special gift from Heaven and devoting himself exclusively to sacred subjects, is a different sort of minstrel from that one who is introduced in Beowulf singing the lay of Finnesburh. His motive is different. It is partly the same motive as that of King Alfred in his prose translations. Cædmon made versions of Bible history for the edification of Christian people.

Anglo-Saxon poetry, which had been heathen, Teutonic, concerned with traditional heroic subjects was drawn into the service of the other world without losing its old interests. Hence comes, apart from the poetical value of the several works, the historical importance of Anglo-Saxon poetry, as a blending of Germania, the original Teutonic civilization, with the ideas and sentiments of Christendom in the seventh century and after.

Probably nothing of Cædmon’s work remains except the first poem, which is paraphrased in Latin by Bede and which is also preserved in the original Northumbrian. But there are many Bible poems, Genesis, Exodus, and others, besides a poem on the Gospel history in the Saxon language of the Continent—the language of the ‘Old Saxons’, as the English called them—which followed the example and impulse given by Cædmon, and which had in common the didactic, the educational purpose, for the promotion of Christian knowledge.

But while there was this common purpose in these [36] poems, there were as great diversities of genius as in any other literary group or school. Sometimes the author is a dull mechanical translator using the conventional forms and phrases without imagination or spirit. Sometimes on the other hand he is caught up and carried away by his subject, and the result is poetry like the Fall of the Angels (part of Genesis), or the Dream of the Rood. These are utterly different from the regular conventional poetry or prose of the Middle Ages. There is no harm in comparing the Fall of the Angels with Milton. The method is nearly the same: narrative, with a concentration on the character of Satan, and dramatic expression of the character in monologue at length. The Dream of the Rood again is finer than the noblest of all the Passion Plays. It is a vision, in which the Gospel history of the Crucifixion is so translated that nothing is left except the devotion of the young hero (so he is called) and the glory; it is not acted on any historical scene, but in some spiritual place where there is no distinction between the Passion and the Triumph. In this way the spirit of poetry does wonderful things; transforming the historical substance. It is quite impossible to dismiss the old English religious poetry under any summary description. Much of it is conventional and ordinary; some of it is otherwise, and the separate poems live in their own way.

It is worth remembering that the manuscripts of the Dream of the Rood have a history which is typical of the history in general, the progress of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the change of centre from Northumberland [37] to Wessex. Some verses of the poem are carved in runic letters on the Ruthwell Cross (now in the Parish Church of Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire) in the language of Northumberland, which was the language of Cædmon and Bede. The Ruthwell Cross with the runic inscription on it is thus one of the oldest poetical manuscripts in English, not to speak of its importance in other ways.

The Ruthwell verses are Northumbrian. They were at first misinterpreted in various ways by antiquaries, till John Kemble the historian read them truly. Some time after, an Anglo-Saxon manuscript was found at Vercelli in the North of Italy—a regular station on the old main road which crosses the Great St. Bernard and which was commonly used by Englishmen, Danes, and other people of the North when travelling to Rome. In this Vercelli book the Dream of the Rood is contained, nearly in full, but written in the language of Wessex—i.e. the language commonly called Anglo-Saxon—the language not of Bede but of Alfred. The West Saxon verses of the Rood corresponding to the old Anglian of the Ruthwell Cross are an example of what happened generally with Anglo-Saxon poetry—the best of it in early days was Anglian, Northumbrian; when the centre shifted to Wessex, the Northern poetry was preserved in the language which by that time had become the proper literary English both for verse and prose.

Cynewulf is an old English poet who has signed his name to several poems, extant in West Saxon. He may have been the author of the Dream of the Rood; he was probably a Northumbrian. As he is the most [38] careful artist among the older poets, notable for the skill of his verse and phrasing, his poetry has to be studied attentively by any one who wishes to understand the poetical ideals of the age between Bede and King Alfred, the culmination of the Northumbrian school. His subjects are all religious, from the Gospel (Crist) or the lives of saints (Guthlac, Juliana, Elene, probably Andreas also). The legendary subjects may be looked on as a sort of romance; Cynewulf in many ways is a romantic poet. The adventure of St. Andrew in his voyage to rescue St. Matthew from the cannibals is told with great spirit—a story of the sea. Cynewulf has so fine a sense of the minor beauties of verse and diction that he might be in danger of losing his story for the sake of poetical ornament; but though he is not a strong poet he generally manages to avoid the temptation, and to keep the refinements of his art subordinate to the main effect.

There is hardly anything in Anglo-Saxon to be called lyrical. The epic poetry may have grown out of an older lyric type—a song in chorus, with narrative stuff in it, like the later choral ballads. There is one old poem, and a very remarkable one, with a refrain, Deor’s Lament, which may be called a dramatic lyric, the utterance of an imaginary personage, a poet like Widsith, who comforts himself in his sorrow by recalling examples of old distresses. The burden comes after each of these records:

That ancient woe was endured, and so may mine.

Widsith in form of verse is nearer to this lyric of Deor than to the regular sustained narrative verse of Beowulf. [39] There are some fragments of popular verse, spells against disease, which might be called songs. But what is most wanting in Anglo-Saxon literature is the sort of poetry found at the close of the Middle Ages in the popular ballads, songs and carols of the fifteenth century.

To make up for the want of true lyric, there are a few very beautiful poems, sometimes called by the name of elegies—akin to lyric, but not quite at the lyrical pitch. The Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Ruin, the Wife’s Complaint—they are antique in verse and language but modern in effect, more than most things that come later, for many centuries. They are poems of reflective sentiment, near to the mood of a time when the bolder poetical kinds have been exhausted, and nothing is left but to refine upon the older themes. These poems are the best expression of a mood found elsewhere, even in rather early Anglo-Saxon days—the sense of the vanity of life, the melancholy regret for departed glories—a kind of thought which popular opinion calls ‘the Celtic spirit’, and which indeed may be found in the Ossianic poems, but not more truly than in the Ruin or the Wanderer.

When the language of Wessex became the literary English, it was naturally used for poetry—not merely for translations of Northumbrian verse into West Saxon. The strange thing about this later poetry is that it should be capable of such strength as is shown in the Maldon poem—a perpetual warning against rash conclusions. For poetry had seemed to be exhausted long before this, or at any rate to have reached in Cynewulf the dangerous stage of maturity. [40] But the Maldon poem, apart from some small technical faults, is sane and strong. In contrast, the earlier poem in the battle of Brunanburh is a fair conventional piece—academic laureate work, using cleverly enough the forms which any accomplished gentleman could learn.

Those forms are applied often most ingeniously, in the Anglo-Saxon riddles; pieces, again, which contradict ordinary opinion. Few would expect to find in Anglo-Saxon the curious grace of verbal workmanship, the artificial wit, of those short poems.

The dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus is one of the Anglo-Saxon things belonging to a common European fashion; the dialogue literature, partly didactic, partly comic, which was so useful in the Middle Ages in providing instruction along with varying degrees of amusement. There is more than one Anglo-Saxon piece of this sort, valuable as expressing the ordinary mind; for, generally speaking, there is a want of merely popular literature in Anglo-Saxon, as compared with the large amount later on.

The history of prose is continuous from the Anglo-Saxon onwards; there is no such division as between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry. In fact, Middle English prose at first is the continuation of the English Chronicle, and the transcription of the homilies of Ælfric into the later grammar and spelling.

The English had not the peculiar taste for prose which seems to be dealt by chance to Hebrews and Arabs, to Ireland and Iceland. As in Greece and France, the writing of prose comes after verse. It [41] begins by being useful; it is not used for heroic stories. But the English had more talent for prose than some people; they understood it better than the French; and until the French influence came over them did not habitually degrade their verse for merely useful purposes.

Through the Chronicle, which probably began in King Alfred’s time, and through Alfred’s translations from the Latin, a common available prose was established, which had all sorts of possibilities in it, partly realized after a time. There seems no reason, as far as language and technical ability are concerned, why there should not have been in English, prose stories as good as those of Iceland. The episode of King Cynewulf of Wessex, in the Chronicle, has been compared to the Icelandic sagas, and to the common epic theme of valorous fighting and loyal perseverance. In Alfred’s narrative passages there are all the elements of plain history, a style that might have been used without limit for all the range of experience.

Alfred’s prose when he is repeating the narratives of his sea-captains has nothing in it that can possibly weary, so long as the subject is right. It is a perfectly clean style for matter of fact.

The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is in religious instruction. This is various in kind; it includes the translation of Boethius which is philosophy, and fancy as well; it includes the Dialogues of Gregory which are popular stories, the homilies on Saints’ Lives which are often prose romances, and which often are heightened above prose, into a swelling, chanting, alliterative tune, not far from the language of poetry. The great master [42] of prose in all its forms is Ælfric of Eynsham, about the year 1000. Part of his work was translation of the Bible, and in this, and in his theory of translation, he is more enlightened than any translator before Tyndale. The fault of Bible versions generally was that they kept too close to the original. Instead of translating like free men they construed word for word, like the illiterate in all ages. Ulphilas, who is supposed by some to have written Gothic prose, is really a slave to the Greek text, and his Gothic is hardly a human language. Wycliffe treats his Latin original in the same way, and does not think what language he is supposed to be writing. But Ælfric works on principles that would have been approved by Dryden; and there is no better evidence of the humanities in those early times than this. Much was lost before the work of Ælfric was taken up again with equal intelligence.