Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 29

In the school at Winchester Ælfric was trained (born 955?) and thence went to instruct the young monks in the abbey of Cerne in Dorset, where he preached homilies; he wrote them both in English and in Latin. His sermon on the "Holy Housel," that is the Holy Communion, contained ideas which the Protestants, at the Reformation, thought similar to their own, and they printed this homily. "All is to be understood spiritually." "It skills not to ask how it is done, but to believe firmly that done it is." The style of the prose is more or less alliterative, and a kind of rhythm is detected in some of the sermons, as if they were intended to be chanted.

The Latin grammars written by Ælfric do not concern English literature; his Dialogue (Colloquium) between a priest and a number of persons of various occupations, throws light on ways of living. He wrote Latin "Lives of Saints," and edited part of an English translation or paraphrase of the Bible, suitable as material for homilies. He produced many other theological works, and died about 102-(?) being Abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire.

The interest of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the rest, for us, is that they upheld a standard of learning and of godly living, in evil times of fire and sword, and that English prose became a rather better literary instrument in their hands.

The "Leechdoms," and works on herb-lore and medicine of the period, partly derived from late Latin books, partly from popular charm songs, are merely curious; they are full of folk-lore. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose, save in the "Chronicle," was almost submerged, though, in poetry, there were doubtless plenty of popular ballads, for the most part lost or faintly traceable as translated into the Latin prose of some of the writers of history. There would be songs chanted among the country people about the deeds of Hereward the Wake and other popular heroes; minstrels, now poor wanderers, would sing in the farmhouses, and in the halls of the English squires, but not much of their compositions remains.

We have, however, a few famous brief passages of verse, like the poem of "The Grave," familiar through Longfellow's translation, and probably earlier than the Conquest. It is written on the margin of a book of sermons, and the author's mood is truly sepulchral. The "Rhymed Poem" is celebrated only because it is in rhyme, which was a novelty with a great future before it; it is older than 1046, its muse is that of moral reflection.

The one verse of a song of King Canute is handed down by a monkish chronicler who lived more than a century later. The king in a boat on the Ouse, near a church, bids his men row near the shore to hear the monks sing:—

Merie sungen the munaches binnen Ely,

Tha Cnut ching rew therby:

"Roweth cnihtes neer the land,

And here we thes munches sang."

This contains a kind of rhyme, or incomplete rhyme, of the vowel sounds only (assonance) in Ely, therby, "land", "sang."

St. Godric (died 1170) also left a hymn to Our Lady, in rhymed couplets, with the music.

Of about the same period is a rhymed version of the Lord's Prayer; the number of syllables to each line varies much, as in Anglo-Saxon poetry, contrary to the rule in the poetry of France.

There are other examples all showing the untaught tendency of the songs of the people towards rhyme and towards measures unknown to the early Anglo-Saxons.

1. The Amazons appear to have been the armed priestesses of the Hittite empire in Asia Minor, about 1200 b.c.