Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 6

The society of the Anglo-Saxons, as described in the oldest surviving poems, was like that of the early Irish about a.d. 200 as depicted in their oldest romances, and like that of the early Icelanders as painted in the sagas, or stories of 1100, and later. Each free man had his house, with its large hall, and a fire in the centre. In the hall, usually built of timber, the people ate and passed their time when not out of doors, and also slept at night, while there were other rooms (probably each was a small separately roofed house) for other purposes. The women had their "bower," the married people had their little bedclosets off the hall, and there were store-rooms. The house stood in a wide yard or court, where geese and other fowls were kept; it was fenced about with a palisade, or a bank and hedge. Tilling the soil, keeping cattle, hunting, and war and raiding, by sea and land, were the occupations of the men; the women sewed and span, and kept house.

A group of such homesteads, each house well apart from its neighbours, made the village or settlement: there were no towns with streets, such as the Romans left in Britain.

A number of such villages were united in the tribe, each tribe had its king, while the other chief men, the richest and best born, constituted a class of gentry. Later, tribes were gathered into small kingdoms, with a "Bretwalda" or "Over-Lord," the most powerful of the kings, at the head of all.

This kind of society is almost exactly the same as that which Homer describes among the Greeks, more than a thousand years before Christ. As in Homer, each Anglo-Saxon king had his Gleeman (scop) or minstrel, who sang to his household and to the guests in hall. The songs might be new, of his own making, or lays handed down from of old.

We shall see that the longer Anglo-Saxon poems, before Christianity came in, were stories about fabulous heroes; or real kings of times past, concerning whom many fables were told. Most of these tales, or "myths," were not true; they were mere ancient "fairy stories," in which sometimes real but half-forgotten warriors and princes play their parts. The traditions, however, were looked on as being true, and the listeners to the gleemen thought that they were learning history as well as being amused. Meanwhile any man might make and sing verses for his own pleasure, about his own deeds and his own fancies, sorrows, and loves.

There was no lack of old legends of times before the English invasion of Britain, or of legends quite fabulous about gods and heroes. We know from Roman and early Christian authors, that the other Germanic peoples, on the Continent, had abundance of this material for poetry: thus the Germans sang of Arminius, the Lombards sang of Alboin, or Ælfwine (died a.d. 573), and the Scandinavians and Germans had legends of Attila, the great Hun conqueror, in the fifth century, and of Sigurd, who slew Fafnir, the Snake-Man; of the vengeance of Brynhild, and all the other adventures of the Volsungs and Niblungs; in Germany fashioned, much later, into the famous "Nibelungenlied".1

The Anglo-Saxons, too, knew forms of these legends; and mention the heroes of them in their poetry. Thus there is no reason why the Anglo-Saxons should not have produced poems as magnificent as those of the early Greeks, except that they, like all other peoples, had not the genius of the Greeks for poetry, and for the arts; and had not their musical language, and glorious forms of verse. They were a rough country folk, and for long did not, like the Greeks, live in towns.

But even if they had possessed more genius than they did, much of their old literature would probably have been lost when they became Christians; and when the clergy, who had, most to do with writing, generally devoted themselves only to verses on Biblical or other Christian subjects, or to prose sermons; and to learned books in Latin. While plenty of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry survives, of poetry derived from the heathen times of the Anglo-Saxons there is comparatively little, and much of it has been more or less re-written, and affected by later changes and additions, in early Christian times.

The fragments of old poetry enable us to understand the poetic genius of our remote ancestors as it was before they had wholly adopted Christianity, or come under Latin, French, and Norman influences. From the descendants of the Britons whom they had conquered, or who survived as their Welsh neighbours, they seem, at this time, to have borrowed little or nothing in the way of song or story.

Before beginning to try to understand the Anglo-Saxon literature, we ought to set before our minds two or three considerations. Though the language of these very old poems is the early form of our own English, we cannot understand them except in translations, unless we learn Anglo-Saxon. However well a translator may render the ideas of a poem, he cannot give the original words of it in another language. Now the poet's very own words have a beauty and harmony and appropriateness which a translation cannot reproduce. The ideas remain, but the essence of the poem is lost: gone is the vigour, the humour is weakened; the harmony is impaired. Once more we are accustomed to rhyme, and to certain forms of versification in our poetry. The early Anglo-Saxons did not employ rhyme; the peculiar cadence, with alliteration, of their verse cannot easily be reproduced; and there is much difference of opinion as to the prosody or scansion of Anglo-Saxon verse. Thus, till we can read Anglo-Saxon easily, and while we only read its poetry through translations, we are apt to think less highly of it than it deserves.

Again, the ideas and manners of the Anglo-Saxons were not like our own in many details. Their poets did not write for us, but for men of their own time, whose taste and ways of thinking and living were in many respects very different from ours.

If many people cannot now take pleasure in the novels of Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, Thackeray, and Dickens—the novels of 1745-1870—because these seem "so old-fashioned," they will certainly be unable to admire the poetry of 500-800. Yet it may be excellent poetry, when we put ourselves as far as we can in the place of the hearers for whom it was composed. If we fail to do this we may read Anglo-Saxon poetry as a matter of history, but, as poetry, we cannot enjoy it.