Читать книгу We British: The Poetry of a People - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 8

It begins in Yorkshire, on the coast by Whitby, in the year 657. Peat-smoke, the sound of waves and gulls, and winding through them the music of a harp, and words chanted in a language and a dialect so far-away we can barely understand one of them.

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,

Meotodes meahte on his modgeðanc,

weorc Wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,

ece Drihten, or onstealde.

He ærest sceop eorþan bearnum

heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend;

þa middangeard moncynnes Weard,

ece Drihten, æfter teode

firum foldan, Frea ælmihtig.

It’s a very simple little hymn, and the traditional starting point for English poetry. Later on, we’re going to hear a lot from the educated and self-confident elite of the British countries, poets from the great cities and the courts of barons and kings. But we start with a middle-aged man, Caedmon, whose name isn’t English – it might be Celtic – and who was a herdsman looking after bullocks and heifers before he joined the great monastery of Abbess Hild as a farm labourer.

He was too shy to take his turn singing poems with the other labourers and monks, and retired to a stable where he fell asleep and had a vision in which he was told to sing about God. His story was told to the abbess, who commanded him to sing, with wonderful results.

We know about all of this because of the great chronicler Bede, who was working in Jarrow just fifty years after it all happened. Bede insists, again and again, on the remarkable nature of what Caedmon did. Why? In modern translation his hymn sounds pious but almost blandly straightforward:

Now we must praise the Guardian of Heaven,

the might of the Lord and his purpose of mind,

the work of the Glorious Father; for he,

God Eternal, established each wonder,

he, Holy Creator, first fashioned

heaven as a roof for the sons of men.

Then a Guardian of Mankind adorned

this middle earth below, the world for men,

Everlasting Lord, Almighty King.

This hardly seems like the beginning of the great story of English poetry. But almost everything about it should unsettle our sense of who we are, right at the beginning.

Let’s start with the obvious, the Christian theme of the poem. Caedmon’s world had been, until relatively recently, a pagan one. Christianity had arrived in Britain long before, towards the end of the Roman era; and it was strongly established in Wales, Ireland and western Scotland, in the Celtic Church whose rites went back to early Rome. Since then, however, the waves of Germanic invaders – Angles from Denmark and northern Germany, the Saxons and the Jutes – had pushed the old Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants to the west, re-establishing paganism as they slaughtered, and then settled.

Now, Northumbria, one of the new and powerful Germanic kingdoms of Britain, was being reintroduced to the religion of Christ by missionaries from the Scottish island of Iona, themselves originally Irish. In modern times, we often assume that new ideas bubble up from the south and move north – and for centuries the Celts and the Irish were regarded by the southern English as barbarians. All wrong: right here at the beginning of the story, the new Christian religion had been brought southwards and eastwards from the north and west. Caedmon’s monastery itself had been founded by Irish monks.

Eventually, a different form of Christianity would push up across the Channel, and establish a new base at Canterbury, after Pope Gregory I sent Bishop Augustine to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent in 596. But when our ploughman made his poetry he was living in the Celtic religious world, not the English one. Caedmon’s Northumbria, with its monasteries at Lindisfarne, Whitby and Jarrow, was a great European centre of learning until it fell to the Vikings. And if many today think of Canterbury as the natural home of ‘English Christianity’, let’s remember that Canterbury’s power owed much to the arrival of a Greek, Theodore, and a North African monk, Hadrian.

Caedmon’s Britain was differently shaped from today’s state. After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, the islands were a hodge-podge of tiny warring statelets: warlords passed power to their children and established royal dynasties. These slowly congealed into larger kingdoms. The great ethnic division was between the Celtic or British people still surviving in the west and north, and their enemies, the immigrant Germanic tribes of the south and east. Today ‘Welsh’ describes the land and the people to the west of Offa’s Dyke, the smallest of the nations of Britain. But around the time Caedmon was writing, the ‘Welsh’ were everywhere. There was for instance a kingdom of Welsh-speaking people to the north, centred on Edinburgh, fighting for their survival against the Saxons of Northumbria.

The tragic war poem about their failure and slaughter, Y Goddodin, is considered one of the earliest Welsh poems; it’s classic, heroic-battle-against-the-odds stuff, though it perhaps didn’t help its three hundred heroes that they had spent a year getting drunk on mead before they finally went into battle. Although the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians were pushing the British or Celtic people back, there was no sense that one side was more cultured than the other. The heroes of Goddodin seem, as it happens, to have been Christians fighting pagans.

Does any of this matter much? Only because we need to shake up our ideas about what the very words ‘British’, ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ mean. This was a harried, violent and marginal archipelago in which the offer of Christianity spread remarkably fast because it promised a happy and tranquil life after death – a great alternative to the cold, dangerous and relatively short experience of life in Northumbria, or anywhere else.

But it would also be a mistake to think of Caedmon’s Britain as simply a wilderness of macho warlords. Note, for a start, that he answered not to a man, but to a woman – the abbess. For much of the Anglo-Saxon period, religious institutions for men and women existed side by side, with female religious leaders highly literate and, in their own way, powerful. Very little writing by them has survived, but we know enough to understand that in the world of the Church, at least, women could be as powerful as princesses. Second, from artworks that have survived, in gold hoards or the glorious illuminated manuscripts, we know that the Britain of Caedmon’s time had a highly developed artistic sense; its people valued intricacy, complexity and show-off display. Although in translation his hymn may seem simple enough to us, in the original Anglo-Saxon it was a dazzling weave of assonance and rhythm, as carefully wrought as a letter colourfully inscribed in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

So, what of the language itself? I’ve called it Anglo-Saxon, and that’s the term most scholars would use; but that’s a very loose description of something that was in fact written in a specific Northumbrian dialect.

The marvel of Caedmon, according to Bede, was that he could pour out poetry while being, by the standards of the day, an uneducated man. In other words, he didn’t speak Latin. Today we are used to thinking of Latin as the dry, dead, elite language of scholars and priests. Back then it was still the left-behind language of the Roman Empire, heard all over the place. In fact, it seems to have been more used in the west and the north than in the south.

Bede said Britain had five languages: English, by which he meant the Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon; British, close to what we would call Welsh; Irish; Pictish – another ancient British language from Scotland, now vanished; and Latin, which he said ‘is in general use among them all’.

Latin was the language of the monasteries; yet it is only thanks to the monasteries that we have any early English surviving at all. In fact a single book, presented to Exeter monastery around 1070, contains the single greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in a mishmash of Germanic dialects. This is a language which takes root for just long enough that it can’t be torn up again by the next wave of invaders, the Scandinavian Vikings; and it’s still buried inside the mouths of everyone who speaks modern English today.

Caedmon’s world, the great, humane monasteries of the north-east, would soon be obliterated. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the record for the year 793 reads:

Dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying into the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.

Eventually Caedmon’s tongue found its defender in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Meanwhile, the thread of human thought and communication ran mainly in Latin. Even the old British scripts used for cutting language into stone and onto slate, runes and ogam were simplified versions of Latin letters. So having no Latin in a monastery was, even for a cowherd, a huge disability. What was miraculous to Caedmon’s contemporaries was that he used the earthy, rhythmic old German way of making poetry and applied it directly to a religious subject.

I hope it’s obvious by now that Caedmon wouldn’t have thought of himself as English – England as a country name didn’t yet exist. His very name is probably Celtic, and alongside the Irish he’d have known in his monastery there were almost certainly Scandinavians too. It wasn’t at all obvious that the west Saxons and their language would eventually triumph, or that the people of the biggest bit of the archipelago would one day call themselves English. Politically, everything was still up for grabs. We know this by looking at other early poems. For instance, ‘The Battle of Maldon’ is about a defeat of the English by the Danes, while ‘The Battle of Brunanburg’ describes a close-run-thing victory by Aethelstan, the ruler of Wessex, often described as the first King of England, over an alliance between the Viking King of Dublin, the King of the Picts and the Scots.

As the relentless warfare went on, almost everywhere Christianity was gaining ground. But outside the monasteries, almost everywhere, the older beliefs remained potent. This was a world still confused about the contradictions between the old Norse warrior culture, which was pagan and toughly pessimistic, and Christianity. The enormous poem Beowulf – not even set, by the way, in Britain but in Denmark – is famously confused between its Christian vision and its pagan funerals. Beowulf is famous but it’s not much fun, except in the modern translation and rewriting by Seamus Heaney. Instead, here’s something from the wonderful ecstatic poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’, in which the anguish of daily life is confronted by God Almighty, who seems to be something like a young Saxon chieftain:

then the young warrior, God Almighty,

stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed

upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.

I quivered when the hero clasped me …

… now I look day by day

for that time when the cross of the Lord,

which once I saw in a dream here on earth,

will fetch me away from this fleeting life

and listening to the home of joy and happiness

where people of God are seated at the feast

in eternal bliss …

Here is a Warrior Christ, more like a Viking than a Hebrew figure, sitting down for a good old-fashioned feast – the early British didn’t have much to compare things to, beyond their own lives and culture.

What sustained them? Apart from the hope of heaven, the answer is the security of their extended families or clans: thirty-five distinct tribes were recorded around the time of Caedmon’s hymn. The most heavily populated areas were still the lowland farming territories, whose forests had been felled, and land ploughed, in prehistoric times. The Anglo-Saxon landscape was already old and heavily marked by the huge expansion of farming in the Bronze Age, and the burial mounds, castles and henges of earlier Britons. Caedmon’s people lived in a haunted landscape. Much of the infrastructure of Romano-British culture remained semi-intact. The new Saxon settlement of Lundenwic, just to the west of the walls of Roman Londinium, had well-built-up river embankments and trade facilities. To the north, towns such as Newcastle kept their Roman names well into the 400s; York was a well-established Christian centre from Roman times.

People lived in their local tribal polities, but they travelled widely. Saxon roads, unmetalled, have rarely survived, but Roman roads were still being heavily used, and archaeology confirms that there was a vigorous shipping economy and trade with the Continent. Whether trading, raiding or fishing, the Anglo-Saxon British were at least as much a seafaring race as the British of the time of Raleigh, or Nelson. Hardly any of their boats survive, for obvious reasons, but there are two substantial ships, one from the famous Sutton Hoo burial, and the other from Graveney in Kent. Modern reconstructions of these clinker-built vessels (that is, overlapping planks, pinned together) suggest that they could travel long distances at around ten knots, a considerable speed, using a coarse cotton sail. Though very different from the sleeker Viking longships, these Saxon vessels could also be rowed at speed up rivers and along coasts, and beached very easily. Large numbers of finds by archaeologists and amateurs using metal detectors show that Anglo-Saxon Britain traded extensively across the North Sea and the Channel. Discoveries of French and German pottery and glass, and Continental coins, confirm that this was a well-connected culture. In a famous poem, ‘The Seafarer’, here translated by the modern poet Ezra Pound, we get a vivid sense of what this really meant. Addressing the soft-living, wine-drinking landlubbers, the poet reminds them:

… how I in harsh days

Hardship endured oft.

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round and hunger begot

Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

Deprived of my kinsmen;

Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

There I heard naught save the harsh sea

And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,

Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,

Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,

The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.

Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern

In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

With spray on his pinion.

Bringing luxuries from the Rhine and the Seine was hard and dangerous work. And through most of the Anglo-Saxon era, Scandinavian raiders and pirates were an ever-present threat. Even on dry land, what mattered most in this dangerous world was what matters most still in today’s colonised and harried societies, such as Iraq or Syria: a tight local network of kith and kin, to provide and sustain. Few things were scarier than exile, or losing your overlord. In ‘The Wanderer’, one of the great surviving poems of the period, it’s being excluded that really hurts:

… I had to bind my feelings in fetters,

often sad at heart, cut off from my country,

far from my kinsmen, after, long ago,

dark clothes of earth covered my gold-friend;

I left that place in wretchedness,

ploughed the icy waves with winter in my heart;

in the sadness I sought far and wide

for a treasure-giver, for a man

who would welcome me into his mead-hall,

give me good cheer (for I boasted no friends),

entertain me with delights.

Anglo-Saxon poetry harps (literally) again and again on the loss of warrior-comrades as if it’s the worst possible thing that could happen. There is remarkably little from a woman’s point of view. Anglo-Saxon women had greater property and legal rights than medieval women enjoyed, and some exercised considerable power, in monasteries and in the courts. The random destruction of literature means that we have only a single poem in a woman’s voice: it complains about the disappearance of a husband – apparently after some misbehaviour – leaving his wife to the brutal mercies of his family.

Early and late, I must undergo hardship

because of the feud of my own dearest loved one.

Men forced me to live in a forest grove,

under an oak tree in the earth-cave.

This cavern is age-old; I am choked with longings.

Gloomy are the valleys, too high the hills,

harsh strongholds overgrown with briars;

a joyless abode. The journey of my Lord so often

cruelly seizes me. There are lovers on earth,

lovers alive who lie in bed,

when I pass through this earth-cave alone

and out under the oak tree at dawn;

there I must sit through the long summer’s day

and there I mourn my miseries …

Along with the misery and mourning, the poet, then, understands that there are good married lives to be had. She has been forced out of her community, into the woods. We used to think of Anglo-Saxon Britain as being very heavily wooded. In fact, modern historians of the landscape tell us, much of the country had been opened up for farming for a thousand years or more.

There’s a strong sense in this poem of life being literally close to the earth, and surrounded by foliage. That’s an obvious separation from our lives today. Back then, even impressive towns were tiny and dangerous. Here is a fragment of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem about Durham, rare in being written after the Norman Conquest:

All Britain knows of this noble city,

its breathtaking sight: buildings backed

by rocky slopes appear over a precipice.

(And, particularly if you pass through by train, Durham is pretty much like that today. But hang on:)

Weirs hem and madden a headstrong river,

diverse fish dance in the foam.

Sprawling, tangled thicket has sprung up

there; those deep dales are the haunt

of many animals, countless wild beasts.

Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon Britain was studded with trading towns and urban centres huddled around churches, even if most of them, being made of wood and straw, have long disappeared. Durham, like York, got its sense of itself through the saints and missionaries buried there.

But what about the rest of the people? What sense of history did they have? Who did they think they were? We know we live in the twenty-first century. But by seven or eight centuries after the Roman legions had left, most British had no real sense of how their own history connected to that of the rest of mankind. There’s a wonderful eighth-century poem in which an Anglo-Saxon wanders through the ruins of Bath:

Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate;

the city-buildings crumble; the works of the Giants decay.

Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,

barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,

houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,

undermined by age. The Earth’s embrace,

its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;

they are perished and gone.

So who were these craftsmen, who used techniques no longer understood, and built such walls? Wrongly, the Anglo-Saxon poet, himself a representative of the people who destroyed the Romano-British world, thinks they must have been destroyed by the plague, a contemporary problem; and he imagines them as being like bigger Anglo-Saxons – warriors bestriding courts where

… Once many a man

joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour,

proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour …

Interesting, isn’t it, that passing reference to wine? But this Anglo-Saxon tourist is most impressed that these extraordinary people washed themselves, a pleasure which he almost salivates over:

Stone houses stood here; a hot spring

gushed in a wide stream; a stone wall

enclosed the bright interior; the baths

were there, the heated water; that was convenient.

They allowed the scalding water to pour

over the grey stone into the circular pool …

And in ‘The Seafarer’, the poem quoted earlier, we get a similar strong sense that the world has decayed since the great days of – presumably – the Romans. That poet speaks of:

Days little durable,

And all arrogance of earthen riches,

There come now no kings nor Cæsars

Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

Howe’er in mirth most magnified,

Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,

Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

This pessimism, so different from the Christian celebration of Caedmon, is something we should take with a pinch of salt. Anglo-Saxon Britain was full of advanced and sophisticated craftsmanship, from ornate goldwork to well-built ships and fine vellum books. No serious historian of the age now regards it simply as a time of anarchy and disaster. But if there is pessimism it is surely driven by politics – the restless, bloody tribal struggles that convulsed all of Britain, from the Picts in northern Scotland to the lands of the Jutes in southern England. Local warlordism isn’t much fun even for the warlords. It isn’t until the 800s, as the kingdom of the west Saxons pushed back against its Mercian, Northumbrian and Viking enemies, that the possibility of a dominant nation, an ‘England’, begins to emerge. Alfred the Great first managed to unite Wessex with Mercia, and then reached out until he could call himself the king of all the Anglo-Saxons. We know from a life written by the Welsh cleric Asser that Alfred was brought up on English poetry, though we don’t know what that was. As a ruler he was much more than a warlord, a highly ambitious and cultured figure, in touch with the latest developments on the Continent. Alfred personally oversaw the translation of key European Christian texts from Latin into English. He imported French and German men of letters. He began – almost, it seems, single-handedly – to forge a coherent English culture.

Despite the devastating effects of the Norse raids on monasteries, with their books, we might from this point have expected a steady growth and flowering of English poetry.

It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for another three centuries, again because of dynastic politics, in this case the unwanted arrival of those transplanted Vikings with their strange foreign tongue, the Normans. Eventually, the violent collision between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman French would produce a supple, flexible new language. But the hugely disruptive collision of the Conquest meant that there is a long gap after 1066 before we hear again the authentic voice of ordinary British people expressed in verse in their own language. No doubt it once existed. But it’s gone, and gone forever.

If the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, it would have been a poetry of lamentation. The Chronicle ends by describing the coronation of the man it calls simply Count William, who despite earlier promises ‘laid taxes on people very severely’. He and Bishop Odo then ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!’

But there was more to this than the clash of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Recent scholarly work points out that the pre-Norman Conquest court of Cnut, king of most of Scandinavia as well as England (and the Canute who mocked himself by ordering back the waves) and the court of Edward the Confessor were open to Danish, German, French and Latin learning. English queens were notable early sponsors of what became French literature. Britain in this period was very much part of Europe, and its dynasties were interlinked with those of France, Sweden and Hungary. The cowherds spoke Anglo-Saxon; but on the coasts and in the towns you would have heard a chatter of Norse, Latin, French – and Welsh too. For the people speaking the old British or Celtic languages hadn’t gone away. What was their poetry like? Mostly oral, of course, and therefore mostly lost, of course. We have infuriatingly few fragments to go on, but there is an Irish poem about a fair in County Wexford, around the time of the Norman Conquest, which gives some idea of early non-English poetry in these islands:

There are the Fair’s great privileges:

trumpets, harps, hollow-throated horns,

Pipers, timpanists unwearied,

poets and meet musicians.

Tales of Find and the Fianna, a matter inexhaustible,

sackings, forays, wooings,

tablets, and books of lore,

satires, keen riddles:

Proverbs, maxims …

… The Chronicle of women, tales of armies, conflicts,

hostels, tabus, captures …

Pipes, fiddles, gleemen,

bone-players and bag-pipers,

a crowd hideous, noisy, profane

shriekers and shouters.

They exert all their efforts

for the king of seething Berba:

the King, noble and honoured,

pays for each art its proper honour.

That’s a translation, of course, by Professor Thomas Owen Clancy of Glasgow University. He makes it sound great fun – like a modern literary festival on acid. Not everybody in the so-called dark ages was having a miserable time.