Old English or Anglo-Saxon Literature

The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ covers the early, foundational period in the formation of the English

people, language and culture, initiated by the Anglo-Saxon conquest – the invasion and

occupation, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, of the former Roman colony of Britannia by

the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic peoples generically referred to as the ‘Anglo-

Saxons. The alternative term of ‘Old English’ has come to be used in literary and cultural

studies only in the 19th century, in order to eliminate any possible suggestion of discontinuity

between Anglo-Saxon and modern English language and culture, thus including the Anglo-

Saxon period as a first and foundational stage in development of English culture and letters.

The development of Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture

The Anglo-Saxon invaders occupied the southern and eastern part of the island, displacing

the largely Romanized and Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain, who retreated to the

more confined, mountain-guarded areas of the west (Wales and Cornwall) and north (the

Highlands of Scotland). The old Roman order and the native Celtic civilization disintegrated

rapidly in front of this new and massive colonization, even though there is a whole mythical

tradition about fierce Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, supposedly led by

the legendary King Arthur. But the island’s Germanic colonization brought with it a

civilization that quickly took root in the new soil. This is evident in the abundance of place-

names of Anglo-Saxon origin, now essentially English place-names, which attest their

massive ownership of homesteads and cultivated lands, and the extent to which they imposed

their language in their areas of settlement. Of course, alongside their language, they brought

with them their pagan beliefs and worldview, and their characteristic warrior traditions and

social organization forms.

At first, their social formations were essentially tribal organizations, based on the

cohesion of extended family clans and ties of kinship, grouped around a lord who ruled with

absolute authority, supported by a class of faithful warriors, or liegemen/retainers, bound to

their leader by a strict code of loyalty and mutual duty. Of course, the various tribes were

likely to be conquered by the more powerful ones, and soon became united into small

kingdoms: Wessex, West Mercia, Northumbria. The kingdom of Wessex, with Winchester as

its capital, became the largest, the most powerful and influential one, reaching the peak of its

development in the 9th century, under King Alfred the Great (848-99), who ruled over a large

part of what was to become the English people and nation, then occupying the largest part of

the fertile arable land in southern Britain. Actually, in his writings, King Alfred, who was

also a man of wide learning and culture, refers to the language of his people as ‘englisc’. This

was a language that had certainly evolved since the sixth century and become, despite its

regional dialectal variations, into a common language now distinct from the Germanic

dialects brought to the island in the 6th century, as well as from the contemporary ‘Saxon’

tongue of the continental Germans. More importantly, this incipient ‘englisc’ people,

language and culture had been united and catalyzed not only by a common form of speech

and common traditions, but also by the Christian religion, which had been instrumental in

establishing the propitious setting and matrix for the development of the kingdom’s cultural

life.

Christianity in Anglo-Saxon culture

The process of re-Christianization, or rather the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxon peoples

of Britain began at the end of the 6th century, in AD 596, when a group of Benedictine

missionaries, led by Augustine, were sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great. The pagan

inhabitants were successfully converted and received Christianity by way of mass baptisms.

But once its evangelizing work was done, the mission’s preoccupation was to secure the

continuance of its success by establishing the necessary places of worship and Christian

learning necessary for perpetuating and reinforcing the ethos of the new faith. The

Benedictines established an impressive chain of monasteries and seats of ecclesiastical

learning, which linked Britain to the Latin civilization of the Roman Church and to the

incipient Christian national cultures of Western Europe.

Poetry

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with

them the common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for

panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after the

conversion of King Aethelberht I of Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that

the English wrote poetry in their own language. But St. Bede the Venerable, in his Historia

ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), wrote that in

the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd, was inspired in a dream to

compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed verses based on the

Scripture, which was expounded for him by the monks at Streaneshalch (now called Whitby),

but only the “Hymn of Creation” survives. Caedmon legitimized the native verse form by

adapting it to Christian themes. Others, following his example, gave England a body of

vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before the end of the 1st millennium.

Alliterative verse

Virtually all Old English poetry is written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a

syntactical break, or caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration

linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The

poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying

standard epithets to various classes of characters, and depicting scenery with such recurring

images as the eagle and the wolf, which wait during battles to feast on carrion, and ice and

snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems such formulas, far

from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from which

poets could draw. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for

a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g., swan-road used to name the sea); and

variation, the repeating of a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new

level of meaning. That these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of literary

production suggests the extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp

accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard. Often bold and strong, but also mournful

and elegiac in spirit, this poetry emphasizes the sorrow and ultimate futility of life and the

helplessness of humans before the power of fate. Almost all this poetry is composed without

rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed syllables alternating with an

indeterminate number of unstressed ones. This line strikes strangely on ears habituated to the

usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmical unit, or foot, theoretically consists of a

constant number (either one or two) of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow

any stressed syllable. Another unfamiliar but equally striking feature in the formal character

of Old English poetry is structural alliteration, or the use of syllables beginning with similar

sounds in two or three of the stresses in each line.

Anglo-Saxon poetry

The experiential and philosophical poetics of the Anglo-Saxons informs a complex,

sophisticated poetry. It speaks of a male-centred, tribal society structured by the bond

between the lord and his liegemen, of the virtues of heroism, and the ineluctability of wyrd

(fate).

Deeply set in the social, communal space of the tribe or kingdom, poetry is an

essentially public, communal art, cultivated by skilled bards. It required the learning of rules

of diction and versification. The bard, or scop (from the verb scieppan, meaning to create,

shape), also known as a gleeman, an entertainer (from gleo-man), had to undergo up to 20

years of training. The prosody is characterized by 2 double stress half lines, with the strict

observance of stress, caesura and the wide use of alliteration. The creations chanted at public

festivities are based on the solemnity of repetitions that punctuated the recitation.

Improvisation was an important skill of the Scop or Sceop. Beowulf contains repeated

references to the clear song of the scop, whose dignity is that of a thane of the king’s.

Anglo-Saxon poetic forms were preserved in diverse ways. There are 30,000 lines of

written verse which survived in a collection of manuscripts known as Junius, Vitellius,

Vercelli manuscripts and the Exeter Book. There are also numerous Runic alphabet

engravings (the writan means to engrave), which served as mnemonic inscriptions, many

based on the trope of prosopopoea, or personification. Poetry was linked to the recording and

perpetuation of the communal history, its memory verses being actually live records of laws,

genealogies and the mythology of the Thule. Other popular forms were the gnomes,

instructive fables mixing human experience and fairytales. Charms were short, magically

endowed creations based on the use of hypnotic repetition and imperatives.

Epic poetry. Beowulf

Epic poems were the artistic hallmark of a heroic society taking pride in communal sagas of

survival, recited by its minstrels during the festive gathering of warriors in the mead-hall.

They sing of an ordered society, ruled by a developed sense of ornament, tradition,

moralizing, assimilation. A surviving saga known as the Legends of Volkerwanderung (4-6th

c.) speaks of the vagaries of Germanic peoples and reflects on the experience of loyalty,

revenge, treachery, exile. The Battle of Finnesburgh narrates adventures of the Danes. Their

actions predominate in this continental saga of warring with no clear motivation, despite the

reflections which suggest a Christian moral perspective.

The only complete Germanic epic that has come down to us is Beowulf (1st half of 8th

c.) – a long heroic epos full of compelling portraits and feelings of grief, loss, compassion,

gratitude, exile, sadness. The surviving 3138 alliterative metres (500 AD) are informed by

Scandinavian history and legend, telling a story of monster-slaying in Scandinavia. Beowulf

narrates the battles of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe in what is now southern

Sweden), against the monstrous Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a fire-breathing dragon.

The poem can be seen in the 10th century manuscript Cotton Vitellius A. XV in the

British Museum. It is believed to be pre-Christian composition transcribed by a monastic

scribe so as to give it a Christian frame of reference, postdating the composition by 3-4

hundred years – which is a theory no longer tenable, though.

The anonymous Christian narrator finds a pagan world of heroism compatible with

Christian virtues. The recognizable English elements are the harp and the King’s council (the

Witan). The poem draws together two different ontological and epistemological strands –

pagan and Christian – and the elements of action, reflection and narration mirror the

progressive transition to Christianity. This double perspective is voiced through the

characters’ pagan beliefs, intermingled and qualified by those of the Christian narrator. The

systems of belief coexisting in the poem alternately foreground Fate and God, while the

narrative moralization about a truly ideal hero sacrificing himself in the confrontation

between good and evil juxtaposes the pagan and Christian models of the hero and saviour.

All these qualities of form and spirit are exemplified in Beowulf. Beginning and

ending with the funeral of a great king, and composed against a background of impending

disaster, it describes the exploits of a Scandinavian cultural hero, Beowulf, in destroying the

monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. In these sequences Beowulf

is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a savior of the people. The Old Germanic virtue of

mutual loyalty between leader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the aged

Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert him in

this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry with which fragments of other heroic tales are

incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to

symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized.

Another feature of Beowulf is the weakening of the sense of the ultimate power of

arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That

feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved

by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early

conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities.

The fragile political and social order imposed on their dangerous world by the

Scandinavian chieftains is confronted with supernatural forces beyond their knowledge and

control, represented by the monster Grendel and his kind. His identification with the spawn of

Cain unmistakeably harks back to the Christian representation of the source of evil on earth.

Among the forces undoing human order, Grendel is identified as ‘Godes andsaca’, the enemy

of God. Opposed to him is the selfless, self-sacrificing hero and his faithful warriors. The

ensuing parallels with the New Testament’s Saviour allow a reading in which supra-biblical

concepts of the hero lend themselves to interpretations of Christ’s acts and the missions and

martyrdoms of his saints.

Like any foundational epos of a cultural space, this epic poem of the Scandinavian

ethos is aimed at the narrating and celebrating of heroic achievements. Its geographical and

cultural scope is larger than that of other similar epics, but its more loosely structured

accounts of action and location render it less coherent in its enunciation of cultural rooting

and settling. Though casually episodic, it appears as less tight than the poems of Homer or

Virgil. The descriptions of place and character, as well as the protagonists’ speeches, are

filtered through the narrator’s qualifying perspective, who, as do the heroes themselves,

mediates between settled and unsettled cultures.

The poem metaphorically reflects on the infinite mysteries of the natural world and its

arcane threats and dangers, whose ways are hard to decipher in the confused signs, portents,

meanings confronting men. King Hrothgar, the powerful creator of the majestic hall Heorot, a

symbol of man-made material splendour, is confronted with the brute force of the man-eating

Grendel. The ordering power of human creation and its works of art is humbled by the

knowledge of the limited demiurgic power of humanity before the destructive force of

overpowering, mysterious nature. Earthly glory bows to the whim of heavenly will. Human

failure is suggested by reference to man’s fall, and the King’s feud with his son-in-law

mirrors the Cain’s mortal sin.

As the king and his warriors prove helpless victims of monstrous forces, Hygelac,

who rules Geatland in southern Sweden, send to the rescue his nephew Beowulf, a mighty

Geatish hero. Beowulf crosses the sea with his 40 thanes to relieve the Danes after 12 years

of terror. Beowulf has three encounters with the otherworldly, occasions for the narrator to

expound on the heroic code, sternness and pride of the Geats. The hero shows his worth in

bare-handed confrontation, and the scop compares him to the valiant Sigmund of Germanic

legends. His journey towards the monster’s mother den is a metaphor for all the pains

associated with man’s sallying into the unknown outside his familiar world. These are also

motifs characteristic of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon poetics: the horrors of migration and

loss. The cumulative effect of the evocations of desert, darkness, wilderness, emptiness

heightens the sense of the dangers facing the outcast, the exile, the outsider. The atavistic

fears of the unknown are embodied by the monsters.

In the second part of the poem, following his heroic slaying of the monsters, Beowulf

rises to the dignity of king of the Geats. His people are also threatened by a pestering creature

who holds their gold. The king kills the treasure-keeping dragon with his faithful Wiglaf, but

is mortally wounded. His heroic, sacrificial death sanctions his unfailing bravery, and the

funeral he is given, the ceremonial pyre and the high barrow proclaim the passing of a

matchless hero. The pagan death ritual ship suggests his transition into the immortality of

deeds, to be perpetuated in the formulaic, ritualistic records of his world genealogy.

The poems proliferating stories broaden the perspective on civilization and tradition,

opening into a world of strong values, of human communion, blessed with the warmth and

comradeship of the mead-hall, the social haven of home and kin, protecting one from the

dangerous outside. The poem thoroughly reflects an ordered society of decorum and

ceremonial, bound by ties of loyalty for the lord providing protection, nourishment, a place in

the masculine hierarchy of mutual ties and obligations, with its codes of social and military

loyalty. The lord is the worthy defender of his people, while the warriors are bound in loyalty

to their ‘ring-giver’, ‘gold-friend’ and ‘founder of feasts’ as the lord is variously called in the

text. The story is haunted by premonitions of fate. Fatefully betrayed by his cowardly

liegemen, Beowulf gives his life for his people, but his death leaves a power-vacuum that can

only bring more woe. The poem ends in mourning for Beowulf, interred in a barrow with his

entire armoury, proclaiming his heroism. The description of the funeral rites and interment

customs shows a marked similarity with the funeral barrows full of artefacts discovered at

Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. The poem’s last lines evoke a pre-Christian spectacle, but the

stress on mortality and the determining nature of wyrd, but to its Christian audience it could

also have sent a message of heroic submission to a benevolent, almighty God.

Beowulf is an integrative cultural synthesis informed by balance and oppositions, by

the binaries of good and evil attending human destiny on earth: social protection/alien nature,

ends/beginnings; rising/setting, youth/age, nature/civilization, familiar space/wilderness,

peace/anger, generosity/selfishness, personal/collective achievement, order/disorder/chaos.

The text echoes with bitter reminders of life’s transience, through its abounding images of

death, temporal existence, mortality, time. An important moral admonition regards the danger

of gold-hoarding, and the futility of greed in front of death. The stress on the treasure’s

immortality suggests not so much the endurance of gold and material artefacts, but reverence

for the memorial value of the work of old, of the ancestors’ testimony of their engagement

with their world trough art and creation art. Riches in themselves hold not a material but a

creative value. The poem is imbued with just pride in civilization’s artefacts, illustrated by

the ample descriptions of armours, sculptures, metal work, embroidery, the distinguishing

achievements of Anglo-Saxon civilization.

Ultimately, Beowulf resounds with genuine human celebration. Its proliferating

stories tell of earthly joys and sorrows, and the heroism of man’s struggles, of his

transcendence of time through creation and art. It also contains allegories of salvation. If

Christians are saved through Christ, the heathen Geats are doomed by Beowulf’s death. The

poem’s pervasive mysticism is evident in its careful numerological patterns, in its cycles of

creation and destruction. There is a constant tension between mythical double mentalities and

archetypes of cosmogonies, apocalypses and the promise of the last judgement.

The solemn, yet lively, conversational tonality of the poem owes to the oral style

devices which beckon to the primary public function of the epic. This is particularly striking

in the recurrent appeal for attention ‘Lo’, the mark of orality styles and the art of epic

storytelling. The prosody is informed by sound patterns whose calculated effect was meant to

be achieved when the poem was intoned and chanted to harp accompaniment. Its heavy use

of autonomasia, a complex, compound metaphor used for describing a thing, the so-called

kenning (land-dwellers, bone-frame, house’s mouth, heath-rover, i.e. stag) is specific to the

Anglo-Saxon poetic sensibility. The account also contains some of the best elegiac verse in

the language, and, by setting marvellous tales against a historical background in which

victory is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the poet gives the whole an elegiac

cast. Beowulf also is one of the best religious poems, not only because of its explicitly

Christian passages but also because Beowulf’s monstrous foes are depicted as God’s enemies

and Beowulf himself as God’s champion.

Elegiac and heroic verse

Other heroic narratives are fragmentary. Of “The Battle of Finnsburh” and “Waldere” only

enough remains to indicate that, when whole, they must have been fast-paced and stirring. Of

several poems dealing with English history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the

most notable is “The Battle of Brunanburh,” a panegyric on the occasion of King Athelstan’s

victory over a coalition of Norsemen and Scots in 937. But the best historical poem is not

from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. “The Battle of Maldon,” which describes the defeat of

Aldorman Byrhtnoth and much of his army at the hands of Viking invaders in 991, discovers

in defeat an occasion to celebrate the heroic ideal, contrasting the determination of many of

Byrhtnoth’s thanes to avenge his death or die in the attempt with the cowardice of others who

left the field. ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (1000) narrates of the battle of an Essex nobleman

against the Vikings around the year 991. Its heroic style serves the expression of a code of

action which exhorts to martyrdom for the liege-lord King Ethelred and the nation (folc,

foldan), which points to a strong, precocious sense of cultural unity. It also calls for sacrifice

in the name of Christian culture against the pagans. Minor poetic genres include catalogues

(two sets of “Maxims” and “Widsith,” a list of rulers, tribes, and notables in the heroic age),

dialogues, metrical prefaces and epilogues to prose works of the Alfredian period, and

liturgical poems associated with the Benedictine Office.

The elegies

The term elegy is used of Old English poems that lament the loss of worldly goods, glory, or

human companionship. “The Wanderer” is narrated by a man, deprived of lord and kinsmen,

whose journeys lead him to the realization that there is stability only in heaven. “The

Seafarer” is similar, but its journey motif more explicitly symbolizes the speaker’s spiritual

yearnings. Several others have similar themes, and three elegies – “The Husband’s Message,”

“The Wife’s Lament,” and “Wulf and Eadwacer” – describe what appears to be a

conventional situation: the separation of husband and wife by the husband’s exile.

The few surviving pieces of lyrical poetry are gathered in a collection of manuscripts

called the Exeter Book, which is kept, as the name indicates, in the chapter of Exeter

Cathedral. The emotional charge and tonality of the poems qualifies them as elegies, a poetic

subgenre informed by expressions of nostalgia and regret for the better days of bygone times,

lamentations for lost life, friends, fortune, privileges, things and people held dear, in other

words for the inexorability of the passage of time, change, and death.

Even if they are expressions of personal grief, in the Anglo-Saxon elegies, much as in

Beowulf, the key scenes and emotions conveyed concentrate on the ethos of communal life

rather than the singularity of personal experience. Old English poets produced a number of

more or less lyrical poems of shorter length, which do not contain specific Christian doctrine

and which evoke the Anglo-Saxon sense of the harshness of circumstance and the sadness of

the human lot. “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” are among the most beautiful of this

group of Old English poems.

“Deor’s Lament” tells a story of a bard’s loss of his lord’s patronage. It describes the

links of loyalty between patron and vassal, and the misfortunes of the displacement attending

disfavour. The poem is a first-person lament of the former scop now supplanted by a rival. It

offers a masterfully conducted instruction in self-consolation. It begins by offering five

examples of misfortune, in which time always healed the heroes’ suffering. The echoed

refrain ‘That evil passed. And also shall this’ covers the dual vision of Anglo-Saxon belief,

from pagan endurance of fate to Christian faith in divine providence. “Deor’s Lament”

bridges the gap between the elegy and the heroic poem, for in it a poet laments the loss of his

position at court by alluding to sorrowful stories from Germanic legend.

“Widsith” replicates the soliloquy of an imaginary scop, a ‘far-wanderer’ who

‘unlocks his word-hoard’ to describe his journeys among Teutonic peoples, princes, nations.

In depicting his exotic wanderings, he includes references to Jews, Egyptians, Assyrians,

Medes, Persians also mentioned in contexts intended to show a knowledge of the Bible. He

enumerates the rewards he earned and meditates upon the interdependence between poet and

patron.

“The Wanderer” similarly bemoans a lost lord and patron. It reveals an alienating

vision about the watery wasteland of exile. Sea appears as a disconnecter from earthbound

security, a realm of loneliness, severance, exile. However, the poem invites to the wisdom of

self-comfort and the consolations to be found in wise patience.

“The Seafarer” is built on an antithesis between the land and the sea, the realm of

exile and of bitre breostceare, i.e. bitter breast-sorrow. The feeling of displacement and loss

is literalized through the image of the hlimman sae, iscaldne waeg, i.e. pounding sea, ice-cold

wave. There is the suggestion of a self-imposed exile, in flight from the earthly treacherous

illusions. The shore seems to represent a transitory sojourn in an uncertain world, in which

only heaven represents man’s true home.

“The Ruin” is an ubi sunt type of nostalgic meditation on the relics of past glory and

the insecurity of life on earth. The longing for heavenly resolution ensues from the speaker’s

musing on the ruins of Aquae Sulis (Bath). His wonder at the former majesty of stone

bespeaks the awe of Anglo-Saxons in front of the stone structures of Roman civilization,

which somehow made the invading waves avoid the Roman settlements. The pervading

feeling is that of a temporal exile from vanished wonders and awe at the ravages of time and

wyrd.

“The Wife’s Lament” replays the theme of banishment and displacement, this time in

the context of a couple’s separation due to the husband’s social disgrace. The wife is

mourning a banished husband, and deploring the forlornness of loss and loneliness. The poem

is linked to another poem, “The Husband’s Message”.

These poems are remarkable due to their elegiac stress on loss, estrangement, exile

and the transience of early pleasure, but also to their claim to another form of heroism, man’s

resilience and resistance in times of adversity.

Other verse forms cultivated by the Anglo-Saxons are riddles. The short poetic riddles

are dense little poems which illustrate a tremendous fascination with the operation of

metaphors. A legendary parable remains that of the metaphor used by Edwin of Northumbria

at the 627 Council, describing man’s transitory lot on earth by comparing it to the

disorientation of a sparrow in a hall, whose origins and destination remain unknown.

Religious verse

Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first

such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a

humble man of the late 7th century who was described by the historian and theologian Saint

Bede the Venerable as having received the gift of song from God. Caedmon’s Hymn to God

the Creator was composed at the monastery of Whitby during the late 7th century. Later the

same type of subject matter was treated in the more ornate language of the Anglo-Saxon poet

Cynewulf and his school. The best of their productions is probably the passionate “Dream of

the Rood.”

If few poems can be dated accurately, still fewer can be attributed to particular poets.

The most important author from whom a considerable body of work survives is Cynewulf,

who wove his runic signature into the epilogues of four poems. Aside from his name, little is

known of him; he probably lived in the 9th century in Mercia or Northumbria. His works

include The Fates of the Apostles, a short martyrology. The Fates of the Apostles, signed in

runes by Cynewulf, represents Christ’s apostles as ‘12 men of noble heart’, described as

being as hardy as Nordic heroes. The Ascension (also called Christ II), a homily and biblical

narrative; Juliana, a saint’s passion set in the reign of the Roman emperor Maximian (late 3rd

century ad); and Elene, perhaps the best of his poems, which describes the mission of St.

Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to recover Christ’s cross. Cynewulf’s work is

lucid and technically elegant; his theme is the continuing evangelical mission from the time

of Christ to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. Several poems not by Cynewulf

are associated with him because of their subject matter. These include two lives of St.

Guthlac and Andreas; the latter, the apocryphal story of how St. Andrew fell into the hands of

the cannibalistic (and presumably mythical) Mermedonians, has stylistic affinities with

Beowulf. Andreas also extols a militant St. Andrew who crosses the sea to rescue St.

Matthew. Also in the “Cynewulf group” are several poems with Christ as their subject, of

which the most important is “The Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross speaks of itself as

Christ’s loyal thane and yet the instrument of his death. This tragic paradox echoes a

recurring theme of secular poetry and at the same time movingly expresses the religious

paradoxes of Christ’s triumph in death and humankind’s redemption from sin. Several poems

of the Junius Manuscript are based on the Old Testament narratives Genesis, Exodus, and

Daniel. Of these, Exodus is remarkable for its intricate diction and bold imagery. The

fragmentary Judith of the Beowulf Manuscript stirringly embellishes the story from the

Apocrypha of the heroine who led the Jews to victory over the Assyrians.

The Dream of the Rood offers a highly symbolic vision of Christ’s cross. It is centred

on a daring, surreal play with paradox and images metamorphosis. Its being quoted in a runic

inscription on the Ruthwell cross on Scottish border suggests an early date of composition. It

records sudden shifts in the narrator’s perception of Christ’s cross. It starts with the dreamer’s

vision of a gilded cross of victory, a ‘sige beam’, worshipped by angels, which inspires a

sense of shame in the early beholder. The paradoxical appearance of the cross yields an

image of sacrifice that is both glorious and moist with blood. The cross tells the story of a

tree made in to a gallows for the ‘young hero’. The cross and the hero are nailed together,

scorned and blooded. Then the cross is discarded, buried and discovered as the symbol of

salvation, glorified in heaven as the ‘best of signs’. This vision instils a sense of joy, worship

and wonder in the dreamer. The speaker appears torn between a heavenly serenity and his

attachment to earth. Heaven is glimpsed as a glorified, royal mead-hall full of the lord’s

bounty – a double image of physical, earthly comfort and the higher comforts of heavenly

grace. The poem plays with Christian paradoxes, in which the cross is represented as an icon,

a sign to be interpreted and merged with its meaning. A most impressive religious poem, The

Dream of the Rood contains a complex parable of sacrifice and salvation, as well as the

human aspiration for spiritual relief.

The major manuscripts

Most Old English poetry is preserved in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th

centuries. The Beowulf manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three

prose tracts; the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics,

riddles, didactic poems, and religious narratives; the Junius Manuscript (Bodleian Library,

Oxford)—also called the Caedmon Manuscript, even though its contents are no longer

attributed to Caedmon—contains biblical paraphrases; and the Vercelli Book (found in the

cathedral library in Vercelli, Italy) contains saints’ lives, several short religious poems, and

prose homilies. In addition to the poems in these books are historical poems in the Anglo-

Saxon Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51–150; the 31 “Metres” included in King

Alfred the Great’s translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of

Philosophy); magical, didactic, elegiac, and heroic poems; and others, miscellaneously

interspersed with prose, jotted in margins, and even worked in stone or metal.

Problems of dating

Few poems can be dated as closely as Caedmon’s “Hymn.” King Alfred’s compositions fall

into the late 9th century, and Bede composed his “Death Song” within 50 days of his death on

May 25, 735. Historical poems such as “The Battle of Brunanburh” (after 937) and “The

Battle of Maldon” (after 991) are fixed by the dates of the events they commemorate. A

translation of one of Aldhelm’s riddles is found not only in the Exeter Book but also in an

early 9th-century manuscript at Leiden, Neth. And at least a part of “The Dream of the Rood”

can be dated by an excerpt carved on the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshire,

Scot.). But in the absence of such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and the

scholarly consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North in the 8th and

9th centuries gave way to uncertainty during the last two decades of the 20th century. Many

now hold that “The Wanderer,” Beowulf, and other poems once assumed to have been written

in the 8th century are of the 9th century or later. For most poems, there is no scholarly

consensus beyond the belief that they were written between the 8th and the 11th centuries.

The early Middle English period

Poetry

The Norman Conquest worked no immediate transformation on either the

language or the literature of the English. Older poetry continued to be copied

during the last half of the 11th century; two poems of the early 12th century

—“Durham,” which praises that city’s cathedral and its relics, and “Instructions

for Christians,” a didactic piece—show that correct alliterative verse could be

composed well after 1066. But even before the conquest, rhyme had begun to

supplant rather than supplement alliteration in some poems, which continued to

use the older four-stress line, although their rhythms varied from the set types

used in classical Old English verse. A post-conquest example is “The Grave,”

which contains several rhyming lines; a poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on

the death of William the Conqueror, lamenting his cruelty and greed, has more

rhyme than alliteration.

Early Middle English poetry – Of Man, People and History

If much of the poetic creation of the Anglo-Saxons emphasized the relation between man and

society, the poetry of the subsequent period focuses on the origins of the nation and its

history. A most influential work, which inaugurates the cultivation of a foundational epic,

replete with a myth of origins and the narrative of a heroic past, is Historia Regum Britanniae

(1130-8) by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1130-55). This loosely assembled compilation of

historical allusion and whimsical flights of fancy, of historiographic ambition of unbridled

invention, was to represent a significant source of material and inspiration for proliferating

epic poems weaving fabulous, legendary narratives of the birth and growth of the British

people.

Monmouth, a Welsh monk latterly promoted to the bishopric of St. Asaph, upholds

and promotes the ascendancy of the Welsh nation in the future destiny of Britain. His

creative, imaginative and highly inventive approach to history helps construct a mythological

genealogy of his people. Claiming that his history is translated from ‘a very old book in the

British tongue’, he adapts oral traditions, amplified by imaginative facts and explanation

(such as the origin of place-names). The 190 surviving manuscripts circulated all over Europe

and became the seminal written source of most legends about King Arthur and his society of

the Round Table.

His ‘history’ creates and spreads a flattering myth of origin according to which the

British are the descendants of the Trojan prince Brutus (son of Sylvius and great-grandson of

Aeneas). Brutus supposedly fled from Troy and landed in Devon, where he defeated a race of

giants and founded the city of Troynovant, the future London. From this founding Brutus

springs forth an ancient line of kings whose stories will inspire Elizabethan writers

(Gorboduc, Lear, Cymbeline). Monmouth proposes an assertively British narrative fiercely

averse to the Saxon invaders, which extols the heritage and deplores the doom of Romano-

Celtic Britain.

Factually and chronologically incredible, it is the unreliable work of invention of a

fantasist-historian, who, nevertheless, proved to be a fertile source of inspiration, full of

political and literary potential for the coming generations of poets, storytellers and the writing

of diverse national ideologists and mythologists. His version of history profoundly inspires

and informs the literature of the 12th and 13th centuries.

The Anglo-Norman poet Geoffrey Gaimar (fl. 1140), who focuses on this myth in his

poem Estorie des Engles, invokes the mythical origins of the Britons. He narrates of the

Saxon invasions, dwelling at length on the exploits of William the Conqueror and his son

William Rufus.

Wace (b. in Jersey, c. 1100-after 1171) is another apologist for the Norman hegemony

in England. His Roman de Rou (Gestes des Normands) celebrates the conquests of the dukes

of Normandy. Roman de Brut is a verse chronicle in French octosyllabics, translating and

transforming Monmouth’s Latin history.

By the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily influenced by

French models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Laзamon, a Worcestershire

parish priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhyming couplets while

generally eschewing French vocabulary. Laзamon is tributary to Old English rather than

Norman-French traditions. The Brut draws mainly upon Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de

Brut (1155), based in turn upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (History

of the Kings of Britain). His lengthy poem of 16.000 lines, albeit based on Wace’s Roman,

was intended as a romanticizing patriotic epic addressing a wider provincial audience. In

Laзamon’s hands the Arthurian story takes on a Germanic and heroic flavour largely missing

in Wace.

His epic opens with a patriotic statement of intent, which is writing about ‘the noble

origins of the English, what they were called and whence those who first possessed England

came’. The terms English/British, England/Britain are interchangeable, confusing territorial

and cultural designations historically shaped by conflicts and conquests. He continues by

invoking how a glorious Arthur succumbs to the Saxons, which can be interpreted as an

inherited alertness to the workings of wyrd. - Britain’s moral authority from acceptance of

processes of change and decay - past and future of uncertainties, reversals, restorations of all

human experience - survival through providentially inspired continuity- Arthur stories central

to the text physically/morally- Arthur as generous, nonchalant and unswervingly mighty

warrior extolled by Anglo-Saxon poetry – imagery harkens back to a wilder heroic past;

Arthur comes down on foes like a swift wolf of the woods, his fur hung with snow

(‘bihonged with snawe’), ready to devour whatever animals (swule deor swa him likeð);

Childric is hunted through forest like a fox driven to ground - battle of Bath – fleeing Saxons

drown in river Avon like steel fish girt with swords, scales gleaming like gold-plated shields,

fins floating as if they were spears (heore scalen wleoteð swulc gold-faзe sceldes/þer fleoteð

heore spiten swulc hit spaeren weoren)- broad sweep of national history in syllabically

irregular, alliterative verse of ancestors

The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one written shortly after 1200 and the other some

50 years later. That the later version has been extensively modernized and somewhat

abridged suggests the speed with which English language and literary tastes were changing in

this period.

The Proverbs of Alfred was written somewhat earlier, in the late 12th century; these

proverbs deliver conventional wisdom in a mixture of rhymed couplets and alliterative lines,

and it is hardly likely that any of the material they contain actually originated with the king

whose wisdom they celebrate. The early 13th-century Bestiary mixes alliterative lines, three-

and four-stress couplets, and septenary (heptameter) lines, but the logic behind this mix is

more obvious than in the Brut and the Proverbs, for the poet was imitating the varied metres

of his Latin source. More regular in form than these poems is the anonymous Poema morale

in septenary couplets, in which an old man delivers a dose of moral advice to his presumably

younger audience.

By far the most brilliant poem of this period is The Owl and the Nightingale (written

after 1189), an example of the popular debate genre. The anonymous The Owl and the

Nightingale (first years of 13th c.) was found in the same manuscript compendium with one

version of Brut. It contains a debate conducted in spirited, jocular, four-stressed rhyming

couplets. While indebted to the Latin tradition of debate poetry, it grafts it on the

contemporary inclination for vernacular beast fables extracted from the popular bestiary and

drawing out moral signification from animal description. However, the poem strikes one as

more of an intellectual jeu d’esprit than a moral or didactic exercise. The birds contending in

the fable are endowed with human intelligence and articulacy. The fastidious nightingale

insults the owl’s personal hygiene and singing, while the owl claims to have a bold musical

voice, misunderstood by one chattering ‘like an Irish priest’. What begins as mere mutual

personal abuse gives way to more subtle charges and counter-charges. The owl is chastised as

being dirty, dismal, pompous, perverse and life-denying, while the nightingale is claimed to

be flighty, frivolous, libidinous and self-indulgent. The opponents score intellectual points off

one another, twist in and out of complex issues, capped aspersions and temporary advantages,

remaining caught in an irreconcilable philosophical opposition. The two birds argue topics

ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage, prognostication, and the

proper modes of worship. The nightingale stands for the joyous aspects of life, the owl for the

sombre.

As there is no clear winner, an arbiter is agreed upon, and they fly off to Portisham in

Dorset to submit to the judgement of an underpaid clerk, Master Nicholas of Guildford. The

debate is suspended as the birds go off to state their cases to Nicholas of Guildford, held to be

a wise man. The birds seem to forget their quarrel as they emphasize the provincial priest’s

wisdom; it ends with the arbitration unrealized, since, as soon as the birds fly to Dorset, the

narrator is silenced into ambiguity: ‘as to how their case went, I can tell you nothing more.

There is no more to this tale (Her nis na more of þis spelle)’

Based on contemporary legal, philosophical and theological debates, the poem is

learned in the clerical tradition but wears its learning lightly as the disputants speak in

colloquial and sometimes earthy language. Like the Poema morale, The Owl and the

Nightingale is metrically regular (octosyllabic couplets), but it uses the French metre with an

assurance unusual in so early a poem. Possibly written for the edification and amusement of a

literate but not Latinate community of nuns, it is an important contribution to the religious

and didactic culture of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Didactic poetry

The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical

narrative, saints’ lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The most

idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north of England.

Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is

interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm’s autograph and shows his

somewhat fussy efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical paraphrases

are Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the vast Cursor mundi, whose subject, as its

title suggests, is the history of the world. An especially popular work was the South English

Legendary, which began as a miscellaneous collection of saints’ lives but was expanded by

later redactors and rearranged in the order of the church calendar. The didactic tradition

continued into the 14th century with Robert Mannyng’s Handling Sin, a confessional manual

whose expected dryness is relieved by the insertion of lively narratives, and the Prick of

Conscience, a popular summary of theology sometimes attributed to the mystic Richard

Rolle.

The influence of French poetry: Chivalry and ‘Courtly’ love

The knight is represented as a solder on horse, with the armour and weapons of a mounted

warrior, a chevalier, in French. Its English equivalent comes from the Old English cniht

(young man, military servant), a concept which, after the Conquest, merely developed the

existing feudal service prevalent among ruling classes. By early 12 th century, the ancient

Germanic military system based on the apprenticeship of the young warrior had been refined,

formalized, ritualised and blessed under the concept of chivalry.

Chivalry refers to the ritual and code of conduct in French vocabulary. The chivalric

code dictated that the squire serve his term to the knight, before his own gradual ascent to the

dignity of knighthood. Being knighted involved a ritual bath, a night’s vigil, a sacramental

confession dubbed by the liege lord (king). The knight swore a binding oath before the king,

pledging to protect the weak, to right wrongs, to defend the Christian faith. This system of

aristocratic male bonding created three great crusading Military Orders: the Order of the

Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (Hospitallers) (1099), the Order of the Poor Knights of

Christ and the Temple of Solomon (Templars) (1119) and the Teutonic Knights of St Mary’s

Hospital in Jerusalem (1143).

These tightly knit bodies of celibate gentlemen soldiers were formed to protect the

pilgrim routes after the capture of the Holy City from the Saracens in 1099. Until they were

gradually forced into westward retreat by the Saracens, these orders rose to great wealth and

prestige. The Templars were disbanded in early 14th century by kings in France and England.

The idea of knighthood flourished under the royal patronage of Edward III, who

emulated the reign of Arthur and founded the Order of the Garter in 1344, as a new military

confraternity of 25 members, an order cherishing the chivalric ideal and England’s claim to

France.

The literature of chivalry emerges as a belated realization of military ideals and long

fostered literary images, with Arthur as the mirror of all Christian kings, his fabled court as

the focus of chivalric enterprise. This rapidly developing myth is consistently reinvented

within a variety of legends and Celtic myths, rife with religious, literary and moral concepts.

In the course of time, the round table knights acquire names, ancestries, coats of arms, and set

out on moral and religious quests of spiritual discovery and edification.

Associated to this ascent of the chivalric quest of values is the new-found concern

with amatory relationships, due to the cosmopolitan influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife

of Louis VII and Henry II in the 12th century. The granddaughter of the first troubadour poet

and the dedicatee of Wace’s poem, she was instrumental in transplanting on English soil the

culture of Provence troubadours. The queen favoured poetry linking the troubadours’

elevated view of sexual love with the exploits of Arthurian knights. Hence the cultivation of

fin’amors or courtly love, based on a parallel between the knight’s service to liege-lord and

the lover’s service to an adored, honoured lady. This richly cultivated literary pattern places

new emphasis on the dignity of women in a male dominated, clerical, military civilization.

“De Amore”, a Latin treatise by Andreas Capellanus, chaplain to Marie de

Champagne (Eleanor’s daughter), casts the woman as a dominant partner in the love affair,

and sexual love as integral to the chivalric court, as in Arthur’s day. The vassalage of the

lover to his lady is an ideal projected beyond or outside marriage, in which the shared passion

of adulterous lovers is seen as an ennobling and semi-religious experience, often tragically

unfulfilled and unfulfilling.

Marie de France (1160-90) is the authoress of 12 brief Lais adapted from Breton

stories, placed in diverse settings and geographic references. “Lanval” mentions Arthur and

elaborates on the amatory encounters of knights and ladies in a world informed by chivalrous

action and supernatural influence.

Chretien de Troyes (1170-90) revives a lost version of the Tristan legend and writes

five surviving romances on Camelot: “Yvain”, “Chevalier de la Charrette” (Lancelot),

“Percival /Le conte de Graal” propound legends central to the Arthurian canon. “Yvain” was

translated as “Ywain and Gawain” (1400), while “Lanval” inspires further late 14 th century

versions about Sir Landeval/ Lambewell, Lamwell, such as Thomas Chestre’s “Sir Launfal”.

These chivalric romances had an induring influence over later poets and translators. Thus,

Marie’s Breton Lais influences Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and Gower’s ‘Tale of Rosifelee”,

and Chretien de Troyes influences the subjects and styles of poems like “Sir Orfeo” and Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight.

Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la rose (1237-1275, Jean de Meun) marks a shift

from military and heroic subjects to the allegorical treatment of fin’amors. Its central image is

a garden on a May morning, with a well reflecting a rose’s image, symbolic of the perfection

of love. The enamoured dreamer’s quest to achieve the rose is either assisted or opposed by

allegorical figures embodying aspects of the beloved. This vastly popular romance was

translated by Chaucer, who uses the device of the dream allegory. Chaucer’s Book of the

Duchess proposes a modified vision of love, built on the revelation of a Pearl.

Verse romance

Most French and English romances treat of both secular and religious subject matter. Most

express pious confidence in the values of Christian society, figuring heroic knights pursuing a

lonely quest, while also stressing the shared, communal values of the chivalric world. The

romance crystallises as a defined genre, derived from the English translations, naturalizations,

imitations and reflections of French romances. English versions are simpler in form and more

direct in address.

The earliest examples of verse romance, a genre that would remain popular through

the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and Blauncheflour were

both preserved in a manuscript of about 1250. King Horn (c. 1225) is the earliest surviving

poem illustrating the genre. Oddly written in short two- and three-stress lines, it is a vigorous

tale of a kingdom lost and regained, with a subplot concerning Horn’s love for Princess

Rymenhild. The prince is driven out of his homeland by the invading Saracens. He takes

refuge in the Kingdom of Westernesse, where he falls in love with the king’s daughter

Rymenhild. The lovers are betrayed and Horn is banished to Ireland. A tale of knightly

heroism, it narrates of spectacular deeds of valour. Eventually, the hero recovers his kingdom

and claims Rymenhild as his queen. The protagonist matures through both adventure and

love. The woman is represented as equal to him in fidelity, wit and courage.

Floris and Blancheflour (1st half of 13th c) is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of

royal lovers who become separated and later reunited after various adventures in eastern

lands. It presents the adventures of two precocious children at the court of a Saracen Emir,

who form an odd couple – a magically endowed Muslim prince and the daughter of a

Christian lady. The Emir eventually overcomes his religious scruples and blesses their union.

Not much later than these is The Lay of Havelok the Dane (Lincolnshire c. 1300), a

tale of princely love and adventure similar to King Horn but more competently executed. It is

built on a pattern of exile and return. The dispossessed Prince Havelok seeks refuge in

England, where he ekes out a humble existence at Grimsby. His noble origin is twice

revealed by a mystical light shining over his head. He returns to Denmark with Princess

Goldborough, kills his usurping guardian and regains his rightful throne. The narrative places

stress on inborn royalty, but also on the values of ordinary life and labour, on manly struggles

which do not preclude defence by any means, be they fists, wooden club and sword.

Many more such romances were produced in the 14th century. There are three types

of historical material of English and French romances: the ‘matter’ of Rome, of France

(Charlemagne and knights, advancing Saracens) and of Britain (Arthurian stories, tales of

knightly heroes). The most popular subgenres belonged to “the matter of Britain” (Arthurian

romances such as Of Arthour and of Merlin and Ywain and Gawain), “the matter of Troy”

(tales of antiquity such as The Siege of Troy and King Alisaunder), and the English Breton

lays (stories of otherworldly magic, such as Lai le Freine and Sir Orfeo, modelled after those

of professional Breton storytellers). Sir Orfeo (early 14th c.) proclaims its Breton origin,

despite being an embroidered reworking of Orpheus and Eurydice. The world of Celtic

fairyland supplants Hades and offers a happy ending. Otuel and Roland (c. 1330) treats of the

knightly career of a former Muslim knight at the court of Charlemagne, converted when the

Holy Ghost alights on his helmet in the form of a dove. The Sege of Melayne (c. 1400) tells of

the defence of Christianity in Lombardy.

There are two very popular late 13th century romances are designed to celebrate the

putative ancestors of aristocratic families. Their heroes face dire challenges in their quests to

prove themselves and their love. Bevis of Hampton is content to accept the rewards of

international labours, while Sir Guy of Warwick atones for his worldly pride by embarking on

further exploits for the glory of God and ends up as a hermit, unrecognized by his wife, who

brings food to his retreat.

These relatively unsophisticated works were written for a bourgeois audience, and the

manuscripts that preserve them are early examples of commercial book production. The

humorous beast epic makes its first appearance in Britain in the 13th century with The Fox

and the Wolf, taken indirectly from the Old French Roman de Renart. In the same manuscript

with this work is Dame Sirith, the earliest English fabliau. Another sort of humour is found in

The Land of Cockaygne, which depicts a utopia better than heaven, where rivers run with

milk, honey, and wine, geese fly about already roasted, and monks hunt with hawks and

dance with nuns.

The lyric

The lyric was virtually unknown to Old English poets. Poems such as “Deor” and “Wulf and

Eadwacer,” which have been called lyrics, are thematically different from those that began to

circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written down in great numbers in the 13th; these

Old English poems also have a stronger narrative component than the later productions. The

most frequent topics in the Middle English secular lyric are springtime and romantic love;

many rework such themes tediously, but some, such as “Foweles in the frith” (13th century)

and “Ich am of Irlaunde” (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few lines. Two lyrics of

the early 13th century, “Mirie it is while sumer ilast” and “Sumer is icumen in,” are preserved

with musical settings, and probably most of the others were meant to be sung.

The dominant mood of the religious lyrics is passionate: the poets sorrow for Christ

on the cross and for the Virgin Mary, celebrate the “five joys” of Mary, and import language

from love poetry to express religious devotion. Excellent early examples are “Nou goth sonne

under wod” and “Stond wel, moder, ounder rode.” Many of the lyrics are preserved in

manuscript anthologies, of which the best is British Library manuscript Harley 2253 from the

early 14th century. In this collection, known as the Harley Lyrics, the love poems, such as

“Alysoun” and “Blow, Northern Wind,” take after the poems of the Provençal troubadours

but are less formal, less abstract and livelier. The religious lyrics also are of high quality; but

the most remarkable of the Harley Lyrics, “The Man in the Moon,” far from being about love

or religion, imagines the man in the Moon as a simple peasant, sympathizes with his hard life,

and offers him some useful advice on how to best the village hayward (a local officer in

charge of a town’s common herd of cattle).

A poem such as “The Man in the Moon” serves as a reminder that, although the

poetry of the early Middle English period was increasingly influenced by the Anglo-Norman

literature produced for the courts, it is seldom “courtly.” Most English poets, whether writing

about kings or peasants, looked at life from a bourgeois perspective. If their work sometimes

lacks sophistication, it nevertheless has a vitality that comes from preoccupation with daily

affairs.

Later Middle English poetry

The revival of alliterative poetry

The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature is the

apparently sudden reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century.

Debate continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems

written between about 1350 and the first decade of the 15th century should be regarded as an

“alliterative revival” or rather as the late flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching

back to the Old English period. The earliest examples of the phenomenon, William of Palerne

and Winner and Waster, are both datable to the 1350s, but neither poem exhibits to the full all

the characteristics of the slightly later poems central to the movement. William of Palerne,

condescendingly commissioned by a nobleman for the benefit of “them that know no

French,” is a homely paraphrase of a courtly Continental romance, the only poem in the

group to take love as its central theme. The poet’s technical competence in handling the

difficult syntax and diction of the alliterative style is not, however, to be compared with that

of Winner and Waster’s author, who exhibits full mastery of the form, particularly in

descriptions of setting and spectacle. This poem’s topical concern with social satire links it

primarily with another, less formal body of alliterative verse, of which William Langland’s

Piers Plowman was the principal representative and exemplar. Indeed, Winner and Waster,

with its sense of social commitment and occasional apocalyptic gesture, may well have

served as a source of inspiration for Langland himself.

The term alliterative revival should not be taken to imply a return to the principles of

classical Old English versification. The authors of the later 14th-century alliterative poems

either inherited or developed their own conventions, which resemble those of the Old English

tradition in only the most general way. The syntax and particularly the diction of later Middle

English alliterative verse were also distinctive, and the search for alliterating phrases and

constructions led to the extensive use of archaic, technical, and dialectal words. Hunts, feasts,

battles, storms, and landscapes were described with a brilliant concretion of detail rarely

paralleled since, while the abler poets also contrived subtle modulations of the staple verse-

paragraph to accommodate dialogue, discourse, and argument. Among the poems central to

the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends of Alexander the Great, the

massive Destruction of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived

from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets were likely to have been

clerics with a strong, if bookish, historical sense of their romance “matters.” The “matter of

Britain” was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte Arthure, an

epic portrayal of King Arthur’s conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, which combined a

strong narrative thrust with considerable density and subtlety of diction. A gathering sense of

inevitable transitoriness gradually tempers the virile realization of heroic idealism, and it is

not surprising to find that the poem was later used by Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his

prose account of the Arthurian legend, Le Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470).

The alliterative movement would today be regarded as a curious but inconsiderable

episode were it not for four other poems now generally attributed to a single anonymous

author: the chivalric romance Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, two homiletic poems

called Patience and Purity (or Cleanness), and an elegiac dream vision known as Pearl, all

miraculously preserved in a single manuscript dated about 1400. The poet of Sir Gawayne far

exceeded the other alliterative writers, in his mastery of form and style, and though he wrote

ultimately as a moralist, underlying the core of his work is a genuine plea for human warmth

and sympathy (often taking comic form). Patience relates the biblical story of Jonah as a

human comedy of petulance and irascibility set off against God’s benign forbearance. Purity

imaginatively re-creates several monitory narratives of human impurity and its consequences

in a spectacular display of poetic skill: the Flood, the destruction of Sodom, and Belshazzar’s

Feast. The poet’s principal achievement, however, was Sir Gawayne, in which he used the

conventional apparatus of chivalric romance to engage in a serious exploration of moral

conduct in the face of the unknown.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This verse romance remains unmatched for its sustained energy, effective patterning and

superb detailing. The anonymous poet, most probably from the northwest Midlands of

England and writing in the second half of the 14th century is the putative author of four

untitled poems preserved in crudely illustrated manuscript in British Library (including

“Pearl”, “Cleanness/Purity”, “Patience”). The poems are illustrative of the ‘alliterative

revival’ in north-western England from 1350, rather a survival of pre-conquest interests,

manifest in the patronage of English speaking noblemen. The poet strikes us as a highly

sophisticated narrative artist versed in the Holy Scriptures and devotional literature, familiar

with French and English romances. The poem opens with line of British Kings from Brutus to

Arthur. The action begins at Arthur’s court during the New Year’s festivities, with the visit of

a Green challenger bearing a branch of holly (life) and an axe (death), who proposes a

beheading game. Reminiscent of a custom of pagan, Celtic origin, the challenge is taken up

by Arthur’s nephew Gawain, on condition that if he succeeds in beheading the knight submits

to the same in a year’s time. The image of the knight leaving Camelot head in hand fuses a

Celtic beheading myth with Arthurian adventure. Gawain’s quest for the Green Knight and

his chapel are interpreted in terms of Christian knighthood, as a test of resistance to

temptation. Gawain sets out on 1st November, All Saints’ Day, associated with the season of

dying nature. He bears the image of Virgin Mary on the inside of his shield and the mystical

pentangle of central knighthood virtues. The account of his journey is filled with descriptions

of filthy weather and empty landscapes, ice cold water and air. The hero fights dragons,

wolves, wild men, and vanquishes all obstacles aided by ardent prayers to Christ. His

unexpected, real test comes as he is welcomed for the Christmas festivities at a castle in the

wilderness. Strict in his religious observance, he warms to host’s courtesy and agrees to

exchange ‘winnings’ with him, but fails to give up a girdle presented to him by the host,

protecting against death. He is directed to the Green chapel and punished by the Green

Knight, revealed to be the lord of the castle. The plot against Arthur and the Round Table

contrived by Morgan le Fay is averted. The knight is self-disgusted at the exposure of his

fallibility. In Camelot his imperfection is eventually excused as human folly. His trial

concerned not his valour, but his chastity. Morality is not merely concerned with sexual

chastity. The series of contrasts foreground a questioning not only of the value of knighthood

but the idea of value itself. The poem allows an already old-fashioned chivalric, gentlemanly

ideal, based on personal integrity residing in feudal and communal loyalties, to co-exist with

a mercantile notion of barter and exchange (merchants and Lord Mayors rising to

knighthood). It suggests that the codes of Christian chivalry can help define human

advancement towards spiritual integrity. Gawain is required to live up to the perfection

symbolized by the Solomonic pentangle – one unending line, an endless knot of five

intersecting points (symbolising the five wits/fingers/wounds of Christ/joys of Mary/virtues:

generosity, fellowship, cleanness, courtesy, pity). His symbolic fault is represented by the

girdle, a broken line that can be joined in a circle, which is a token of his fear and loss of

fidelity to the codes he holds most dear. It is an act of failure revealing his fullest humanity

and the truest test of knightly integrity. The hero is ultimately received into the fellowship of

the round table, another emblem of perfection. The knights wear the green girdle as a sign of

shame and an avowal of the ‘renoun of the Rounde Table’. The poem ends with the motto of

the new Order of the Garter: ‘Shame to him who thinks evil of it’. While upholding the high

ideals of knighthood, through the suggestive number patterning, it also deals with human

lapses from uprightness, also reflected in the other poems.

The hero, Gawain, the questing knight of Arthur’s court, embodies a combination of

the noblest chivalric and spiritual aspirations of the age, but, instead of triumphing in the

conventional way, he fails when tested (albeit rather unfairly) by mysterious supernatural

powers. No paraphrase can hope to recapture the imaginative resources displayed in the

telling of the story and the structuring of the poem as a work of art. Pearl stands somewhat

aside from the alliterative movement proper. In common with a number of other poems of the

period, it was composed in stanzaic form, with alliteration used for ornamental effect.

Technically, it is one of the most complex poems in the language, an attempt to work in

words an analogy to the jeweller’s art. The jeweller-poet is vouchsafed a heavenly vision in

which he sees his pearl, the discreet symbol used in the poem for a lost infant daughter who

has died to become a bride of Christ. She offers theological consolation for his grief,

expounding the way of salvation and the place of human life in a transcendental and extra-

temporal view of things.

The alliterative movement was primarily confined to poets writing in northern and

north-western England, who showed little regard for courtly, London-based literary

developments. It is likely that alliterative poetry, under aristocratic patronage, filled a gap in

the literary life of the provinces caused by the decline of Anglo-Norman in the latter half of

the 14th century. Alliterative poetry was not unknown in London and the southeast, but it

penetrated those areas in a modified form and in poems that dealt with different subject

matter.

William Langland and Piers Plowman

William Langland’s long alliterative poem Piers Plowman begins with a vision of the world

seen from the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, where, tradition has it, the poet was born and

brought up and where he would have been open to the influence of the alliterative movement.

If what he tells about himself in the poem is true (and there is no other source of

information), he later lived obscurely in London as an unbeneficed cleric. Langland wrote in

the unrhymed alliterative mode, but he modified it in such a way as to make it more

accessible to a wider audience by treating the metre more loosely and avoiding the arcane

diction of the provincial poets. His poem exists in at least three and possibly four versions: A,

Piers Plowman in its short early form, dating from the 1360s; B, a major revision and

extension of A made in the late 1370s; C (1380s), a less “literary” version of B, apparently

intended to bring its doctrinal issues into clearer focus; and Z, a conjectured version that calls

into question the dating for A, B, and C.

The poem takes the form of a series of dream visions dealing with the social and

spiritual predicament of late 14th-century England against a sombre apocalyptic backdrop.

Realistic and allegorical elements are mingled in a phantasmagorical way, and both the poetic

medium and the structure are frequently subverted by the writer’s spiritual and didactic

impulses. Passages of convoluted theological reasoning mingle with scatological satire, and

moments of sublime religious feeling appear alongside forthright political comment. This

makes it a work of the utmost difficulty, defiant of categorization, but at the same time

Langland never fails to convince the reader of the passionate integrity of his writing. His

bitter attacks on political and ecclesiastical corruption (especially among the friars) quickly

struck chords with his contemporaries. Among minor poems in the same vein are Mum and

the Sothsegger (c. 1399–1406) and a Lollard piece called Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed (c.

1395). In the 16th century, Piers Plowman was issued as a printed book and was used for

apologetic purposes by the early Protestants.

Courtly poetry

Apart from a few late and minor reappearances in Scotland and the northwest of England, the

alliterative movement was over before the first quarter of the 15th century had passed. The

other major strand in the development of English poetry from roughly 1350 proved much

more durable. The cultivation and refinement of human sentiment with respect to love,

already present in earlier 14th-century writings such as the Harley Lyrics, took firm root in

English court culture during the reign of Richard II (1377–99). English began to displace

Anglo-Norman as the language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal

and noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident. These processes

undoubtedly created some of the conditions in which a writer of Chaucer’s interests and

temperament might flourish, but they were encouraged and given direction by his genius in

establishing English as a literary language.

Chaucer and Gower

Geoffrey Chaucer, a Londoner of bourgeois origins, was at various times a courtier, a

diplomat, and a civil servant. His poetry frequently (but not always unironically) reflects the

views and values associated with the term courtly. It is in some ways not easy to account for

his decision to write in English, and it is not surprising that his earliest substantial poems, the

Book of the Duchess (c. 1370) and the House of Fame (1370s), were heavily indebted to the

fashionable French courtly love poetry of the time. Also of French origin was the octosyllabic

couplet used in these poems. Chaucer’s abandonment of this engaging but ultimately jejune

metre in favour of a 10-syllable line (specifically, iambic pentameter) was a portentous

moment for English poetry. His mastery of it was first revealed in stanzaic form, notably the

seven-line stanza (rhyme royal) of the Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382) and Troilus and

Criseyde (c. 1385), and later was extended in the decasyllabic couplets of the prologue to the

Legend of Good Women (1380s) and large parts of The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400).

Chaucer’s cultivation of courtly love is elaborately, if humorously, expounded in the

allegory The Parlement of Foulys (1382), meant to be a witty, elegantly formed,

complimentary dedication to the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. It creates

a vision of birds gathered on St Valentine’s Day in order to choose their suitable mates in

front of the goddess of Nature; they are shown to behave in conformity with ‘natural’ law, by

courting, disputing and pairing off according to the their rank in the stratification of avian

society. The royal eagles take precedence over all, the others following in descending order

from birds of prey to the humblest fowl and smallest seed-eaters. The heated debate on how

to choose a proper mate remains unresolved, but the central message is that the more majestic

the bird the more formal and sophisticated its rituals of courtship and mating. For instance,

eagles look for more elevating things in their definition and exploration of love, looking

down on the crudely pragmatic common sense of the simple-minded, unpretentious ducks

(‘“Thy kynde is of so low a wretchednesse/That what love is, thow canst nat seen ne gesse”

’... ‘“Ye quek!” yit seyde the doke, full well and feyre,/There been mo sterres, God wot, than

a payre!”’). Obviously, this allegorical dramatization of notions of hierarchy and degrees of

amatory sophistication and decorum in the avian world transparently extols the elevating

refinement of matrimonial sentiment and conduct underlying the royal union.

Though Chaucer wrote a number of moral and amatory lyrics, which were imitated by

his 15th-century followers, his major achievements were in the field of narrative poetry. The

early influence of French courtly love poetry (notably the Roman de la Rose, which he

translated) gave way to an interest in Italian literature. Chaucer was acquainted with Dante’s

writings and took a story from Petrarch for the substance of “The Clerk’s Tale.” Two of his

major poems, Troilus and Criseyde and “The Knight’s Tale,” were based, respectively, on the

Filostrato and the Teseida of Boccaccio.

Living in an age of political and social disruptions, which he engages both as a man of

state and a man of letters, Chaucer is deeply concerned with ideas of order and decorum at all

levels of human and social experience. His poetry both expresses and embodies a firm sense

of order, evident in his twin masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde (mid-1380s) and The

Canterbury Tales (planned c. 1387), as well as in his minor poems or prose work. This

preoccupation with order is manifest in his reflections on the nature and workings of the

cosmos, which inform the prose treatise on the astrolabe he wrote for his son Lewis; in his

frequent allusions to Boethius’s De Consolatio philosophiae, which he translated in c. 1380),

but also in his steady affirmations of an orthodox Christian belief in divine involvement in

human affairs.

Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s single most ambitious poem, is a moving story of

love gained and betrayed set against the background of the Trojan War. As well as being a

poem of profound human sympathy and insight, it also has a marked philosophical dimension

derived from Chaucer’s reading of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, a work that he

also translated in prose. His evocation of the time of the Trojan war and of the ‘payens corsed

olde rytes (the accursed rites of the pagans) is transcended by a vision of Troilus in the next

life looking with serene mirth upon the his wailing mourners. Thus tragedy turns into a divine

comedy, while pagan rites recede before the pious invocation of the Holy Trinity at the end, a

prayer reminiscent of Dante, which proclaims the Triune God’s eternal reign over all things

and setting his mysterious seal on human aspiration. His entire work is pervaded by the faith

in the symbiotic harmony of natural and human worlds, essentially interrelated in the divine

scheme of things and ordered in hierarchies like the kingdom of heaven.

His consummate skill in narrative art, however, was most fully displayed in The

Canterbury Tales, an unfinished series of stories purporting to be told by a group of pilgrims

journeying from London to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket and back.

The Canterbury Tales describes a world whose existence and perceptions are

determined and conditioned by degree and rank. The ‘General Prologue’ inducts us to the

circumstances bringing the pilgrims together at Tabard Inn. Presenting the pilgrims according

to their rank, from the highest to the humblest, Chaucer evinces the same preoccupation with

social degree and order.

The three estates or established social strata are clearly represented. Due precedence

is given to the first estate, the king’s military nobles, represented by the knight. The first to be

introduced, the deserving knight is followed by his son the Squire and their attendant

Yeoman. The Knight’s portrait appositely presents him as the true human model of feudal

society, a paragon of virtue for the age of chivalry and its values. His professional career

recommends him as a worthy servant to his king and the cause of Christendom, even if its

evocation enumerates campaigns marked by military disasters, which has been held to

suggest that his portrait and tale could be read ironically. Another line of opinion has it that

Chaucer seems to be bent on enhancing his exemplary dignity.

The second estate, the Church, is represented by the fastidious Prioress, her

accompanying nun and personal chaplain, and three other priests. There follows a Monk,

who, being the outrider in his monastery, is shown to enjoy extra-mural luxuries rather too

much. The worldly and mercenary Friar is also somewhat at a remove from the prescribed

canons of demeanour of his calling.

The third estate is also stratified to include the urban lucrative class, with its rich,

middling and poor. Higher among these are a shifty Merchant, a bookish Oxford Clerk,

Sergeant of the Law, a Franklin (a landowner of free but not noble birth). The intrepid urban

guildsmen are represented by the Haberdasher, the Carpenter, the Weaver, the Dyer and the

Tapicer). Next are introduced the skilled tradesmen: Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic. There

is also a feminine version of progressive industriousness, ushered in by the Wife of Bath, a

rich widow with a trade of her own.

Last, but no least, the Parson and the Ploughman are fondly placed at the very

foundation of the social edifice, as meek, but praiseworthy pillars of the nation, which they

help nourish, spiritually and materially, through their honest labour of soul and soil. The

narrator’s stress on the due humility of the Parson and the Ploughman proclaims their

exemplary fitness for modest but essential roles – one for the true mission of the Church to

the poor, the other for the blessedness of holy poverty. They are described as brothers whose

fraternity is rooted in Christian meekness and closeness to God. Both of them are considered

to act out the Gospel, one as a ‘noble ensample to his sheep’ and the other ‘lyvynge in pees

and parfit charitee’. Their humble status is duly ennobled by the meekness of their

demeanour, and Chaucer envelops them in an aura of sanctity.

They are followed by the Manciple and a bunch of reprobates (Reeve, Miller,

Summoner, Pardoner), who are relegated to the end because of their morally objectionable

character and occupational dealings. This last group contrasts the previous paragons of virtue

with those whose very calling prompts periodic falls from grace. For instance, it is suggested

that the Manciple’s wit and acquired administrative skills render him worthy of better things.

Even worse, their misdemeanour invariably involves the spoliation of the poor and the

complete lack of a moral conscience. The Reeve strikes fear into master’s tenants while

feathering his own nest; the Miller steals corn and overcharges clients; the lecherous

Summoner parades his limited learning; the Pardoner sells false relics. Out of sheer,

unfeigned modesty, Chaucer takes care that the narrator himself is placed at the very rear of

the troupe, as a high-ranking royal official whose worth is enhanced by his unassuming

positioning and demeanour.

The pilgrims’ tales themselves are apposite to their social station, beliefs and moral

character. Each pilgrim was supposed to tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on

the way back. However, this section remains unfinished, fragmentary, with only 24 tales.

The knight’s taking precedence is not incidental. His tale is an abbreviated version of

Boccaccio’s Teseida, a high-minded story of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love a

princess, elegantly complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention and elegant

decisive human ceremonial. The Ploughman is allotted no tale at all. The Parson’s concluding

tale is a long prose treatise on the seven deadly sins, a careful sermon about devout gravitas

and earnest learning.

The stories are loosely fitted to the tellers’ tastes and professions, and tailored to fit

into the overarching narrative shape by prologues, interjections or disputes between the

characters. For example, the Parson’s worthy discourse is complemented by the shadowy

Nun’s Priest’s lively story of a wily cock caught by a fox, ending with the clerical insistence

on ‘the moralite’. Other tales ironically illuminate the character’s own weaknesses. The

Pardoner tells a tidy moral tale warning against covetousness, thus directly reflecting on his

own avarice, which he spiritedly and frankly confesses to. The Prioress’s short devotional

tale of Christian child whose throat is cut by the Jews, but who continues to sing a Marian

hymn is well received by the company.

By contrast, other tellers are not so ingenuous. The Merchant, prompted by the

Clerk’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s story of the trials of patient Griselda, offers the tale of an

old husband, January, and his ‘fresse’ young bride May, an impatiently frisky wife who

exploits her husband’s sudden blindness and lets herself seduced in a pear tree; January’s

sight is mischievously restored by Pluto, while Proserpine inspires May to claim, in her

defence, her husband’s best interest. Such earthier stories are allocated to the Miller, Reeve,

Friar, and Summoner, thus placing them at the lower end of the social and moral scale. Many

of the stories are set in counterpoint, coming to counteract or qualify the ideas expressed by

the tales of the other pilgrims. Thus, the Miller drunkenly intrudes after the Knight’s story

with a tale of dull-witted carpenter, his tricksy wife and her two suitors, which ostensibly

offers a diametrically opposed view of courtship. This, in turn, provokes the Reeve into

telling an anecdote about a cuckolded miller. The same mutually subversive exchange is

evident when the Friar tells the story of an extortionate summoner carried to hell by the devil,

which causes the enraged Summoner to respond by the story of an ingenious friar obliged to

share out the unexpected legacy of ‘the rumblynge of a fart’ with his brethren.

While the other tales are shown to display the storytelling talents of the tellers,

Chaucer casts himself as incompetent storyteller. There is a refined irony of in his extended

self-deprecatory ruse. His shyness is repeatedly challenged by Host. He falteringly begins

tells a tale of Sir Thopas, a parody of contemporary romance, told in awkward singsong 6 line

stanzas. Then he begins another long weighty prose homily of imprudent Melibeus and his

wife Prudence. This pretence of incompetence is a very effective device, echoing the

discussion on the virtues of truthful representation expounded in the General Prologue, with

its insistence on frankness and proper representation.

The illusion that the individual pilgrims (rather than Chaucer himself) tell their tales

gave him an unprecedented freedom of authorial stance, which enabled him to explore the

rich fictive potentialities of a number of genres: pious legend (in “The Man of Law’s Tale”

and “The Prioress’s Tale”), fabliau (“The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The

Reeve’s Tale”), chivalric romance (“The Knight’s Tale”), popular romance (parodied in

Chaucer’s “own” “Tale of Sir Thopas”), beast fable (“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The

Manciple’s Tale”), and more—what the poet John Dryden later summed up as “God’s

plenty.”

A recurrent concern in Chaucer’s writings is the refined and sophisticated cultivation

of love, commonly described by the modern expression courtly love. A French term of

Chaucer’s time, fine amour, gives a more authentic description of the phenomenon;

Chaucer’s friend John Gower translated it as “fine loving” in his long poem Confessio

amantis (begun c. 1386). The Confessio runs to some 33,000 lines in octosyllabic couplets

and takes the form of a collection of exemplary tales placed within the framework of a lover’s

confession to a priest of Venus. Gower provides a contrast to Chaucer in that the sober and

earnest moral intent behind Gower’s writing is always clear, whereas Chaucer can be

noncommittal and evasive. On the other hand, though Gower’s verse is generally fluent and

pleasing to read, it has a thin homogeneity of texture that cannot compare with the colour and

range found in the language of his great contemporary. Gower was undoubtedly extremely

learned by lay standards, and many Classical myths (especially those deriving from Ovid’s

Metamorphoses) make the first of their numerous appearances in English literature in the

Confessio. Gower was also deeply concerned with the moral and social condition of

contemporary society, and he dealt with it in two weighty compositions in French and Latin,

respectively: the Mirour de l’omme (c. 1374–78; The Mirror of Mankind) and Vox clamantis

(c. 1385; The Voice of One Crying).