Old English Christian literature

Christianity first came onto the British Isles during the Roman times. In III-IV c. it came to Ireland. Celtic Christian church didn’t depend on Rome and didn’t relate with it, so was different a lot. It didn’t pay much attention to Fasting and confession; the priests didn’t know celibacy and icons and kept unique rites (borrowed from Celtic cults).

ONLY two names emerge from the anonymity which shrouds the bulk of Old English Christian poetry, namely, those of Caedmon and Cynewulf; and in the past, practically all the religious poetry we possess had been attributed to one or other of these 2 poets. But, as well shall see, the majority of the poems to be considered here should rather be regarded as the work of singers whose names have perished, as folk-song, as manifestations of the spirit of the people. The subject of the Christian epic is indeed, for the most part, apparently, foreign and even at times Oriental: the heroes of the Old and New Testaments, the saints as they live in the legends of the church, furnish the theme. The method of treatment hardly differs, however, from that followed in non-Christian poetry; the metrical form with rare exceptions is the alliterative line constructed on the same principles as in Beowulf; Christ and His apostles have become English kings or chiefs followed, as in feudal duty bound, by hosts of clansmen; the homage paid to the Divine Son is the allegiance due to the scion of an Anglian king, comparable to that paid by Beowulf to his liege lord Hygelac, or to that displayed by Byrhtnoth on the banks of the Panta; the ideals of early English Christianity do not differ essentially from those of English paganism. And yet there is a difference.

The Christianity of England in the VII and VIII cc., and the Latin influences brought in its wake, which inspired the poetry under discussion, was a fusion, a commingling, of 2 different strains. Accustomed as we are to date the introduction of Christianity into England from the mission of St. Augustine in 597, we are apt to forget that, prior to the landing of the Roman missionary on the shores of Kent, Celtic missionaries from the islands of the west had impressed upon the northern kingdoms, the earliest home of literary culture in these islands, a form of Christianity differing in many respects from the more theological type preached and practised by St. Augustine and his followers. Oswald, the martyr king of Northumbria, had been followed from Iona, where, in his youth, he had found sanctuary, by Aidan, the apostle of the north, to whose missionary enterprise was due the conversion of the rude north Anglian tribes. The monastery Whitby, for ever famous as the home of Caedmon, was ruled by the abbess Hild in accordance with Celtic, not Roman, usage; and though, at the synod of Whitby in 664, the unity of the church in England was assured by the submission of the northern church to Roman rule, yet the influence of Celtic Christianity may be traced in some of the features that most characteristically distinguish Christian from non-Christian poetry. It would for instance, be hard to deny that the depth of personal feeling expressed in a poem like The Dream of the Rood, the joy in colour attested by the vivid painting of blossom and leaf in The Phoenix and the melancholy sense of kinship between the sorrow of the human heart and the moaning of the grey cold waves that make The Seafarer a human wail, are elements contributed to English poetry by the Celts. St. Columba had built his monastery on the surf-beaten shores of the Atlantic, where man’s dependence on nature was an ever-present reality. The Celtic monastery was the home of a brotherhood of priests, and the abbot was the father of a family as well as its ecclesiastical superior. The Christian virtues of humility and meekness, in which the emissaries of the British church found Augustine so deficient, were valued in Iona above orthodoxy and correctness of religious observance; and the simplicity of ecclesiastical organisation characteristic of Celtic Christianity, differing from the comparatively eleborate nature of Roman organisation and ritual, produced and simple form of Christianity, readily understood by the unlettered people of the north.

When the Anglo-Saxons first came to the B.I. they became to dechristianize the Celts and Christianity has to escape to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. A new step was done in 597 when Pope Gregory sent a Christian mission of St. Augustine which was very successful, but the competition with Ireland was great. There were a few relapses to paganism (e.g. in Kent and Essex after king Ethelburt death in 616), but the process was over in VII c. Britain became covered by a net of schools and monasteries. One of the most glorious was one founded by St. Augustine in Canterbury. The Anglo-Saxon monasteries became the centres of culture and art. Not only theology but other sciences were developed there. Old English poets created then the best samples of Latin poetry and poetry in vernacular. Rome won the battle. It brought new order and close connection not only with Rome, but with all the Europe, which brought the development of monarchies and country in general. The church supported agriculture and tried to make literate as many people as poss. that brought a mix of 2 cultures. The highest develop. Of Old-E.literature in the VII-X cc.

Simultaneously, the Latin language as the language of the sermons and church books became the instrument of the clerical enlightment, science and school. There appeared a number of talanted poets writing in Latin in the monasteries around Britain – in Kent, Wessex, Northumbria. The names of Aldhelm, Ceolfrid, Tatvin, Felix, - especially Beda and Alkuin, - became widely known also abroad.

Aldhelm (640-709), a brother of the Wessex king Ine, the abbot of 1 of the I monasteries – of Mulmsbery, future bishop of Sherborne in 709, and the account given by William of Malmesbury, on the authority of king Alfred’s Handbook, of Aldhelm’s skill as a poet in the vernacular, and of his singing to the harp songs of his own composing by which he hoped to teach the country people, is probably the only fact associated with his name in the minds of most. In his youth he was for a considerable time a pupil of Hadrian of Canterbury. A late biographer, Faricius, credits Aldhelm with a knowledge of Greek, of Hebrew and of Latin, which tongue no one had employed to greater advantage since Vergil. There are many of his Latin poems and prosaic works in different manuscripts. The writings of his which we possess are the following: 1. A number of letters. 2. A prose treatise on the praise of virginity. 3. A versification, in hexameters, of the same treatise. 4. A prose book on the number seven and on meters, especially the hexameter, containing also a collection of one hundred riddles in verse. 5. Occasional poems, principally inscriptions for altars or the like. A prosaic “Praise of Virginity” (De laudibus virginitatis sive de virginitate sanctorum) decorated with the samples from the Bible and the lives of saints. This literary work as well as a few other was written in Latin hexameter. With regard to the source of the prose treatise in particular, we see that Aldhelm had access to a very considerable library of Christian authors. It included (taking the citations as they occur in the text) an unidentified work in which an angel appears as speaker (not The Shepherd of Hermas), Isidore, Pseudo-Melito’s Passion of John, Acts of Thomas, Revelation of Paul (in the fullest Latin text), Recognitions of Clement, Acts of Sylvester, Paulinus’s Life of Ambrose, Sulpicius Severus, lives of Gregory and Basil, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, Vitae Patrum, Gregory’s Dialogues, Rufinus’s version of Eusebius, Jerome’s letter and his Life of Malchus, and an extensive collection of Passions of Martyrs. Among poets, Vergil and Prosper are prominent. A list of the books whose influence is perceptible in phrases or allusions would be of equal length.

However, popular he became not thanks to these ascetic works but due to the collection of Latin poetic “Riddles” (Aenigmata), which borrowed a lot from the Anglo-Saxon folklore. The genre of riddles was extremely popular among the Anglo-Saxons, especially in the 8^th c. It was also popular at the court of Carl the Great, where it was spread by Alcuin. Riddle corresponded to the peculiarities of medieval mind as these were people that grew up on the mythology and this was one of the most effective then means of teaching. Aldhelm’s “Riddles” include 100 Latin ones, based on Latin riddles and folk ones. They are modelled on those of Symphosius (a V century writer) but are not, like his, confined to the limits of three lines apiece. They are, for the most part, ingenious little descriptions of simple objects: e.g. —to take a series at random—the locust, the nightcrow, the gnat, the spindle, the cupping-glass, the evening, the dagger, the bubble. That this form of wit-sharpening made a great appeal to the mind of our ancestors is amply evident from many passages in the Old English literature,—notably The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturn, and the documents related thereto; and are not the periphrases of all early Scandinavian poetry exemplifications of the same tendency? As we have seen, Aldhelm’s riddles were copiously imitated by Englishmen in later centuries. The Christian themes are not leading among them. There are a lot of riddles about animals, plants, stones, stars, nature phenomena, utensils, etc. The following riddlers – Tatvin, bishop of Canterbury, Winifrid Bonifacius and other paid more attention towards Christian notions (Adam, Christ, altar, goodness, sin) and made them didactic.

Different stylistic means and the usage of mythopoetry complicates guessing:

I talk, but I do not speak my mind

I hear words, but I do not listen to thoughts

When I wake, all see me

When I sleep, all hear me

Many heads are on my shoulders

Many hands are at my feet

The strongest steel cannot break my visage

But the softest whisper can destroy me

As the master of versification Aldhelm usedacrostics and telestics. Summing up the literary work of Aldhelm, we find in him a good representative of the pupils of Theodore and Hadrian, on whom both Roman and Greek influences have been exercised; and we see in him also one for whom the grandiloquence of the Celt, the love of an out-of-the way vocabulary, of sound rather at the cost of sense, had great attraction. Additional evidence of the importance of Aldhelm as a literary figure is afforded by the existence of what we may call the Aldhelmian school of English Latinists. The works of these are neither many in number nor large in compass; but the distribution of the writers covers a fairly considerable space both geographically and in time. 2 direct imitators of Aldhelm, Tatwin and Eusebius were men of eminence: Tatwin died archbishop of Canterbury in 734, and Eusebius is almost certainly identical with Hwaetberct, abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow from 716. 2 collections of riddles in Latin hexameters by these persons have survived.

Even more famous in all the medieval Europe was a scholar, historian and a prose writer Venerable Bede (673-735). Bede is by far the greatest name which this period presents. Like the later Alcuin, he was of European reputation; but he owed that reputation to the sheer excellence of his books. Alcuin occupied a great and influential position, and used the opportunities which it gave him with the best effect. But he has left no writing which we value much for its own sake. Bede, on the other hand, made an indelible mark on the literature of succeeding centuries, and our debt to him can hardly be exaggerated. Not many lives of great men have been less eventful. We know of his life from the short note to his main literary work. He was born in the present county of Durham. At the age of 7 he became a disciple of Wearmouth monastery, and in 682 came to the Jarrow, where he spent all his life. It seems probable that the longest journey he ever took was from Jarrow to York, and that the greatest crisis of his life was the pestilence in 686 which decimated the monks of Jarrow. He died in 735 at Jarrow, where, practically, his whole life of 63 years had been spent. He was a connoisseur of the antique literature, adored Vergilius and was citing “Eneid” in his works.

Over and over again has the life of Bede been sketched, and the long and varied list of his works reviewed and discussed. By none has this been better done than by Charles Plummer (1896), in connection with his admirable edition of the History. From this source we borrow the chronology of Bede’s writings. He left more then 45 Latin works: philological as De orthographia, grammar book of Latin with Latin-Greek dictionary, De arte metrica and De natura retum; astronomic works De temporibus, theological commentaries on Old and New Testament, hagiography, historical works, manuals on physics, arithmetics, music, medecine, etc. He commited a translation of St. John’s Gospel, and wrote a few poems in vernacular written down by his disciple Guthbert. They are dedicated to death and closer to Latin verse than Anglo-Saxon one.

To the period between 691 and 703 belong the tracts on metre, on figures of speech in Scripture, on orthography; to 703 the small work De Temporibus; to 708 the letter to Plegwin on the 6 ages. The metrical life of Cuthbert was written before 705. In or before 716 fall the commentaries on the Apocalypse, Acts, catholic Epistles, Luke, Samuel and 2 exegetical letters to Acca; after 716 the history of the abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and commentary on Mark; about 720 the prose life of Cuthbert and commentary on Genesis; before 725 the book De Natura Rerum; in 725 the large work De Temporum Ratione; in 725-731 commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah, and books on the Tabernacle and the Temple; the Ecclesiastical History of the English Race in 731; Retractationes on the Acts and the letter to Egbert must be placed after this. For the following works no date can be accurately fixed: on the Holy Places, questions on the books of Kings, commentaries on Proverbs, Canticles, the Song of Habakkuk, Tobit, the martyrology, homilies, hymns and a few minor tracts.

The names of these books suggest Bede’s industry and his wide range of interests. Theology is a dominant factor in the list, but we have, besides, natural science, grammar and history; nor is poetry excluded. Of the grammatical treatises and those which relate to natural science it may be said that they are, to a very large extent, compilations. To Pliny and Isidore, in particular, Bede owes much in the book De Natura Rerum. Probably the supplementary comment on the Acts, called Retractationes, is one of the most interesting to us of the series, since it demonstrates Bede’s knowledge of Greek, and shows that he had before him, when writing, the Graeco-Latin copy of the Acts already mentioned, which is now in the Bodleian.

The historical works are, of course, those which distinguish Bede above all others. There are 4 books which come under this head. Two of them may be very shortly dismissed. First, the Martyrology. It has been enlarged, as was natural enough, by many hands. The popularity of it is evident from the fact that it formed the basis of recensions by Florus of Lyons, Rabanus of Mainz, Ado of Vienna, Notker of St. Gall. Next the short work De Temporibus, written in 705. This consists of a few brief chapters on the divisions of time and the calculations connected with the observance of Easter, and ends with a very curt chronicle of the chief events in the 600 of the world’s history. In 725 Bede expanded this little tract into a much larger book, De Temporum Ratione, and the chronicle of the six ages of the world with which this concludes has been one of the most far-reaching in its influence of all his works. It served as a model and as a source of information to numberless subsequent chroniclers. “In chronology,” says Plummer, “Bede has the enormous merit of being the first chronicler who gave the date from Christ’s birth, in addition to the year of the world, and thus introduced the use of the Dionysian era into western Europe.” One of the main topics of the book, the methods of calculating the date of Easter, is one which interested the men of his day far more than ourselves. A principal reason for this - nearness and urgency of the controversies which so long divided the Celtic from the English church on the subject. It was also 1 of few which brought the mathematical side of men’s intellects into play in the service of religion.

The Ecclesiastical History of the English Race (Historia ecclestastica gentis anglorum) is Bede’s greatest and best work. This’s the basis of medieval historiography and the I Anglo-Saxon history. 5 books will be more to the purpose. The I book begun with a quite fantastic description of Britian, carries the history from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the year 603, after the arrival of Augustine. Among the sources used are Pliny, Solinus, Orosius, Eutropius, Marcellinus Comes, Gildas, probably the Historia Brittonum, a Passion of St. Alban and the Life of St. Germanus of Auxerre by Constantius. It’s not a bare listing of facts as it’s decorated by many folk legends and stories. The II book begins with the death of Gregory the Great, and ends in 633, when Edwin of Northumbria was killed and Paulinus retired to Rochester. It is in this book that the wonderful scene is described in which Edwin of Northumbria takes counsel with his nobles as to accept or reject the Gospel as preached by Paulinus; here occurs the unforgetable simile of the sparrow flying out of the winter night into the brightly-lighted hall and out again into the Dark (of Scandinavian origin and can be called a parable – about a Saxon chief of the VII c. who offered king Eadwin to accept the monks’ religion and told a story). In the III book we proceed as far as 664. In this section the chief actors are Oswald, Aidan, Fursey, Cedd and Wilfred. The IV book begins with the death of Deusdedit in 664 and the subsequent arrival of his successor Theodore, with abbot Hadrian, deals with events to the year 698. The chief figures are Chad, Wilfrid, Ethelburga, Etheldreda, Hilda, Caedmon, Cuthbert. In the V and last book we have stories of St. John of Beverley, of the vision of Drythelm, and others, accounts of Adamnan, Aldhelm, Wilfrid, the letter of abbot Ceolfrid to Nechtan, king of the Picts, the end of the Paschal controversy, a statement of the condition of the country in 731, a brief annalistic summary and a list of the author’s works.

In the dedication of the History to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, Bede enumerates the friends who had helped him in the collection of materials, whether by oral or written information. The chief of these were Albinus, abbot of Canterbury, Nothelm, afterwards archbishop, who had copied documents preserved in the archives of Rome, and Daniel, bishop of Winchester. Bede used to the full, besides, his opportunities of intercourse with the clergy and monks of the north who had known the great men of whom he writes.

From the literary point of view the book is admirable. There is no affectation of learning, no eccentricity of vocabulary. It seems to us to be one of the great services which Bede rendered to English writers that he gave currency to a direct and simple style. This merit is, in part, due to the tradition of the northern school in which he was brought up; but it is to his own credit that he was not led away by the fascinations of the Latinity of Aldhelm. The popularity of the History was immediate and great. Nor was it confined to England. The two actually oldest copies, both of which may have been written before Bede died, were both produced, it seems, on the Continent.

In the VIII c. the city of York became the leading centre of cultural life. Beda’s friend Egbert, the brother of the king of Northumbria and the archbishop of York (732-766), founded the I prolific library in York and a famous school, where Alchwine was educated and later was a headmaster of and later became one of the active figures of the so-called “ Carolingian Rennaissance ”.

Alchwine (735-804) was born in Northumbria in a rich Anglo-Saxon family. Destined for the church from the early childhood was taken by his teacher to Italy where he completed his education and became the school’s headmaster. In 781 Alchwine arrived to Rome and met Carl the Great that invited him to his court. The fact is that, very shortly before Alcuin left England for ever, the Scandinavians had begun that desolating series of raids upon this country which ended by exterminating the learning and literature of Northumbria and paralysed intellectual effort all over the land. In an often quoted poem on the saints of York, Alcuin enumerates the principal authors whose works were to be found in the library collected there by Egbert and Albert. Within a generation after the poem was written, that library had ceased to exist; and so had that earlier treasury of books at Wearmouth which Benedict Biscop commended in the last years of his life to the special care of his monks. The end of the eighth century and the course of the ninth saw learning gradually obliterated in England, until the efforts of Alfred revived an interest in the things of the mind among his countrymen. In 782 Alchwine became the head of the courtschool and tutor of the princes. There he spent all his life. In 796 he received the abbey of Martin's at Tours. He was the author of 3 textbooks in Latin of “grammar”, “rhetorics” and “dialectics” – trivium; in the form of dialogues as the Christian catechism. One of the most valued pedagogical works by Alchwine is a witty treatise written for prince Pippin "The argument of kingly and noble yong man Pippin and the scholar Albin" in a form of a dialogue.

These are the chief remains of the Latin literature which was produced in England before the time of Alfred. The period of greatest activity lasted for about a 100 years, from A.D. 690 to 790. It is marked by the rise of 2 great schools, those of Canterbury and York, and by the work of 1 great scholar. It was the north which gave birth to Bede, the one writer of that age whose works are of I-rate value, and to Alcuin, whose influence was supreme in the schools of the continent.

In his Ecclesiastical History Bede told of a shepherd living near the monastery of Whitby whose name was Caedmon. Beyond the fact that his name seems to imply that he was of Celtic descent, we have no knowledge of the historical Caedmon other than that to be derived from the often-quoted passage in Bede. The man had lived in the world till the time that he was of advanced age, and had never learnt any poetry. And as he was often at a feast when it was arranged, to promote mirth, that they should all in turn sing to the harp, whenever he saw the harp come near him he arose out of shame from the feast and went home to his house. Having done so on one occasion, he left the house of entertainment, and went out to the stables, the charge of the horses having been committed to him for that night. When, in due time, he stretched his limbs on the bed there and fell asleep, there stood by him in a dream a man who saluted him and greeted him, calling on him by name, “Caedmon, sing me something.” Then he answered and said, “I cannot sing anything, and therefore I came out from this entertainment and retired here, as I know not how to sing.” Again he who spoke to him said, “Yet you could sing.” Then said Caedmon, “What shall I sing?” He said, “Sing to me the beginning of all things.” On receiving this answer, Caedmon at once began to sing, in praise of God the Chreator, verses and words which he had never heard, the order of which is as follows:

Now [we] must honour nu scylun hergan

the guardian of heaven, hefaenricaes uard

the might of the architect, metudæs maecti

and his purpose, end his modgidanc

the work of the father of glory uerc uuldurfadur

— as he, the eternal lord, swe he uundra gihwaes

established

the beginning of wonders.

He, the holy creator,

first created heaven as a roof

for the children of men.

Then the guardian of mankind

the eternal lord,

the lord almighty

afterwards appointed

the middle earth,

the lands, for men.

As soon as the rumours of a self-taught singer reached the monastery abbess Hilda, the Northumbrian princess (died in 680), she took him to the monastery and ordered some of literate monks to retell the Scripture to him; whatsoever he had learned from scholars concerning the Scriptures he forthwith decked out in poetic language. Many others, also, in England, imitated him in the composition of religious songs. His songs and his music were so delightful to hear, that even his teachers wrote down the words from his lips and learnt them.

The most important of the religious poems at one time attributed to Caedmon are Genesis, Exodus, Daniel.

Turning to Cynewulf and the poems that may be, or have been, attributed to him, we are on somewhat safer ground. He must be the author of 4 well-known poems, since he marked by his signature in runes. Again, though there is no doubt that a Mercian origin would facilitate the transcription of poems into West Saxon, yet we have West Saxon transcripts of other originally Northumbrian poems, a fact which affects the value of geographical arguments of this nature. His undisputed work is of too mature a character to seem to be the spontaneous product of a self-made singer, unfostered by literary society. Moreover, he excels more especially in descriptions of the sea and the sea-coast, a point in which a dweller inland might easily have been deficient. Notable in this respect are Elene, which we know to be his, and Andreas, which is very possibly his. He was a man of learning, certainly a good Latin scholar, for some of his work is based upon Latin originals. Some scholars assume that, after leading until old age the life of a man of the world, and attaining some distinction as an author of secular poetry, he became converted by the vision described in The Dream of the Rood, inscribed on the Ruthwell Cross, and devoted himself to religious poetry, the last consummate effort of his poetic powers being Elene.

The poems marked as Cynewulf’s own by the insertion of runes are Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles and Elene. Juliana is contained in the same book, and, of other poems attributed to Cynewulf, and certainly belonging to his school, Guthlac, Andreas and The Phoenix can be mentioned. Elene is, undoubtedly, Cynewulf’s masterpiece. The story is that of the discovery of the true cross by Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine. The search carried to so successful a conclusion was instituted by the emperor in consequence of the famous vision, the sign of a cross in the sky. Its immediate importance for us is that the conversion of the emperor by this means became the starting-point for the adoration of the cross: the symbol which had hitherto been one of ignominy became one of triumph and glory. The festival of the exaltation of the cross was established in the western church in 701, in consequence of the supposed discovery in Rome of a particle of the true cross. This event is duly recorded by Bede in De sex aetatibus saeculi. Cynewulf’s poem on Helena’s search for the true cross is contained in 14 cantos. It is written in a simple, dramatic style, interspersed with imaginative and descriptive passages of great beauty. The glamour and pomp of war, the gleam of jewels, the joy of ships dancing on the waves, give life and colour to a narrative permeated by the deep and serious purpose of the author. The 15th fitt, superfluous from the point of view of the story, is valuable as documentary evidence bearing on the poet’s personality: “I am old,” he says, “and ready to depart, having woven wordcraft and pondered deeply in the darkness of the world. Once I was gay in the hall and received gifts, appled gold and treasures. Yet was I buffeted with care, fettered by sins, beset with sorrows, until the Lord of all might and power bestowed on me grace and revealed to me the mystery of the holy cross. Now know I that the joys of life are fleeting, and that the Judge of all the world is at hand to deal to every man his doom.”

Portions of an Old English Physiologus have also been attributed to Cynewulf. Allegorical bestiaries were a favourite form of literature from the V c. down to the Middle Ages. They consisted of descriptions of certain beasts, birds and fishes which were considered capable of an allegorical significance. The allegorical meaning was always attached to the description, much as a moral is appended to a fable. The development of this form of literature was due to the fondness for animal symbolism characteristic of early Christian art. Only 3 specimens of such descriptions are extant in Old English literature. They deal with the panther, the whale and the partridge. The panther is complete, there is a gap in the description of the whale, of the partridge there is hardly sufficient to prove that the bird described was really a partridge. The panther, as usual, is symbolical of Christ, and the whale, which lures seafarers to moor their “ocean-mares” to it, represents the “accuser of the brethren” and its gaping mouth is the gate of Hell.

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