A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance. J. J. Jusserand

[38] It seems impossible to admit, as has been suggested, that these frail objects should have been saved from the plunder and burning of the villas and preserved by the Anglo-Saxons as curiosities. Glasses with knobs, "à larmes," abound in the Anglo-Saxon tombs, and similar ones have been found in the Roman tombs of an earlier epoch, notably at Lépine, in the department of the Marne.

[39] Where the Celtic element was reinforced, at the commencement of the sixth century, by a considerable immigration of Britons driven from England. Hence the name of Bretagne, given then for the first time to Armorica.

      

      CHAPTER III.

      THE NATIONAL POETRY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS.

      I.

      Towards the close of the fifth century, the greater part of England was conquered; the rulers of the land were no longer Celts or Romans, but men of Germanic origin, who worshipped Thor and Woden instead of Christ, and whose language, customs, and religion differed entirely from those of the people they had settled amongst and subjugated.

      The force of circumstances produced a fusion of the two races, but during many centuries no literary fusion took place. The mind of the invader was not actuated by curiosity; he intrenched himself in his tastes, content with his own literature. "Each one," wrote Tacitus of the Germans, "leaves an open space around his dwelling." The Anglo-Saxons remained in literature a people of isolated dwellings. They did not allow the traditions of the vanquished Celts to blend with theirs, and, in spite of their conversion to Christianity, they preserved, almost without change, the main characteristics of the race from which they were descended.

Their vocabulary, save for the introduction of a few words, taken from the Church Latin, their grammar, their prosody, all remain Germanic. In their verse the cadence is marked, not by an equal number of syllables, but by about the same number of accents; they have not the recurring sounds of rhyme, but they have, like the Germans and Scandinavians, alliteration, that is, the repetition of the same letters at the beginning of certain syllables. "Each long verse has four accented syllables, while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent, and is divided by the cæsura into two short verses, bound together by alliteration: two accented syllables in the first short line and one in the second, beginning with any vowel or the same consonant"[40] (or consonants giving about the same sound):

      Flod under foldan · nis thät feor heonon.

      "The water sinks underground; it is not far from here." (Beowulf.) The rules of this prosody, not very difficult in themselves, are made still easier by a number of licenses and exceptions. The taste for alliteration was destined to survive; it has never completely disappeared in England. We find this ornamentation even in the Latin of poets posterior to the Norman Conquest, like Joseph of Exeter in the twelfth century:

Audit et audet Dux falli: fatisque favet quum fata recuset.[41]

      The famous Visions of Langland, in the fourteenth century, are in alliterative verse; under Elizabeth alliteration became one of the peculiarities of the florid prose called Euphuism. Nearer to our own time, Byron makes a frequent use of alliteration:

      Our bay

       Receives that prow which proudly spurns the spray;

       How gloriously her gallant course she goes:

       Her white wings flying—never from her foes. (Corsair.)

The purely Germanic period of the literary history of England lasted six hundred years, that is, for about the same length of time as divides us from the reign of Henry III. Rarely has a literature been more consistent with itself than the literature of the Anglo-Saxons. They were not as the Celts, quick to learn; they had not the curiosity, loquacity, taste for art which were found in the subjugated race. They developed slowly. Those steady qualities which were to save the Anglo-Saxon genius from the absolute destruction which threatened it at the time of the Norman Conquest resulted in the production of literary works evincing, one and all, such a similitude in tastes, tendencies, and feelings that it is extremely difficult to date and localise them. At the furthest end of the period, the Anglo-Saxons continued to enjoy, Christian as they were, and in more and more intimate contact with latinised races, legends and traditions going back to the pagan days, nay, to the days of their continental life by the shores of the Baltic. Late manuscripts have preserved for us their oldest conceptions, by which is shown the continuity of taste for them. The early pagan character of some of the poetry in "Beowulf," in "Widsith," in the "Lament of Deor," is undoubted; still those poems continued to be copied up to the last century of the Anglo-Saxon rule; it is, in fact, only in manuscripts of that date that we have them. An immense amount of labour, ingenuity, and knowledge has been spent on questions of date and place, but the difficulty is such, and that literature forms such a compact whole, that the best and highest authorities have come on all points to contrary conclusions. The very greatness of their labour and amplitude of their science happens thus to be the best proof of the singular cohesion between the various produce of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Of all the poets of the period, the one who had the strongest individuality, as well as the greatest genius, one whom we know by name, Cynewulf, the only one whose works are authentic, being signed, who thus offered the best chance to critics, has caused as many disagreements among them as any stray leaf of parchment in the whole collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. According to Ten Brink he was born between 720 and 730; according to Earle he more probably lived in the eleventh century, at the other end of the period.[42] One authority sees in his works the characteristics of the poetry of Northumbria, another inclines towards Mercia. All possible dates have been assigned to the beautiful poem of "Judith," from the seventh to the tenth century. "Beowulf" was written in Northumbria according to Stopford Brooke, in Mercia according to Earle, in Wessex according to Ten Brink. The attribution of "Andreas" to Cynewulf has just been renewed by Gollancz, and denied by Fritzsche. "Dream of the Rood" follows similar fluctuations. The truth is that while there were doubtless movement and development in Anglo-Saxon poetry, as in all human things, they were very slow and difficult to measure. When material facts and landmarks are discovered, still it will remain true that till then authorities, judging poems on their own merits, could not agree as to their classification, so little apparent was the movement they represent. Anglo-Saxon poetry is like the river Saone; one doubts which way it flows.

      Let us therefore take this literature as a whole, and confess that the division here adopted, of national and worldly and of religious literature, is arbitrary, and is merely used for the sake of convenience. Religious and worldly, northern and southern literature overlap; but they most decidedly belong to the same Anglo-Saxon whole.

      This whole has strong characteristics of its own, a force, a passion, a grandeur, unexampled at that day. Contrary to what is found in Celtic literature, there is no place in the monuments of Anglo-Saxon thought for either light gaiety, or those shades of feeling which the Celts could already express at that remote period. The new settlers are strong, but not agile. Of the two master passions attributed by Cato to the inhabitants of Gaul, one alone, the love of war, rem militarem, is shared by the dwellers on the shores of the northern ocean; the other, argute loqui, is unknown to them.

Members of the same family of nations established by the shores of the North Sea, as the classic nations were on the Mediterranean coasts in the time of the emperors, the Anglo-Saxon, the German, and the Scandinavian tribes spoke dialects of the same tongue, preserved common traditions and the memory of an identical origin. Grein has collected in his "Anglo-Saxon Library" all that remains of the ancient literature of England; Powell and Vigfusson have comprised in their "Corpus Poeticum Boreale" all we possess in the way of poems in the Scandinavian tongue, formerly composed in Denmark, Norway, the Orkneys, Iceland, and even Greenland, within the Arctic circle.[43]