Christianity and Anglo

ture

British was reduced into literary form more perfectly than it can well be thought to have been. How different it might have been if Carausius, near the end of the third century, had succeeded in his bold design of establishing an independent British kingdom! How interesting the speculation whether, if Roman and Celt had been left to work out their destiny without Saxon interference, Britons would at this day be speaking a Romance or a Celtic language! A momentous question had it arisen, for, if united by affinity of speech to the Latin nations of the Continent, we should have been far more obnoxious to foreign influences than has been the case; if, on the other hand, our speech had been Celtic, we should have been cut off from the majority of mankind.

The man who gave the first decided impulse to the transformation of Saxon litera- Anglo-Saxon literature was Pope Gregory the Great, and the day from which it dates is that on which the beauty of the captive Saxon youths extorted from him the world-famous exclamation, Non Angli sed angeli. Evidence, nevertheless, is not wanting that Gregory was but, in French phrase, driving in a door already ajar. A century and a half had now elapsed since the first Saxon settlement in Britain (449); and half a century since the death of King Arthur about 544, a date which, even if imaginary as regards the particular event coupled with it by tradition, may be fairly taken to denote that of the final victory of the Saxon over the Celt in South Britain. A generation of comparative tranquillity must have contributed to dim the old ideals; and that these were really obsolescent is shown by the extremely rapid progress of the new religion, and the slight opposition it received from any quarter. Though priests existed among the Saxons, there can have been no endowed hierarchy deeply interested in the maintenance of the ancient order of things; and the success of the missionaries (A.D. 597) was probably promoted by their dissociation from the ancient Celtic church still extant in the unsubdued west and north of Britain, which the Saxons abhorred as inimical and the Roman missionaries as schismatical. While the sole visible token of Christianity among the Saxons prior to the mission of Augustine is the private chapel of Queen Bertha, it is still probable that King Ethelbert and his spouse were far from a solitary instance of the union of heathen husbands with Christian women from beyond sea. In any case, Christianity never made an easier conquest, and the ideals of a converted people never underwent a more complete metamorphosis. It was indeed a displacement of the original centre of gravity when saints and martyrs eclipsed warriors in the popular veneration, and the traditions of Teutons gave way to the traditions of Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins. The natural development of Anglo-Saxon literature was destroyed, and every prognostic concerning it which might have seemed reasonable a century earlier was brought to nought.

Influence

of Latin learning

Contemporaneously with this revolution appeared another development of which the Anglo-Saxons could have had no idea, the introduction of

learning. For the first time a classical and hieratic language was brought to their knowledge, a tongue no longer the living speech of any people, but acquaintance with which, and in some measure with its literary monuments, was henceforth to distinguish the man of culture from the mere warrior and the boor. For the first time an erudite caste was established among them, men of the book, deeply demarcated from the rest of the community by costume and rule of life. The monastery was to bring the school in its train, and, ere long, prose literature was to arise among a people who had hitherto known no literature but the poetical. King Ethelbert's instinct had not wholly misled him when he shunned to meet the first missionaries from dread of their incantations, though the spirits they were actually to raise came in another shape than any he could have foreseen. At the time of Augustine's mission the Saxons appear to have had no other written character than runes, understood by so few that they were regarded as magical, and proscribed as such by the missionaries. Pre-Christian Before considering the influence of the new creed upon the Angloemains of Saxon mind as manifested in its literature, it will be expedient to dispose Anglo-Saxon of the few literary relics of the pre-Christian age. The position of by far the most important of these is anomalous. The epic of Beowulf, one of the few commanding peaks of Anglo-Saxon literature, is and is not preChristian. Modern criticism, at least, seems almost to have established that it was composed more than a century after the mission of Augustine, and traces of Christianity-perhaps interpolated-are not absent from it. On the other hand, its spirit is that of the old heroic age, it bodies forth unchristened chivalry in its intensest form, it is a near neighbour of the Eddas, and consequently very remote from Bede, Caedmon, and other lights of Christianised Anglo-Saxondom. If the poet really wrote so late as now generally believed, he dwelt spiritually in a romantic past, and cherished ideals extinct among the Saxons, though still flourishing in Scandinavia. His poem, therefore, should be treated rather with reference to its spirit than to the actual date of its composition, even were this absolutely certain. Before examining it, it will be convenient to deal with the inconsiderable fragments of early Anglo-Saxon literature which are probably pre-Christian in every point of view.

Remains of Pre-Christian literature

As in Latin, the earliest written remains of Anglo-Saxon are not literary. They consist mainly of charms, resembling, but surpassing in dignity, the ancient Roman incantations preserved in Cato the Censor's work on agriculture. Being earlier than the knowledge of writing, and transmitted orally from generation to generation, they have come down to us in a mutilated and adulterated form, having been largely interpolated by monastic transcribers in order to eradicate the traces of their original heathenism, which are nevertheless obvious. The earliest, as it would seem to be, is probably the oldest specimen of English

extant :

PRE-CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

Hal wes thu, folde, fira modor;
Beo thu growende on Godes faethma;
Fodre gefylled firum to mytte.

Hail to thee, Earth, mother of men;

Be thou fruitful in God's embrace;
Filled with fruit for the good of men.

7

This and similar invocations must date from a very early period, and were doubtless chanted in Angleland before the emigration to Britain. Poetry unquestionably existed among the Saxons and Angles and kindred German tribes before they came into contact with the Romans, and was an entirely indigenous product, owing nothing to Latin or Celtic influence. It usually took the form of the praise of heroes. Tacitus tells us how in his time the German bards sang the exploits achieved by Arminius a century earlier. It would be most interesting to know whether these songs were contemporary with Arminius, and orally transmitted to a later generation, or whether successions of bards took the subject up anew from age to age. Julian, in the fourth century, found the Alemanni singing heroic lays, which it is to be wished that he had transmitted to us. Priscus, the Byzantine ambassador to the court of Attila, tells us that Attila's deeds were chanted in his presence by his minstrels, whose strains must of course have been contemporary with the events celebrated. But these Ugrian or Mongolian warblings must have been as unintelligible to the Germans as to the Romans, and the insignificant place of the mighty Attila (Etzel) in the Nibelungen Lied affords a striking illustration of Horace's Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona. Attila is nevertheless mentioned in what is most probably the earliest English poem we possess.

The history of this poem is, notwithstanding, involved in many Widsith difficulties. It claims to be the composition of Widsith, an assumed name denoting "the far-traveller," and to commemorate the various courts visited by him as an itinerant minstrel. Chief among these is that of Hermanric, King of the Ostrogoths about 375. If Widsith is a real person, and the poem a genuine record of his bygone days, it must have been composed early in the fifth century. He speaks, however, distinctly of his comradeship with the Goths when they were contending" against the bands of Aetla" (Attila). Attila did not become king until 433, so, even allowing that he may have battled against the Goths before coming to the throne, if the passage is really from the pen of a poet who had known Hermanric in 375, Widsith must have attained a great age. It is, perhaps, in favour of the genuineness of the poem that palpable interpolations should occur in several places. If, for example, Widsith had really mentioned Alboin, King of the Lombards, he could not have written until after 568 A.D. So late a date, however, seems irreconcilable with the mention of the Ostrogoths as still settled upon the Vistula, and other geographical details. It is manifest that, while seeming indications of a late date may easily find

Lament of
Deor

their way into an old poem, tokens of antiquity are not likely to be interpolated into a recent one unless with the deliberate purpose of deceit, which seems unlikely here. It is difficult not to be impressed by the apparent sincerity of Widsith's praise of his patrons, and still more difficult to conjecture why a literary imposture should be perpetrated in honour of the deceased sovereigns of an extinct nation two centuries. after their death. Widsith, as rendered by Mr. Stopford Brooke, says :

For a longish time lived I with Eormanric;

There the King of Gotens with his gifts was good to me;
He, the Prince of burg-indwellers, gave to me an armlet

On the which six hundred scats of beaten gold

Scorèd were, in scillings reckoned.

And another gift Ealdhild gave to me,

Folk queen of the doughty men, daughter of Eadwine,

Over many lands I prolonged her praise :

Whensoe'er in singing I must say to men

Where beneath the sky I had known the best

Of all gold-embroidered queens, giving lavishly her gifts.

It therefore seems not unlikely that Widsith's lays on the conflicts between the Goths and the Huns really related to those which took place under Hermanric's immediate successors, but that the passage has been altered by a later poet, for whom Attila was the representative of the obliterated Hunnish nation, now passing into the domain of legend. An additional argument for the authenticity of Widsith's poem is the occurrence in it of Slavonic names accepted as real by modern Slavonic scholars.

Apart from the veneration due to so ancient a monument of our tongue, the literary claims of Widsith's poem are but slight. It is chiefly interesting for the picture of the minstrel-sole representative of letters and articulate voice of public opinion-faring from court to court and meeting with honour everywhere-for all have an appetite for praise, and all would fain live in song:

Always, South or Northward, some one they encounter,
Who, for he is learned in lays, lavish in his giving,
Would before his men of might magnify his sway.
Manifest his earlship. Till all flits away,

Life and light together, land who getteth so
Hath beneath the heaven high established power.

Another very interesting poem probably belongs to the pre-Christian era, even though it may have undergone modification in form. This is the Lament of Deor, an ancient Teutonic bard, perhaps mythical, who bewails his eclipse in popular favour by another bard, Heorrenda, the Horant of the German epic of Gudrun, precisely as, in after ages, Addison and Scott were, as poets, dethroned by Pope and Byron. Deor's behaviour recalls Scott's rather than Addison's; he indulges in no railing against his successful rival, but, unable to rehabilitate himself