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The Englishman

An Evolution

force of enlightenment. Gradually they learned the language, not much different from their own; they accepted Christianity as readily as had the Anglo-Saxons; they took English wives; they mingled freely with the conquered people, and in time their national identity was swallowed up completely.

The Formative Era. Between Hengist and William the Conqueror lies a period of six centuries,-a period five times as long as our own national history. Its importance need not be dwelt upon. It was the formative era in English history. At its opening we see barbaric hordes, at its close we have what is essentially the Englishman of to-day. Other elements were to be added, but they were to work no fundamental changes. The English had evolved themselves; seldom has there been a people that has arisen from barbarism to enlightenment with so little help from outside hands. One important element, that of Christianity, had come from abroad, but nevertheless it is safe to say with Duruy that" from the time when the Roman power had been broken until the moment when William the Conqueror brought the British Isles again under continental dominion, England's relations with the rest of Europe were slight." It was this that gave the Englishman his peculiar personality, his views of life, his estimate of values, so different from those of other Europeans.

CHAPTER V

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE

I. THE PRIMAL POETRY

The Scop. (Brooke, History of Early English Literature; Morley, English Writers, vol. ii.; Azarius, Development of Old English Thought; Earle, Anglo-Saxon Literature.) To a greater extent than that of almost any other nation, save perhaps Greece, the literature of England has been an evolution. In everything that pertained to mental culture the Englishman began at the lowest elements, and in a corner of the world, almost out of contact with all others, educated himself. The story of his earliest lispings will never be known. When, through the aid of Tacitus, we first catch sight of him, he has already made an advance, he goes into battle singing rude songs of heroism and boasting. Still later, in Beowulf, we see him again in his bardic age. First of all a warrior, his loftiest ideals are connected with physical bravery, with power, with glory. Kings and heroes love to hear chanted the praises of their own prowess and the glory of their ancestry. A class of professional singers has arisen,—scops, or gleemen,-who wander, like the rhapsodists of Homeric days, from court to court, chanting from memory or improvising at will wild songs of battle and bale," accompanying themselves upon the glee-beam," and stirring their hearers as with trumpets. On the joyous morning after Beowulf had cleared Heorot of Grendel, the gleeman of the hall,

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The Wandering Singer

a thane of the folk-lord,

Few Songs Preserved

Who ancient traditions treasured in memory,
New word-groups found properly bound:
The bard after 'gan then Beowulf's venture
Wisely to tell of, and words that were clever
To utter skilfully, earnestly speaking.1

This gleeman was a singer stationed permanently in the court of the king. In The Lament of Deor we have the complaint of such a gleeman after he has been supplanted in the king's favor by another singer more skilful or more popular. But more frequently the scop was a wanderer like Widsith who

Far traveled through strange lands and learnt
Of good and evil in the spacious world,
Parted from home friends and dear kindred.?

Such a wanderer was eagerly welcomed wherever he went. He brought news, gossip, entertainment. He was poet, novelist, singer, actor, newspaper, all in one. Through a long era the scop ruled supreme in every realm of literature.

The poetry of this prehistoric epoch was not written. It was transmitted orally from generation to generation as were the earliest murmurings of Greek song. The few mutilated leaves that have survived the blasts of more than a thousand winters represent but a pitiful fragment of that minstrelsy that made joyous those long hypoborean evenings,-the twilight of history. Moreover, the little that survives is far from its original form. The songs, since they were not written, changed constantly. All the specimens now extant are in Anglo-Saxon, a lan2 Morley's translation.

'Dr. Hall's translation.

The Most Important Survivals

Anglo-Saxon Prosody

guage formed after the migration to Britain, a fact which proves that the gleemen, as the language changed, were forced gradually to recast the old ballads in order to be understood. In later days all the heathen poetry was at the mercy of the Church. In her hands alone was the art preservative. The scops and gleemen became monks, and the few ancient ballads which they saw fit to copy they mutilated and amended at will.

These fragments of primal poetry which have come without name or date out of the mists of the past may be counted almost on one's fingers. Aside from the single manuscript of Beowulf and Judith, now in the British Museum; the Junian Manuscript of Cadmon, now in the Bodleian; the mutilated leaf of parchment rescued from an old bookbinding, telling of a fight around the burning castle of Finn, doubtless all that remains of a noble epic; and two leaves of the poem Waldhere, accidentally discovered at Copenhagen-they are all to be found in a single manuscript collection that by great good fortune has remained undisturbed in Exeter Cathedral for nearly nine centuries. This collection includes Widsith, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Lament of Deor, The Fates of Men, The Ruined City.

[For a full bibliography of the Anglo-Saxon literature up to the time of Ælfred, see Brooke, p. xiv.; also Earle, ch. ii. Excellent translations from most of these poems may be found in Brooke and Morley.]

The Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. While early English poetry knew nothing of rhyme or meter it nevertheless followed laws that were definite and difficult. Each verse must have four accents and must consist of two parts with three alliterating words, two of them in the first half.

A Blood-stirring Meter

Its Picturesqueness

Oft Scyld Scefing sceathena þreatum,
Monegum maegbum meodo-setla ofteah.

The effect of this arrangement is to give a curious, jerky movement. One gets from it the idea of rude, nervous strength. It is poetry for the dealers of sword-strokes, for the rowers of war-galleys. The very monotony of the time-beat is exhilarating. One can almost hear the excited cadences of the old gleeman; the steady, bloodstirring roll of his harp-notes; and see the rhythmic sway of his head and his body as one reads such lines as those describing the attack on the castle of Finn:

Then wildly cried he, the warrior king,
This is no dawn of East,
Nor burn the cressets,
Fierce is the flaming.
Wild chirps the cricket,
Shield and shaft meeting.
In clouds she wanders,
Hates of the people.
Fight for your dear land,

no flight of dragon;
bright in the broad hall,
Frightened the birds sing,
but wilder the war wood,
See the moon shining,
waking the woful deeds,
Rouse ye my heroes!
fight in the forefront.

Then in the hall rose

roar of the slaughter,

Round mighty Guthlafsson lay many corpses.
Sailed then the raven, swart and brown-sallow;
In the fierce sword-gleam seemed it Finn's castle
Blazed altogether. Battle I never heard,

Nobler of heroes fitter for mead feast.1

But usually this old poetry moves slowly. Repetitions and parallel constructions are frequent. The singer often hovers over his ideas, repeats his nouns in figurative synonyms, and dwells fondly on the added epithets thus made possible. Picturesque compounds and metaphors

I Washburn's translation.

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