country from a monster, called GRENDEL, who comes into the royal palace at night, and kills the warriors as they lie asleep after the feast. The name of the hero, BEOWULF, also appears in the national epic poem of the Germans, called “The Lay of the Nibelungs" (Nibelungen Lied). There is only one MS. of this poem in existence, and it is in the British Museum. It was probably written down from dictation by a monk of the ninth century. It is, therefore, the oldest heroic poem extant in any Teutonic tongue. It consists of 6357 short lines, each with two accents. The only approach to rhyme in it is the head-rhyme or alliteration, which was characteristic of all our English poetry down to the coming of the Normans. It was probably recited in a kind of chant, to the accompaniment of the harp; and no doubt sounded much better to the old Anglian warriors, over their cups of strong mead in the vaulted hall, lighted only by a large wood fire, than it reads to us of the present age, who have lost the art of reading aloud, and the corresponding art of listening, but prefer to read solely with our eyes. The following is a translation of a few lines, by Professor Morley : The careful prince Warriors marched also, Tracks of the troubler; and so on. The style and vocabulary are of that simple and literal kind which is characteristic of Teutonic languages, and which we still find exemplified in German by the words hand-shoe for glove, and finger-hat for thimble. Thus, in Beowulf, we find, instead of "He began to speak," "He unlocked his word-hoard"; for armour, we have war-shirts; for soldiers, sons of strife; and for retainers, boardsharers or hearth-sharers. Again, the rocks are called "windy seawalls;" the sea is the "water-street," or "the swan-road"; and a ship is "the wave-cutter." But what is usually considered poetical ornament is quite absent from the Beowulf. It is a plain but vivid narrative of what took place. Thus, when the warriors enter Hrothgar's hall, "Sea-weary they set their broad shields, round and hard as stone, against the house-wall. Then, stooping to a bench, they placed in a ring their war-shirts; and the darts-the weapons of the seamen stood together, with the ash-wood grey above." Professor Morley adds that, in the whole "six thousand three hundred and fifty lines, only five similes have been discovered; and these are rather natural expressions than added ornaments." It is worthy of note, that neither the name Angle nor the name Saxon occurs at all in this poem. They also brought with them a poem called The Battle of Finnesburg.1 In this poem occurs the name of Hengst, or Hengist, who, with Horsa, is said to have come to England; but their story is now regarded as mythical. These poems are written in a language, which is really English, but which is more frequently called Saxon, and continental Saxon, to distinguish it from the English spoken and written in England, which is often, but unnecessarily, called Anglo-Saxon. The English of the Beowulf differs from the English of Milton, as a child of a few months old differs from a man of fifty. An ordinary English reader cannot read Beowulf without help; but neither would he be able to see any trace of likeness between the child of six months and the man of half a century. 3. For the first one hundred and fifty years of their residence in this island, our ancestors wrote no books, but passed on their literature, which consisted of rude historical poems, from mouth to mouth. During this period they were pagans. About the year 600, Pope Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine and a body of missionaries to England to preach Christianity. These missionaries taught as well as preached, and they introduced the use of the Roman alphabet, and taught the English to read Latin books. The first English poet, who was born and bred in England, was, CAEDMON. He was a monk of the monastery of Whitby, in the seventh century. This monastery was founded by Hilda, a lady of royal descent, in the year 657. Caedmon was a secular priest (he is generally, but wrongly, represented as a cowherd); and one night, in a dream, he heard a 1 Finsbury, i.e., the town on the Fen. Finsbury in London is so called from the fact that it stood on a fen, or moor. Hence Moorfields, Moorgate Street, etc. B 66 voice, "Caedmon, sing me something!" "I cannot sing; I left the feast because I could not sing." "But you must sing to me.' "What must I sing, then ?" he replied. Sing the origin of creatures," answered the vision; and Caedmon sang some lines in his sleep, of God, and the creation of the world. When he awoke, he remembered the lines; and, being taken to the abbess, he repeated his song to her. The abbess thought his gift came from God, advised him to doff his secular habit, and to become a monk, and "having received him, with all his goods, into the monastery, caused him to be taught the series of sacred history." All this, Caedmon, "by remembering, and, like a clean animal, ruminating, turned into sweetest verse, and by rendering it back to them more smoothly, made his teachers in turn to be his hearers." The subjects of his poems are taken from the Old and New Testaments. He died in 680. Only one MS. of his poem exists. The Norman monks looked upon English books (" AngloSaxon MSS.") as "old and useless," and cleaned the writing off the parchment with pumice-stone, and then used it for their own docu ments. He wrote a Metrical Paraphrase of the Scriptures, which seems to have been read by about fifteen generations of English, through nearly five centuries. It was read, and passed from hand to hand, in manuscript of course; and was not printed till 1655. Milton is said to have borrowed thoughts and incidents from Caedmon; but this is doubtful. 4. The next most important poem before the Conquest is that called The Song of the Fight of Maldon, or the Death of Byrhtnoth. It celebrates the heroic deeds and death of BYRHTNOTH, an English Earl, or Ealdorman, who fell fighting with the Pagan Northmen at Maldon, in Essex, in the year 991. The deeds performed in 1The first book printed in England, "The Game and Playe of the Chesse," was printed at Westminster, by William Caxton, in 1474. battle by each of the combatants are described; and their name and genealogy given, just as Homer describes his heroes. A battle was then a set of individual combats; and its issue depended, not upon a plan, but upon the muscle and courage of the men and their leaders. 5. There are other poems and songs preserved in the prose book, called THE SAXON CHRONICLE. The most notable is The Brunanburh War Song, which describes the battle of Brunanburh in 937, in which Anlaf the Dane was defeated. There is also extant, in the "Saxon Chronicle," a wonderful poem on The Grave, which faithfully reflects the serious, and even gloomy, character of the English mind. 6. The most versatile of the old English poets is the Northumbrian CYNEWULF, who flourished probably during the tenth century. His extant poems (contained in two collections of poetry known as the "Exeter" and "Vercelli" skin-books), include (1) a collection of Riddles, which, as itinerant minstrel or gleeman, he recited at the houses of the nobles and the courts of kings; (2) beautiful Lyrics— such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, full of regretful pathos over lost joys; and (3) the noble religious epics of The Andreas and The Elene. 7. The first great prose-writer in English Literature is KING ALFRED, who was born in 848, and died in 901. After his agreement with the Danes under Guthrum, that the highroad from Dover to Chester, called Watling Street, should be the boundary between the two people, Alfred set to work to raise his people and kingdom from the degradation into which they had sunk. He founded colleges; he invited to his Court men of learning from abroad; and he translated from Latin into English many works on geography, history, and philosophy. He translated, for example, (1) The Ecclesiastical History of Bede; (2) The Ancient History of Orosius; and (3) The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius. To these he added original matter of his own. His colleague in this work was ASSER, a monk of St David's, whom he afterwards made Bishop of Sherborne, 8. The greatest prose work of the so-called Saxon Literature is however, THE SAXON CHRONICLE. This book was written by a series of successive writers, all of whom, were monks; and it is found in seven separate forms, each named after the monastery in which it was written. It seems to have been begun in the ninth century; and it has been brought down to the year 1154, the year in which Henry II. succeeded to the throne. This Chronicle is said to have been established by King Ælfred; and it is supposed that local annals were sent at regular periods to the "monastic head-quarters of a national historiographer," who abridged these local paragraphs, and drew up a general summary of the history for the past year of the whole kingdom. Copies of this summary were then sent round to the different religious houses; "and thus," says Professor Morley, every possessor of the Chronicle might add to it year by year, in an authentic form, each year's instalment of the story of the nation." Thus this Chronicle was the newspaper, review, and history of the whole country. 66 This chronicle has a twofold value for the English people: it is valuable as a storehouse of facts-as containing the materials for history; and it is still more valuable as a specimen of the state of, and the changes in, the English language during the centuries in which it was written. 9. Many of the old English or "Saxon" authors wrote in Latin— which for many centuries was recognised throughout the west of Europe as the language of the learned class. The greatest of these was the VENERABLE BEDE, or Baeda, who was born in 673 and died in 735. He was born at Monkwearmouth, a small town at the mouth of the Wear, in Durham, and lived the greater part of his life in the monastery of Jarrow-upon-Tyne. He wrote an Ecclesiastical History and a large number of other works. It is from him that all our information regarding Caedmon comes.-ASSER, the Bishop of Sherborne, who died in 910, wrote a Latin biography of his king and friend, King Alfred. There were many other distinguished Englishmen who wrote in Latin; and almost all of them belonged to the Church. |