Anglo-Saxon Poetry and the Pleasures of Not Knowing
Quotations from all the poetry in this article are drawn from Elaine Treharne's anthology of Old and Middle English, Wiley-Blackwell 2004
“There is now no one living to whom I might dare clearly to reveal my heart,” begins the elegy “The Wanderer,” written down in the late tenth century, and indeed readers alive today are not likely to find much clear in their encounter with Anglo-Saxon poetry. Enjoying these texts —written during the six hundred years between the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England and the Norman Conquest in 1066— means coming to terms with an irreducible quality of mystery, a stubborn barrier that keeps us from full knowledge of these works and the human beings who wrote them. Part of the reason for these gaps is the immense expanse of time between them and us, but the language in which these poets wrote, though it bears a recognisable relationship to the English that we speak in the twenty-first century, is nevertheless so distant that most of us (including myself, as I write this article) must depend on translations to read it.
The gulf is apparent in other ways. Questions that we might be in the habit of asking about a given piece of writing, such as when it was composed or the author's identity, are difficult to answer for Anglo-Saxon texts, and a meaningful answer may not even be possible. It’s likely that versions of these poems circulated in oral tradition, retold for centuries before they were written down. The scribes who copied and re-copied the manuscripts undoubtedly left their personal stamp on the texts, as did the compilers who chose how to collect them into books —whether by theme, authorship, or simply the whims of taste, is hard to tell. This doesn’t mean that some poems don’t have a strong sense of individual voice. In fact, we do know a handful of names, such as the religious poet Cynewulf who included a “signature” of acrostic runes in each of his poems. But when it comes to authorship, this certainty (if such it can be called) is very much the exception.
We must also calculate the odds of a book —a precious, rare object vulnerable to fire, mildew, and many other calamities— surviving to the present day. For the entire Anglo-Saxon period, we know of just four poetry books and a handful of poems scattered throughout other prose manuscripts. Sometimes an allusion to a work that is now lost gives us a tantalising glimpse of the much larger corpus that once existed. An example of this window into the past is “Deor,” a short poem on the theme of philosophical resignation. Each stanza references a famous story in which some hero experienced either great fame or great suffering, and each ends with the refrain, “as that passed over, so will this.” In the final stanza the narrator Deor reveals himself, explaining that he was once a fortunate man, serving a good lord, but has now been cast out of favour. He hopes that his misfortune will prove as temporary as his former happiness. What makes the poem intriguing for a modern reader is that we no longer know all of the original stories that are referenced. Some names, like Weland the Smith, are legends that survive in several sources, but the following remains an enigma:
Many of us have heard about that business of Maeðhilde: the passion of Geat was bottomless so that this sorrowful love deprived her of all sleep. As that passed over, so will this.
Though scholars have speculated, we still don’t know who either Maeðhilde or the person in love with her was, or the tragic consequences that arose from their relationship. The poem’s open-ended shape offers powerful fuel for the imagination.
Another case in which the vagaries of history give a poem an added, haunting resonance is “The Ruin,” which is found —like all of my favourite Anglo-Saxon poems— in the Exeter Book manuscript. The poem is thought to describe the Roman-era town of Aquae Sulis (modern-day Bath), but the magnificent buildings are in ruins:
The site of the city crumbled. The repairers, the armies, fell to the earth. Therefore, these dwellings fall down, and this red-arch comes away from the tiles.
At the same time the poem itself not only contains copying errors, but the page on which it is written is partially burned, making it fragmented and incomplete: a literary and textual ruin that echoes its subject matter. This might seem like a case of modern eyes spinning artificial circumstances into themes that the original poets never intended, imposing them retrospectively onto the original texts. But I would argue that these layers and lacunae of meaning would probably delight Anglo-Saxon poets —or at least, the sample of poets whom we find represented in the Exeter Book. They seem to enjoy allegories, double-meanings, riddles, mysterious unidentified or even inhuman narrators, and most of all, laconic understatement: the often breathtaking impact that comes from saying little and implying much. The quote from “The Wanderer” that opens this essay goes on to say:
It is a noble custom that a man should bind fast his breast should hold fast his thoughts, think as he will.
This may be just as much advice for writing as it is for stoic emotional regulation. It can sometimes feel as if these poets have set themselves the challenge of finding the absolute minimum of words that is still capable of conveying the enormity of human experience, in this case the unending weight of grief.
Nearly a hundred short poems in the Exeter Book are classified as riddles, on topics that include the humorous, the religious, and the bawdy. The concept of riddles often crops up in many longer texts, for example through Cynewulf’s acrostic signatures, and provides a haunting context to the poem “Wulf and Eadwacer,” which is famously difficult to parse. One reading, which I offer humbly as one of multiple possibilities, is that the poem is narrated by a woman experiencing great loneliness and fear while her husband is in exile (a subject also found in the poem “The Wife’s Lament,” in the same book). In his absence she has started a relationship with another man, but some terrible danger threatens the safety of both her lover and her child. The final lines have been translated as:
A wolf bears our wretched whelp to the woods. That may be easily separated which was never bound, The riddle of us two together.
Existing translations seem to be divided on whether to render the word giedd in the final line as “song” or “riddle,” but it’s easy to see what prompted translator Elaine Treharne to use the latter. It hearkens back to a theory by some nineteenth-century scholars which no longer seems to be taken very seriously, but nevertheless gives me a lot of pleasure: that the entire poem “Wulf and Eadwacer” is indeed intended as a riddle, inviting the same active engagement from the listener as the shorter riddles surrounding it, whose answers are more tangible objects like “an onion” or “a eucharistic chalice.” Is it possible that the poet of “Wulf and Eadwacer” has left the meaning deliberately obscure in order to invite the listener to try and guess at the relationship’s true nature?
Speaking as a poet, I find that the open-ended nature of Anglo-Saxon poetry is reflected even at the micro scale of sound and speech. Before the Norman Conquest, English poetry famously used alliteration rather than end-rhyme, the sounds repeating at the beginning of the words and lines rather than at the end, as in the opening lines of “Deor,” Welund him be wurman wraeces cunnade (“Weland knew the torment of serpents”). An end-rhyme, even a highly original one, carries a sense of inevitability, of closing a loop, whereas the end of a line of alliterative poetry propels us into an unknown, giving no clue as to what should come next.
In the case of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the sheer scale of this unknown leaves a lot of space for the imagination to run free. It’s appealing to think that the physical and linguistic difficulties of reading these poems only enhance a mystery intrinsic to the original text, but it could be that if we had access to the vast body of poetry that was lost, we would find that our sample is not representative after all and that most Anglo-Saxon poetry actually extolled values of clarity, straightforward storytelling, and emotional honesty. There is no way to know, however —which leaves us to savour the possibility-laden gaps and subtle riddles in the rich fragments that remain.--Mary Thaler
