Why Anglo-Saxon Poetry?

he question came to my inbox fairly recently: “What is it about Anglo-Saxon poetry that interests you?” The question came from a teacher whose highschool students wondered why the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons continues to be studied. In this essay I’ll treat the question on its face— there is a reason this poetry fascinates me, and I have a personal answer which I believe translates fairly universally.

Anglo-Saxon poetry appeals to my literary sensibilities of how a story should go, and what it should be made up of. Battles and heroism are essential ingredients in their stories, but so are the stories of saints who are portrayed just as heroically, or more so, than the warlord kings they lived alongside. Anglo-Saxon literature also gives us misty battle plains and burial mounds, deep murky swamps and craggy caves. While scene-painting is not the main feature of this poetry, there is no doubt that it evokes them, touching that part of appeal that C.S. Lewis identified as sehnsucht— unreachable longing— and which Tolkien related as the experience of seeing far away mountains, and wondering what goes on between them. In short, Anglo-Saxon poetry is tangible, and yet evokes mystery.

I feel certain about this mysterious appeal because I experienced it even before I was able to read. My older brother owned a book whose cover featured a fierce-looking man wearing a headdress made of wolf’s skin. Clearly the man was dangerous, but not evil per se. That cover haunted my imagination until adulthood when I rediscovered it in order to confirm its subject matter: Early England, and the Cold North (I’m loosely grouping ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poetry with Scandinavian legend because the two are often intertwined). That cover art had done something to my soul. If I were to attempt a psychological formulation, I should say that it put into my head the idea of manliness, of being dangerous but not evil— of the heroic. To stand firm and fiercely in defense of good, to be a dangerous force against evil.

That is my personal gut response, but there is no doubt a broader appeal, even if not immediately recognizable for having been filtered through many years and many external influences. But the popularity of video games like Skyrim and The Witcher series, to pick two recent examples, confirms this appeal. The student who goes home to play Skyrim or The Witcher 3 may not immediately realize the significance of their professor’s ramblings about the family connections between Beowulf and Hrothgar, but the developers of those games were certainly aware as they designed stories based in those histories and legends (in Skyrim we find a very obvious reference in the place name of the mountain: “High Hrothgar”). They give us an experience of a Beowulfian world in their games far better than any film adaptation has so far. More than that, they give us an immersive experience in a fictional culture (although I posit that Skyrim’s history is a thinly disguised version of the British Isles) that includes books which you actually read, herb mixtures, courtship and marriage, and even differences of custom between two cities. We desire the fantastic (dragons) and the heroic (warriors who fight with swords), but we don’t divorce them from the regular day-to-day (books, baskets, spoons, clothes, beggars, wildlife etc).

I’ve gone far enough, I hope, to make the point that this Anglo-Saxon/Medieval appeal has filtered through our culture to the present. It’s found in the image of warriors, kings, saints, dragons, even washerwomen— living in our collective imaginations as an image of times and places when life was more difficult, but also filled with valor. It’s how we feel some stories should go.

any will truthfully point out that the appeal of the images given by old poetry is not the same as the form of the poetry itself. It’s certainly true on some level, for if they were the same, the same amount of people would read Beowulf at the same rate as play Skyrim. Since this is not always true, we need to understand why reading Anglo-Saxon poetry is still appealing to those who do, and why it’s worth studying. And it doesn’t have anything to do with learning to love education, or relating to hip-hop.

In the first place, I do not believe reading Anglo-Saxon poetry (or poetry in general) is necessarily meant to make us fall in love with it straight away. Certain people may, but because all poetry is a construction of words with a particular rhythm, there is never a guarantee of universal appeal. Image and rhythm are two separate metrics for art, after all. I am not even sure all Anglo-Saxons loved poetry, although the number of harps they crafted and the high status they ascribed to them indicate that they did. The story behind a particular poem, Caedmon’s Hymn, tells us more about their poetic culture than we might first suspect. The story goes that Caedmon, a farmer, was a shy and tight-lipped man. One evening, during what we would call a song circle, he was passed a harp and asked to sing. He was so terrified of being put in the spotlight that he ran away and cried in shame. In a dream he heard the voice of God speak to him, and when he returned to sing with his friends, he sang the poem we now call Caedmon’s Hymn. This story is related to us by the scholar-monk Bede the Venerable, who lived from 672 - 735 A.D., a little over 1,296 years ago, or 473,662 days ago, to be more precise.

I quote these numbers not to be showy (I had to look them up anyways), but because they put perspective on the distance between us and the Anglo-Saxons and their poetry. If literature is supposed to tell us anything, it is that we are not alone unto ourselves— we are surrounded not only by the people around us, of course, but in a greater sense we inherit the history of people who lived before us. We should understand they had the same feelings we do, and a need to express them in their own ways. Which brings me to the subjects that they most often wrote about. Let’s take a look at the titles of these popularly studied poems:

1. Poems about warriors and battles: Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh;  2. Poems based on scripture or church history: Genesis, Exodus, Judith, Daniel, Christ, St. Andrew (more often spelled Andreas);  3. Religious poems: The Dream of the Rood,  Caedmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song;   4. Poems about lament and longing: The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message.

Already from the titles we glean two strands: sacred subjects and heroic narratives. In the third and fourth categories these strands are often merged. In the case of St. Andrew and The Dream of the Rood, religious and martial imagery are combined. The poem St. Andrew in fact echoes two of Beowulf’s most famous lines. It goes:

What have we learned in former-days

of glory-blessed heroes, twelve under the stars,

the thanes of the Lord?

…

That is a worthy king!

Contrast with the opening of Beowulf: 

Yes! We have heard     of years long vanished

how Spear-Danes struck     sang victory songs

raised from a wasteland     walls of glory.

…

That was a king!

This opening call to attention at the start of both poems in the original Anglo-Saxon (that is, English as it was spoken and written before the Norman invasion of 1066 A.D.) is even more striking, since both use the exclamatory “Hwæt!”— literally “What!” Here is the matching sample in Anglo-Saxon:

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum, 

þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon, 

hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.

…

þæt wæs god cyning!

And you’ll notice above that Honstetter, the translator I’ve used for St. Andrew, keeps the original word while Rebsamen, the translator for Beowulf, chooses an alternative word as a call to attention. Now would be a good time to turn our attention to the form. In the two samples above we notice that Honstettor’s translation is looser and more relaxed. You can tell this visually by comparing the way the Anglo-Saxon original is spaced with caesuras, to Rebsamen’s which does the same. Rebsamen, unlike many translators, takes the alliterative element of the ‘Beowulf Meter’ very seriously. His translation is not exact line-for-line, but rhythmically and stylistically his comes the closest to the original as any I have read.

The twelve apostles are positioned at the start of St. Andrew to contrast where we find mention of the Spear-Danes in Beowulf. It is the holy apostles who forge ahead heroically, making piecemeal of their spiritual enemies, demons who inhabit the hearts of people. In St. Andrew it is Christ who is a good king, contrasted with the pagan Scyld Scefing in Beowulf, a semi-deified figure. 

n The Dream of the Rood, we again find the  “Hwæt!” call to attention. The voice of the holy cross (rood, in Anglo-Saxon) speaks as the events of the Crucifixion play out. This extended sample (translated by Richard Hamer) shows us how explicitly the religious and martial imagery was combined:

A host of enemies there fastened me.

And then I saw the Lord of all mankind

Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount

Upon me. I durst not against God's word

Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all

The surface of the earth. Although I might

Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

Then the young hero (who was God almighty)

Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.

He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,

Bold in the sight of many watching men,

When He intended to redeem mankind.

I trembled as the warrior embraced me.

Where we are familiar with a vision of Christ on the cross weary and tired with the burden of human sin, in this poem he hastens “with eager zeal”, as a warrior forging into  battle. Christ is the warrior, the cross is the weapon of war against sin. The cross itself faces a conundrum: to obey Christ and uphold him, and the desire to strike down the enemy, which it resists doing. This resistance to violence is not the opposite of warfare here, it is in fact the battle and courageous act. 

Anglo-Saxons very often focused on conundrums (they were great riddlers), but these conundrums are often solved in the same way as the Gordian knot: swiftly and defiantly, with courage— hastening with zeal to the battlefront. In the fragmentary poem The Battle of Maldon, the war-leader Byrhtnoth and his men are given a choice by a viking messenger: to either pay ransom or be invaded and killed. They choose to fight. In Beowulf the title character himself does not seem reluctant to make decisions. In fact, he feels so confident about defeating the monster Grendel that he does not feel it a fair fight to use a weapon against him. Beowulf explains this in a speech and at other points similarly seems to defend his decision and why he is making it. At the end of the poem when Beowulf is an old king in his own kingdom, he is faced with having to fight a dragon. He gives no excuse to not fight the dragon, but asks instead that his old age be accounted as the reason that he will use a sword and shield. This decision turns out to be fatal— in both senses. Nevertheless, Beowulf’s decision and courage, though dooming him, saves his people, for he defeats the dragon with the help of a single loyal thane, Wiglaf.

There is much yet to say, but I hope students and readers of this essay can glean some aspect of understanding this poetry better. The significance of kennings, stock phrases, and oral recitation and memorization, and especially the sound of the poetry will be enough for another essay.