Read Battle of Hastings, The Online
Authors: Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood
There is a similar reference in
Beowulf
to the story of a fight at Finnesburg, of which we have confirmation in a mere fifty lines of another poem on the subject;
the fragment of vellum on which it was originally written has vanished since it was transcribed in the seventeenth century but, to judge by what we have, it must have been a poem of considerable
distinction, though probably shorter than
Beowulf.
The fragment describes the resumption of another blood feud; the young prince, trapped in the hall of his host, sees lights in the night
sky and warns his followers that they signal the advance of enemies:
Here there is no dawn from the east, here no dragons fly,
It is not the horns of this hall that burn,
They come to attack us. Birds sing,
The grey wolf howls, wooden war-gear echoes,
Shields receive the spear. Now shines the moon,
Wandering beneath the clouds; now arise deeds of woe
That will work harm to our people.
It is the combination of the small natural details (the alarmed birds singing, the moon shining erratically through the clouds) with the more standard descriptions of heroic
lays (the wolf howling, the sound of spear on shield) that gives it its peculiarly evocative magic. But what is common to all the surviving Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry –
Beowulf,
the
remains of
Finnesburh
and
Waldere,
the remnant of a poem on Walther of Aquitaine (and also in the remnant we have of the Old High German
Hildebrand) –
is a dignity of
proportion and style that gives it its indubitably epic stature. Beowulf being received by Hrothgar at Heorot is fully comparable to Odysseus at the court of Alcinous. Heroic epic rarely springs,
fully formed, from the head of an original poet;
generations of shorter, possibly cruder lays and songs on its subject herald its appearance. Many generations of legends and
shorter poems on the subject of Beowulf and his exploits, now lost, must have preceded and generated the epic we have now. Not all would have been in English, but some undoubtedly were.
Beowulf
itself (probably dating from the eighth century in its present form) has only survived through a series of happy accidents, the last being the rescue in 1731 of the only surviving
manuscript (though in a damaged form) from the disastrous fire in the Cottonian Library in Ashburnham House, Westminster, in which it was then held. As with so much else of the civilization of the
Anglo-Saxons, we are tormented by our ignorance of what has been lost, as well as grateful for the little that has been saved. Not all of what has endured is on the epic scale or concerns blood
feuds and monsters. Among the rest is something that at that date was peculiar to England – as far as we know, that is, since again we can never know what has been lost of the work of other
countries – and that is poetry of a more reflective nature. Most of it has a peculiarly elegiac or lyrical character. Some are shorter poems reflecting on the human condition, the loss of a
lord, a wife deserted by her husband, a husband who has made good overseas sending for his wife. Many mourn the transitory nature of worldly happiness, such as
The Ruin,
in which the poet
broods over the remains of what was probably an ancient Roman city, possibly Bath, or
The Wanderer
in which the narrator laments:
A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be
When all this world’s wealth standeth waste
Even as now, in many places over the earth,
Walls stand, wind beaten,
Heavy with hoar frost; ruined habitations. . .
The maker of men has so marred this dwelling
That human laughter is not heard about it
And idle stand these old giant works.
How that time is gone, he mourns, vanished beneath the shadow of night, as though it had never been. But if the predominant mood of Anglo-Saxon poetry was elegiac, it was
flexible enough to serve other purposes: to depict the frenzy of battle, as when the sparks from the clashing swords blaze ‘as if all Finnesburh were aflame’ or to portray the almost
Miltonic ambition and resentment of Satan in the retelling of the Genesis story (‘I could be God as well as He’). The Old English
Genesis
may have been a biblical story, but
Satan, declaring war on heaven, does so in the old Germanic heroic spirit:
Strong comrades, bold-hearted heroes, stand by me, who will not fail me in the fight; they, brave men, have chosen me for their master. With such can a man lay a plan, carry
it out with such companions in war. They are keen in their friendship to me, loyal in their hearts; I can be their leader, rule in this kingdom. Thus it seems not right to me that I need
flatter God any whit for any benefit; no longer will I be his follower.
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But he finds himself in another land, ‘void of light and teeming with flame, a great peril of fire’, many hundreds of years before Milton described a later
Satan’s ‘darkness visible’.
There are quantities of riddles, a verse form in which even monks thought it permissible to indulge (which is presumably why so many, comparatively speaking, have survived) and which
frequently illuminates life in Anglo-Saxon England. This riddle has more modern resonances:
The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave; it called out in its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth;
its edges were sharp. It was malignantly cruel, not easily brought to battle but fierce in the fighting; it stove in the ship’s sides, relentless and ravaging. It bound it with a baleful
charm; it spoke with cunning of its own nature: ‘My mother is of the dearest race of maidens, she is my daughter grown to greatness, as it is known to men, to people among the fold, that
she shall stand with joy on the earth in all lands.’
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It is an iceberg.
And there is that unforgettable, extraordinarily powerful and fully achieved masterpiece,
The Dream of the Rood,
in which Christ’s cross speaks of its experience of the crucifixion
with a passion and imaginative originality that were not to be recaptured in English poetry for three centuries after the conquest:
As a rood was I raised up; I bore aloft the mighty King, the Lord of Heaven; I durst not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails; the wounds are still plain to view in me,
gaping gashes of malice; I durst not do hurt to any of them. They bemocked us together. I was all bedewed with blood, shed from the Man’s side, after He had sent forth His Spirit. I have
endured many stern trials on the hill; I saw the God of hosts violently stretched out; darkness with its clouds had covered the Lord’s corpse,
the fair radiance; a
shadow went forth, dark beneath the clouds. All creation wept, lamented the King’s death; Christ was on the cross.
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When poetry was written in English again, it had a different character, the difference not always easy to define but probably due in part to the fact that, while before the
conquest much of the most impressive work had been written for an aristocratic audience or readership, by the time of its revival it was being written for a more popular and provincial public. It
was not until the fourteenth century that it regained its old authority.
Anglo-Saxon poetry has been accused of a gloomy overemphasis on the darker side of human existence. It is true that it tends to dwell on the transitoriness of life and of pleasure; happiness in
any Dark Age society probably was transitory. But it reflects the circumstances of the life in which it was written. Just as the Anglo-Saxons’ love of gold was derived in part from the way
its radiance lighted the darkness and cold of their churches and houses, so their poetry mirrors the harshness of their daily existence. The reader is always conscious of the gloom and wildness of
the northern landscape that produced it: the cold, the hard life extracting a living from the soil, the seaspray in the face, the loneliness of a life deprived of the support of a lord, contrasted
with the warmth and joy of feasting in the hall and the company of comrades. It calls to mind Bede’s famous story of the Northumbrian ealdorman’s comparison of the life of man to the
sparrow flying through the warm lighted hall, passing from the cold darkness outside to another unknown darkness on the other side. There is none of the joy of the merry month of May in Anglo-Saxon
poetry. But there is a noble melancholy and an elegiac lyricism, combined with a stoic acceptance of fate, and a courage
‘perfect, because without
hope’,
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exquisitely summed up in the words of Byrhtwold, the old retainer, at the battle of Maldon:
Mind shall be the braver, heart be the fiercer,
Courage be the greater, as our strength lessens.
Here lies our lord, hacked and cut down,
A brave man in the dust; ever will he mourn
Who thinks from this war-play to return home.
England was unique in Europe in 1066 in having a fully developed vernacular prose. Its most remarkable manifestation is, of course, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which recorded in
English events from the seventh century onwards at a time when chronicles would normally have been written in Latin. It was, in fact, not one chronicle but several, different versions being
maintained at different ecclesiastical centres around the country. Its establishment has been credited to Alfred, as part of his campaign to promote writing in English that could be read in their
own tongue by all of his people who were literate. There is no written evidence to support the claim, but the coincidence of the appearance of a chronicle in English at the time when Alfred was
campaigning for essential books to be available in English is, to say the least, suggestive, especially since it would have taken a certain amount of central authority to get the project going in
the first place. Whatever the origin of the Chronicle, it does, in itself, provide an overview of the development of written English, from the earliest entries, such as the rather incoherent but
vivid account of the blood feud in 755 between Cynewulf and Cyneheard (the first ever substantial piece of historical writing in Europe in any vernacular) to the bitter irony of the late tenth- and
early eleventh-century entries on the Danish raids in the reign of Æthelred and
the fluency and power of the account of Count Eustace’s affray at Dover and the
outlawing of the Godwin family in 1051. The Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode gives a fair sample of Alfredian prose in its early stages, though it may be a reworking of an earlier account of the
episode that had been handed down: after telling us that Cynewulf had held the kingdom of the West Saxons for thirty-one winters, it continues:
He wished to drive out a prince named Cyneheard. . . and when [Cyneheard] heard that the king was lying with a woman at Merton, he rode there and surrounded the bower before
the king’s men were aware of him. And when the king perceived that, he went to the door and there valiantly defended himself until he saw the prince and then rushed at him and severely
wounded him. And then they were all fighting with the king until they had slain him. And when the king’s men heard the din from the woman’s bower they rushed there, whoever was
readiest and swiftest; and the prince offered all of them life and goods but none would accept. And they fought together until all were slain but one Welsh hostage, and he was badly wounded.
And in the morning when the king’s thegns that had been left behind heard that the king was dead they rode thither with his ealdorman Osric and his thegn Wiferth and the men who had been
left behind, and found the prince where the king lay slain and the gates had been locked against them, and there they were fighting. And he offered them lands and goods at their own choice if
they would grant him the kingdom, and told them that kinsmen of theirs were within who would not go from
him. And they answered that no kinsmen were dearer to them than
their lord, and they would never follow his slayer. And they offered that their kinsmen should go safely hence; and they said that the same had been offered to their companions who had been
with the king. They said that they cared for this ‘no more than your companions who were slain with the king’. And they were fighting around the gates until they got inside and slew
the prince and all who were with him, all but one who was the ealdorman’s godson, and his life was spared though he was much wounded.
The confusion of personal pronouns, the abrupt unexplained switch from the third to the second person, all mark it out as early experimental prose; but nothing conceals the
vitality and immediacy of the account given, even though it must have been written well over a hundred years after the events described. The contrast in fluency and control with the much later
Chronicle extracts already quoted is striking but this early piece was written by a clerk who already had an instinctive feeling for the rhythms and potentialities of English prose.
Outside the Chronicle, it is equally possible to track the development of the language in flexibility and sophistication from the slightly elementary individuality and sincerity of
Alfred’s first efforts to the fiery eloquence of Archbishop Wulfstan’s
Sermon of the Wolf
and the classic elegance of Ælfric. It is impossible not to wonder what would have
resulted if the language had been allowed to continue along its well-established trajectory; but the development of the prose, like that of the poetry, was stamped out brutally overnight on 14
October 1066. When in the 1070s the English language ceased to be used for political and administrative
purposes, there was no longer any central authority to establish and
propagate a standard ‘received’ English and it broke down into a confusion of regional dialects. Indeed, it is likely that the written Old English that has descended to us, the Wessex
form of the language, must always have been something of a literary and bureaucratic mandarin, probably different from its spoken form even in Wessex, certainly different from what was spoken in
Mercia or Northumbria. With the loss of its dominance, the regional variants had their way. Thus, when English prose began to be used again for literary purposes, three centuries later, it was, in
effect, a new English, and had returned to the tentative experimentalism that Old English had shown in Alfred’s day. Not until Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur,
roughly four hundred
years after the conquest, did it show itself again as a fully developed literary medium.