THE MIDDLE AGES: FROM DARKNESS TO VITALISM

Interesting resource: https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature

1. Darkness and its unexpected lyricism: from Old English to Middle

Some initial historical considerations: who were the Anglo-Saxons?

 Who were the first ‘Englishmen’? The first ‘Englishmen’ were foreigners

 The ‘British Race’ (called Britanni by the Romans, and their country Britannia),
was located mainly in the East of England (Wales). Ironically, “Welsh” meant in
Old English ‘foreigner’. They were ruled by the Roman, Britannia being the most
westerly and northerly province of the Roman Empire.

 The time of the fall of the Roman Empire coincided with migrations of peoples
from the East of Europe (Goths and Vandals, who included the Angles and
Saxons). They drove the British west and claimed the country for themselves, a
process which was completed by the end of the 7th century. Their language was
called Anglo-Saxon (Old English)

 The Angles, Jutes and Saxons were initially non-Christian (they worshipped the
old Germanic Gods), but under the influence of the Christian evangelists from
Ireland they were converted into Christianity by the end of the sixth century.

The first literature of the Anglo-Saxons

 Oral, passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.

“The oldest poem in the English language is Beowulf. It was not composed in
England, but on the continent of Europe. […] It was not written down till the end
of the ninth century. It is a stirring, warlike, violent poem of over three thousand
lines, and it is perhaps difficult to think of it as being set down by a monk, a man
of peace, in the quiet of a monastery. These Anglo-Saxon monks, however, had
the blood of warriors in them, they were the son and grandsons of Vikings.
Beowulf’s essentially a warrior’s story. It tells of the hero who gives his name to
the poem and his struggle with a foul monster (half-devil, half-man) called
Grendel, who had for a long time being raiding the banqueting-hall of King
Hrothgar of Jutland (land of the Jutes) and carrying off and devouring Hrothgar’s
warriors. Beowulf sails from Sweden and comes to the help of Hrothgar. His
fights with Grendel […] are the subject of the poem, a poem whose grim music
is the snapping of fangs, the crunching of bones, and whose colour is the grey of
the northern winter, shot by the red of blood. […] It is not a Christian poem […]
but the product of an advanced pagan civilization. Much of the strength and
violence of Beowulf derives from the nature of Old English itself. That was a
language rich in consonants, fond of clustering its consonants together, so that
the mouth seems to perform a swift act of violence” (Burgess, 17-18)

→https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaShOr5AeKAç

→https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/b/beowulf/study-help/famous-quotes-from-
beowulf
  Other Old English Verse dealing with war: The Battle of Maldon, The Seafarer
and The Wanderer

“There are two great poems (The Seafarer and The Wanderer) whose resigned
melancholy (the laments of men without fixed abode) and powerful description
of nature still speak strongly through the strange words and the heavy-footed
rhythms. Resigned melancholy is a characteristic of much Old English Verse: even
when a poem is at its most vigorous – dealing with war, storm, sea and the
drinking-hall, the creation of the world – we always seem to be aware of a certain
undercurrent of sadness. Perhaps this is a reflection of the English climate, the
grey skies and the mist, or perhaps it is something to do with the mere sound of
English in its first phase – heavy-footed, harsh, lacking in the tripping, gay quality
of a language like French or Italian. Or perhaps it is a quality added, in odd lines
or even words, by the scribes in the monasteries – monks aware that this world
is vanity, that life is short, that things pass away and only God is real. But the
sense of melancholy is there all the time, part of the strange haunting of Old
English poetry” (Burguess 20)

→ https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-wanderer/

 Other pieces of Old English Verse:

A poem composed by Caedmon, the first piece of Christian literature to appear

“Caedmon, a humble and unlearned man, tended the cattle of an abbey on the Yorkshire
coast. One night, at a feast, when songs were called for, he stole out quietly, ashamed
that he could contribute nothing to the amateur entertainment. He lay down in the cow-
shed and slept. In his sleep he heard a voice asking him to sing. ‘I cannot sing,’ he said
‘and that’s why I left the feast and came here,’ ‘Nevertheless,’ said the mysterious voice,
‘you shall sing to me.’ ‘What shall I sing?’ ‘Sing me the Song of Creation,’ was the answer.
[…]” (Burgess 19-20)1

1
Burgess, Anthony 1987. English Literature. London: Longman.
Historical Instability and Changeable Cultural Centers: from Old English to Middle
English

At the end of the ninth century, England was divided into three main kingdoms:
Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

Northumbria, plenty of rich monasteries, became the new cultural center. All the poetry
of England was recorded in the Northumbrian Dialect.

However, the Danes invaded England and destroyed books, monasteries and
slaughtered monks. Wessex became the new cultural centre when King Alfred defeated
the Danes (878). In a now peaceful kingdom he became increasingly worried about
improving culture and education. A significant aspect is that he encouraged the
translation from Latin books into West Saxon English (Wessex English), which became
the language of English culture from now on.

In 1066 the Normans (who spoke Norman French) took control of England with William
the Conqueror at their head. His Domesday Book was the first document written in
Norman English. With the advent of the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons were marginalized
and their language and culture considered inferior.

As Anthony Burgess has argued,

“the Normans remembered the literature they shared with much of the rest of France,
and it is the qualities of old French literature which are to appear in England later. […]
Its themes, like the themes of Old English Literature, were often warlike, as in the great
Song of Roland, but, if one may take a metaphor from the cinema, Old English verse is
in black and white, French literature in colour. Old English verse is drenched in mist, grey
and grim, while French literature is drenched in sunlight. […] To the Anglo-Saxons French
must have appeared a feminine language, softer and gayer than their own masculine
tongue. But out of the mingling of feminine and masculine was to come something like
an ideal language” (24)

However, with the passage of time English, which became enriched after the contact
with Norman French and the borrowing of Latin words, would prevail over Norman.
Middle English was born, and a new kind a lyricism was born with it too:
“Of the non-religious works in Middle English, one can point first to certain lyrics, written
with great delicacy and skill, but signed by no name, which still have power to enchant
us and still, in fact, are sung […] There is love poetry, like the fine son Alison (a common
name for girls in the Middle Ages). […] Longer poems are The Owl and the Nightingale
[…] (the story of a dispute between the two birds as to which has the finer song; Pearl
(a long lament in very ornamental language on the death of a child and a vision of the
heaven to which she has gone). Contained in the same manuscript as Pearl (and
belonging with it to the middle of the fourteenth century) is a remarkable work written
in the Lancashire called Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight. This takes its tale from the
myths of the Round Table […] (Burgess 27)

→ Alisoun (Middle English Lyric) (luminarium.org)

→https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnv-4XR2xeI