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ANGLO SAXON POETRY :

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with them the
common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for panegyric, magic, and
short narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after the conversion of King Aethelberht I of
Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that the English wrote poetry in their own
language. But St. Bede the Venerable, in his HistoriaecclesiasticagentisAnglorum (Ecclesiastical
History of the English People), wrote that in the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate Northumbrian
cowherd, was inspired in a dream to compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later
composed verses based on the Scripture, which was expounded for him by the monks at Streaneshalch
(now called Whitby), but only the Hymn of Creation survives. Caedmon legitimized the native verse
form by adapting it to Christian themes. Others, following his example, gave England a body of
vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before the end of the 1st millennium.

The experiential and philosophical poetics of the Anglo-Saxons informs a complex, sophisticated poetry.
It speaks of a male-centred, tribal society structured by the bond between the lord and his liegemen, of
the virtues of heroism, and the ineluctability of wyrd (fate). Deeply set in the social, communal space of
the tribe or kingdom, poetry is an essentially public, communal art, cultivated by skilled bards. The
theory of Eduard Sievers of alliterative verse gives the clearest comprehension of Old English poetry.
The system is based on accent, alliteration, the number of vowels, and patterns of syllabic stress. It is
based on five versions on base-verse scheme; any one of the five categories can be used in any verse.
The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic
languages.

The other noticeable styles found in Anglo-Saxon poetry is a lyrical compound which attracts reader or
listener making a vivid picture; kenning .It has an intentional effort to be vague and mysterious,like
wound-dew for blood . Anglo-Saxon poetry is marked by the comparative rarity of similes. This is a
particular feature of Anglo-Saxon verse style, and is a consequence of both its structure and the
rapidity with which images are deployed, to be unable to effectively support the expanded simile. As an
example of this, the epic Beowulf contains at best five similes, and these are of the short variety. This
can be contrasted sharply with the strong and extensive dependence that Anglo-Saxon poetry has upon
metaphor, particularly that afforded by the use of kennings. Also repetition with variation is a common
feature alglo saxons poetry.Whereas, Litotes is a type of oral irony. This is expressed in form of the
overstatement such as in Beowulf when the hero is in the clasp of Grendels mother, and the poet
writes repeatedly that what deep trouble Beowulf is in. It was used similarly used in the case of the
understatement. Litotes aims to intensify the feeling in the poetry.
More or less, Old English verses are parted in half by a pause; the pause is called a "caesura." Each
half-line consists of two stressed syllables. The first stressed syllable of the second half-line alliterates
with one or both of the stressed syllables of the first half-line. The second stressed syllable of the
second half-line does not alliterate with either of the stressed syllables of the first half.

Almost all this poetry is composed without rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed
syllables alternating with an indeterminate number of unstressed ones. This line strikes strangely on
ears habituated to the usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmic unit or foot, theoretically consists of
a constant cumber of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow any stressed syllable.
Another unfamiliar and equally striking feature in the formal character of Old English poetry
is structural alliteration, or the use of syllables beginning with similar sounds in two or three of the
stresses in each line.
Old English had many inflections, large consonant clusters, borrowings from Latin and
Scandinavian. The earliest written English words are from the 7th century. Much of Old English
poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, of
bard . This poetry is often bold and strong, but also mournful and elegiac in spirit, this poetry
emphasizes the sorrow and ultimate futility of life and the helplessness of humans before the power of
fate. Anglo-Saxon poetry typically depicts the problems which arise as the theology of the Church
(Christianity) and the theology of the Pagan world are played off of, and against, each other. Like many
of the epics during this time, the poetry of the Anglos was meant to be a moral lesson to those
listening. A sort of fable, the poems taught lessons on life and righteousness.
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The themes in Anglo-Saxon poetry start with heroics such as Beowulf and gradually move towards to
the religious themes of Gospels. The following themes and subjects are commonly found in
Anglo-Saxon literary works: Battle, war, warriors; seas; storms; ravens; eagles; wolves; death,
dying; fate, destiny; nobles, rulers; weapons and armor. The Anglo-Saxons were ever ready to
fight and go top the war. It was their in their blood to look for battles. The warriors were
entertained by the poets when they came back from a war being triumph. The poets told them
the stories of heroes, gallantry, valor, etc. as we can find much discussed poem Beowulf has
many fighting depictions against the monster and the dragon. There is heroic poem which is
actually a retelling of Beowulf namely The Fight at Finnsburh. Waldere is another heroic poem
dealing with the life of Walter of Aquitaine. Widsith is also a heroic one pertaining to Eormanric
and the Goths from 4th century. MoreoverAnglo-Saxon Chronicle has heroic poems. They were so
influenced by this heroic poetry that they thought of turning Gospel into heroic poetic manner.

The Anglo-Saxon poetry remained under growth for centuries. It started as pagan and then evolved to
Christian religious poetry and from oral to manuscript. Therefore it gathered numerous genres in it.The
elegiac poems describe wisdom and the ups and downs of life. The Exeter Book has a numerous poems
which fall under the category of elegies. The noticeable elegiac poems are The Ruin, The Wanderer,
The Seafarer, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, and The Husband's Message. Some of the
great poems include The Battle of Brunanburh, The Battle of Maldon, Deor, Widsith, Beowulf,
Cdmon's Hymn, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Waldere, The Fight at Finnsburh, Dream of
the Rood and Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

Epic poems were the artistic hallmark of a heroic society taking pride in communal sagas of survival,
recited by its minstrels during the festive gathering of warriors in the mead-hall. They sing of an
ordered society, ruled by a developed sense of ornament, tradition, moralizing, assimilation. The only
complete Germanic epic that has come down to us is Beowulf (1st half of 8th c.) a long heroic epos full
of compelling portraits and feelings of grief, loss, compassion, gratitude, exile, sadness. The surviving
3138 alliterative metres (500 AD) are informed by Scandinavian history and legend, telling a story of
monster-slaying in Scandinavia. Beowulf narrates the battles of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe
in what is now southern Sweden), against the monstrous Grendel, Grendels mother, and a fire-
breathing dragon. The poem can be seen in the 10th century manuscript Cotton Vitellius A. XV in the
British Museum. It is believed to be pre-Christian composition transcribed by a monastic scribe so as to
give it a Christian frame of reference, postdating the composition by 3-4 hundred years which is a
theory no longer tenable, though.

Significantly , Beowulf resounds with genuine human celebration. Its proliferating stories tell of earthly
joys and sorrows, and the heroism of mans struggles, of his transcendence of time through creation
and art. It also contains allegories of salvation. If Christians are saved through Christ, the heathen
Geats are doomed by Beowulfs death. The poems pervasive mysticism is evident in its careful
numerological patterns, in its cycles of creation and destruction. The solemn, yet lively, conversational
tonality of the poem owes to the oral style devices which beckon to the primary public function of the
epic. The prosody is informed by sound patterns whose calculated effect was meant to be achieved
when the poem was intoned and chanted to harp accompaniment. Its heavy use of autonomasia, a
complex, compound metaphor used for describing a thing, the so-called kenning (land-dwellers, bone-
frame, houses mouth, heath-rover, i.e. stag) is specific to the Anglo-Saxon poetic sensibility. The
account also contains some of the best elegiac verse in the language, and, by setting marvellous tales
against a historical background in which victory is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the
poet gives the whole an elegiac cast. Beowulf also is one of the best religious poems, not only because
of its explicitly Christian passages but also because Beowulfs monstrous foes are depicted as Gods
enemies and Beowulf himself as Gods champion.
Other heroic narratives are fragmentary. Of The Battle of Finnsburh and Waldere only enough
remains to indicate that, when whole, they must have been fast-paced and stirring. Of several
poems dealing with English history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most
notable is The Battle of Brunanburh , Maxims and Widsith .
The few surviving pieces of lyrical poetry are gathered in a collection of manuscripts called the Exeter
Book, which is kept, as the name indicates, in the chapter of Exeter Cathedral. The emotional charge
and tonality of the poems qualifies them as elegies, a poetic subgenre informed by expressions of
nostalgia and regret for the better days of bygone times, lamentations for lost life, friends, fortune,
privileges, things and people held dear, in other words for the inexorability of the passage of time,
change, and death. Old English poets produced a number of more or less lyrical poems of shorter
length, which do not contain specific Christian doctrine and which evoke the Anglo-Saxon sense of the
harshness of circumstance and the sadness of the human lot. The Wanderer and The Seafarer are
among the most beautiful of this group of Old English poems.These poems are remarkable due to their
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elegiac stress on loss, estrangement, exile and the transience of early pleasure, but also to their claim
to another form of heroism, mans resilience and resistance in times of adversity.

Other verse forms cultivated by the Anglo-Saxons are riddles. The short poetic riddles are dense little
poems which illustrate a tremendous fascination with the operation of metaphors. A legendary parable
remains that of the metaphor used by Edwin of Northumbria at the 627 Council, describing mans
transitory lot on earth by comparing it to the disorientation of a sparrow in a hall, whose origins and
destination remain unknown.

Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first such
verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of
the late 7th century who was described by the historian and theologian Saint Bede the Venerable as
having received the gift of song from God. Caedmons Hymn to God the Creator was composed at the
monastery of Whitby during the late 7th century. Later the same type of subject matter was treated in
the more ornate language of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf and his school. The best of their
productions is probably the passionate Dream of the Rood.
Most Old English poetry is preserved in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th centuries. The
Beowulf manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose tracts; the Exeter Book
(Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics, riddles, didactic poems, and religious
narratives; the Junius Manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford)also called the Caedmon Manuscript, even
though its contents are no longer attributed to Caedmoncontains biblical paraphrases; and the
Vercelli Book (found in the cathedral library in Vercelli, Italy) contains saints lives, several short
religious poems, and prose homilies. In addition to the poems in these books are historical poems in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51150; the 31 Metres included in King Alfred the
Greats translation of Boethiuss De consolationephilosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy); magical,
didactic, elegiac, and heroic poems; and others, miscellaneously interspersed with prose, jotted in
margins, and even worked in stone or metal.
A great deal of Latin prose and poetry was written during the Anglo-Saxon period. Of historic as well as
literary interest, it provides an excellent record of the founding and early development of the church in
England and reflects the introduction and early influence there of Latin-European culture.The term
Anglo-Saxon covers the early, foundational period in the formation of the English people, language
and culture, initiated by the Anglo-Saxon conquest the invasion and occupation, in the fifth and sixth
centuries AD, of the former Roman colony of Britannia by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic
peoples generically referred to as the Anglo-Saxons. The alternative term of Old English has come to
be used in literary and cultural studies only in the 19th century, in order to eliminate any possible
suggestion of discontinuity between Anglo-Saxon and modern English language and culture, thus
including the Anglo-Saxon period as a first and foundational stage in development of English culture
and letters.

Prose In Anglo-Saxon Literature

There is no doubt that Anglo-Saxons had the tradition of oral poetry and they brought
it to Britain with them as well when they invaded. However, there is no evidence
available that they had the tradition of prose. It can be safely said that the Anglo-
Saxons had no origins of prose. The art of prose, in fact, initiated much later after their
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invasion. It is a common phenomenon in literature if the poetry comes first, then

prose. The prose which is extant from old English is more in quantity than poetry. The
most of the prose consists of sermons and Latin translations of religious works. The
origination of prose can, without any doubt, be attributed to King Alfred. He translated
Bedes Ecclesiastical History, Orosius Histories, Gregorys Pastoral care and
Dialogues, Augustines Soliloquies and Boethius Consolation of Philosophy. He
also translated fifty Psalms into Old English. In all this process, he was accompanied
by many other well-known writers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was most likely started
in King Alfreds reign and it was carried on for more than 300 years as a historical
record of Anglo-Saxon history.
The Role Of Women In Anglo-Saxon Literature
It seems very evident in Anglo-Saxon literature that it highlights the role of men as
warriors with a male-dominated society. There is barely a mention or reference of the
role of women. Even if they are mentioned, their character is not given consideration;
instead they are referred as whom they belong to. Their main role is merely described
as a cupbearer or a peacemaker.
It is well described in Beowulf when there is a feast for the king and the warriors.
The women just worked as cupbearer which is found in the following verses in the
poem Beowulf.

"Sometimes, Hrothgar's daughter distributed ale to older ranks,

in order on the benches I heard the company call her Freawaru

as she made her rounds, presenting men with the gem-studded bowl."

(Beowulf ll. 2020-2025. 75)

"So the Helming woman went on her rounds,

queenly and dignified, decked out in rings,

offering the goblets to all ranks."

(Beowulf ll.620-622. 45).

The women were also used to end fights between tribes. They women belonging to
some influential class were married off to bring peace. The following verses from
Beowulf also depict this situation.

"A queen should weave peace"

(Beowulf l.1942. 74)

there are the 'hopes this woman will heal old wounds and grievous feuds."

(Beowulf ll.2027-2028. 75).

Women have only been shown as important and influential figures as an abbess,
Hilda, in "Caedmon's Hymn" and as a female monster, Grendel's mother, in Beowulf.
So the women have significant role only if they possess extraordinary or strange
position and ability in the society. Overall, it is clearly observed that in Anglo-Saxon
literature, women are presented as submissive creature.
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