record of extermination or general exodus (despite the tendency of the old Britons to move westward) so that “one would suppose that a great mass of them must have remained in the country . . . their blood entering into the composition of a new people.” Arnold noted among these early Britons “a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts” yet also a “turn for melancholy” and “natural magic” together with a “passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.” In his somewhat deterministic vocabulary this natural temperament of the Celts is different from that of the Anglo-Saxons which is “disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence,” with a propensity for “spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain sense, of practical utility.” Succeeding chapters of this book will suggest the extent of this “practical” or empirical genius, but it is worth noting that according to Arnold the conflation of Celtic and Saxon in the national temperament has produced a kind of awkwardness or embarrassment—a tendency to understatement—in the characteristic productions of England. We may trace it through Chaucer and Auden, and will find one of its earliest manifestations in the verse of Beowulf.
Old English
Ornamental page with the beginning of the Gospel according to John, from the Lindisfarne Gospels
CHAPTER 3
Listen!
In the beginning was the poem. It is of some 3,182 lines and is written in the language of the Anglo-Saxons known to us as “Old English.” The events related in Beowulf can be dated approximately to the early decades of the sixth century, and to that period when the Frisians, Danes, Swedes, Franks and Geats were engaged in their occupation of England. The period in which it was actually written remains in dispute, although the most recent scholarship suggests a date in the tenth century. Yet Beowulf is so instinct with life and spirit that, on its discovery, it was believed to have been composed at the time of the events themselves. It is an act of the historical imagination, and may be seen as one of the earliest triumphs of historical consciousness.
The poem begins with a call for attention: “Hwaet!” — What! or Listen! Immediately invoked are the “gear-dagas,” the days of old, a threnody which will become a constant passion among the English. There then follows a description of the funeral of Scyld Scefing, “ beaga bryttan” or the Lord of the Rings, whose body is carried down to a great ship and despatched upon the whale-road and wave-domain of the sea; the sea is a constant presence in the poem, moving within the four beats of the alliterative line in an insistent rhythm which will affect the whole subsequent movement of English poetry. The grandson of Scyld Scefing, the warrior Hrothgar, builds a great “heal aern,” or hall-building, in order to memorialise his own triumphant career; this is a place of warmth and light, of food and drink, wide-gabled and lofty. It is a wine-mansion and gold hall of men. In a world of danger and of darkness, it represents human felicity. There is an Anglo-Saxon term, “ seledreorig,” meaning “sad for a hall” (perhaps a longing for home); it is a harbinger of English melancholy.
Within this hall the “scop,” or bard, chanted the song of creation when the “Aelmihtiga” created the earth and the waters, as well as the “sunnan ond monan” which grant light to humankind. And so good fortune reigned over Hrothgar’s kingdom until a “feond on helle,” a moor-dweller and border-wanderer, the monster Grendel, fell upon the bright hall and devoured thirty of Hrothgar’s retinue. Grendel was descended from Cain, just as Alfred the Great’s line was traced to Adam himself. The feud of Cain and Abel was in direct and powerful relationship to the Anglo-Saxon culture from which Beowulf sprang; events did not necessarily take place in time but were endlessly foreshadowed in the texts of sacred or spiritual teaching. The fraternal feud, then, might be seen as the most significant event in English history. It anticipates the sense in which later writers treated biblical history as a form of historical redaction.
Thus Grendel, the seed of Cain, was a “death-scua,” or death shadow, a “hel-rune” who in the depths of night traversed the “mistige moras,” or misty moors. Here, too, are the first traces of that delight in the strange and the occluded which marks the English imagination. The wonderful and the terrible stalk the “mistige moras” of subsequent poetry