Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination - By Peter Ackroyd Page 0,7

and fiction, with a particular conflation of horror and pathos which has become so characteristic and so familiar.

The monster was an exile and a wanderer, a state which the Anglo-Saxons feared and hated in equal measure. For twelve winters—note how, in this landscape, time is measured by winter—the monster pursued a campaign of extirpation and carnage against Hrothgar. Some of his men and counsellors offered sacrifices in propitiation to the pagan gods, and prayed to the “ gast-bona,” or devil, but the narrator consigns them to doom and damnation. Beowulf is a Christian poem concerning pagan warriors. This is a world in which the forces of elemental myth and of Christian typology are not necessarily distinguished. It is not a question of the Christian and pagan elements opposing or modifying each other; they are equivalent in a poem of formal contrasts in which pathos and savagery, humour and celebration, are mingled. It is an inclusive English narrative.

After these twelve winters the thegn, Beowulf, came over the sea to assist Hrothgar. A watchman above the shining cliffs and high hills rides down to confront him. “I have watched by the sea for many years,” he tells him, “and have never witnessed such a host of armed men.” Then Beowulf unlocks his “word-hoard” and speaks of his quest against the fiend. “Beowulf is min nama.” He takes up arms against Grendel and, in one desperate fight, the monster is fatally wounded by the warrior. Beowulf then severs the head of Grendel’s monstrous mother. At a later time, he himself is delivered a fatal wound by a guardian dragon. The pattern is completed. The poem ends, as it begins, with a funeral ceremony. It is a high chant. It resembles an oratorio, and may be compared with John Milton’s Paradise Regained. It is wrought at an intricate and formal pitch even though it springs out of melancholy and a sense of transience. It has the violence and intensity of Celtic work with the formality and fluency of Old English. The heart of the attentive listener may well break, but the scop keeps on singing.

The musical instruments of the Anglo-Saxon world, known to us, are the six-stringed harp or lyre, the horn, the bagpipe, the viol, the cymbals, the hand-bell and the reed flute. The association between music and poetry, however, is a matter of speculation. It is indeed possible that Beowulf was sung, and that the peculiar marks in the manuscript of the poem act as musical notations. The Latin word signifying singing, “ cantare,” is translated into Old English as “the hearpan singen,” or sung to the harp. The phrase, “swutol sang scopes,” appears. Yet the poem may have been chanted or intoned, to the accompaniment of the “hearpan”; it may even have been recited without the aid of any music. That its oration demanded a rigorous and formal performance is not in doubt; the scop was a significant figure in any lord’s retinue, since he was both poet and historian of the community. The subsequent history of English poetry is so entwined with music, however, that the notion of musical accompaniment is a pleasing one. From the plaintive lyrics of the early Tudor court to the collaborations of Dryden and Purcell, Auden and Britten, the combined line of word and melody is persistent and continuous. It conjures up the image, expressed in an Old English Life of St. Dunstan, of a harp sounding a melody—a song of joy—of its own accord.

Like many works of the English imagination, Beowulf has left its mark upon the landscape. The ancient site of Belbury Castle in Devon was known as “bigulfesburh,” or “Beowulf ’s burgh,” and the name of “grendlesmere” appears in a Wiltshire charter of 931. The association of specific places with fatality is indeed an ancient one; the sites of pre-Saxon communities were generally held to be blessed or cursed, and until recent times there was a marked reverence for fairy circles and standing stones. There is a more elusive, but perhaps more significant, continuity. It is appropriate that in one sense Beowulf is a saga of origin, an attempt to animate or revive the culture from which the English believed they had sprung. Within the body of Anglo-Saxon writing itself lie the origins of subsequent English literature, whether in the form of dream-vision or riddle, history or travel, biography or elegy, verse moral or pastoral. There is also the matter of epic.

Beowulf itself survives in only one manuscript, its provenance unknown, but