Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination - By Peter Ackroyd Page 0,8

its fortuitous discovery is an intimation of the fact that there may have been other Old English epics which are now lost irretrievably; extant references suggest, if they do not prove, that there were long verse narratives concerning mythological figures such as Wade or Weland the Smith while fragments of the “Battle of Brunanburh,” the “Battle of Finnsburh” and the “Battle of Maldon” point to a relatively large corpus of lost and forgotten epic narrative.

That attraction to the epic form has persisted among the English poets. There are of course the great examples of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Hardy’s The Dynasts and the fragment of The Fall of Hyperion by Keats. The epic ambition is to be found in Sidney’s Arcadia, in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, in Tennyson’s Idylls, in Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in Blake’s Jerusalem, in Wordsworth’s Prelude, in Byron’s Don Juan, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. One scholar of the English epic, E. M. W. Tillyard, cites Langland’s Piers the Plowman as a worthy successor of Beowulf but refers to other examples in order to demonstrate “the kinship of them all.”1 He places The Pilgrim’s Progress in this company, but then broadens his theme by arguing for the inclusion of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The case of Gibbon is instructive. In his childhood he had read Pope’s translation of Homer, and Dryden’s translation of Virgil; he was aware of the facility with which English poets could appropriate the epic tradition. In similar fashion he conceived of his History as a didactic and exemplary undertaking, and of himself as the true heir of Spenser and of Milton. The epic strain is deeply rooted.

One central preoccupation, however, might have been taken from Be owulfitself—that of a national epic celebrating the foundation and development of the race. Milton wished to “rasp out a British tune” or Arthurian epic before he ever contemplated Paradise Lost; Dryden lamented his inability to write an epic upon a national subject, while Pope contemplated a blank verse narrative upon the theme of Brutus and his discovery of Albion. Coleridge had surmised that “I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem,” but then surrendered the idea to Wordsworth, who believed that only epic “can satisfy the vast capacity of the poetic genius.” The epic mood was endemic, therefore. “There is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth,” one contemporary noted, “which acts as a spell upon the hearer.” The ancient chant of Beowulf is heard across the generations.

There is also a steadiness and intensity of tone which later poets have inherited. Here is a passage translated from the “Battle of Finnsburh”:

Around him lay many brave men dying. The raven whirled about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There was a sparkling of blades, as if all Finnsburh were on fire. Never have I heard of a more worthy battle in war.

Here is a passage from Siegfried Sassoon, on another battle, in “Counter Attack”:

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud

There is the same understated vehemence, the same directness and passion. It is reminiscent of Carlyle’s remark that in the obstinacy and stolidity of the nineteenth-century labourer lay the lineaments of the Saxon warrior. When David Jones invoked his own experiences of the First World War, within In Parenthesis, he placed them in the context of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mythology. As Taine puts the question (of the Anglo-Saxons), “Is there any people which has formed so tragic a conception of life? Is there any which has peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams? . . . Energy, tenacious and mournful energy, an ecstasy of energy—such was the chosen condition.”

The poetic life of approximately four hundred years survives now in only thirty thousand lines, snatched fortuitously from the oblivion of time; they are to be found in four manuscripts, one of them still located in the cathedral library of Vercelli near Milan, where no doubt it was left by a wealthy pilgrim on a journey to Rome. They were transcribed in the latter part of the tenth century, as part of the monastic revival of that period, when the scriptoria of the cathedrals and great monasteries were involved in a programme of educational and administrative reform. It was a question of preserving the