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inland dwelt the more widely spread Saxons. These restless Teutonic seamen in their 'foamy-necked bark journeyed over the sea waves most like a bird,' to borrow the phraseology of Beowulf, till they beheld the sea-cliffs gleam, the lofty downs, and the great headlands,' and were early led to seek a new field for plunder in Roman Britain. Like the Danes of later days, long before they came to settle they came to spoil. By A.D. 286 an imperial fleet, large enough to encourage its commander to revolt and proclaim himself Emperor, had to be fitted out to stay their ravages; a 'Count of the Saxon Shore' had to be appointed to defend the coasts, and nine castles, that of Richborough among them, lined the shores from the Wash to Sussex. Such attacks, however, were but piratical raids, and the Coming of the English' is connected with the great wave of Teutonic invasion which swept not only over distant provinces but over Italy itself. Four hundred years before Christ, Brennus the Gaul had uttered Væ victis over a conquered Rome; not till eight centuries later (A D. 410) did the city again fall beneath a foreign foe. Then the spoilers were Teutons; the West Goths, under Alaric. Not even the plaintive 'groans of the Britons' could now draw help from desolated Italy for a remote province; and enervated by nearly four centuries of Roman rule, Britain was left defenceless against the Picts and Scots of the North. In despair, King Vortigern called in the Teutonic seamen, and our Old English Chronicle under the year 449 thus sets forth the result:-The king bade them fight against the Picts; and they did so and had victory wheresoever they came. They sent then to Angeln and bade them send further help, and bade them tell the nothingness of the Britons and the goodness of the land. They therefore sent them more help. Then came men from three tribes of Germany, from Old Saxons, from Angles and Jutes.' To these we may add the Frisians, many of whom are known to have accompanied the other tribes.

2. The Old English Language, its Dialects and versification.-'All these tribes spoke the same Anglo-Frisian language with slight differences of dialect,' and all agreed in calling their common language English (O.E. Englisc), i.e. Anglish, because the Angles were for a long time the dominant tribe.'* The name Anglo-Saxon was applied to the people, not to the language; originally, indeed, it was but a name to distinguish the 'English' Saxons from the Saxons of the mainland, and the growing tendency to discard its usage in favour of that of 'Old' or 'Oldest English' is one of many signs of the revived interest in the history of our early speech and Hy. Sweet, New English Grammar, Pt. I. 1892, p. 214.

literature. Modern English, indeed, differs much from its earliest form, but our grammar still remains thoroughly Teutonic, while, in spite of all additions to our vocabulary, the great majority of the words we use are of similar origin. Old English, like Latin or German, was a highly inflected language; but even in its earliest. known form its inflectional system begins to show signs of decay. Some of the case-endings seen in the cognate Gothic and Icelandic are already gone; the gender distinctions in the plural of adjectives, also seen in both these languages, have disappeared; and very early the tendency to use compound forms for the past and future tenses is noticeable. The stages of inflectional change cannot of course be sharply defined, but convenience demands approximate division, and the retention of the name 'English' throughout is an obvious advantage for marking the unity of our linguistic history.*

As has been stated, it was the Anglian tribes which first assumed supremacy; and it was also in the North that our early poetry was produced. The coming of the Danes swept away the northern centres of learning, and when literature revived it was under the West-Saxon Alfred; thus the Wessex dialect henceforth became the official and practically the literary language of England. In it the older poems were re-copied, and they now remain to us only in their southern dress, though the language often retains traces of the original northern. But West-Saxon writers from King Alfred to Abbot Ælfric still called their language English.

The remains of our early literature are but fragmentary. Beo* Various divisions of English into 'periods' have been from time to time proposed, but there is an increasing and healthy tendency to adopt the names Old,''Middle,' and 'Modern' English. These correspond with those adopted for other languages, and as technical names there can be little doubt as to their advisability, although in general speech other names may be and are at times employed. An astronomer may still speak of the sun rising,' or a chemist of 'sulphuric acid' instead of hydric sulphate, and similarly the terms AngloSaxon' and 'Early English' may be used; but this in no way detracts from the value of a more systematic terminology. The technical use of the name AngloSaxon for the dialect of Wessex, as adopted by Professor Skeat and some others, seems but a kind of 'half-way house.' It limits a term which was popularly used in a wider sense before the study of our older dialects was recognised; and it departs from the otherwise uniform territorial nomenclature adopted for these dialects-the Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and Wessex.

The following subdivisions are those proposed by Dr. Sweet (New English Grammar, 1892), and when it is remembered that all such dates are at best but approximate, it will be seen that his scheme presents several advantages :—

I. Old English

a. Early O. E. (Eng. of Alfred)

700-900 900-1100

b. Late 0. E. (Eng. of Elfric)
c. Transition O. E. (Eng. of Layamon) 1100-1200
a. Early M. E. (Eng. of Ancren Riwle') 1200-1300

II. Middle English b. Late M. E. (Eng. of Chaucer)
c. Transition M. E. (Eng. of Caxton).
a. Early Mod. E. (Tudor Eng. Eng. of
Shakespeare)

III. Modern English

b. Late Mod. English

1300-1400 1400-1500 1500-1650

1650

1

wulf is preserved in a single manuscript: the Bodleian Library contains the solitary copy of the Cadmonian poems: the 'great English book on various subjects wrought in verse' given by Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter (1050-1072), to his Cathedral library, where it still remains, contains in most cases the only existing copies of other poems. In 1822 a volume of six poems was discovered at Vercelli, in North Italy: a fragment of the Fight at Finnsburg was found a century ago on the cover of a book in Lambeth Library: in 1860 two leaves of the lost epic Waldere were found at Copenhagen. On such slender threads has the life of our old literature hung. But if this is so in regard to the literature as a whole, much more is it so in regard to our dialects. For the study of these-so important philologically and phonetically if not on the purely literary side-we are dependent upon scraps of verse, inscriptions, charters, and the fortunate ignorance which led to interlining Latin books with English translations, or to crude glossaries or dictionaries. Of the early Northumbrian dialect in which our poetry was chiefly composed, less than thirty lines remain in the manuscript versions of Cadmon's Hymn,' Bæda's 'Death-song,' and a metrical riddle found at Leyden. To these must be added a few inscriptions, of which the chief is that on the tall stone cross behind the pulpit at Ruthwell church, overlooking the Solway Firth, close by the early home of Carlyle and the last home of Burns. In the interlinear glosses of the Durham Gospels and the 'Ritual' are preserved very pure examples of late Northumbrian (950-1000). The Mercian dialect of middle England is best represented in its early form by the 'Vespasian Psalter,'* and by a glossary preserved at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: while an interlinear gloss on the Rushworth Gospel of St. Matthew shows the dialect in its later form. Kentish is seen, in part at least, in the glossaries at Erfurt and Epinal, the former of which probably dates from the beginning of the eighth century; also in numerous charters. Glosses, charters, and the 'Proverbs of Solomon' show its later form. West Saxon first appears in a charter of 778, while some contemporary MSS. of King Alfred's works fortunately exist. The homilies of Elfric show the later form of this dialect in a very pure state, but most of the late West Saxon MSS. exhibit a great mixture of forms.†

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In the library of Sir Rob. Cotton, now in the British Museum, the shelves were originally named after the busts of the Roman Emperors placed over them The Museum still keeps this nomenclature. Thus the MS. of Beowulf is 'Vitellius A. xv.,' so called after Vitellius. Similarly with the 'Vespasian' version of the Psalms.

† Dr. Hy, Sweet edited for the Early English Text Society in 1885 all these

The age of verse precedes that of prose, and song was part of the very life of our bygone days. At the court of Hrothgar in our English Beowulf the banquet is no more complete without the song of the scop, than was that of Alcinous in the Odyssey without the voice of the sacred singer, grave Demodocus.' And not only was there the professional poet-gleóman or courtly scóp— but the King himself, like the Hebrew David, could touch the glee-wood,' wake its sweet note, and tell well a wondrous tale:'* even among peasants the harp passed from hand to hand, as the legend of Cædmon shows; the churchman Aldhelm would sing to the crowds on the bridge at Malmesbury; and the saintly scholar Bæda died with a note of song on his lips. For linguistic purposes the Gothic gospels of Wulfila take us several centuries further back, but no early Teutonic poetic remains can compare with our own. The German fragment of The Song of Hildebrand,† found, like that of the Fight at Finnsburg and the first mention of Chaucer, on a scrap of parchment in the binding of a book, is the only other specimen. But it is a mere fragment of less than sixty lines; our Beowulf contains over three thousand.

As our older English language differs from that of modern days, so does the structure of old English verse. Coleridge in his Christabel claimed to make an 'innovation' in modern poetry which may partly serve as an illustration. In justifying himself from the charge of irregularity, he states in his Preface that the metre was 'founded on a new principle, namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. This 'new principle' was but one main feature of a verse system which 'belonged to the antiquity of all Germanic races ;' for Old English verse is based on rhythm, not on metre. Each line has four accented syllables, the accents coinciding, as in Christabel, with the natural word-stress. But to give a clearer idea of the rhythm of our older verse, the lines of Christabel should have a well-defined cæsura clearly dividing the line into two half lines, each having two accents. Further, these accented syllables would have to be inseparably connected by means of 'alliteration:' both the accented syllables in the first half line and the first of the two in the second half must begin with the same consonant or group of consonants.

Oldest English Texts, and has made many of them accessible in his small Clarendon Press ed. called A Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, Archaic and Dialectic. *Beowulf, 2107-2110.

A translation will be found in Morley's English Writers, 1887, i. 259, 260. Ten Brink, Early English Literature, Pt. I. Kennedy's translation, p. 21.

If the alliteration were on vowels these vowels would differ.* Still further: Christabel is in rhyme: classical Old English verse knows no rhyme, its metre is blank verse.' Only one regularly rhyming poem-and that of but eighty-seven lines-exists in Old English, and it is a late work, due to Scandinavian influence. Rhyme appears in some of the later poems, but its presence is a sign of decadence. 'The measure,' if we may adapt Milton's words concerning his own metre, is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially.' Coleridge also claims for Christabel that the variation in the number of syllables is 'not introduced wantonly... but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.' A like freedom was used by our old poets, who at times employedas in the Cadmonian poems and in Judith-lengthy 'expanded' lines; while even in the shorter lines the system of alliteration is not always uniformly carried out. A strophic arrangement is clear in one short poem, The Lament of Deor, each strophe of which ends with the same refrain; and conjectural strophic divisions have been sought in various other poems.

3. The Epic Poetry.-The general character of Old English poetry is distinctly epic, but we have no epos in the strict sense ;' our noblest old poem, Beowulf, is but a ‘half-finished epos, as if benumbed in the midst of its growth.'t The word 'epic' inevitably suggests comparison with the works of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, and though the Old English poem falls far beneath these in technique, it still has much that is truly Homeric. The style, Indeed, has in one sense a severe directness; the long splendour of the Homeric simile is wholly absent; and abundant as this figure is in contemporary Celtic poetry, there are but four similes in the three thousand lines of Beowulf, and these are brief and obvious. Ccmpensation may be said to be sought in the abundant use of metaphorical or periphrastic speech, in which, for example, the sea becomes the whale-road,' the 'swan-road,' the water-street-;' a ship a 'foamy-necked floater;' the King, a 'ring-distributer,' &c., or a speaker 'unlocks his word-hoard.' Such usage is common to other Teutonic verse, and in Old English an example is found, on an average, in every nine or ten lines. In the later verse this

*See Extract I. in Appendix A, and the preceding comment. † Ten Brink.

Cf. W. Bode's interesting essay on the subject, Die Kenningar in der Angelsächsischen Dichtung, Darmstadt, 1886. The technical name Kenning-ar is from the Icelandic plural of kenning, 'that by which one knows.'

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