Anglo-Saxon Prose

(from Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature; London: Dent, 1937)

Origins. (12. Anglo-Saxon Prose. Alfred, Aelfric, Wulfstan). (1)

The breach between Anglo-Saxon and English poetry is everywhere apparent, and to pass from Cynewulf to Chaucer is to bridge a deep gulf. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is deliberately archaic. In order to produce a desired emotional state in its hearers, it reverts to traditional turns of expression, to words almost consecrated, as religion works its effects by the constantly recurring use of an ancient liturgy. This poetry is modelled on an earlier age of which the remoteness cannot now be determined. It retains many periphrases and locutions already obsolete, imitates and systematizes the disorder of primitive lyrical construction. The poetic form tends towards the past.

On the other hand, the tendency of the prose is towards observance of the rules of ordinary speech, unless it copies the Latin prose of the clerks. Its object is to instruct and inform, not to move, and since it thus educates the understanding, it necessarily turns to the future. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the prose writings of the Anglo-Saxons, which are much less curious than their poetry, are also much nearer ourselves. No revolution seems to separate Alfred's pages from those of Caxton, Aelfric's from Wyclif's. There is a change but no break. National and linguistic continuity is felt to exist; there almost seems to be a continuity in the thought as it is framed in much the same mould as now. While an Englishman has to make a quite considerable effort in order to read the verse of the Anglo-Saxons, he finds it comparatively easy to understand their prose.

If such facility be not marked in the oldest prose literature, this is because it is either of earlier compilation than any of the poetry extant—like the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, which were promulgated at the end of the seventh century, although our transcription dates only from the time of Alfred—or because some of this prose is more than half poetry and seems to be fragments of old epic tales. This character belongs to many passages of the chronicle usually attributed to the influence of King Alfred, of which we have distinct versions written by the religious of different monasteries, those of Winchester, Canterbury, Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough, the last-named having continued its narrative to the middle of the twelfth century. In this chronicle several references to early times, brief but impressively vehement, are pagan in feeling and emphasis and seem to date from the pre-Christian period. Even in the references to the eighth century there are a suddenness and a roughness in the narrative which betray that mental and grammatical habits were still empirical. It is continually necessary to complete the ellipses and to relate the pronouns to their proper subjects, as with a story told by a small child. For instance, the chronicler relates, as follows, the beginning of the struggle between Cynewulf and Sebright in 755:

This year Cynewulf took from Sebright his kingdom, and the councillors of the West Saxon [did as much], for unrighteous deeds, except Hamptonshire, and he [that is, Sebright] reigned there [that is, in Hampshire] until he slew the alderman who stayed longest with him. Then Cynewulf drove him to the forest of Andred, where he remained until a swain stabbed him at Privett, and he [that is, the swain] revenged the alderman Cambra.

The alderman is not named until he is mentioned for the second time.

This formless prose was succeeded at the end of the ninth century by a regular prose possessed of nearly all its essential parts. Since it is modelled on Latin texts, which are almost literally translated, it is very near English prose, as that was fixed, and also near French prose which was formed under the same masters.

Alfred, the glorious king of Wessex, was the pioneer of the prose-writers. The exclusively poetic or Latin literature which had hitherto flourished had emanated principally from the north-east, the country of the Angles, or from central Mercia. About 800, the supremacy was passing to the south-west, and the king of Wessex was tending toward the sovereignty of all the Germanic groups settled in the island. But the Danish invasions supervened, and with them the destruction of the centres of religion and letters. In the year 878 it seemed as though nothing would escape the invaders. It was then that the young King Alfred withdrew to Athelney in Somerset, formed there a nucleus of resistance, defeated the Danes, and won from them a treaty which left him the south of England while they remained masters of the old country of the Angles and northern Mercia.

After his victory, Alfred set himself to retrieve his country from the barbarism to which it had relapsed. A decadent and demoralized clergy had sunk into depths of ignorance. Alfred did for Wessex what Charlemagne, a hundred years earlier, had done for the country of the Franks: he endeavoured to teach the people, and to re-establish Christian discipline and culture, and to this end he brought foreign monks into his kingdom and reformed education. It was under his influence that the earlier poetic works, which had almost all been written in the Northumbrian dialect, were transcribed into the language of the West Saxons.

The part which the king himself took in this literary movement was considerable. His early education had been much neglected, and he had to learn before he could teach. He surrounded himself with scholars and learned men, learnt Latin after he was grown up, for Saxon had been the only language of his childhood, and had no sooner learnt it than he began to translate the works which seemed to him most apt to civilize his people. It was thus that he became the father of English prose-writers.

Whether in the works he inspired or in those he himself produced, an effort is apparent to regularize the old elliptical, abrupt style, with its obscurity and lack of continuity. Thus the Annals or Chronicles of Winchester, Alfred's capital town, were amplified and given smoothness until they are almost a continuous story, in which, for instance, the history of the king's war against the Danes can be read without any irritating difficulty in following the text.

Alfred himself is credited with a translation of the Universal History of Orosius, the compilation which made antiquity known to the Middle Ages. The task was difficult, for Orosius, a Spanish historian and theologian of the fifth century, writes an obscure, tortured Latin. Sometimes Alfred, as he himself says, translates 'word by word, sometimes meaning by meaning.' Although the literal translation had the most formative influence on prose, it is naturally the free version which most attracts us. Its very weaknesses are characteristic. Alfred, who does not know Latin very well and who has acquired no historical sense, aims at producing a work of pedagogy. The result is that he is often very inexact, and that, as he diverges from his author, he attains to a certain originality. While he deletes what seems to him of little use to his subjects, he also makes additions, especially in the geographical section. One of the stories he adds, that of Ohthere's sail along the shores of Scandinavia, is so simple and elementary in style that its vocabulary differs only slightly from modern English. The conclusion is that the spoken language was almost fixed.

Of Alfred's other translations, either made or ordered by him—Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Angles, the Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great, and the Consolation of Boethius (2)—it is the Boethius which is the most interesting. His choice of this book, which was again translated by Chaucer, is characteristic. Boethius has reproduced the Platonic and Stoic doctrines, coloured by Christianity and at their highest moral level—the distinction between true and false happiness, the lofty discussions on the existence of evil, on human liberty, and on divine prescience. He gives these abstractions a dramatic frame. Philosophy herself appears to him in his prison, and drives away the Muses, those prostitutes who were vainly seeking to console him. Thus he makes use of allegory, and although his style is not always pure and is often mannered, it is full of life and movement. His book could not but suffer gravely when it was translated by Alfred, who mistakes the meaning fairly frequently and is incapable of conveying the fine shades. When he renders the metrical passages, which have a classic elegance, his limitations obtrude themselves. But in nobility of sentiment he is the equal of the Latin author. He explains, as follows, his reasons for undertaking this arduous task:

As I have desired material for the exercise of my faculties that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if wisdom be not in them. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.

This king's literary work was, like his political work, interrupted for almost a century after his death in 901. The sketchy civilization of Wessex was once more scattered to the winds, and the clerks relapsed into ignorance and inertia. They were gradually redeemed thence, during the tenth century, by a reform of the monasteries which was inspired by the similar movement accomplished in France under the influence of the Benedictines. Religious houses were founded and organized in England, on the model of the abbeys of Cluny and Fleury, in which a strict rule enjoined intellectual work. This innovation was led by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his friend Aethelwold, 'the father of the monks.' Secular priests, not bound to celibacy, then abounded in the monasteries. They retained something of the patriarchal constitution which the Church of Ireland had originally given to their communities, and therewith very disorderly morals, much laziness, and gross superstition. The fact is proved by the so-called Blickling Homilies, a medley of canonical and uncanonical legends which swarm with strange arguments and allusions. It is to works of this kind that Aelfric alludes when he says: 'I have seen and heard many heresies in many an English book which unlearned men, in their simplicity, took for great wisdom.' Stories of the saints, replete with the marvellous, and the obsession that the end of the world was at hand, take up most space in this collection.

It was at this time that the strict rule of Saint Benedict was introduced. Morals once more became austere. The lives of the saints did indeed remain the principal subject of study and the marvellous continued to fill a large place in them, but the stories, as compared with their predecessors, were pure and even reasonable. Two men who with Alfred are the best writers of Anglo-Saxon prose are connected with this reform, Aelfric and Wulfstan.

Aelfric was a pupil of the monastic school which Aethelwold founded at Abingdon, and he wrote in the first years of the eleventh century. We owe to him a Colloquium for teaching Latin by conversation, and a vocabulary which was the first Latin-English dictionary. But he made his name by his Homilies, that is, his compilations and translations from the Fathers of the Church which form two series of forty sermons each, and commemorate the various saints venerated by the Anglo-Saxon Church.

Aelfric's prose, unlike that of Alfred, is written not to be read but to be spoken to the people, in the conventional tone of a priest delivering a sermon. It has therefore a rhythm which brings it near to verse: its sentences are divided into sections, more or less equivalent to the metrical line, and it is frequently alliterative. For this reason scholars were long uncertain whether to classify it as verse or prose. It celebrates the saints, as the scops once sang the deeds of warriors. This poetic prose marks a great advance on that of Alfred. It aims at beauty, measure and harmony. It is remarkably clear and finished. There is much less awkwardness and effort in the connection of phrases than in Alfred's writings. In fact, the author is consciously literate, even when he is using the vulgar tongue, and he excuses himself, with some shame, for the popular character of his translation of the Latin homilies, pleading the ignorance of his fellow-countrymen.

Wulfstan, who was Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, was first of all a preacher. The most remarkable of his homilies dates from 1012, the time when the English were suffering the ills of the Danish invasions. With deep feeling the homilist deplores the irreligion and immorality of his people to which he attributes their misfortunes, and he proclaims the near advent of the great chastiser, the Antichrist. Wulfstan is less of a finished artist than Aelfric, but the popular emphasis of his language gives it rich color and lively tones.

After Wulfstan all was over: the Antichrist came indeed. The Danes became masters of the country, and then, after a short interval of independence, the Anglo-Saxons were brought under the Norman yoke. Such prose writings as we have prove, however, that, even without the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose would have taken shape, modelling itself on Latin, and, with the exception of part of its vocabulary, would have become much what it was when in the fourteenth century it regained a place in literature.

It was poetry which was principally affected by the Conquest. The poetic form had outlived its time and had little life left in it. It was conventional and was getting further and further away from the real language of the people. It was fated to be abolished and superseded. The aesthetic ideal was to undergo a change, or rather a revolution. England was to learn to love verse of another kind, other cadences and new subjects. All the rich ornament which profusely decorated verse with a pomp still half barbaric was to go out of fashion. Poets were to shed their periphrases and ejaculations, and gradually to learn sobriety of style and an art almost unknown to them, that of stating facts clearly, grouping them, and inventing stories.




Notes

(1) Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, edited by C. W. M. Grein, R. P. Wülker, and H. Hecht, Leipzig and Hamburg, 1872 et seq. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, edited by J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (Oxford and Cambridge, 1858); Stopford Brooke, King Alfred as Educator of his People and Man of Letters (1901); H. Sweet, Selections from Aelfric's Homilies (Oxford, 1896); A. Napier, Wulfstan's Homilies (Berlin, 1883); B. Thorpe, Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vols. (Aelfric Society, 1844-6); C. L. White, Aelfric, a New Study of his Life and Writings (Yale Studies in English, 1898).

(2) King Alfred, Old English Version of Boethius, ed. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899).

Around Cynewulf

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