The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions
of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their
fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political
freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of
Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there
a people first assumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and
our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among
them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national
establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our
theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines
and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the
moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and
literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people
everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.
The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the
annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in
this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen;
the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs
and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their
literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in
their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long
neglected--in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had
not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems
often to have been to them "the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation,
were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by
strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The
language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into
desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so
utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.
But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and
religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned
Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, who was the first to attempt their
restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas
Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this
king's secretary, Asser, _printed in the Saxon character_; we are told,
as "an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an
acquaintance with the _handwriting of their ancestors_."[1] "The
invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or
dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archaeologist,
was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon
duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the
writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names
and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to
the study; and his "Glossary" is too humble a title for that treasure of
law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the
learned world at home and abroad--while the unsold copies during the
life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of
students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was
not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon
professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the
inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned
SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not
antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted
lore. HICKES, in his elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which
had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read.
These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to
their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded
in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer
could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary
Rowe Mores expresses it, "unsightly to politer eyes." A lady--and she
is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient
language of our country--Mrs. ELSTOB, the niece of Hickes, patronised by
a celebrated Duchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the
Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were
suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our
National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly
to disappear from our literature.
None of our historians from MILTON to HUME ever referred to an original
Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of
the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in
Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in
which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race
dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record
the polity which had once constituted their lost independence. The
annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in
other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of
feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England.
MILTON, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the
Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, or Octarchy, would be as worthless "to chronicle
as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air." Thus a
poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that
knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired--this was less
pardonable in a philosopher; and when HUME observed, perhaps with the
eyes of Milton, that "he would hasten through the obscure and
uninteresting period of Saxon Annals," however cheering to his reader
was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly
unconscious that these "obscure and uninteresting annals of the
Anglo-Saxons" formed of themselves a complete history, offering new
results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political
state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we
track BURKE in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our
elegant antiquary, Bishop PERCY, lamenting the scanty and defective
annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest
indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our
land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy
of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and
conjecture.
We find ELLIS and RITSON still erring in the trackless paths. All this
national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous
investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the
Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to
the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for
the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was
given to the country. It was our studious explorer, SHARON TURNER, who
first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.[2]
Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected
difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been
regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose
orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when
confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be
too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous.
Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.[3]
It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a
most corrupt state.[4] This fatality was occasioned by the inattention
or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a
learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of
alliteration,[5] and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the
strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or
misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are
disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been
mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns."
These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely
increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The
tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense:
their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous
inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous
metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by
twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by
the most remote and dark analogies[6]--all these have perplexed the most
skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted passages, but have
even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last
circumstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of
BEOWULF. When it first fell to the hard lot of WANLEY, the librarian of
the Earl of Oxford, to describe "The Exploits of Beowulf," he imagined,
or conjectured, that it contained "the wars which this Dane waged
against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden." He probably decided on
the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero
descends from his ship--but for a very different purpose from a military
expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the manuscript as a "tractatus
nobilissimus," and an "egregium exemplum" of the Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Probably this manuscript remained unopened during a century, when SHARON
TURNER detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the
design of these romantic "Exploits." Yet this diligent historian
carefully read and analysed this heroic tale. CONYBEARE, who had fallen
into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this
labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though
possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr.
KEMBLE.
Even the learned in Saxon have not always been able to distinguish this
verse from prose; the verse unmarked by rhyme being written continuously
as prose.[7] A diction turgid and obscure was apparent; but in what
consisted the art of the poet, or the metrical system, long baffled the
most ingenious conjectures. RITSON, in his perplexity, described this
poetry or metre as a "rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or
insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished."
TYRWHIT and ELLIS remained wholly at a loss to comprehend the fabric of
Anglo-Saxon poesy. HICKES, in the fascination of scholarship, had
decided that it proceeded on a metrical system of syllabic quantities,
and surmounted all difficulties by submitting the rhythmical cadences of
Gothic poesy to the prosody of classical antiquity. This was a literary
hallucination, and a remarkable evidence of a favourite position
maintained merely by the force of prepossession.
To what cause are we to ascribe the complex construction of the diction,
and the multiplied intricacies of the metres of the poetry of the
Northmen? Bishop Percy noticed, that the historian of the Runic poetry
has counted up among the ancient Icelandic poets one hundred and
thirty-six different metres. The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon are
cognate languages, being both dialects of the ancient Gothic or
Teutonic. The genius of the Danish Scalds often displays in their
Eddas[8] a sublime creative power far out of the reach of the creeping
and narrow faculty of the Saxon, yet the same mechanism regulated both;
the fixed recurrence of certain letters or syllables which constitutes
that perpetual alliteration, which oftener than rhyme gratified the ear
of barbaric poesy, and a metaphorical phraseology or poetical vocabulary
appropriated by the bards, furnishing the adept with phrases when he had
not always ready any novel conceptions. Shall we deem such arbitrary
forms and such artificial contrivances, the mere childishness of tastes,
to have been invented in the wintry years of these climates, to amuse
themselves in their stern solitudes; or rather, may we not consider them
as a mystery of the Craft, the initiation of the Order? for by this
scholarlike discipline in multiplying difficulties the later bards
separated themselves from those humbler minstrels who were left to their
own inartificial emotions.
Such prescribed formulae, and such a mechanism of verse, must have
tethered the imagination in a perpetual circle; it was art which
violated the free course of nature. In this condition we often find even
the poetry of the Scandinavians. The famous death-song of Regner Lodbrog
seems little more than an iteration of the same ideas. An Anglo-Saxon
poem has the appearance of a collection of short hints rather than
poetical conceptions, curt and ejaculative: a paucity of objects yields
but a paucity of emotions, too vague for detail, too abrupt for deep
passion, too poor in fancy to scatter the imagery of poesy. The
Anglo-Saxon betrays its confined and monotonous genius: we are in the
first age of art, when pictures are but monochromes of a single colour.
Hence, in the whole map of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is difficult to
discriminate one writer from another.[9]
Their prose has taken a more natural character than their verse. The
writings of Alfred are a model of the Anglo-Saxon style in its purest
state; they have never been collected, but it is said they would form
three octavo volumes; they consist chiefly of translations.
The recent versions in literal prose by two erudite Saxonists of two of
the most remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems, will enable an English reader to
form a tolerable notion of the genius of this literature. CONYBEARE'S
poetical versions remained unrivalled. But if a literal version of a
primitive poetry soon ceases to be poetry, so likewise, if the rude
outlines are to be retouched, and a brilliant colouring is to be
borrowed, we are receiving Anglo-Saxon poetry in the cadences of Milton
and "the orient hues" of Gray.