_Erthe upon Erthe_ cannot be said to possess great literary value in
itself. The interest of the poem lies chiefly in its evident popularity,
and in the insight it gives into the kind of literature which became
popular in the Middle Ages. It belongs essentially to the same class as
the _Soul and Body_ Poems, and the _Dance of Death_. In the early days
of its introduction into Western Europe, Christianity made great use in
its appeal to the mass of the people of the fear of death and dread of
the Judgement. The early monastic writers dwelt upon the idea of man's
mortality and decay, and the transitoriness of human rank and pleasure.
Hence the frequency with which such themes as the _Dance of Death_ were
treated in literature and in art. Closely allied with this idea of the
fleeting nature of earthly things, and to some extent a result of it,
was the conception of the separation of man's bodily from his spiritual
self which pervades all mediaeval post-Christian literature. In Old
English times already, this sense of a sharp division between the two is
embodied in No. xliv of the O.E. _Riddles_:--
[28]Ic wat indryhtne æþelum deorne
[gh]iest in [gh]eardum, þæm se grimma ne mæg
hunger sceððan ne se hata þurst,
yldo ne adle [ne se enga deað],
[gh]if him arlice esne þenað,
se þe agan sceal [his [gh]eongorscipe]
on þam siðfæte: hy gesunde æt ham
findaþ witode him wiste [&] blisse,
cnosles unrim, care, [gh]if se esne
his blaforde hyreð yfle
frean on fore, ne wile forht wesan
broþer oþrum: him þæt bam sceðeð,
þonne hy from bearme begen hweorfað
anre magan ellorfuse
moddor [&] sweostor.
This sets forth the same conception of the duality in man as is
represented in the O.E. _Speech of the Soul to the Body_, and in the
whole group of _Soul and Body_ poems, and the idea recurs constantly in
other monastic texts, cf. Morris, _O. E. Miscellany_, iii (_Sinners
Beware_), p. 83:--
326. þe feondes heom forþ ledeþ
Boþe lychom and saule.
331-336. Þe saule seyþ to þe lychome,
Accursed wurþe þi nome,
Þin heaued and þin heorte.
Þu vs hauest iwroht þes schome,
And alle þene eche grome
Vs schall euer smerte.
_MS. Harl._ 2253, fol. 106, v^o, l. 7: þe fleysh stont a[gh]eyn þe gost.
These two fundamental ideas of the transitoriness and hence
worthlessness of man's earthly part, and the cleavage between it and his
spiritual part, lie at the root of much of the mediaeval literature, and
represent the two not incompatible extremes to which the monastic ideal
of life, from its very one-sidedness, was capable of leading: on the one
hand a certain morbid materialism, on the other an ascetic mysticism.
Nor can it be denied that the mediaeval mind took a certain grim
pleasure in dwelling upon the more grotesque aspect of these things. The
O.E. poet found the same enjoyment in describing his '[Gh]ifer'--
[29]se wyrm, þe þa [gh]ea[gh]las beoð
nædle scearpran: se genydeð to
ærest eallra on þam eorðsciæfe,
as the painters of the _Dance of Death_ in the drawing of their
skeletons and emblems of mortality, or the Gothic carver in his
gargoyles. Perhaps, too, some satisfaction in dwelling upon the
hollowness of earthly joys, and the bitter fate of those who took their
fill of them, was not lacking to a few of those who had turned their
backs upon them.
_Erthe upon Erthe_ is perhaps more especially concerned with the first
of the two conceptions mentioned above, man's mortality, but, as has
already been shown, a close connexion exists between it and the _Soul
and Body_ poems, and though the idea of the duality in man is not
mentioned, it is certainly present. The poem is more popular in form
than either the _Dance of Death_ or the various _Soul and Body_
Dialogues, perhaps because of its purely English origin, and seems to
represent a later and more popular product of the ideas which gave rise
to the other two groups. Its short mono-rimed stanza, its jingling
internal rime, and its half-riddling, half-punning character, appear to
have especially commended it to popular favour, and it is significant
that it became most widely-known in its simpler forms.