Bold English: Anglo-Saxon Poetry

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Hwæt. That word, barking through the clatter of the mead hall, typically opened an Old English poem in the Dark Ages, and roughly translates to “What” or “Listen now.” Old English is largely Germanic, its brusque sounds ungussied by the softer French words that would later mix into Middle English. It is the language of conquerors: The Roman Empire, finally crushed by the Vandals and Goths, withdrew from Britain in the fifth century, leaving the rural Britons to a vicious invasion by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, whose language and pagan sensibilities formed the base elements of Old English poetry.

Hailing from what is now Germany and southern Scandinavia, the tribal Anglo-Saxons brought over stories of the bleak climate and brutal life of their homeland. Yet as settlers in Britain, their lives were no less violent — hordes of Norse Vikings and other wandering barbarians routinely devastated the handful of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spreading throughout Britain, and eventually the Norman Invasion would overrun them all.

In either setting, stress and enclosure defined the Anglo-Saxon experience: the enveloping gloom of the vast forests and long winters, the icy waters and limited geography, the pitiless enemies closing in, and the bloody shortness of life. Old English poetry was sharpened and compressed accordingly. Bare of rhetorical flourish, elaborative similes, and pleasing rhymes, its oral style is instead marked by abrupt, percussive phrasing, heavy alliteration, the heaving meter of German caesuras (or mid-line pauses), and dense metaphors or kennings, which fused layers of meaning within single epithets.

Michael Alexander’s selection of “The First Poems in English” (Penguin Classics, 176 pages, $15), originally published in 1966 but now revised and expanded, remains a high watermark of translation. Mr. Alexander fashions from modern English a vivid reincarnation of Anglo-Saxon poetry — its grim pathos studded with brilliant figurations, its morbid griefs sung in an armorial tone of resolve.

Likewise, Mr. Alexander’s introductions and detailed notes for each section — from the history behind the famous epic poem “Beowulf” to a philological analysis of the charmingly devious Exeter Riddles — are indispensable. Often enough, however, the poetry speaks for itself. Take these three quotations as a brief sampling of Mr. Alexander’s handiwork and of the rich variety of his selections:

“My heart shall never / suddenly sail into slack water, / all the longing of a lifetime answered” (“The Wife’s Lament”); “The worms that braid the broidered silk / with Wierd cunning did not weave me” (“Exeter Riddle 35”); “good men lay round, / a pale crowd of corpses. Crows dangled, / black and brown. Blades clashing / flashed fire — as though all Finnsburgh were ablaze” (“The Fight at Finnsburgh”).

Fidelity to the unusual rhythms and word order of Old English often cripples modern English treatments more than it resurrects the deceptively spare structure of the original. Yet Mr. Alexander sustains a remarkable level of poetry within tough formal constraints. His rarest gift, however, may be his judgment of when to let an odd line stay odd — to let the reader acclimate to the Anglo-Saxon language as nearly as possible.

Around the sixth century, Christianity began its gradual percolation through the grittier sensibilities of Anglo-Saxon culture. The few literate monks in Britain had been translating the Latin Bible long before its subtler teachings and turned cheeks were palatable to a battle-minded audience. Instead, Christian themes first emerged on the terms of heroic virtues, mingling the ethics and lore of Germanic paganism with tales of bravely martyred saints and apostles. The heavens, too, began to merge. In “The Seafarer,” a shivering sailor, “hung with hoar-frost,” melds Anglo-Saxon posterity with the solace of a Christian afterlife: “That after-speakers should respect the name / and after them angels have honour towards it / for always and ever. From those everlasting joys / the daring shall not die.”

The strongest of the surviving Christian poems may be “The Dream of the Rood,” in which Jesus’s cross (or rood), appearing in a dream, bizarrely describes the crucifixion from the perspective of wood, telling how “They drove me through with dark nails, / on me are the deep wounds manifest, / wide-mouthed hate-dents.” In Mr. Alexander’s gorgeous rendition, the cross tells how “Darkness shrouded / the King’s corse. Clouds wrapped / its clear shining. A shade went out / wan under cloud-pall. All creation wept, / kenned the King’s death. Christ was on the Cross.”

This gradual twining of values was part of the broader reconciliation of Latin texts — and the endangered classical traditions they contained — with the fallen Western world. It was a precarious tussle between the Anglo-Saxons, who built the monastic libraries, and the marauding raiders who burned them down. The struggle must have seemed timeless, if not futile; Rome’s great stone masonry, ominously fallen, was a dismal testament to the odds. In “The Ruin,” by now itself an anonymous fragment, an Anglo-Saxon broods beautifully on Roman rubble: “Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran …. Came days of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead, / death fetched off the flower of the people.”

The best of Anglo-Saxon culture was not its rage to conquer but the nobility with which it fought to survive. The Anglo-Saxon universe tends toward ruin, and its consolations lie in images of transcendence. The heroic elegies and lamentations, sad as they are, double as celebrations: The lasting quality of a life was crystallized in a single moment of sacrifice. “The Battle of Maldon,” a true account of a doomed last stand against the Vikings, puts it this way: “Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will, / the heart fiercer, as our force faileth.” In these lines, “shall,” or “sceal,” means not only “will be” but “must be” — for the Anglo-Saxons, there was no alternative.

Mr. Axelrod is an editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. He last wrote for these pages on 19th-century Italy.


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