Lecture1 Anglo-Saxon roots. Pessimism and comradeship. John Sutherland, PH.D.

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English literature is not emphatically not the same thing as literature in English, to a very important distinction.

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In the year of 2005, the BBC program held a poll to establish who was the greatest Britain who’d ever walk their green and pleasant land. The shortest included such giant, such obvious giant as Winston Churchill, good Queen Bess, the lady with the lamp, Florence Nightingale. But the all-right winner was William Shakespeare. As it emerged in the post result analysis, the swan of Avon, Shakespeare was voted for by millions of listeners, not merely because of his literary genius, but because it was felt by these voters that he embodied what one might call the soul of Britain.?Or, as Shakespeare himself put it in an immortal quotation, that’s much repeated.

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This precious stone set in the silver sea.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

--Richard |||

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Linguists like to say that language is a dialect with an army behind. So, we may define literature as writing with a national state behind it. And more importantly, the literature is embodied in the nation, as the heart is embodied in the body. We can feel the most revealing aspect through literature. The United Kingdom, its inner self, its soul.

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In the poetics, Aristotle makes the grandest of claims for literature. (Aristotle is their first great literary critic.) literature, as Aristotle said, is truer than history, because history, the chronicle of what actually happened is shackled to the accidental and incidental. It has to record what really happened. However, literature can penetrate to the heart of the human condition. It could generalize. It could extract the truth.

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On the long winding path of English literature, the first milestone is the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

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Periclean Athens produce literature as sophisticated as Oedipus Rex, which, as Aristotle thought, was the greatest work of literature ever produced.

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Law of uneven development. Primitive, pre-industrial communities can produce perfect works of art as perfect as anything we can do. The Beowulf, which is the dragon standing at the mouth of English literature, deserves the same wonderful reaction. Without any essential factors in modern society, it is totally primitive and can prove that an English literature before there was in England.

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The greatest work of the early period was the creation of minstrels or scopes. These were very different from our poets, but you can see a genetic link. The early literature was sung, recited pr spoken. It was not written and certainly not printed. Its circulation was oral, not scripting. The oral literature is notoriously fragile, and it presumes a different author and audience relationship. It is a literature of the ear, as much of the eye. And typically, it is a communal, not a private experience. That is to say all literature is experienced in a group. Beowulf dates from around the sixth century. That dark age, the night that fell after the romans went home to their own dark age, was not propitious for literature. It is too chaotic. And literature requires stability. The roman left, however, one mighty monument behind them, Latin, the Latin language. The one beacon of light and learning in these dark times was the church. The church was not entirely sympathetic to pagan literature. Although it was often less censorious than one might expect it was, it was tolerant. But not entirely sort of welcoming to what was going on, as it were among the people in their own tongue.?Long rooted pagan traditions collided with Christian Orthodoxies. There was a kind of clash of civilization, which would energize and cross fertilize literature as spill blood for centuries.

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The churches were, until the bureaucratic Normans came in in the eleventh century, they were the nations chroniclers. They kept the records. The Latin, which is the church’s institutional language, the great linguistic bond which glued together the parts of what we now call Europe and glued together also the present with the past it created. It went right the way back to the times when the Romans brought the first civilization to the shores of England. Nonetheless, the primal text in English literature is our first work of literature, Caedmon’s Hymn, as it’s called, is in the vernacular. (7th) It’s in the language of the people or the folk, not of the clerics, that’s very important.

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At the same time, we need to mention another founder figure, the Venerable Bede, who was a monk at the monastery in the eighth century. He was a great scholar, and by report, although we don’t have any of his poetry who was himself a poet. Now Bede tells us about Caedmon in his The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). Caedmon was illiterate and entirely ignorant of the art of song. He would slink away and find refuge among his cows when he was invited to join the activity. Because he couldn’t sing. Then something wonderful happened one night in a dream. Caedmon was given the art of song. He went on to become a zealous monk and an inspirational religious poet in his own Anglo-Saxon tongue, the vernacular. Thanks to Bede, who meaningfully calls Caedmon’s work a carman, which is Latin for a song, not a hymn. This is what Caedmon’s fellows heard as sat at table in the middle of the eighth cenyury,1300 years ago, drinking their mead and relaxing and wanting to be entertained, at the same time uplifted by literature.

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“Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven’s kingdom…

He first created for the sons of men

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,

then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,

the Eternal Lord, afterwards

made,

the earth for men.”

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The foundation block of English literature, is principally poetic. Largely because its continuity depended on the scop or singer. Some of them are non-standard. For example, the poetry is organized around stress, not syllables. (Half lines and organization by two stresses per half line will be find in an English poetry to the present day and an American as well. It’s the main aspect of the Englishness of it, the English language.)

The period, roughly from the eighth to the eleventh century, falls into distinct genres or styles. There are hymns and secular songs like Caedmon’s. There are elegies, which are short poems of poignant loss. There are minor works like riddles which are there only to entertain.

Now we focus on the elegies. They’re less heroic than stoic. They celebrate suffering nobly born.

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Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care’s

hold,

And dire sea-surge.

--The Seafarer (8th century)

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Kennings: a prime feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

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Beowulf:

Those invaders who came in small boats from what we now known as Friesland and northern Germany brought along with their swords and chain mail, a somber view of life, a kind of tough pessimism. Now there is a line in Beowulf which summed up the overriding mood, and it’s itself. It is a wonderful Anglo-Saxon word. “Weird is full of it.”

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Wyrd bith full aread.

Fate will be fulfilled.

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Wyrd: the etymological ancestor of weird.

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Now for those pioneers, life was a constant battle against the elements, against monsters, against their fellow men, against nature. It was a hard life. But in that battle, the greatness of humanity shines brightest.

Now the finest late, heroic, Anglo-Saxon poem is The Battle of Maldon. (c.991) it recounts an eleventh century invasion by the Viking heathens, who are very different from the Anglo-Saxons. The English and the battle are defeated. But as they go down, an old warrior, Byrhtnoth stands defiantly over the body of his dead King, and he brandishes his spear and he shouts:

Mind must be the firmer, heart

the more fierce,

Courage the greater, as our

Strength diminishes.

He said he will fall where his king fell, fighting to the end. And he does just that. The British will later become their famously good losers. Being on the losing side, they think the battle brings out the metal in them, it brings out the best in them.

However, Anglo-Saxon verses are not entirely sombre. We could look at a whole library of verse, riddles which have survived very happily in what have been an Anglo-Saxon joke book.

Obviously, the English sections like the fun as much as they did, in fact, the probably wasn’t as much comedy and fun in their life as they’re privileged to have.

There is the point, we are making more than one mood. But the strongest moods are found in the epic narratives. And they also convey overwhelming sense of the virtue of comradeship, which is based on the sword like the gun in the wild west, the sword is the instrument of civilization and of terror. It is power.

You will feel a connection with the ale hall and Beowulf in the pub. You’ll notice the man still drinking rounds like their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. If truth be told, they also boast rather more than they should, as the Anglo-Saxon did when they relaxed in their ale halls.

Beowulf, the first and indeed the only surviving Anglo-Saxon or Germanic epic, and something like the form in which it was first recited is a result of an almost miraculous serious of accidents.

Generally speaking, readers who come to read Beowulf for the first time have two very different reactions. The first is incomprehension. The language is so foreign. It jars. The second reaction is just the opposite, why even if we have not read it, does the poem seem so familiar we seem to know it. We seem to know what’s happening in it. The reason can be traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien, which is a household name today for his Lord of Ring. But he was also the greatest Beowulf scholar of the twentieth century, and his view on the poem was uncompromising. It was a fantasy, the monsters, the dragons and the epic battle which made Beowulf great. And the best preparation John would argue for a reading of Beowulf is to go to the cinema and watch one of the Peter Jackson adaptations of Tolkien’s narratives. Look around the enraptured audience that we suspect is how the first listeners of Beowulf looked 1500 years ago.

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Hwat： what. It’s designed to attract attention and impose silence.

Geardagum: contains the essence of Anglo-Saxon verse. Literally, it means your days or days of your long ago.

Anglo-Saxon can compress it into one compound known or kenning. The rugged economy of Anglo-Saxon represents its highest linguistic achievement. The creative writer remake language. Beowulf was talking to people, who were part of his community. There was common ground between them. That’s the wonderful in literature. It’s one of the reasons why we dedicate our lives either to reading it and sometimes some of us talking about it is that it gives us, to some extent, a connection across many hundreds of years. That is to say, Beowulf is not merely talking to those contemporaries, but it is also talking to us. Literature is like a time machine, which takes its back. It connects us with people who are no longer here. It’s in the sense. And that is the reason why we read it. It’s the reason why we study it, and it’s the reason why even though the makers are long dead, and in the case of Beowulf, we don’t even know who the makers were, it lives for us. The quality of literature is neither a museum nor a graveyard. It’s something which still vibrates.

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Lecture2 Chancer—Social Diversity

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Sometimes working in old English literature depth, one feels more like an archaeologist than a student or a literature lover. Reading those surviving Anglo-Saxon works is like hearing indistinct echoes from a long way off. They are fascinating, but one can’t always make out what’s being said. Much changed in the regional kingdoms of Britain during the half millennium which separates Beowulf from the Canterbury Tales.

There was continuous and exhausting invasion by the Vikings which eventually led to the accession of a Viking king, Canute. The monarch who demonstrated his only powers at the seashore, tried to command the waves, not because he believed he could but to demonstrate that he couldn’t, and he proved to his subjects that a king’s power was limited. Scandinavian, which is what the Viking were, although infiltrated English and could still be heard in the majority accent of English speakers in the northeast of England never took hold. As late as the eleventh century, Anglo-Saxon, that alien tongue that we encountered in Beowulf was still the language of literature. In the 1390s, the greatest narrative poem in English is from the prologue or introduction to Geffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which sings a vernal song.

How did the great change happen so suddenly? We should mention that the epochal date of the Norman conquest and the defeat of the Saxon king Harold at Hastings on the English coast. These French invaders brought with them a unifying mission to bind international unity. They installed what we would call a national infrastructure: a language and a system of law, a hierarchy of nobility and commoners. That’s to say the British class system. Although they talk more than they do, the great institution came with the Normans.

The greatest document of the Norman period is the Domesday Boke, a hugely comprehensive register of every town and village and hamlet in the country. What the Normans created after they’d taken over the country is not merely a unification but also an organic connection with Europe. Latin and rhyme are among the cultural baggage. However, we can still hear the stress systems or Old Anglo-Saxon literature throbbing away under this superstructure.

In the Canterbury Tales, the world is reborn. We can assume that Chaucer’s work is poetry for cultivated people who probably read Petrarch. Chaucer’s reference in that passage indicates a nodding acquaintance with astrology, which is fourteenth century science. Thus it is not just a poetry which alludes to poetry. It is also poetry which draws on learning, on knowledge, on the kind of the bodies of institutional learning, which eventually became concentrated in universities. So an educational system lies behind this poetry were a tradition of a poetry itself. More specifically, a knowledge of Latin is implied. (Zephyrus is the Roman god of wind.) Chaucer is part with a variety of linguistic resources at his disposal. And above all, we must feel the tone of verse is civilized. It belongs to a civilization. The rain is sweet, not harsh. The apples are sour. The showers are sweet. This is not merely a new world, but a new universe, a new worldview, which is emerging through the poetry and out of which the poetry itself is emerging.

Now we will introduce something about the Canterbury Tales. By Chaucer’s time, London has become the engine room of a commercially thriving England. It was less a city than a metropolis and English is inexorably becoming the national tongue. It’s nonetheless important to stress that the conquest of England begun in 1066. But the conquest is not yet quite complete. Masterpieces are still being produced in other anachronistic or regional dialects, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman(an epic of working class life). The point we are making is that there are lots of languages in England which are gradually being subordinated to the English of London and Chaucer is a main actor in the standardization process. The Canterbury Tales is very different from Anglo-Saxon poetry, which is restricted to classes like warriors and peasants and women are largely invisible and wholly insignificant. ?It has knights, soldiers, peasantry which are represented in choices and powerful women. Moreover, we perceive a stratified class system or hierarchy, which is similar to our own.

(motley crew.)

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Lecture3 Chaucer-A Man of Unusual Cultivation

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The father of English verse.

The good years for England, which was basking in the medieval warm period and more or less at peace, despite uprising like the peasants revolt and the never ending hostility with France.

An age of elaborate courtesy, of high paced gallantry, of courageous venture, of noble distain for mean tranquility. It was a goo time to be alive, in other words, and a good time to be writing-literature.?