Andreas is a 1,722-line OLD ENGLISH poem preserved in the VERCELLI BOOK. The extant poem is
divided into 15 sections, or fits, and retells a story
based on a lost Latin translation of the apocryphal
Acts of Andrew and Matthew, originally written in
Greek in the late fourth century. The story focuses
on the apostle Saint Andrew and his miraculous
rescue of Saint Matthew from a tribe of cannibals
whom Andrew is ultimately able to convert to
Christianity.
In the poem, the Mermedonians are a fiendish
tribe of Ethiopia who eat the flesh and drink the
blood of any strangers they capture in their land.
The prisoners are blinded and forced to drink a
potion that robs them of their reason and reduces
them to eating hay like beasts while awaiting their
slaughter. Saint Matthew is captured and, though
he drinks the potion, remains faithful to God, who
rewards his prayers with healing and the promise
of rescue.
Andrew is called upon in Achaia, from whence
he sets forth somewhat reluctantly with a group of
his thanes on a ship captained, as he later learns, by
Christ himself. After a stormy voyage he arrives in
the land of the Mermedonians, where he is himself captured and tortured for more than three
days. But when Andrew miraculously lets loose a
great flood from a stone column, the water drowns
the Mermedonians in a symbolic baptism. All but
14 of the most wicked of the cannibals are revived
and converted to the new faith, while Saint
Matthew and the other prisoners are saved.
Andreas was once thought to be the work of the
poet CYNEWULF, but that attribution is no longer accepted, and the poem is probably of a later date
than that poet’s work. Readers have admired Andreas for its vivid description of Saint Andrew’s
stormy sea crossing. Scholars have commented
upon resemblances to BEOWULF in the text, in things
like the sea-voyage to rescue people from man-eating monsters. Some phrases may even be borrowed
from Beowulf or other heroic poetry. The heroic
language, in fact, seems awkward or even unsuitable to some readers. But the poem is an admirable
and effective effort, and seems to invite an allegorical interpretation with Andrew as a type or figure of
Christ, harrowing an earthly hell where demonic
humans hold captive citizens of God’s kingdom.
The bondage may suggest bondage to sin, the
blindness a spiritual blindness that results in
bondage. Ultimately, Andreas is a more sophisticated poem than it may at first appear, and certainly makes for exciting reading, though the story
itself was hardly considered orthodox in its time.
Bibliography
Greenfield, Stanley B., and Daniel G. Calder. A New
Critical History of Old English Literature. New
York: New York University Press, 1986.
Kennedy, Charles William, trans. Early English Christian Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press,
1963.
Lapidge, Michael. “The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon
England.” In The Cambridge Companion to Old
English Literature, edited by Malcolm Godden and
Michael Lapidge, 243–263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.