Old English is the name given to the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons from the time of their
conquest of Britain in the fifth century until their
own conquest by the Normans in 1066, after which
the influence of Norman French on the language
helped produce some of the changes that resulted
in the development of Old English into MIDDLE
ENGLISH. Old English literature includes a complex
and sophisticated poetic tradition that preserves
some of the prehistoric heroic tradition of the
Anglo-Saxon people, as well as a rich prose tradition of texts concerned chiefly with Christian
themes. Old English is the earliest written vernacular literary tradition in Europe.
The Old English language was a Germanic language, and like modern German was highly inflected, relying on case endings that designated the
function of nouns in sentences. Nouns were categorized as masculine, feminine, and neuter, and
the grammatical genders were inflected differently. Adjectives were also inflected, agreeing with
the nouns they modified in case, number, and
gender. Some verbs had a weak conjugation that
formed its past tenses by a dental suffix (like -ed in
modern English), but most fell into one of seven
classes of “strong” verbs (as in modern German)
that give us “irregular” verbs like write, wrote,
written in modern English. Written Old English
used three characters unknown in modern English: the thorn (lo) and the eth (∂ ´ ), which indicated the sounds spelled as th in modern English,
and the œsc—pronounced “ash”—(œ), which indicated the sound in modern English called the
short a.
According to the Venerable BEDE (d. 735), the
chief historical source for the period, three Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—
began their invasion of Celtic Britain in 449 C.E.
They came from the southern part of the Jutland
peninsula, from northwestern Germany, and from
the Low Countries and spoke mutually intelligible
but somewhat distinct dialects of Germanic that
developed eventually into four Old English dialects: Kentish (spoken by the Jutish people who
presumably settled Kent), West Saxon (spoken by
the Saxon people who settled in the southwestern
part of Britain), and the more closely related Mercian and Northumbrian (spoken by the Angles
who settled the rest of the island). By the time the
Christian missionary St. Augustine arrived in Kent
in 597, there were seven established Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. Christianity brought the Latin alphabet
and with it the potential to produce written texts.
By the eighth century, the monasteries of AngloSaxon England had become the most important
centers of intellectual culture in Europe, and Bede,
a Benedictine monk from the monastery at Jarrow, was probably the most learned man on the
continent—a scientist, grammarian, theologian,
and historian. By the end of the century, CHARLEMAGNE was to turn to ALCUIN OF YORK (735–804),
the product of this English monastic system, to
direct the renaissance of learning in the Carolingian empire. Viking invasions in the ninth century
colonized much of northeast England and threatened to put an end to this vital Anglo-Saxon civilization, but the military genius of the king of
Wessex, ALFRED THE GREAT (r. 871–899), prevented
that destruction.
Alfred also fostered a renaissance of learning in
England, which had declined since the time of Alcuin. He wrote and translated a number of texts
himself, and also encouraged the production of
other texts, including the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE (a record of events in England from the eighth
century through his own reign) and a translation
of Bede’s most important work, his Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, into Old English. Alfred and his descendents, who further limited
Viking incursions into England (though many
Norsemen settled on the island peaceably), were
the first monarchs able to call themselves kings of
all England. But by the time of Ethelred the Unready (as he is commonly known—actually the
Old English adjective usually attached to his name
means “unadvised”), Viking raids had increased
again, and Danish influence in England grew so
strong that after Ethelred’s death in 1016, the Danish king Canute became king of England. After his
death, the line of Wessex was restored and Edward
the Confessor became king in 1042, but upon his
death the claim to the throne by his successor
Harold was challenged by Duke William of Normandy, who successfully invaded England, killed
Harold in battle, and was crowned king of England
on December 25, 1066, effectively bringing the Old
English period to an end.
There are only some 189 extant manuscripts
containing a significant amount of writing in the
Old English language, and of these, 125 are essentially ecclesiastical collections. As a result of his work
to revitalize learning in England, almost all of these
manuscripts are in the late West Saxon dialect of
King Alfred’s Wessex. The most admired genre of
Old English literature in modern times has been poetry, yet nearly all Old English poetry survives in
only four manuscripts, known as the JUNIUS MANUSCRIPT, the EXETER BOOK, the VERCELLI BOOK, and
Ms. COTTON VITELLIUS A.xv, the manuscript containing the great epic BEOWULF. There are 140 poems
in these four manuscripts, and another 45 scattered
among other texts. Like Germanic poetry in general,
Old English verse was based on stress and alliteration: Each line contained four stressed syllables
(plus an unspecified number of unstressed syllables). The line was divided into two half-lines by a
caesura between the second and third stressed syllable. The two half-lines were linked by alliteration:
The initial sound of the first stressed syllable in the
second half line is also used in either or both of the
stressed syllables of the first half line. Other characteristics of Old English poetry include the use of
KENNINGS—truncated metaphors that refer to common nouns in figurative terms, as “whale’s road” for
the sea, and LITOTES, or understatement—in which
the poet ironically understates a condition or emotion, saying perhaps “with few companions” to
mean “alone.”
The earliest surviving poem in English is a seventh-century lyric known as CAEDMON’S HYMN. A
poem praising God for the creation of the world,
Caedmon’s Hymn adapts the Germanic heroic poetic tradition to Christian themes, and in doing so
establishes a pattern that most Old English poetry
would follow. There are SAINTS’ LIVES and prayers, for
example, as well as long narrative retellings of Old
Testament stories in poems like GENESIS, EXODUS and
DANIEL, as well as the impressive Old English version
of the apocryphal book JUDITH. The best-known of
all Old English religious poems is the DREAM OF THE
ROOD, a retelling of the crucifixion of Christ from
the point of view of the Cross itself.
Other Old English poems generally fall into three
categories: ELEGAIC poems, heroic poems, or GNOMIC
VERSE. Well-known elegiac lyrics like The WANDERER,
The SEAFARER and The WIFE’S LAMENT deal with the
experience of loss and the transience of earthly
goods and power. Gnomic verses include a number
of maxims that survive in two short collections, as
well as a large number of RIDDLES in the Exeter
Book. The heroic tradition continues in poems like
The BATTLE OF BRUNNANBURH—a celebration of a
great English victory in 937 by King Alfred’s grandson Aethelstan over an alliance of invaders that survives in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and The BATTLE
OF MALDON—a poem celebrating the old Germanic
heroic customs by lauding the courage of retainers
who go down to glorious defeat after the death of
their lord in a battle with Vikings in 991.
Beowulf, whose 3,182 lines make it the longest
poem in Old English (with 10 percent of the entire body of Old English verse), also celebrates the
Germanic warrior code, but does so from the view
of a Christian poet who sees it as glorious but
flawed, and invokes a kind of elegiac mood for the
lost glory of those heroic days. Thus Beowulf is a
compendium of all the most important themes of
Old English poetry.
Of course, far more Old English prose survives
than poetry, much of it of literary significance.
Aside from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself and
the Old English translation of Bede, a number of
Alfred’s translations are much admired, including
his English version of Saint GREGORY THE GREAT’s
Cura pastoralis and his translation of BOETHIUS’s
CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. But the most popular genre of Old English prose is the sermon. The
two most admired prose stylists in Old English,
WULFSTAN and AELFRIC, both active around the
year 1000, in the period of Viking invasions under
the ill-advised Ethelred, are both known for their
sermons. Wulfstan’s famous Sermon of Wolf to the
English in 1014 attributes the Viking atrocities to
the punishment of a just God for the English sins.
Aelfric, the greatest scholar of his age and the most
admired Old English prose writers, left two large
collections of sermons for use during two seasons
of the Christian year.
When the Normans displaced the Anglo-Saxon
nobility and ended the Old English culture that
was superior to their own, they effectively ended
written literature in English for 200 years. It was
not until the 14th century that English literature
regained the heights it had reached in the Old English period. Indeed, European vernacular literature begins with Old English texts.
Bibliography
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