The cult of Anglo-Saxon and the literary canon

The cult of Anglo-Saxon and the literary canon* Bede inaugurates the Anglo-Saxon literary canon with his story of Caedmon, an aged lay brother at Whitby Abbey in the 660s. It was the custom after a convivial supper for everyone present to sing, and it was Caedmon's practice, when he saw his turn approaching, to duck out into the darkness and look after the cattle. After his miraculously inspired hymn of Creation, the learned members of the community cross-examined the old fellow, who could neither read nor write, andfilledhim up with knowledge. As a translator of AngloSaxon verse, who has studied the arts of versification and of variation of words, poetic qualities in which the Anglo-Saxons delighted, I honour Caedmon and sympathize with him.1 I choose to speak on the 'Anglo-Saxon' Literary Canon and the cult of Anglo-Saxon, rather than on the 'Old English' Literary canon, because it is a common mistake among the unlearned to suppose that 'Old English' refers to Chaucer, and a common mistake among the teamed is to offer Old English literature as a purely linguistic ortextualthing with no context. I wish that I had called the History of Old English Literature I pubtished in 1983 a History of Anglo-Saxon Literature. The Anglo-Saxon literary canon has not been challenged or questioned very much, but whether it belongs in the canon of English Literature at all, itsrightto canonical status, bas not been accepted semper, ubique et ab omnibus. Although this Uterature was composed, recited, heard, and read for 500 years, it was largely unreadable for the next 500, and has only been made part of the core cuniculum for an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature for 100 years or so, and then only at one of the two ancient EngUsh universities, though at all four of the ancient Scottish ones and at many abroad. Most English universities followed Oxford rather than Cambridge, but none of the new post-war British universities have made Old English obligatory, and it was an option available only at some. In a recent survey three-quarters of 41 British university departments of EngUsh Language and/ or Literature teach Anglo-Saxon Literature; it is obligatory to study it in 17; and part of degree assessment at 6 more. But it has been disestablished at, for example, Liverpool; and 'modularization' may mean marginalization for Originally presented as a plenary paper at A N Z A M R S XVI in the University of Melbourne in February 1992. 1 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 3.24. Alexander translations: The Earliest English Poems, Harmondsworth, 1966, 1977, 1991; Beowulf, Harmondsworth, 1873; Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book, London, 1980, 1984. 2 M. Alexander medieval literary studies (especially earlier medieval studies) in many British universities.2 The canon of Anglo-Saxon has not been intenogated much; litde power resides there, and the intenogators would rather terminate it. At Oxford, however, home of the O.U.P., the O.E.D., the E.E.T.S., and the erstwhile Inklings, it once had power, like the Scylding dynasty in Denmark. If compulsory Old English goes at Oxford, the ghost of R. W . Chambers, among others, wtil groan, for he regarded the Bodleian Library as 'the last bastion of the humanities'—which I remember as the last words of Man's Unconquerable Mind (1939). Chambers' essay On the Continuity ofEnglish Prose from Alfred to Sir Thomas More his School (1932) is a fine late example of the cult of AngloSaxon . Man's Unconquerable Mind is atitleeach term of which would attract the attention of the Thought Police today. Not every P.C. might recognize that the sonnet from which it quotes is dedicated to the memory of Toussaint L'Ouverture, put to death by the French.3 The canon of Anglo-Saxon Literature could be simply the corpus of what survives in Old English. Or if a qualitative meaning is retained for literature, then much everyday non-fictional prose would go: charters, wdls, leechdoms, glosses on Latintexts,and a quantity of religious prose and verse, not all of which is non-fiction. A stiicdy literary canon would exclude...