English Poetry before Chaucer (review)

Swanton argues that during the early Middle Ages, six centuries of continuously changing and often contradictory 'pleated or helicoidal' patterns of events in England, including the Norman Conquest and linguistic changes, created feelings of inadequacy, disorder and anxiety. These widespread emotions inspired poets to seek and freely express their understanding of life to audiences in marketplaces, taverns and on pilgrimages.

Early heroic songs typically described great warriors, fearsome weapons, enemies hated and homelands defended, but some poets went deeper: Widsith explored conflicting loyalties and compromises, and Beowulf the dilemma of a society which admired its dragon-slaying hero but was uncertain about his overriding authority and its dissonance with egalitarian values within his own comitatus and English culture generally – a dilemma only resolved later by Alcuin's hero being a channel of divine power.

As the pagan English became Christian so did their literature. Following Augustine of Canterbury's missionary policy of adapting vernacular pagan customs, Caedmon's Creation-Hymn (late seventh century) used traditional vocabulary for its Christian message, but his biblical translations into Old English were more confrontational because they starkly prescribed an entirely new plan for the human condition. The poems Genesis and Exodus mingled heroic elements with biblical themes, the latter including brilliant descriptions of terror in the Day of Judgement. TheDream of the Rood depicted Christ as the one hero who could not be heroically rescued, but must suffer whilst God (the Chief) commanded constraint and acceptance, until eventually the rood is revealed as the glorious source of all healing.

During the eighth century, anxiety focussed on time passing. The Wanderer, with 'cruel grief as a companion', was in exile, destitute, friendless and tormented by memories of how life was in the distant past and should be now. The desolate ruins of the sophisticated Romano-British past proclaimed that all communities naturally wither and perish, so that the 'ruin of time' foreshadows the imminent end of the world and only God remains eternal. Similarly gloomy, TheSeafarer follows his heavenly Lord into exile, preparing for the final pilgrimage of death. Yet hope remains, and The Phoenix weaves a plaitwork of meditations on resurrection.

Heroic themes returned in poems about Christian warrior saints. Guthlac A described a spiritual combatant who reclaimed the Fenland from the sophisticated malevolence of demons. Swanton argues that Vikings, Saracens and authoritarian European governments led Christians to tolerate violence, and to see other races, rather than individuals, as the enemy. Thus the poem Judith praises the killing of the Assyrian Holofernes, although Swanton suggests that the text indicates distrust of female violence. Racial distinctions and emotions recur with The Battle of Maldon (991), portraying the inner feelings of defending Englishmen, including the guilt of survivors, and Layamon's Brut portrays the King Arthur as a ruler tinged with romance but nonetheless ferocious and rather nasty.

Post-conquest poetry became more self-consciously fictional, peppered with realistic descriptions and sexual themes. Havelock's story is the rescue of a Danish Prince but it began with a call for ale, ended with prayer, and in between referred to markets, kitchens, the ironies of evil being thwarted by goodness, and the blessings of a happy marriage. In contrast, Sir Tristrem was a tragi-comedy of tensions between high-minded chivalric love and illicit sexual passion, with lovers' deceptions revealing the ambiguities of truth, falsehood, illusion and reality. Floris and Blancheflur is another tale of transcendent love, in an improbable Saracen setting possibly drawn from Ibn Hazm's more sophisticated poetry on entwined physical, spiritual and sexual love as gifts of God. Madam Sirith shows a cruder sexuality, with a medley of jokes about a married woman being easily persuaded to allow a lusty young cleric to 'stretch her thighs wide'. Yet even this bawdy sexuality contains elements of both sexual parody and searching for God.

Later poems expressed a range of anxieties and ambiguities: vigorous but discontented poets are 'sick for love'; The Fair Maid...