"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

FOREWORD

FOREWORD Tom Shippey SONG AND POETRY About fourteen hundred years ago, mourners buried a man in what archaeologists have now labeled “Grave 32” in the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Snape, in Suffolk. He was laid out carefully and respectfully , in pagan fashion, with a spear by his right side and a round shield covering the left side of his torso. Underneath the shield, though, the mourners placed what may have been the dead man’s most precious possession: his harp. (Technically speaking, it is a lyre, but Anglo-Saxons would have called it a hearpe.) Made of maplewood, with a sound-board of thin oak, and with attachments including a wrist-strap which would allow it to be played twohanded , it is an unusually fine instrument even compared with the similar harps recovered elsewhere, one of them from the lavishly furnished royal burial at Sutton Hoo a few miles away. The report of the archaeologist Graeme Lawson notes that it was left “cradled in the crook of the [dead man’s] left arm, almost as though in preparation for performance,” and adds that such graves provide us with “direct archaeological links” to the world in which Old English poetry was composed and preserved (215, 223). The “warrior-poet” of Grave 32 was surely a scop, one of those who (see “The Fortunes of Men” ll. 74–77 below) “sits with his harp at his lord’s feet, / Takes his treasure, a reward of rings, / Plucks with his harp-nail, sweeps over strings, / Shapes song: hall-thanes long for his melody.” What we now know as poetry, then, began as song, though the tunes and the music have been lost beyond recall. Performers nowadays, such as x | T OM SHIPPEY Ben Bagby, try to reimagine it, though one may wonder whether any one person can now recreate a whole art form developed long ago by many minds and marked by delighted virtuosity. The Anglo-Saxons’ word for “harp-nail,” or plectrum, was sceacol, and the poet of “The Fortunes of Men” calls it, in very literal translation, “the shackle, which leaps, the sweet-sounding nail.” It is “the harp’s sweet songs, the poet’s music” that provoke Grendel to envious fury in Beowulf, and there are “sound and music mixed” when Hrothgar’s poet plays the “joy-wood” and sings the story of Finnsburg to the Danish court and its guests (see ll. 1064, 1062–1162). At a much lower social level, Bede’s story of Cædmon (see pp. 191–93) indicates that it was normal at an Anglo-Saxon drinking-party for a harp to be passed round so that everyone could sing. Cædmon is unusual in that he cannot sing (or play?) and has to hide his embarrassment in the cowshed, from which the angel rescues him by the gift of inspiration. Of course, Bede’s story may not be true, but it cannot have seemed implausible either to the first readership of Bede’s own version written in Latin, or to the readership of the translation into Old English made more than a century and a half later. For the pagan and pre-literate Anglo-Saxons of the early Anglo-Saxon period, poetry delivered as song was at once the main channel of their own traditions, their highest intellectual art form, and their most valued entertainment. When the Messenger who announces Beowulf’s death says that their lord has “laid down laughter,” he is thinking of gamen and gleodream, “game and gleedream ,” or as we would say, “merriment and joy in music.” The very high cultural value placed on their native skill by Anglo-Saxons must account for the preservation of Old English poetry in relatively large quantities, rather more than 30,000 lines of it all told, enough to fill the six thick volumes of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (to which the best overall guide is Fulk and Cain’s A History of Old English Literature). This body of literature is a striking anomaly on the early medieval European scene. Anglo-Saxons were still writing poems in the traditional style, with fairly strict adherence to the old rules of meter and use of traditional “kennings” (see pp. 8–9) almost up to 14 October 1066, when the last Anglo-Saxon king Harold died on the battlefield of Hastings: the latest datable poem we have is the one preserved in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of his predecessor King Edward nine months...