Category Archives: Britain

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The Exeter Book

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts on literature from Anglo-Saxon England.

Lnks to other posts in this series can be found at the end of this post. 

 

One of the important sources of surviving literature from Anglo -Saxon England is the Exeter Book. There are only four surviving collections of Anglo-Saxon literature, and of these, the Exeter Book is the oldest, most varied, and the best preserved. I have mentioned this book before in posts on various manuscripts that are found within the book, and I will be highlighting more in the future, but I thought you might find it interesting to know more about the book as a whole.

The Exeter Book was donated to the library of Exeter Cathedral in 1072 AD by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, and there it has stayed ever since. In his will, which details the sixty-seven books and other objects he wished to be donated to the then-impoverished Cathedral, Leofric describes  “a large English book of poetic works about all sorts of things,” which is believed to be what is now known as the Exeter Book, or as the Codex Exoniensis.  Scholars estimate that is was compiled somewhere between 960-990 AD, and is a collection of various works of religious and secular Anglo-Saxon poetry, including The Wanderer. In fact it contains over 1/6th of the surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry. It also includes over ninety Anglo-Saxon riddles. Several of the poems included in the book are much older than the tenth century compilation date; some go as far back as the seventh century. In many cases the Exeter book contains the only known source of these works. All in all it’s the largest known collection of Anglo-Saxon literature in the world, and as such was recognized by UNESCO in 2016 as one of the “world’s principal cultural artifacts.”

One of the most fascinating entries in the book is The Rhyming Poem, which dates to the tenth century. It consists of Old English rhyming couplets, which is quite different from any other Anglo-Saxon poetry, which was done in alliterative verse.

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This is an excerpt from Riddle 24 of the Exeter Book. Can you see the runes embedded in this it? They are towards the bottom.  This is an example of a riddle-within-a-riddle. In this case the answer to this riddle, which is “magpie” is spelled out by those runes. (see my post on Cynewulf the poet for another example of this). There are other riddles in the Exeter Book which also include runes as an aid for the reader who is able to read both Old English and the runes. Riddle 24 is fairly straightforward, but there are others, even with the aid of the runes, are still so obscure that the riddle has still yet to be solved. Cool, hey? If you want to read more about this, check out this fascinating article from the University of Notre Dame , which is where this image comes from. 

The book itself is visually unremarkable, however, especially compared with the beautifully illustrated manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells.  It was inscribed with brown ink on vellum, likely copied from an earlier version, and has minimal decorations on a few leaves. A couple of initial letters are slightly ornamented. It has lost its original cover as well as the first original eight pages, which were replaced by others at a later date.

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One of the ornamented letters. Image from exeter-cathedral.org

It’s been used as a coaster at some point, you can see the water ring left behind. The early pages are scored through with a sharp object, so perhaps it was also used as a cutting board. The final pages bear some scorch marks. So despite the value of its contents, perhaps its ho-hum appearance was the reason that it was left behind at Exeter Cathedral when a bunch of the Cathedral’s most precious books were donated to the newly founded Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1602 AD. It was obviously not deemed very valuable.

So, it is still at Exeter Cathedral. If you go to visit, you can see it on display there, along with a bunch of other intriguing books and manuscripts, including a Shakespeare Second Folio. But of all of them, the Exeter Book is the greatest treasure.

The Exeter Book still is not recognized today as the important work of literature it is. Most people have barely heard of it, compared with the Diary of Anne Frank or the Magna Carta, both of which have also been recognized by UNESCO and entered into their Memory of the World register.

But that might change. Exeter University professor Emma Cayley began developing an app in 2016 to make the book more accessible to the  public. I checked, but it’s not available yet. I hope it is soon! I can’t help but think that Leofric would be pleased.

Links to other posts in this series:

The Dream of the Rood

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The Wanderer

What’s In a Word?

Bald’s Leechbook: The Doctor is In

The Lindisfarne Gospels

The Cotton Library

Cynewulf the Poet

Beowulf Basics

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Featured image: The Exeter Book on display at Exeter Cathedral. The book is open to The Wanderer. Image from UNR English 440A, photo credit UMD iSchool

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Re-post: The Wanderer

Note: this is a fun post from a couple years ago. The blog is on hiatus this week but I’ll  be back with fresh content next week. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this “wander” down memory lane….

One of the poignant moments in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers is the scene where King Théoden, newly restored to himself after Wormtongue’s enchantment, prepares for the upcoming battle of Helm’s Deep. Have a listen:

Wonderful! Just this little snippet made me want to go back and watch all three movies, but I digress…

The poem that Théoden quotes here comes from Tolkien, but in the book it is said by Aragon, as he introduces the Riders of Rohan to his companions. It has been condensed somewhat in the film, the original version is this:

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? 

Where is the spring and the harvest, and the tall corn growing? 

They  have passed like rain on the mountains, like wind on the meadow;

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into Shadow.

Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning? 

Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? 

One day I am going to do a longer post about Tolkien, the Anglo-Saxons, and Aragon in particular, but for today I wanted to give you just a little tidbit, illustrated by this poem.

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Ah, yes, Aragon, aka Strider, aka son of Arathorn, aka heir of Esildur, aka…well, stay tuned to the blog to find out!

Tolkien, of course, was an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and in particular he modelled the Rohirrim after the people and culture of Anglo-Saxon Britain.

This poem that Aragon quotes is adapted from one of the poems that survive from that period, called The Wanderer. It begins like this (translated, of course, from Anglo-Saxon):

Often the solitary one 

finds grace for himself

the mercy of the Lord.

Although he, sorry-hearted,

must for a long time

move by hand [i.e. row]

along the waterways,

(along) the ice-cold sea,

tread the paths of exile. 

Events must always go as they must! 

This poem can be found in the 10th century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry called the Exeter Book, but many scholars believe that this poem existed long before then in oral tradition, and could date back to the 6th century.

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Facsimile of the first page of The Wanderer from the Exeter Book (from Wikipedia). This looks like it is written like prose, not poetry, but if you look carefully you will see extra spaces between words, which is the indication of a half-line division of a line of poetry. Also you will see some dots between words, which is also meant to show other half-line breaks.

 

The poem itself is about a warrior who is wandering in exile, having lost his liege lord, kin, and comrades in battle, defending his homeland from attack. It is melancholy in nature, which comes as no surprise – for in the Anglo-Saxon culture with its emphasis on close family ties and allegiance to a lord, to be alone in a strange land with no kin or lord to protect you is almost a fate worse than death.

In the first stanza quoted above, you can see a fascinating mix of the old Saxon religion and beliefs and the new Christian ones. It shows a culture in the midst of transition from the old ways to the new. The opening lines show that the warrior is looking for mercy from God, but at the end of the stanza you see “Events must always go as they must!” 

When you look up this poem you will find that there are many different ways to translate the Anglo-Saxon original, so that last line I can also find translated as, “Fate is established!” or “Fate has been decreed.”

This is the Saxon concept of wyrd, the inexorable fate that binds every person, that cannot be denied. So the poem begins with both the Christian concept of God’s mercy and the Saxon idea of fate. And you will see these two world-views juxtaposed throughout the poem.

In the midst of The Wanderer is the part that Tolkien adapted for The Two Towers. It comes in the poem after the warrior has contemplated the brevity of life, “as now in various places throughout this middle-earth walls stand, blown by the wind, covered with frost, storm-swept the buildings.” After meditating on this the warrior says,

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? 

Where the giver of treasure? 

Where are the seats at the feast? 

Where are the revels in the hall? 

Alas for the splendour of the prince! 

How that time has passed away,

dark under the cover of night, 

as if it had never been! 

It’s all a bit gloomy, I’ll admit, but I can imagine the effect of the scop singing or reciting this poem on the people gathered in the mead hall, snug against the winter storms, surrounded by their kin and secure in their own place in the world. It would have given both a sobering contemplation of the fate of the exiled stranger, and the delicious relief that they were not him. Kinda like the effect of a thunderstorm when you are in bed, you feel extra cozy knowing that you are  not outside in the storm itself.

The Wanderer ends with the counsel, “It is better for the one who seeks mercy, consolation from the father in the heavens, where, for us, all permanence rests.” The Christian world-view has obviously won out for the original writer of the poem. Of course there are other speculations that one could make, for example, that some scribe along the way altered the poem, adding more overtly Christian elements than were originally in there. It’s hard to say, and I guess we will probably never know.

One of the best ways to understand a culture is to read their literature. Unfortunately, as the Anglo-Saxon culture was in many ways an oral culture, we have lost so much of their stories. I’m so glad this poem survived to open up to us the world of the mead-hall, and to enable us to meet the exiled wanderer, journeying alone through the icy mist.

I took my translation of The Wanderer from Anglo-Saxons.net. Hop on over there if you want to see the whole poem in Anglo-Saxon along with the English translation.

And just for fun, click here if you want to hear it read in the original Anglo-Saxon.

Featured photo: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, from WikiCommons

 

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What Day is It, Ecgfrida?

A couple of months back I did a post on the months of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, and I thought it might be fun to do another post on the same theme, but this time on the days of the week.

Many of us probably know is that the names of the days of our week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday – are based on the names of gods, and come to us from way back in history (and if you were paying attention in school you might guess there is at least some Roman connection to all this).

At least that is what I knew, at any rate. But what about the Anglo-Saxons? How did they name their days?

First of all, we should probably take a slight step back and talk about why we have seven days in a week. Because that has not been the case for all people throughout time and across the world. Just like people had various ways of determining how many months in a year, the same was true for calculating how many weeks in a month and how many days in a week. Years, months, and days can be tied to astronomical events – the passage of the sun or moon through the sky. But a week has no such astronomical significance.

However, a lunar month has approximately 28 days, which can be nicely divided in four sections of 7 each, corresponding to each phase of the moon, which have seven days. There was seven heavenly bodies known by the ancients (five planets plus the sun and moon). For all these reasons (and others) the number seven has always been an important number for many cultures.

So it’s not surprising that the seven-day week comes to us from ancient times.  The Sumerians in the 21st century B.C. developed it, and it was adopted by the Babylonians, who in turn (possibly) influenced the Jews (the days of Creation in Genesis number seven), as well as the Romans. But the Romans didn’t start to use a seven-day week until the first century. Up until that point they observed an eight-day week. It was Constantine, in 321 AD, who made the seven-day week official across the Roman Empire. He also decreed that Sunday would be the first day of the week, not Saturday as the Romans observed. This was to honour the resurrection of Jesus, which occurred on a Sunday.

The Babylonians named the days of the week after the five planetary bodies known to them, plus the sun and moon. The Romans took this idea and named the seven days after their gods (who in turn were represented by the planets), so Monday was Dies Lunei (Moon), Tuesday – Dies Martis (Mars), Wednesday – Dies Mercurii (Mercury), and so on. You can still see a direct correspondence to these names for the days of the week in the languages which derive directly from Latin, ie French, Italian and Spanish. So in French, Monday is Lundi, Tuesday is Mardi, Wednesday is Macredi, and so on.

But those of us who speak English have different weekday names. And that’s because ours hearken back to the Anglo-Saxons.

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The Germanic and Norse tribes who were the ancestors of the ones who migrated to England in the fourth and fifth centuries, took the idea of the seven-day week from the Romans, as well as the idea of naming those days after the gods. However, in their case they used the names of their Anglo-Saxon gods. So, for example,  the Roman name for Friday was Dies Veneris (the day of Venus). Venus was the god of beauty, love, and fertility. The Anglo-Saxons named the sixth day of the week after their god of beauty, love, and fertility, whose name was Frigg.

So, in Anglo-Saxon England, the days were named as follows (note: daeg means day in Old English):

Sunday – Sunnandæg. This is a Germanic interpretation of the Latin Dies Solis (the Roman’s name for Sunday), which means “Sun’s Day”. But they are referring to a different god than the Roman one.  The Germanic people personified the sun as a god named Sunna, or Sól.

Monday – Mōnandæg, Named after the god Mani (Sól’s brother), represented by the moon.

Tuesday – Tīwesdæg. Named after the god Tiw or Tyr, who is equivalent to the Roman god Mars, the god of war.

Wednesday – Wōdnesdæg. Woden was the ruler of the gods in the Germanic/Norse pantheon (also known as Odin). The seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kings made sure their lineages traced back to Woden, even if they were Christian kings. Woden cast a long shadow on the Anglo-Saxons.

Thursday – Þūnresdæg. Thunor’s Day. Thunor was the Germanic god of thunder and strength, related to the Norse god Thor. .

Friday – Frīgedæg. Named after the wife of Woden/Odin, who was called Frigg or Freya (they could also be two separate gods, scholars disagree on this).

Saturday – Sæturnesdæg. Interestingly enough, the Anglo-Saxons did not assign any of their gods to this day. They simply used the Roman name for this day, which was named after the Roman god, Saturn.

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Statues of the seven Saxon deities corresponding to the days of the week can be found in Stowe, England. They were created in the early 1700s. This is the god Woden. Image from Wikicommons 

One of the  most obvious influences on English-speaking people from the Anglo-Saxons  is that some of the words we use most often, that being the names of days of the week, come directly from them. You can get a sense of this when you see the written Old English, but have a listen to this very short clip of someone saying these words in Old English.

Fascinating, no? Of course there are quite a few other words that come to us from Old English (Anglo-Saxon), but these ones certainly sound quite a lot like the original ones, don’t they?

It’s amazing to me that despite the fact that many of us know very little about the Anglo-Saxons, we still are influenced by them in more ways than we think, none more evident than the names of the days of the week.

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For more posts on Anglo-Saxon life, check out the links below:

What’s for Dinner, Ecgfrida?

Ecgfrida, I’m Home!

Making a Date in Anglo-Saxon England

What They Wore: Clothing in the 7th Century

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Year of Reading Buechner: Godric

Godric is the second of Frederick Buechner’s books that take place in early medieval England. I reviewed Brendan: A Novel, here on the blog a couple months ago. This month, I turned with great eagerness to Godric.

Godric was published in 1981, so it came before Brendan, which was published in 1987. Probably if I was clever I should have read them in order of publication, but ho hum, oh well.

Godric was published to great acclaim. Edmund Fuller of The Wall Street Journal said in his review, “With a poet’s sensibly and a high reverent fancy, Frederick Buechner paints a memorable portrait.” Similar praise came from The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Publisher’s Weekly. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

All this to say that this is a remarkable novel, and again, Buechner succeeds in bringing this all-to-human saint to life, warts and all.

I didn’t realize until 3/4 of the way through this book that this story, like Brendan’s, was based on the life of a real person, St. Godric of Finchale (1065 – 1170AD). Godric was a popular medieval saint, but he was never formally canonized.

His official hagiography (life of a saint) was written during his lifetime by Reginald of Durham, a monk who knew Godric, and who apparently had Godric bless his manuscript before Godric died. There are apparently other hagiographies of Godric as well, but Reginald’s is the most important.

Godric-Finchale

St. Godric of Finchale, from the Cotton Faustina B manuscript, in the British Library. Image from Wikicommons

The bare bones of Godric’s story is that he was born to poor parents, and became a pedlar, merchant, and finally a sailor, plying his trade to places both near and far. It is possible he owned the ship that ferried the crusader king Baldwin I of Jerusalem to Jaffa in 1102 AD to prepare for a siege against Jerusalem.

During his years at sea, he apparently went to Farne Island, where he had a spiritual encounter with Cuthbert, the beloved Bishop of Lindisfarne, who was long dead by this point. This encounter changed Godric. He dedicated himself to Christ and devoted the rest of his life to Him.

Eventually Godric ended up at Finchale, which is around four miles from the monastery at Durham, where Cuthbert was buried. He lived there for around 50-60 years as an extremely ascetic hermit and died as a very old man.

Godric’s story is a fascinating one. That Reginald actually knew the saint makes his hagiography even more interesting, I think. But even so, it is a “official” account of his life, with hardly a wrinkle showing.

Buechner’s account has no such restraints. There are plenty of wrinkles in this tale. Buechner’s Godric is irrascable, selfish, bitter, and guilt-ridden, and he spends much of the book pining for the love of his life, who happens to be his sister.

I’m glad that I have read a couple of Buechner’s other biographical works – The Son of Laughter (the story of the biblical patriarch Jacob), and Brendan. Both of those books I enjoyed, but they gave me some familiarity of Buechner’s penchance for presenting “holy” figures as all-too-human, no halo attached.

As always, the writing in this book is strong. Buechner gives us lyrical and thoughtful prose, filled with sentences that make you stop and ponder. For example, when he takes his mother to Rome to pray for his father’s soul, they look out over the ruined Coliseum and weep.

Why did we weep? I asked myself. We wept for all that grandeur gone. We wept for martyrs cruelly slain. We wept for Christ, who suffered death upon a tree and suffers still to see our suffering. But more than anything, I think, we wept for us, and so it ever is with tears. Whatever be their outward cause, within the chancel of the heart it’s we ourselves for whom they finally fall. 

The book is full of passages like this. It’s a book that wrestles with faith, doubt and devotion, and what those things meant to Godric in his time and place, and gives you pause to ponder what they mean to you in yours. It’s a portrait of a sinful man who seeks absolution and mercy, and who tries in his humanness to overcome his flaws.

It’s a book that requires more than one reading, I think. I will admit that I did not love it upon first reading, but as I flip back over the pages and see all the places that I underlined and marked, I feel a greater appreciation for it. It’s a book that, like Godric himself, I suspect, you have to sit with awhile to really get to know and appreciate.

There’s a reason why this book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This honest look at one person’s spiritual journey refuses to rest on pat answers or platitudes, yet it remains reverent all the same. In the book Buechner gives Godric more than one encounter with Cuthbert, and as well with a mysterious figure named Gillian, an angel-type being that encourages him even before he meets Cuthbert to embrace Christ. And despite his flaws, and turnings away, Godric’s life is a trajectory towards Christ all the same.

Godric’s story is not told in chronological order. It starts with Godric as an old man, looking back on his life, telling the story to Reginald, and this older Godric’s story is interspersed with the tale of his life as a child and going forward. I think this makes for a richer book, as we get Godric’s interpretation of his life’s choices and reflections on them as the book moves along, which makes the story deeper.

I can’t quite decide whether I found this book depressing or hopeful. It’s a bit more gloomy than the other two biographies, to be sure, and because of that I found it more difficult going. But it’s not all shadows. The light peeks in here and there, sometimes more strongly than others. Godric’s final words in the book, just before he dies, are, All’s lost. All’s found. Farewell. That pretty well sums up  the tension in the book between despair and hope.

At one point Godric remarks, How seemly is a life when told to children thus, with all the grief and ugliness snipped out. I suppose it’s how monk Reginald will tell of mine. 

This book contains all the grief and ugliness, to be sure. But because of that, the light that shines is all the brighter.

It’s a complex book. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s a marvellous portrait of one man’s life, in all it’s glory and shame, and the telling of it asks questions of us. And in the end, that’s the kind of book that means the most.

Other posts in the Year of Reading Buechner series:

2018 Reading Challenge: The Year of Reading Buechner

Year of Reading Buechner: The Remarkable Ordinary

Year of Reading Buechner: A Sacred Journey

Year of Reading Buechner: Brendan, A Novel

Year of Reading Buechner: The Alphabet of Grace

Year of Reading Buechner: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

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Book review: The Private Lives of the Saints, by Dr. Janina Ramirez

The subtitle of this book, Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England, is a clue to why I was attracted to it. There is not a lot of books on Anglo-Saxons out there, and even fewer on the saints of the period. I was very glad to see that someone had tackled this subject!

Dr. Ramirez is an Oxford lecturer, BBC broadcaster, researcher, and author. Her aim in this book is to widen the stories of the Anglo-Saxon saints to encompass the times in which they lived, and to show how their influence in that tumultuous time gives us clues about the culture and society of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The book was published in 2015 by WH Allen.

Needless to say, this is a subject near and dear to my heart, so it was with great eagerness that I opened the book. I was a little afraid that Dr. Ramirez would start from the seemingly more and more popular societal view that the Christians were the source of all that is wrong in our world (ok, maybe an exaggeration but you know what i mean, don’t you?), but thankfully I did not see that bias in this book. I found it to be a fair, balanced, and ultimately fascinating view of these real people who lived so very long ago.

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I will admit to knowing nothing about Dr. Ramirez before reading this book, but I was delighted to find she is has many BBC TV specials to her name (including one on The Treasures of the Anglo Saxons) , as well as print publications both academic and mainstream. She has her PhD thesis, The Symbolic Life of Birds in Anglo-Saxon England available at her website. Cool! Plus, she does many lectures and hosts a podcast, Art Detective. Phew! Busy lady! Image from her Facebook page. 

The book begins with a short but succinct description of Anglo-Saxon England. as well as an important explanation of the word, “saint”.  Too often we take our modern definition of “saint” – an extra-holy person officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church – to frame our understanding of these early saints. However, in the Anglo-Saxon period, a person was declared a saint by the common consensus of the people, which meant that pretty much anyone with influence and high status could earn this title. And even some without those qualifiers.

The lines between secular and sacred, the worldly and the otherworldly, are incredibly hard to define in the early medieval period. A king could be a saint, and a bishop could rule like a king. The idea that someone could be declared a saint simply due to popularity is something that is hard to grasp from our twenty-first century perspective. 

Ramirez gives us a good example from modern times to help us understand how this worked. Princess Diana was a royal figure, who lived in the public eye, and who was known for her good deeds and kindness. Her death sparked worldwide mourning on an heretofore unseen scale. In Anglo-Saxon England, Diana would likely have beeen heralded as a saint (with the caveat that of course, a saint in the early medieval period would also have the added mantle of Christian piety attached). But her example gives us an understanding of the mixture of public status, power, and virtuous living that seized the imaginations of the Anglo-Saxons and prompted them to confer the title of “saint” on various people in their society.

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Princess Di, a modern-day saint? Image by John McIntyre on Flickr

The book looks at the important Anglo-Saxon saints in chronological order, starting with Alban, Britain’s first Christian martyr in the 3rd or 4th century,  and ending with Alfred the Great (died 899 AD). Along the way she covers many of the saints that I have discussed on the blog, such as Brigid, Patrick, Columba, Cuthbert, Hilda, and Bede; plus a few others that I haven’t got to  yet: Alban, Gregory, Wilfrid, and Alfred.

In each chapter Dr. Ramirez gives us a thorough understanding of the times in which the person lived, and attempts to go beyond the official hagiographic account of the saint to explore what this person was really like, as well as their impact on their society. Along the way we learn fascinating details about the Anglo-Saxons and the incredible diversity of people, religion and culture that made up the mix of life at that time.

Dr. Ramirez gives us a really good principle to follow when studying the past, and it’s one that resonated with me. It is exactly this principle that has made it easier for me, as a novelist, to tackle the sometimes daunting task of bringing an era that is so far removed from our own to life:

…it is a central premise when studying the past to remember that humanity never changes beyond recognition, and regardless of the seeming differences between people past and present, basic human interests remain largely the same. 

It is this connection to the humanity of these sometime plastic and daunting figures that makes The Private Lives of the Saints so interesting.

I was happy to see that my own ramblings on these subjects on the blog lined up fairly well with what Dr. Ramirez presents in her book. As I have said before, I am very much an amateur on these subjects – I’m a novelist, not an academic historian – but I have done careful research on the times and people of the Early Medieval period in order to present that era as accurately as I can in my novel.

Dr. Ramirez does take a different view of Brigid than I did, which is fair. She come down on the side of the theory that Brigid was not a real person, but her cult grew out of a Christianizing of the goddess Brigantia. I won’t quibble with her. I think there are compelling cases to be made for either view. And I would certainly not recommend you skip that chapter if you disagree with her on that, because if you did you would miss one of the highlights of the book for me. The chapter on Brigid contains a wonderful explanation of the history of monasticism and how the Celts looked to the early Desert Fathers for inspiration as they established their monasteries in extreme, harsh locations. This chapter is well-worth reading, even if you might not agree with her ultimate conclusion about Brigid.

I also loved that Ramirez included a couple of favourites of mine who are not officially names “saints” but whose influence cannot be denied, that being the Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great (I haven’t done a post on him yet, but I definitely will!).  They were highly important figures not only in their day but also in our own. We owe a lot to them both, and in this book you will find out why.

I highly recommend The Private Lives of the Saints. I learned a lot, but never get bogged down in dry history. Dr. Ramirez has brought these people and the era in which they lived into bright relief. I really appreciate her careful and thorough scholarship throughout, as well as her knack of making it all so very interesting.

I give this one 5 stars. Perfect for lovers of history, especially of the Anglo-Saxon era, but really for anyone who wants to understand more about these fascinating people who have shaped the world we live in today.

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Society News: Weregild

Before I go any further in my series on the different parts and classes of 7th century Anglo-Saxon society, I thought I should pause for a moment and tackle the subject of weregild.

I don’t blame you if that term is unfamiliar to you, but it is vitally important in this whole discussion of Anglo-Saxon society.

In previous posts I have written about the various levels of that society, starting with the kings and queens and working on down to the ealdormen and thegns, and then to the church. It’s pretty obvious that the king would be the top, right? After that, though…how exactly is class measured? How do we measure it today? Generally, in terms of wealth, I suppose, at least here in North America. It’s an interesting topic once you start to think about it. In terms of the Early Middle Ages, wealth is certainly part of the equation. But with a bit of a different twist.

In my post on the church, I stated that a priest had the same rank in society as a thegn, and a bishop was seen as equal to an ealdorman. How can we be that precise?   Well, it’s relatively simple, and it all ties back to the concept of weregild. 

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Some of the Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts from Regia Anglorum. Pretty much the coerls depicted here, I would say. No one is dressed well enough (or has the proper weapons) to be thegns or ealdormen. Image from wildwoodtrust.org

Before we discuss that in too much detail, let your imagination do some work for a moment and think about a society that had no police, no courts, no jails, and in many ways, no laws. At least not any that were written down. What would keep that society from devolving into anarchy? What would happen if someone stole from someone else, or worse, murdered someone else? Well, likely, revenge of some sort would be in order, don’t you think?

In the early 7th century, King Ethelbert of Kent recognized that the blood feud, a practice inherited from Anglo-Saxons Germanic forebears, was a problem. These feuds could go on for generations, and got more and more bloody as the years and generations passed. So, he introduced the concept of weregild, basically, “man-payment”. This was a fine that was levied on those who committed crimes, to be paid to the victim or the victim’s family in compensation. This applied to the crime of murder at first, but eventually expanded over the centuries to include other crimes such as theft or injuring another, or even adultery or desertion from the army. In some instances part of the payment would also go to the king or the lord, in recompense for the loss of the victim’s service.

These fines were not equal, though. They varied according to your rank in society. So, the king’s weregild was the highest, of course, and then the payments decreased the lower down in society you were situated. All classes in society were protected by weregild, except for slaves. However, even in the case of slaves, a nominal payment was made to the slave’s owner, but more as a recompense for lost property than as a valuation placed on their lives.

It is also interesting to note that the weregild itself varied among the kingdoms which made up England in the Early Middle Ages. So in the seventh century, the weregild for a nobleman in Kent was 300 shillings, and that of an ordinary freeman (a coerl) 100 shillings. In West Saxon, the corresponding sums were 1200 shillings and 200 shillings. However, the value of a shilling was not standard across the kingdoms, so these sums are not necessarily equivalent.*

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Anglo Saxon shillings. Image from coinweek.com

There were precise rules set out for the payment of weregild, which covered the time period over which the payment would be made, as it was not a lump sum given all at once, but rather a series of payments over time. In theory, if the weregild was not paid, the victim’s family could then resort back to the blood feud or to taking revenge in whatever way they saw fit.  This did happen on occasion, but in general it seems like the weregild was the preferred method to compensate people for the various crimes committed against them.

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In The Lord of the Rings, Isildur reveals in his journal that he took the One Ring as weregild for the deaths of his father and brother in battle. Oops. 

The concept of weregild served to not only provide a way for victims of crimes to be compensated without resulting in the shedding of blood or other vendettas, but it also cemented the person’s rank in society. It was gradually replaced by capital punishment starting around the ninth century, and disappeared entirely by the twelfth.

*For example, in Kent, a shilling was the equivalent of the worth of one cow. Other kingdoms gave the shilling the same value as one sheep.

Want to know more about Anglo-Saxon society? Here’s my previous posts in this series: 

Society News: Introduction

Society News: The Kings (and Queens)

Society News: The Upper Crust

Society News: The Church

Featured image: copy of a gold coin from the reign of Offa, King of Mercia, from Wikicommons. (If you look closely you will see the coin has Arabic writing on it…there is a story behind that, and maybe I’ll tell it one day!)

 

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Cynewulf the Poet

There are only a few Old English poets known by name, and Cynewulf (pronounced “kin-eh-wolf”) is one of them. We can definitively ascribe four poems to him, which may not seem like a lot, but these four poems together comprise several thousand lines of poetry. There are a couple more which are possibly his, including The Dream of The Rood, which I blogged about here.

It is difficult to determine exactly when Cynewulf lived. His poems appear in two of the manuscripts that survive from the Early Medieval period, the Exeter and Vercelli books, both of which are a collection of poems and other works.  These date to the second half of the tenth century, so we know he lived before then. Dates as early as the 8th century and as late as the 9th are given as to when he actually lived and wrote his poems, with perhaps more credence being given to the 9th century dates, for reasons I don’t have space to catalogue here.

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Lindisfarne Island, Northumbria. Home of Cynewulf? We just don’t know for certain…. CC image courtesy of David Newman on Flickr

Little is known about the poet himself, but he does leave a few clues behind. First of all, linguistic evidence in his poems tells us they are written in the Anglian dialect of the Anglo-Saxon language (our Old English), as opposed to the Saxon dialect. Therefore scholars believe that he lived in Northumbria, and possibly Mericia,. The Saxon dialect was more prominent in Wessex and Kent.

Secondly, he was a learned man, as we see a high level of sophistication in his poetry. As the poems are religious in nature, he was likely a monk or priest. That he came from the Church is also surmised by the fact that his poems referenced other Latin works, and only the people in holy orders knew Latin.

Scholars disagree as to who, exactly, Cynewulf was. His name is of Anglo-Saxon origin, so he was likely not a Celt. There was a Bishop of Lindisfarne named Cynewulf, who died around 780 A.D., who is named as a likely candidate. Others postulate he could be a priest of that name who lived in Dunwich in the 800s, or even Cenwulf, the Abbot of Petersborough, who died in 1006 AD. But this is all speculation, based upon these figures having the same name and living Northumbria or Mercia, so we can’t say for certain.

From the autobiographical epilogues in the poems, we know that at one point in his life he enjoyed the favour of princes and the gifts of kings. He could have been a thegn or a high-ranking scop. Scholars also presume he was a warrior at some point, and as well that he knew much about sea travel, based on the content of his poems. Other than these tantalizing tidbits, we do not know anything about the poet himself.

 

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The Old English and modern English translation from the beginning of Christ II. Image from Mere Inkling

You might wonder how we know that four poems in particular, namely, Juliana, Christ II (both found in the Exeter Book), Elene, and the Fates of the Apostles (both found in the Vercelli Book), were actually written by Cynewulf. Well, it’s simple. He signed his name to them.

Not just any old signature, though. In the poems’ epilogues in which he gave some of the story of his life and asked for prayers,  he included a runic acrostic containing the letters c, y, n, (e), w,u,l,f. The “e” is not included in all four signatures.

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Runes are the characters used in Anglo-Saxon writing. In the poems these runes both spell his name and stand for a word, so it is not necessarily easy to see that he has signed his name to the poems. However, he does leave us a clue, for in one of the epilogues he says, Here anyone who takes pleasure in songs, if he is sharp of mind, may discover who composed these verses. 

The  Vercelli Book languished in a dark corner of the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy, until it was re-discovered in the late 1800s and translated by scholars. One of these, John Kemble, is credited with discovering Cynewulf’s acrostic signature in one of the poems and subsequently it was found in the other three as well.

Interestingly, this is thought to be the first “signed” work in English literature. Previous to this, writers of such works preferred to remain anonymous, so as to give God all the glory for their acts of creativity.  However we shouldn’t assume that by signing his name  Cynewulf  sought personal glory. He states that he wished others to pray for him, thus perhaps emphasizing spiritual rewards rather than material ones for his work.

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I have been unable to find a picture of Cynewulf’s acrostic runic signature as seen in the original MS, but here is a typed version of the autobiographical epilogue in Elene, where you can see how he integrated the Anglo-Saxon runes into the Latin characters of the other words. Image from Pgenglish2015

The four poems are written in the typical alliterative style of Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as Beowulf. Elene is the longest poem, comprised of 1,321 lines, and it is about the finding of the True Cross by St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. It not all poetry, it also contains a prose section. It is thought to be his finest work, and because of that, some speculate it is the last one of the four to be written, but of course we do not know this for sure. Juliana (731 lines), is another hagiographic poem, about St. Juliana, who was martyred for refusing to marry a pagan man. Christ II (427 lines), also known as the Ascension, is a meditation on a sermon given by Pope Gregory, on the resurrection of Christ. It is the second part of a trilogy on the advent, ascension, and second coming of Christ, all of which are by different authors. The Fates of the Apostles (122 lines), is a poetic telling of the life and death of the twelve apostles of Christ.

Aside from the hidden runic acrostic signature, which I think is pretty cool, the other cool thing about Cynewulf is that he is responsible for one of the most iconic terms in our modern day. As many of you know, J.R.R. Tolkien, aside from being an author, was first and foremost an Anglo-Saxon scholar. He, of course, was very familiar with Cynewulf and his poems, and it is in the poem Christ II where he found the term middangeard, which translates as, “middle-earth”.

The lines read:

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men, and true radiance of the sun, bright above the stars – thou of thy very self illuminest for every season!

Very Tolkien-esque, no? Earendel can be translated, “radiance of the dawn”, and is a reference to John the Baptist in the poem. But these words had a profound effect on Tolkien, inspiring him to write the “Lost Voyage of Earendel” in 1916, where the character Earendel is transformed into a voyager who carries the morning star on his brow across the sky.

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Earendil, by Alarie Tano, on DeviantArt

Amazing that this long-dead, obscure poet could still have such a profound impact on our culture today. I’m sure he would be stunned if he knew.

But maybe he does. Perhaps Tolkien and he have had great discussions in the world beyond this world. I’d like to think so!

This post is one of a continuing series on Anglo-Saxon literature. You can see the other posts by clicking the following links: 

The Dream of the Rood

The Lindisfarne Gospels

The Cotton Library

Beowulf Basics

 

Featured image is the Exeter Book, from Wikicommons