I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,
The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Bringing luxuries from the Rhine and the Seine was hard and dangerous work. And through most of the Anglo-Saxon era, Scandinavian raiders and pirates were an ever-present threat. Even on dry land, what mattered most in this dangerous world was what matters most still in today’s colonised and harried societies, such as Iraq or Syria: a tight local network of kith and kin, to provide and sustain. Few things were scarier than exile, or losing your overlord. In ‘The Wanderer’, one of the great surviving poems of the period, it’s being excluded that really hurts:
… I had to bind my feelings in fetters,
often sad at heart, cut off from my country,
far from my kinsmen, after, long ago,
dark clothes of earth covered my gold-friend;
I left that place in wretchedness,
ploughed the icy waves with winter in my heart;
in the sadness I sought far and wide
for a treasure-giver, for a man
who would welcome me into his mead-hall,
give me good cheer (for I boasted no friends),
entertain me with delights.
Anglo-Saxon poetry harps (literally) again and again on the loss of warrior-comrades as if it’s the worst possible thing that could happen. There is remarkably little from a woman’s point of view. Anglo-Saxon women had greater property and legal rights than medieval women enjoyed, and some exercised considerable power, in monasteries and in the courts. The random destruction of literature means that we have only a single poem in a woman’s voice: it complains about the disappearance of a husband – apparently after some misbehaviour – leaving his wife to the brutal mercies of his family.
Early and late, I must undergo hardship
because of the feud of my own dearest loved one.
Men forced me to live in a forest grove,
under an oak tree in the earth-cave.
This cavern is age-old; I am choked with longings.
Gloomy are the valleys, too high the hills,
harsh strongholds overgrown with briars;
a joyless abode. The journey of my Lord so often
cruelly seizes me. There are lovers on earth,
lovers alive who lie in bed,
when I pass through this earth-cave alone
and out under the oak tree at dawn;
there I must sit through the long summer’s day
and there I mourn my miseries …
Along with the misery and mourning, the poet, then, understands that there are good married lives to be had. She has been forced out of her community, into the woods. We used to think of Anglo-Saxon Britain as being very heavily wooded. In fact, modern historians of the landscape tell us, much of the country had been opened up for farming for a thousand years or more.
There’s a strong sense in this poem of life being literally close to the earth, and surrounded by foliage. That’s an obvious separation from our lives today. Back then, even impressive towns were tiny and dangerous. Here is a fragment of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem about Durham, rare in being written after the Norman Conquest:
All Britain knows of this noble city,
its breathtaking sight: buildings backed
by rocky slopes appear over a precipice.
(And, particularly if you pass through by train, Durham is pretty much like that today. But hang on:)
Weirs hem and madden a headstrong river,
diverse fish dance in the foam.
Sprawling, tangled thicket has sprung up
there; those deep dales are the haunt
of many animals, countless wild beasts.
Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon Britain was studded with trading towns and urban centres huddled around churches, even if most of them, being made of wood and straw, have long disappeared. Durham, like York, got its sense of itself through the saints and missionaries buried there.
But what about the rest of the people? What sense of history did they have? Who did they think they were? We know we live in the twenty-first century. But by seven or eight centuries after the Roman legions had left, most British had no real sense of how their own history connected to that of the rest of mankind. There’s a wonderful eighth-century poem in which an Anglo-Saxon wanders through the ruins of Bath:
Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate;
the city-buildings crumble; the works of the Giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,
houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,
undermined by age. The Earth’s embrace,
its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
they are perished and gone.
So who were these craftsmen, who used techniques no longer understood, and built such walls? Wrongly, the Anglo-Saxon poet, himself a representative of the people who destroyed the Romano-British world, thinks they must have been destroyed by the plague, a contemporary problem; and he imagines them as being like bigger Anglo-Saxons – warriors bestriding courts where
… Once many a man
joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour,
proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour …
Interesting, isn’t it, that passing reference to wine? But this Anglo-Saxon tourist is most impressed that these extraordinary people washed themselves, a pleasure which he almost salivates over:
Stone houses stood here; a hot spring
gushed
