of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air.” Thus a poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired—this was less pardonable in a philosopher; and when Hume observed, perhaps with the eyes of Milton, that “he would hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon Annals,” however cheering to his reader was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly unconscious that these “obscure and uninteresting annals of the Anglo-Saxons” formed of themselves a complete history, offering new results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we track Burke in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our elegant antiquary, Bishop Percy, lamenting the scanty and defective annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and conjecture.
We find Ellis and Ritson still erring in the trackless paths. All this national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was given to the country. It was our studious explorer, Sharon Turner, who first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.2
Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous. Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.3
It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a most corrupt state.4 This fatality was occasioned by the inattention or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of alliteration,5 and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. “Nouns have been mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns.”
These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense: their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by the most remote and dark analogies6—all these have perplexed the most skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted passages, but have even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last circumstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of Beowulf. When it first fell to the hard lot of Wanley, the librarian of the Earl of Oxford, to describe “The Exploits of Beowulf,” he imagined, or conjectured, that it contained “the wars which this Dane waged against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden.” He probably decided on the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero descends from his ship—but for a very different purpose from a military expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the manuscript as a “tractatus nobilissimus,” and an “egregium exemplum” of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. Probably this manuscript remained unopened during a century, when Sharon Turner detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the design of these romantic “Exploits.” Yet this diligent historian carefully read and analysed this heroic tale. Conybeare, who had fallen into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr. Kemble.
Even the learned in Saxon have not always been able to distinguish this verse from prose; the verse unmarked by rhyme being written continuously as prose.7 A diction turgid and obscure was apparent; but in what consisted the art of the poet, or the metrical system, long baffled the most ingenious conjectures. Ritson, in his perplexity, described this poetry or metre as a “rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished.” Tyrwhit and Ellis remained wholly at a loss to comprehend the fabric of Anglo-Saxon poesy. Hickes, in the fascination of scholarship, had decided that it proceeded on a metrical system of syllabic quantities, and surmounted all difficulties by submitting the rhythmical cadences of Gothic poesy to the prosody of classical antiquity. This was a literary hallucination, and a remarkable evidence of a favourite position maintained merely by the force of prepossession.
To what cause are we to ascribe the complex construction of the diction, and the multiplied intricacies of the metres of the poetry of the Northmen? Bishop Percy noticed, that the historian of the Runic poetry has counted up among the ancient Icelandic poets one hundred and thirty-six different metres. The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon are cognate languages, being both dialects of the ancient Gothic or Teutonic. The genius of the Danish Scalds often displays in their Eddas8 a sublime creative power far out of the reach of the creeping and narrow faculty of the Saxon, yet the same mechanism regulated both; the fixed recurrence of certain letters or syllables which constitutes that perpetual alliteration, which oftener than rhyme gratified the ear of barbaric poesy, and a metaphorical phraseology or poetical vocabulary appropriated by the bards, furnishing the adept with phrases when he had not always ready any novel conceptions. Shall we deem such arbitrary forms and such artificial contrivances, the mere childishness of tastes, to have been invented in the wintry years of these climates, to amuse themselves in their stern solitudes; or rather, may we not consider them as a mystery of the Craft, the initiation of the Order? for by this scholarlike discipline in multiplying difficulties the later bards separated themselves from those humbler minstrels who were left to their own inartificial emotions.
Such prescribed formulæ, and such a mechanism of verse, must have tethered the imagination in a perpetual circle; it was art which violated the free course of nature. In this condition we often find even the poetry of the Scandinavians. The famous death-song of Regner Lodbrog seems little more than an iteration of the same ideas. An Anglo-Saxon poem has the appearance of a collection of short hints rather than poetical conceptions, curt and ejaculative: a paucity of objects yields but a paucity of emotions, too vague for detail, too abrupt for deep passion, too poor in fancy to scatter the imagery of poesy. The Anglo-Saxon betrays its confined and monotonous genius: we are in the first age of art, when pictures are but monochromes of a single colour. Hence, in the whole map of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is difficult to discriminate one writer from another.9
Their prose has taken a more natural character than their verse. The writings of Alfred are a model of the Anglo-Saxon style in its purest state; they have never been collected, but it is said they would form three octavo volumes; they consist chiefly of translations.
The recent versions in literal prose by two erudite Saxonists of two of the most remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems, will enable an English reader to form a tolerable notion of the genius of this literature. Conybeare’s poetical versions remained unrivalled. But if a literal version of a primitive poetry soon ceases to be poetry, so likewise, if the rude outlines are to be retouched, and a brilliant colouring is to be borrowed, we are receiving Anglo-Saxon poetry in the cadences of Milton and “the orient hues”
