If you, O Assiduous Reader, look on the comments beneath last week’s blog, you’ll find an erudite little exchange between Jane Finnis and myself, where we bat lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry around. I must say, I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with The Wanderer as the source of those half-forgotten lines. It’s years since I’ve read it, but the image had stuck in my mind.
There’s been some interest in various types of Ancient Brits recently, with treasures unearthed from the Anglo-Saxons and a huge pot of Roman coins being dug up by a bloke with a metal detector and – perhaps most striking of all – the discovery that a type of human was living in the British Isles three quarters of a million years ago – in Happisburgh, Norfolk, to be precise - many thousands of years before anyone had imagined possible.
We can’t ever know what a hominin from the Early Pleistocene (as the scientists describe them) would have thought. Maybe, “Why on earth did I move from Africa to Norfolk?” and “This flint’s damn hard” and “Is there any mammoth left for tea?”
We do know, however, a dickens of a lot about Romans and Anglo-Saxons. That’s because they left us, in addition to the archaeology, some striking literature. It’s fascinating to read ancient literature because it’s the one form of time-travel that’s genuinely authentic. The Wanderer, for instance, takes us into the mind of a man who is wandering homeless after the death of his Lord, his protector and provider for his household, in a Britain where Roman ruins are thought to be the work of giants, where wolves hunt through the crumbling cities. The Wanderer, poor guy, is heart-broken by the loss of his Lord. You don’t get anything about romantic love in Anglo-Saxon literature, but you do get men mourning for their companions-in-arms. A man’s loyalty belonged to his group (I simply don’t know about women) not to his wife. The shared hall, not the private house, is the heart of the group.
Do you remember – it used to be taught in schools at one time – how the Venerable Bede in 7 something or other, describes the insight the new teaching of Christianity brought? Our life is, he says, like a sparrow who flies in from a bitter winter’s night, into the hall, with its feast and its fire and light and then out again, into the darkness of winter once more. Christianity, says Bede, illuminates the darkness. The message is clear and the depiction of the hall is unforgettable.
Like anyone who writes history, even recent history, I sometimes get asked how I go about research. Well, for the 1920’s, I do it exactly as I would hope someone writing a novel set in the 10th Century would; read the books. Read about the period if you like – why not? Read other novels set in the period – again, why not? If you’re writing about the hominins of the Early Pleistocene, you might have a few problems, but if they wrote it, read it. To get the absolutely authentic taste of the period, you have to read what they wrote themselves. And sometimes, as with The Wanderer, there might have a few surprises in store.
What an amazing poem! I'd never even heard of it, let alone read it. I've found an online text of it (English as well as Old English, thank goodness!) at
ReplyDeletehttp://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Wdr and I find its sadness, its grieving and loneliness, very moving. I know precious little about tenth-century England, except that the Saxons spent a lot of time fighting the invading Vikings. This kind of thoughtful, melancholy poem is to me quite unexpected. There's a good deal about the sea in the poem, I wish I were more of a scholar so I'd know what that meant. And apparently Tolkien based one of the poems in "The Lord of the Rings" on part of it.
I think one of the most important things to be gained from reading history, historic literature and good historical novels like yours and Jane's, is a sense of perspective. Really a lot of "the more things change the more they stay the same." Especially in the area of human emotions. Isn't it interesting to think that Jane's Romans would have seemed as far away to the author of The Wanderer,or even farther, than they do to us today.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is, Donna - strange, and rather sad. Is it inevitable that people migrating to a new land will be incurious about the history of the people they find there? It seems so, looking back at, for instance, colonisations in America, Australia, Africa...I hope, if humankind ever gets out into space and finds other life-forms, we'll have learned from our mistakes and take more notice and more care of whoever we encounter.
ReplyDeleteDolores, thanks for the reminder of those very distant days at Uni doing battle with Anglo-Saxon poetry. As with many other things, I wish I'd paid more attention. Maybe I just wasn't old enough to appreciate how wonderfully glum the Anglo-Saxons were. Evidently life wasn't, even then, what it used to be.
ReplyDeleteI never said the Anglo-Saxons were cheerful! But doesn't the poetry sound oddly modern? Maybe that's because the form (end-stopped lines for instance) was re-discovered in the Nineteenth Century by such poets as Gerald Manly Hopkins and is so different from other forms that it still strikes us as fresh.
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