Reading Old English Wisdom [1 ed.] 152756407X, 9781527564077

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Reading Old English Wisdom

Reading Old English Wisdom The Fetters in the Frost Robert DiNapoli

Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost By Robert DiNapoli This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Robert DiNapoli All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6407-X ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6407-7

to all my students including my children, Jonathan, Miriam, and Rebecca

No grant committees or institutions of higher learning were disturbed in the writing of this book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................. ix Preface ..................................................................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter One .......................................................................................... 11 Wisdom’s Reach: Maxims I Chapter Two .......................................................................................... 51 The Arrow of Time: Maxims II Chapter Three ....................................................................................... 73 The Scene of Instruction: Precepts Chapter Four.......................................................................................... 88 Seeing Double: The Rune Poem Chapter Five......................................................................................... 124 Survival Kit: The Gifts of Men Chapter Six .......................................................................................... 145 The Big Picture: The Fortunes of Men Chapter Seven ...................................................................................... 164 The Romance of Distance: Widsith Chapter Eight ....................................................................................... 185 The Heavy Hitters: Solomon and Saturn Chapter Nine ....................................................................................... 265

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Conclusion ........................................................................................... 283 Words Fail Me. Or Do They? Bibliography ......................................................................................... 287 Index .................................................................................................... 293

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sarah Bailey wrought her editorial magic on the text in ovo. Special thanks to my constant readers, whose encouragement, care and counsel have proven invaluable: Kate Burridge, Carolyn Masel, Christine Mathieu, Katie Mirabella, Jill Morrow, Sue Rechter, Richard Wrigley and to my ever-ready conference compañero and lifter of spirits, Chris Bishop

Cover image by Jonathan DiNapoli.

PREFACE Human beings have employed their thinking to construct machines. By doing so, they have implanted in these machines the powers of reason gained through science. In a sense, therefore, man’s power of reason got carried away, escaped from his head and turned into horsepower-years in his physical surroundings, and these horsepower-years having made their escape, now work on autonomously. In the civilized world people are largely fast asleep to these things, with little sense of the dizzy speed at which human beings have in recent decades created a non-human world beyond human control. ... People simply do not grasp the fact that they need to think differently when 79 million horsepower-years are at work outside the human being. This requires us to make space for a quite different kind of thinking. Without turning to spiritual science, the riddles of current events cannot be solved. If human beings mechanize the world around them through external, empirical science, then it is all the more essential that they allow an inner science, a new form of wisdom, to arise within them. And this will be capable of governing and directing what would otherwise overwhelm them. —Rudolf Steiner, lecture delivered at the Gotheanum in Dornach, 28 November 1920 1

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul —Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, 6.8-14

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From Cosmic Spirituality and Human Physicality (Collected Works 202, trans. Matthew Barton), London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004, pp. 33, 36. From Leaves of Grass (1891-1892) in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose (ed. Justin Kaplan), New York: Library of America, 1982. 1

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And I was by him, and intimate, I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the world, His earth, and my delight was with humankind. Proverbs 8:22-31 1

More than a thousand years ago, writers in what would eventually become England began composing a new kind of poetry. For unknown centuries previously, poetry had played a central role in shaping and preserving the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral culture, as it did in nearly every ancient culture. The first Angles and Saxons migrated to the abandoned Roman province of Britannia after the legions’ departure in 410, displacing or suppressing its Romano-Celtic population in the process. Some five centuries later, poets among the Christian monastics of the ninth and tenth centuries, descended from those restless tribespeople, still felt some echo of their ancestors’ delight in the memorable play of sound sculpted from (as W.B. Yeats would later characterise it) “a mouthful of air.”2 At least some of what they wrote (no one knows exactly how much) got copied into manuscripts in the scriptorium (“writing room”) of one or another Anglo-Saxon monastery. Their work was unique for its time. The literacy they employed had been established by the church’s Roman missionaries, who first arrived in Kent in 597. It was, not surprisingly, almost exclusively Latinate. A few centuries later, Viking raids devastated many better-endowed Anglo-Saxon monastic houses across the ninth and tenth centuries. Those Scandinavian adventurers sought gold and captives, but their marauding inflicted grave collateral damage on the culture of letters that had once nurtured such thinkers and scholars as the Venerable Bede and Alcuin of York. In the late ninth century, seeking to salvage what he could, King Alfred the Great instituted a series of root-and-branch reforms intended to restore the fortunes and capacities of the Anglo-Saxon church. Among these was a resort to vernacular literacy: if too few clerics (and none of the laity) could understand their Credo and Pater Noster in Latin, then they should have them in their own mother tongue, at least as a stop-gap until Trans. Robert Alter, in The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010). “He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved,” from The Wind among the Reeds (1899). 1

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the higher Latin literacy could be re-established. As Alfred proposed, scholars translated crucial Latin texts of devotion, doctrine and learning into Old English. Eventually some inspired souls among them seized the opportunity to commit their insights and visions into poems composed in a native metre and diction that Germanic singers had been employing for many generations. The result was a new kind of vernacular Christian verse that remained in touch with its pre-Christian roots. Nothing like it was ever attempted anywhere else in Europe at the time.1 Centuries later the extant manuscripts from this period were collected and curated by antiquarians, whose holdings found their way into the museums and libraries where they now reside. The poems they contain have been studied, edited and interpreted by generations of scholars, some much more than others. Many readers will have at least heard of Beowulf, the most widely (and deservedly) renowned of the lot, but the others remain largely the concern of specialists, little known outside their small professional circles. Which is a pity, because many of them speak to human concerns that remain of perennial (and sometimes urgent) interest. Their authors’ assumptions and beliefs may at first appear alien to modern sensibilities, but the differences of culture and psychology that separate us from them can also throw new light on our own perceptions of our place amidst the churn of space and time. To us moderns, the early medieval mind presents aspects both familiar and baffling. Like a family photograph album retrieved from the attic, it might show us younger versions of ourselves we scarcely recognise, though we possess internalised memories of the scenes in which we appear, which we experienced in the bodies we still inhabit, however altered by the years. It may also hold images of friends and relations who have passed beyond reach of voice or eye, some of whom we may never have met even, but whose impact upon our lives still shapes our thoughts and imaginations. Old photographs might remind us of long-ago experiences or illustrate our abstract knowledge of family lines and ancestry. But how could thousand-year-old texts hold any mirror up to our present selves? The Old Saxon Heliand (“saviour”) was composed during the reign of Charlemagne a century earlier. It presents a superficially similar amalgam of Christian doctrine conveyed through vernacular diction and imagery. What it achieves, however, is essentially a paraphrased harmony of the four gospels, whose ends are wholly didactic and doctrinal, merely dressed in Old Saxon drag. The poets of Anglo-Saxon England responded far more freely to their native poetics, allowing them to shape their adopted Christian sensibilities much more radically. 1

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We weren’t there then. What’s it to us? We can answer this question a number of ways, some obvious, some more oblique. First, the obvious: 1. “Genetic” encoding The language and the literature of Anglo-Saxon England simply bequeathed its influence to later generations, the way the genome of a particular life-form might encode aspects of its prior evolution. No real mystery here, just lines of influence too deeply or subtly embedded for us to notice. The portrait of a thrice-great grandparent may depict no one you actually met, but the features it captures may recall the faces of any number of later relations, your own among them. 2. The nature of the beast Certain facts of life in this world have impressed themselves on human thought again and again: our need for food and shelter, the tendency of some to force their wills on others, the demands and delights of love, the inescapable certainty of death. Thus almost anything honestly produced by any human agent is bound to reflect these universal human concerns in one form or another, and they present themselves repeatedly at different junctures among the poems this book considers. On the other hand, a number of specific factors involved in the production of these poems complicate the picture they present: 1. The early medieval scene The history of Anglo-Saxon England spans a good six centuries and more, from the first arrival of Germanic settlers in the fifth century to the imposition of Norman hegemony in the eleventh. When the missionaries under St Augustine of Canterbury came ashore in 597, the new faith they proposed took hold, after some early advances and setbacks, with a speed and tenacity that no one at the time could have anticipated. It must have produced a psychic concussion: a pagan warrior-aristocracy, shaped by centuries of migration and tribal warfare, began to assimilate the teachings of the early church. These demanded, among other things, that enemies were to be forgiven and a single god worshipped who had humbled himself to become fully human and to submit to an abject death on behalf of all humankind. All of these were antithetical to

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the core values that had helped to sustain, across long centuries, the cultures to which they were addressed. 2. A new authority The establishment of the church in Anglo-Saxon England had consequences in many different spheres. One was the culture of textual authority it introduced, grounded in Latin texts such as the Bible and the writings1 of the church fathers. This tradition drew on ancient Judaism’s adoption of the written word as guarantor of its cultural identity in response to the historical traumas of exile and diaspora. Modern notions of something done “by the book” or attested to “in black and white [i.e. in print]” or given an authoritative exposition in The Fisherman’s Bible or The Stamp Collector’s Bible all sound a faint echo of the same sensibility. In the pre-literate migratory cultures from which the Anglo-Saxons descended, however, authority derived largely from genealogy and inherited word-of-mouth tradition. 3. Literacy Evidence exists for the practice of limited forms of literacy among all Germanic peoples. Many had adopted some kind of runic alphabet in the centuries preceding the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion. But none used them to write books as such. The shapes of some runic characters suggest they were derived from the Roman alphabet: r/R, b /B, s /S, t/T et al., but they were used primarily to carve names and brief texts onto hard media such as wood, stone and metal. The Old English word writan (whence we derive modern English “write”) originally meant “to incise” or “to inscribe.” The kind of swift cursive writing I am at this moment committing to paper with a ball-point pen would have been wholly impracticable with such techniques. Runic inscriptions recorded names on gravestones and weapons or brief charms: they functioned as labels, notebook-jottings and graffiti. But the literacy brought by the monks embodied a wholly new power of unprecedented reach and fluency. The echoes of its adoption are with us to this day.

1

The Old English word gewritu (“writings,” “scripture,” “writ”) could denote either.

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4. The displacement of the scopas The advent of Christian literacy raises another issue that looms over the interpretation of any Old English poem. The scop (pronounced somewhere between “shope” and “shawp,” plural scopas1) was a verbal artist whose medium was the air on which his harp rang and his voice sang. As no historical scop’s work was ever recorded in writing, what little we know about it comes by inference from much later echoes of his work. It is likely to have epitomised, recorded and transmitted his people’s cultural memory: their values, traditions and history. He was their library, or, if you like, their back-up hard drive, his verse-forms a critical aide-mémoire. In the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon England, we find in manuscripts not only heroic and religious narratives but charms, riddles and maxims, and heartfelt laments for the desperately brief tenure of all good things beneath the sun. In short, a whole catalogue of hard-won folk wisdom, much of it inherited from preChristian times. Once the scop would have been the curator and dispenser of it all. But with the advent of the new literacy and the church’s heavy emphasis on textual authority, much of the scop’s traditional value would have been diminished and superseded, like an eight-track tape player or floppy drive. Nevertheless, we can see pretty clearly how the work of later Christian poets still registers the native scop’s ghostly presence. The poetry they composed and transcribed in monastic scriptoria, as much as it reflects newer Christian values, breathes an older air at the same time. Its metre, diction and manner are all taken from the scop’s art. Thus the poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, including the works now classified as “wisdom” poems, occupy a doubled semantic field. Their meanings are conditioned by two very different contexts, their Christian present and their pagan past, in variable proportions. To cite only one example, a poem such as The Dream of the Rood (a profound dream-meditation on the crucifixion) is obviously Christian in its inspiration and content, yet the way it goes about its business depends on its reader/hearer’s familiarity with the conventions of the old warrior-aristocracy of pagan times. The Old English word scop may be related (the connection is uncertain) to the verb scyppan (“to shape” or “to make”). In Scots Lollands, poets are makaris (“makers”), just as in Greek the poet is a poietes, from the verb poiein, “to make”). Even if 1

impossible to assert with confidence, it’s an irresistibly attractive possibility.

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Christian? Yes. But aspects of the pre-Christian culture of the poet’s ancestors play as central a part in the poem’s imaginative economy. Wisdom traditions have developed in just about every human culture, in both lettered and oral formats. Examples of wisdom texts comprise humble (and perennial) saws such as “a penny saved is a penny earned,” of wholly unknown provenance or authorship. Others have survived from the deep past: from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and, in its formative years, Christianity inherited a number of earlier Jewish wisdom texts, both canonical and apocryphal, such as the biblical books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, plus apocrypha such as Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and many others. Given its oral medium, any preChristian wisdom tradition among the Anglo-Saxons will have left only indirect traces of its existence, though that existence seems more likely than not. What we actually see in the surviving texts is a tantalising whisper-gallery of hints and possibilities, none of which can be taken as direct evidence. In addition, distinguishing a putative native wisdom tradition from one inherited from Mediterranean or Near Eastern sources is surprisingly difficult. The extant Old English wisdom texts I discuss in this book contain a relatively modest proportion of credal formulation or other overtly Christian sentiment, yet neither do they sound any unambiguously pagan note. Most wisdom traditions tend to emphasise the existential side of human experience over credal or philosophical abstraction. The voices we hear in the texts that follow slide from that of the mead-hall scop to that of the monastic Christian poet with surprising ease and agility. Just as often they hover indeterminately between the two. All of which leads me to a question implicit in the epigraphs with which this prospectus began: Why? Which can be expanded thus: why wisdom? why Old English wisdom poetry? You needn’t be a card-carrying anthroposophist to take Rudolf Steiner’s point. Not in the new electronic machine age of the internet and the algorithm, the latter’s innumerable spawn all busy hoovering up individuals’ online searches and purchases and bundling them as profiles for sale to shadowy enterprises looking for traction in our heads. In the psychology of our digitally mediated moment, you become the sum total of your online searches and purchases. No more, no less, as determined

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by a number-crunching sub-routine, in what seems a radical reformulation of the notion of the human itself. This suggests to me a powerful (if not exactly demonstrable) likelihood that the voices of experience that emerge out of older and far different human experience can help us both to orient ourselves in our modern moment and to respond to its challenges. Ancient thought of any kind can remind us of what the human has been, of how its psychology has shifted and evolved over time while remaining essentially human throughout. I suspect we’re going to need all the reminders we can get. Thought that has wrestled with the fundamentals of existence, with the particular trials and griefs or aspirations and joys that have struck, shaken, abashed or exalted the human psyche along its road from ancient prehistory to our day, might prove a needful oxygen bottle as the digital waves close over our heads. As Whitman tells us, wisdom cannot be taught, nor (to modernise his point) transferred like a digital download from one point of data-storage to another, but simply to stand in its presence may, in time, induce its semblant in our own thought and imagination and remind us of just who we really are. Better than being epitomised by a data-collecting bot for the benefit of some corporation’s bottom line, at any rate. Even better, as the personified Wisdom in the biblical book of Proverbs declares, real wisdom plays, in every sense of the word. She plays like a spotlight over the mere facts of experience to illuminate them and to expose their latent meaning. She plays like a concert pianist, lost in the intricacies of the score she transforms from notations on paper into air alive with dancing sound. And she plays like a child in a boundless funfair, cavorting among God’s acts of creation like an acrobat, celebrating and singing for joy. The merest glance both at current events and at the headlines of the past few decades (and farther!) exposes a world desperately in need of true wisdom’s play. Individually, we are all, moment by moment, obliged to sift through a torrent of sensory data and experience that pours in like a flood upon our belaboured consciousness, further encroached upon from behind by memories (both summoned and involuntary) that demand their share of our attention.1 Were it to lack any means of coping The double whammy of global warming and the current coronavirus pandemic, which looks set to disrupt modern culture’s notions of business as usual for years to come and may presage even more violent disruption across future decades, has thrown into stark relief the wisdom-free zone that is the late-capitalist, neo-liberal order. If ever a post-medieval age stood in need of a sharp dose of wisdom, it is ours.

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with this wilderness of mere fact, the human psyche would be reduced in a trice to catatonia. In a sense, the twitchy, hyper-stimulated landscape of the recent digital revolution represents, at its most extreme, a kind of breach of the mental floodgates and dykes erected by untold centuries of human struggle in the grip of experience. Wisdom literature represents a kind of scaffold, an approximate sorting of experience that allows us a place to stand within its flux and at least try to make some sense of its riot. The texts I translate and discuss, composed by Anglo-Saxon poets a thousand years ago and more, are perhaps best read as the record of one stage in that long psychic project. They constitute only a small samplesection of Lady Wisdom’s repertoire. Small, but rare and therefore precious. I ought to announce at the outset that this is not a formally academic book. Despite my own academic background and this book’s relatively obscure matter (commonly the object of painstaking scholarly discourses), it addresses a more general readership. I have sought to read and translate these poems as intelligibly as I can for a contemporary audience, drawing on the reflections and speculations these poems trigger in my mind as I approach them. Many of the assumptions, values and beliefs I bring to that encounter might have shocked their anonymous authors, but I have tried to let their words set mine in motion, in something like the spirit of the wisdom-discourse itself. I can only hope the author of a poem such as Maxims I might recognise my intentions. A Note on the Texts The translations, unless otherwise credited, are all my own. I have tried to keep them as close as possible to their originals in terms of syntax and tone, as far as that can be judged, in a loose unrhymed pentameter line1 that affords sufficient freedom of word choice and sentence structure to let the Old English prosody sing, however distantly, through a very different modern English medium. The sections of text that head each discussion will be identified by the relevant line numbers of the original text in boldface, from which the lineation of my translations will inevitably stray. In preparing my translations I have consulted the editions of George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie in The Exeter Book (New Which I hesitate to call “blank verse.” Apologies to Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth! 1

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York: Columbia UP, 1936); Bernard Muir, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994); and Robert E. Bjork (ed. and trans.), in Old English Shorter Poems: Wisdom and Lyric (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

INTRODUCTION

Frost will freeze, fire dissolve the wood. The earth must burgeon; ice will make a bridge water wear a helmetwondrously locking the seeds in the ground. One shall loose the fetters of the frost: almighty God. Maxims I, ii.1-5

The matter-of-fact title of Maxims I, conferred on it by modern editors, might lower our expectations of its potential as poetry. The lines I’ve just quoted might do little to raise them. They appear to make some fuss about straightforward natural phenomena: seasonal temperature variation and the tendency of fire to consume wood and hard frosts to lock the vegetative processes of growth and fruition in the earth. Did the Anglo-Saxons really need a longish poem to remind them of such in-yourface-obvious stuff? Well, as even greeting-card doggerel (“Roses are red, violets are blue . . .”) can attest, poetry needn’t avoid the obvious just because it’s obvious. Broadly speaking, poetry does not communicate information. Its truths are not facts. If it tells you something you didn’t know, it’s not necessarily because you lacked the relevant data. Instead poetry often addresses the known and the familiar from unexpected angles, allowing attentive readers or listeners to see how the obvious or the ordinary hides unfamiliar or extraordinary elements they’d not seen before. It is perhaps no accident that the great majority of the world’s wisdom texts adopt poetic forms. Wisdom traditions, whether ancient Near Eastern or early medieval Anglo-Saxon, take common phenomena and experiences as mere starting points. Whether offering practical life counsel or proposing deep insights into the origin and structure of the cosmos, wisdom texts seek to identify and celebrate what lies above, beyond or below the world our five senses and personal histories hand us as facts. While this might involve elements of traditional religious discourse, it needn’t. Wisdom somehow dances in the gap between the world we experience and our inward experience of that world. Even before we might invoke some notion of deity or spirit, what we take for our world or the world is both more personal and far

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larger and more complex than everyday experience commonly tells us. The sheer scale of the big questions that follow on the heels of such a perception can lead our thoughts in directions common in most known wisdom traditions. The following passage from one of the Bible’s wisdom texts is a good example. It comes from the eighth chapter of the Old Testament’s book of Proverbs, and in it a gendered wisdom speaks, in her own person, of her role as God’s consort in his primordial act of creation: The LORD created me at the outset of His way, the very first of His works of old. In remote eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of earth. When there were no deeps I was spawned, when there were no wellsprings, water-sources. Before the mountains were anchored down, before the hills I was spawned. He had not yet made the earth and open land, and the world’s first clods of soil. When He founded the heavens, I was there, when He traced a circle on the face of the deep, when He propped up the skies above, when He powered the springs of the deep, when He set the sea its limit that the water not flout his command, when He strengthened the earth’s foundations. And I was by him, and intimate, I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the world, His earth, and my delight was with humankind. Proverbs 8:22-31 1

This extraordinary self-portrait is itself an archetypal wisdom text: it embodies distinctive features that can be found in just about any wisdom tradition you could identify. First (and perhaps foremost), it is personal. Wisdom is not about abstract philosophising or forensic debate. She is both a person and a personal possession, as intimately known as your best friend or your favourite song. In these lines from Proverbs, Wisdom plays Trans. Robert Alter, in The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010).

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the parts of God’s chief engineer, personal assistant and playmate in the act of primordial creation itself. In Genesis 1:3, this is narrated as a solo verbal act: “God said: let there be light. And there was light.” Well, not quite. Turns out he had help. And that help comes not in the shape of angels focused wholly on adoring God and performing his will, but of a personified Wisdom who is a friend and consort, a lover almost, who appears to exist coevally with God’s own inconceivable eternity. She is a dancer: wisdom is supple, wisdom moves. She plays in God’s presence, and she delights as well to visit the habitations of God’s human creations, once they’ve made their entrance from the wings. Ancient Judaism’s patriarchal leanings and its later embodiments in the prescriptive fixities of the law make this characterisation surprising, to say the least. Yet at the same time the rabbis delighted in the play of the dialogic imagination, in which voice answers voice answers voice in a seemingly endless speculative dance. Beyond the gender issue, moreover, the passage from Proverbs demands that we see double, in order to discern a venerable principle of cosmic making that is also a playful, fleet-footed spriteas if a supernova could also twinkle among the bluebells at the bottom of your garden like a firefly or a fairy. Wisdom’s twinkly flits before the face of God call to mind another fleet-footed figure from Western mythology, the ancient Greek Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury. His Latin name survives in the English adjective “mercurial,” which describes a playfully elusive yet somehow incisive temperament. Romeo’s friend Mercutio exhibits a manic, dancing verbal wit (at least until his voice is stilled in the trundling gang warfare between Montague and Capulet). The mercurial soul resembles the chemical element mercury, which shines and dances and cannot be pinned down. Think of its old name “quicksilver”: “living” silver, a metal that’s also a will o’ the wisp, an impish liquid at the temperatures we normally experience in our world. As the Roman Mercury and the Greek Hermes, this mercurial deity is associated with many different spheres of action as messenger, healer and monster-slayer. His winged, serpententwined rod, the caduceus (which later became an emblem of medical and pharmaceutical practicea cheerful banner of drug culture, if you like) is both his staff of office as the gods’ messenger and an enchanter’s wand capable of casting illusion or sleep over susceptible mortals. Across the cultures of the Mediterranean, he has been regarded variously as a patron of eloquence, rhetoric, lying and theftthe kinds of verbal and mental agility that can evade traps set for slow human consciousness by playing with the shifting contours of material reality. In the hybrid Greco-

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Egyptian culture that emerged from ancient Alexandria, in its time a crossroads of esoteric traditions rather like New Age California, Hermes came to be associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, the ibis-headed accounts keeper of the underworld also credited with ordaining the orderly progress of the cosmos and establishing human arts such as astronomy/astrology, mathematics and medicineall things shiny and clever. Shortly before Christ’s advent (its exact chronology is still in question), the Hermes/Thoth association inspired a body of writings attributed to a new figure named Hermes, sometimes surnamed “Trismegistus” (“Thrice-Great”), who, it was claimed, lived in Egypt around the time of Moses. A philosophical mage, something like the preSocratic philosophers Heraclitus or Pythagoras, this Hermes, according to the tradition, authored a number of tracts that comprise elements of quasi-gnostic, quasi-theosophical speculation, along with snippets of traditional wisdom discourses. Modern scholarship understands this “Hermetic corpus” as a well-meaning fraud, the figure of Hermes Trismegistus an earnest fiction invoked to give its later Alexandrian origins the gloss and glamour of deep antiquity. It worked a treat: hermeticism and hermetic thought remained viable players in Western philosophical circles to the end of the Renaissance and beyond. Tricky stuff, however you regard it, but beguiling. I invoke all these figuresthe female personification of wisdom from the Book of Proverbs, Hermes, Thoth, Mercury and Hermes Trismegistusnot because any of them (apart from the lady Wisdom of Proverbs) could have directly influenced the Anglo-Saxon authors whose poems I discuss in this book. I want only to establish what a curious and tangled web of traditions underlies Western notions of wisdom. Whatever that quality or faculty or possession we call “wisdom” actually is, it involves far more than just practical life counsel or even consistent teachings. One moment’s wisdom can be another’s droll foolery, as the renaissance Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus suggests in his toy of comic profundity, In Praise of Folly. Or as Plato insinuates in the person of his master Socrates, the world’s “wisest man,” whose bad-boy heart-throb and alter ego Alcibiades, as we learn from other sources, was implicated in a drunken midnight carouse in which a number of herms (stylised ithyphallic stelae dedicated to, erm, Hermes) around Athens were sacrilegiously divested of their ithyphalloi. Frat-boy tricksterdom, indeed, especially given the further jolly japes Alcibiades would later inflict upon the Athenian polity in his brief public career. It is perhaps no coincidence

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such figures come to be associated with both wisdom and wiles, profound understanding and deep cunning. Wisdom can sometimes be mad, bad and dangerous to know. Almost every scholarly discussion of wisdom literature opens with either a tortuous attempt to define just what it is we name with the word “wisdom” or a blunt acknowledgement that such a definition cannot be satisfactorily nailed down. Sensibly, no Old English poet attempts to invoke wisdom in any such rigorous fashion by name. The Old English word wisdom occurs frequently in religious poems, especially the longer saints’ lives such as Andreas, Guthlac, Elene and Juliana, where it routinely names divine wisdom in contrast with a limited human wisdom. It’s common in prose texts as well: the tenth-century abbot and homilist Ælfric repeatedly characterises God’s sunu (“son”), the second person of the trinity, as God’s wisdom, through whom he accomplished his plan of creation, a part not unlike that of the personified Wisdom who speaks in the Book of Proverbs. The meaning of the Old English word wisdom appears to have changed little as it travelled the centuries to become modern English “wisdom,” though what exactly both words denote can be questioned: is it a possession or a state? Something the wise man has acquired or a condition the wise woman inhabits? The Anglo-Saxon poems commonly identified as “wisdom” poems in fact use the word wisdom relatively rarely, in contrast to its frequent occurrence in more conventional religious discourses. When Christianity arrived on the shores of Anglo-Saxon England, it brought with it radically different sensibilities from those of the land’s Germanic inhabitants prior to their conversion. At least as far as we can tell: we can paint here in only broad and tentative strokes, because we know so little about the psychology of the pre-conversion Anglo-Saxons, but think for a moment of those items of modern English slang and taboo vocabulary identified as “Anglo-Saxonisms” (sometimes qualified as “ripe” or “four-letter”) associated with basic bodily functions and crudely material considerations more generally. That popular and instinctive sensibility responds to what linguists characterise more specifically as a bias in Old English vocabulary towards the concrete over the abstract. Though it possesses its share of native abstractions (wis-dom, “the condition of being wise,” is one of them), its vocabulary is dominated by concrete conceptionstake the humble compound nas-ðyrl (“nostril”), whose elements denote, literally, “nose-hole.” When you consider further that “drill” and “thrill” both derive from ðyrl, you reach an almost bodily sense (ouch!) of just how concrete Old English vocabulary can be.

6

Introduction

Common Old English abstractions, such as wisdom, stand only one degree removed from concrete, material reality, as their modern English descendants attest (I italicise their suffixes, which derive from the Old English abstract suffixes -oð, -had, -nes, -scip, and -dom): “length,” “breadth,” “strength,” “neighbourhood,” “sisterhood,” “childhood,” “priesthood,” “brightness,” “darkness,” “friendship,” “freedom.” All such native vocabulary, though technically abstract, has a more stolid and concrete feel (and commonly fewer syllables) than such airy-fairy imports as “pulchritude,” “alacrity,” and “contemplation.” When, after their conversion and introduction to formal literacy, Anglo-Saxon writers began to adapt Latin theological abstractions into their own tongue, they fell back on their native tendency to coin new abstract vocabulary from existing concrete words: þrynes (literally, “three-ness”) for trinitas (“the Trinity”), upastige (literally, “up-climbing”) for ascensio (“the Ascension”), up-cynd (literally “up-kind”) for divinus (“divine” or “heavenly”) or menniscnes (literally, “mannishness”) for humanitas (“human nature” or “humankind”). Notice how most of the Old English words were eventually replaced by Latin loan-word equivalents, whose greater abstraction must have suggested a greater theological heft. The Old English words for the Latin coelis (“heaven” or “the heavens”), heofon/heofonasas abstract a concept as any the period affordsstill cling to the concrete realm of gravity in their association with the palpably physical verb hebban (ancestor of modern English “heave” and “heft”). This tension pulls Old English vocabulary two ways: towards the lived and felt facts of experience on the one hand, and on the other toward the often quite abstract thoughts humans’ lived experience can inspire. It lies very near the linguistic heart of the Anglo-Saxon wisdom tradition. So near, in fact, that it remains uncertain whether and to what extent the surviving wisdom poems reflect an inheritance of native lore gathered across unknown centuries of oral composition and transmission, or whether they reflect the influence of imported biblical exemplars such as the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Wisdom. We cannot say. To cite a modern analogue: who can tell where and when the saying “A penny saved is a penny earned” originated? We can record its first known occurrence in manuscript or print, which tells us nothing about how much earlier it may have circulated orally. Or we could cite the introduction of the penny into English coinage as a possible clue, which might suggest the saying is as old as metallic currency. But the word “earn,” with its overtones of an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work, might suggest a more recent origin in the modern

Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost

7

age of wage labour, with its concomitant valorisation of household economy and daily thrift. The point in all this digression is a simple one: the fundamental notion of a “wisdom” literature is elusive and hard to characterise precisely. It can be slotted comfortably into the cultures of widely differing times, from the days of ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires to our present post-industrial modernity. No element of daily conduct is too prosaic or banal for it to consider, nor does the most high-flown metaphysics stand beyond its reach. It can mash up the common, the uncommon and the uncanny in a simple turn of phrase. The Anglo-Saxon wisdom tradition may draw equally on a dimly recalled Germanic antiquity or from even more ancient Near Eastern cultures, rendered vividly present through the new medium of textually mediated discourse and the authority of the Bible. The wisdom of scripture and the church fathers breathed an air wholly different from what the native scopas (“poets”) would have salvaged out of the deep past in their stores of song, passed down through centuries in oral performance and aural memory. Yet untangling the two inheritances of Anglo-Saxon England’s Christian poets is an uncertain undertaking. On top of this, the “wisdom” (we should perhaps say “wisdoms”) recorded in extant Old English poems addresses both universal human concerns and others that may elude modern sensibilities altogether. Modern Western readers respond to the world through a filter of abstractions and categories bequeathed us by Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Plato directs us to follow the projection of changeless, eternal ideal forms down into the world of messy, mutable particulars. Aristotle starts with taxonomies of particulars, whence he would lead us upward to the ideal forms behind them. This is, of course, a grotesque oversimplification of very complex issues, but it can at least suggest how later intellectual constructs often owe a great deal still to Platonic and Aristotelian traditions: scholastic theology, Linnaean taxonomies of zoological forms, the periodic table, pixelated digital imagery and evolutionary genealogies, to name a random few. Awareness of this should teach us caution. We ought to approach texts from cultures that carry in their DNA genes from very different intellectual and cognitive milieux slowly, with open ears and imaginations. The distant forebears of the Anglo-Saxon poets, whoever they were, could not have been influenced directly by ancient Greek philosophy. Their thoughts would have run in channels different from those that lie beneath the main currents of European thought from Plato’s time to ours. The

8

Introduction

Anglo-Saxon poets whose works we do possess inherited a dark legacy from their native forebears, “dark” in the sense of largely invisible to us. It came to them embedded in the vocabulary and diction of their vernacular poetic language, even as they appropriated it to give voice to new ideas, beliefs and world views far different from those of their ancestral past. Christianity remade the world everywhere it took hold, but the poets of Anglo-Saxon England, even as they sang and celebrated that new world’s beliefs, its saints and its ideals, maintained, perhaps unwittingly, vestiges of the old world that the new had relegated to the past, its use-by date (for them) well and truly expired. About the impacts of the new technology of writing that came bundled with monastic practice as Christianity took hold, we can only speculate. But we can also be only grateful that it preserved these alloys of antique thought and imagination for our contemplation. The transformation of Anglo-Saxon culture from pre-Christian to Christian would have taken place fitfully. Little of it is clearly visible to us, though it has left behind countless traces we can piece into a broad picture, such as the one I’ve very briefly sketched here. I am primarily interested in poetry, and all that I’ve reviewed suggests that the practice of poetry would have been a strangely mixed business in Anglo-Saxon England, as all sectors of society registered and adjusted to the new world that had opened around them. The centuries that followed the initial conversion are crucial for any literary investigation, since they involve the ninth- and tenth-century monastic reforms that led Anglo-Saxon scriptoria to devote much more time to the composition, transcription and dissemination of vernacular texts, often translations from key Latin texts such as the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, but including as well the vernacular poetic compositions that frame our entire understanding of Old English poetics. In those surviving poems we can read a constant negotiation conducted between past and present. On the one hand, the church sought to lead its converts away from the old markers of their pre-Christian antiquity, either violently, by the smashing of idols, the demolition or repurposing of temples and the eradication of sacred groves, or more gently, by appropriating old sites and images and characteristic themes and consecrating them to Christian ends. The process is narrated, with some degree of institutional bias, by the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which, taken with due caution, remains a touchstone of modern historiography. The archetypal conversion story in Bede’s History takes hold from the top down: missionaries approach

Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost

9

King Edwin of Northumbria and his nobles to make their pitch (England was then a patchwork of smallish kingdoms, more resembling clans or tribes than anything we’d recognise as nation states). Those notables decide, and the commons follow as they will. Or won’twe hear little about how a kingdom’s ordinary subjects responded to their ruling elites’ decisions in matters of faith. And nowhere at all do we hear any account of how the advent of all this good news would have sat in the consciousness of the scopas, whose lyrics had traditionally recorded the events and key figures who determined the common weal or woe. Once again, any attempt to imagine their situation at the time of the conversion must concede the flimsiness of our present-day knowledge. We simply do not know who these figures were or just how they practised their art. That they possessed an art, highly developed across centuries of oral practice, we can have little doubt. The art of their descendants whose Christian compositions came to be recorded in monastic manuscripts attests to the rich textures and deeply felt patterns of sound, sense and imagination such long practice can develop. But the metamorphosis of the older art into the newer remains invisible to usonly its final effects have reached us in the various manuscripts held in modern museums, butterflies without specimens of cocoon, caterpillar or egg. The transformation, for anyone who lived through it, must have presented confronting aspects: the free-standing cultural authority of the scopas would have to have yielded most of its ground to the new textbased authority of scripture and the culture it supported. In effect, the monastic scribe would have rendered the scop redundant in some of his most visible and respected functions. Major elements of cultural memory and identityreligious and historical narrative, speculative and wisdom traditions, medicine, topography and onomasticswould have passed from the scop’s care to the scribe’s, under the church’s overarching authority that laid claim to it all. These considerations stir behind any modern approach to the poetry of Anglo-Saxon England. In the so-called “wisdom” poems, that stirring is just a little louder than usual. As we shall see, the elusive figure of Wisdom speaks in many tongues and guises. She is the property of no one ideology or belief system, though many claim her as their own. Reading Old English poetic wisdom, we must weigh the claims of the assertive young church authority against other voices, fainter but still powerful, that speak of other wisdoms won in the hard wars of experience

10

Introduction

that echo out of a deep past, only partially censored by the new sensibilities that breathed the air of the cloister. A constant question that haunts any modern reading of such poetry is that of author and audience. Who wrote these poems? For whom? The texts themselves suggest different possibilities. Their mere existence as pieces of writing points to the milieu of the Anglo-Saxon monastery and its scriptorium. But their strangely mixed heritageas far as we can discern it at allspeaks in a chorus of different voices. In The Fetters in the Frost I hope to offer readers an accessible introduction to enough of these voices to allow them some sense of the Anglo-Saxon wisdom tradition’s polyphonic richness. My own readings of these texts assume a kind of faux-innocence, a knowing unknowingness that seeks to evade the constrictions of rigorous academic discourse by approaching each work as a voice in its own right. While no modern reader can engage them intelligibly without some objective awareness of their time and context, I have tried as much as possible to keep the formal armature of textual criticism, source-andanalogue study and patristic theology out of sight, to attend primarily to the poems’ unknown authors’ voices rather than to those of modern scholars. In doing so, I will have inevitably committed my share of gaucheries, naïvetés and re-inventions of the wheel, but that is a price worth paying in the interest of giving this unique wisdom tradition the scope to sound its extraordinary music of the mind once more.

CHAPTER ONE WISDOM’S REACH:

MAXIMS I

My first three chapters discuss poems central to the Anglo-Saxon wisdom tradition, if such a “tradition” in fact existed. Maxims I, Maxims II and Precepts are usually the first cabs off the rank if you ask someone familiar with Old English poetry to name a wisdom text. It’s not hard to see why. Each assembles sequences of propositions concerning the world and how the human psyche wears it, how mind and spirit cope with physical limitation and, of course, universal mortality. As I suggest in my introduction, nearly all wisdom poetry addresses a similar range of questions, but these three poems further share a common structure of “catalogue”: sequences of loosely parallel propositions whose order can often seem random to modern readers. In this they resemble Old Testament wisdom texts such as the books of Proverbs or the apocryphal book of Wisdom, which may have been among the Anglo-Saxon wisdompoet’s 1 inspirations. Maxims I figures prominently in the anthology of Old English poetry that constitutes the Exeter Book. It is a three-part collection of observations on just about everything under the sun: the worlds of nature, of human desire and endeavour, of psychology and physics, botany and physiology, medieval sociology, meteorology, medicine, the life of the sailor, and much else. At some points, the poet’s method feels like free association, at yet others strong hints of deliberate, patterned arrangement begin to haunt the attentive reader. Like life itself, the data of Maxims I rush by in a welter that might conceal an underlying unityor at least coherence. Or they might not. But present any human mind with a That could just as easily be wisdom-poets’: when referring to “the poet” or “the author,” I mean simply “the author of the passage in question.” Several of the poems I discuss in these chapters were almost certainly composed by different hands. Others might have been. The highly speculative question of authorship, single or multiple, does not figure in my considerations. 1

12

Chapter One

jumble, and it will seek pattern where it can. Such compulsion to decode the world we encounter beyond the garden gate of our five senses is a constant of the human psyche, whether manifested in ancient myth, traditional religion, philosophy or science. Maxims I takes the flux of experience as both a starting point and, perhaps, a broad structural principle. The medieval mind, under the influence of Christianity, beheld a more meaningful and purposeful cosmos than we look out across today. It sought intelligible pattern everywhere with what can look like an odd mix of percipience and naïveté. Repeated reading of Maxims I suggests to me that its author was playing a deep game, producing a poem whose occasional expressions of orthodox piety are crossed by a different voice that speaks with a different authority, that of the native scop, through a vernacular verbal imagination still available to him through his native vocabulary and diction. Bede’s account of the poet Cædmon, in Book 4 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, tells how vernacular poetry was re-dedicated to the celebration of the Anglo-Saxons’ new faith: to its teachings, its saints, and its revolutionary world view. For Bede, the miracle of the shy, tone-deaf farmhand Caedmon’s sudden gift of song gave the Christian revelation a new, vernacular voice that would allow it to reach a wider audience. But even Cædmon’s heaven-sent promotion to the status of scop leaves him immured in his cloister, dictating new songs to a monastic scribe for textual preservation. Still, that transcription would allow elements of the Anglo-Saxons’ long-established native poetic traditions to hitch a ride on the new faith’s accelerating bandwagon. With some caution, we can say that Christianity’s advent among the peoples of northern Europe offered its converts what it presented as a great clarity. Large questions about the nature of being, both in this world and the next, received sharply defined answers. We can hear this in, for example, the tenth-century vernacular homilies of Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, who lays out the church’s fundamental teachings with dogged patience and precision. In contrast, Maxims I sometimes reminds me of a modern work such as Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” That poem offers a sequence of tableaux across which the poem’s eponymous bird flits in and out of view. What the poem’s thirteen episodes have in common is not clear to a casual reading. Each is a riddle that challenges the reader to imagine some way of bringing the thirteen vignettes into focus as a single coherent poem centred on the blackbird, or on the idea of the blackbird. Their suggestive juxtaposition provides clues but no “answers.” In a curiously similar fashion, Maxims I presents

Wisdom’s Reach: Maxims I

13

a world that shimmers with all sorts of possibility and flux, occasions of delight or grief, horror or reflection. Different human fates and conditions vie for our attention, and the author often leaves his audience to do the heavy lifting of discerning the significance of his reflections. His occasional expressions of conventional Christian sensibilities and convictions lend an orthodox cast to some of his pronouncements, but these are marbled with other matter that might suggest a pre-Christian influence or origin. Few, if any, of these can be tagged as outright pagan survivalsnot for want of trying by scholars and amateur enthusiasts keen to locate evidence of preChristian Germanic sensibilities that may have evaded the church’s censorship. Nowhere can we confidently identify any literal returns to a rejected pagan sensibility, yet something draws the poet’s discourse away from straightforward articulation of orthodox doctrine, both in Maxims I and in the majority of poems that constitute the “wisdom” genre identified by modern scholars. Exploring the odd mental and rhetorical landscapes of these poems, giving an honest ear to what they seem to say (as far as a modern reader can understand), will be the primary undertaking of this and all the subsequent chapters in this book.

A

1

ll. 1 - 6 Interrogate me with wise words: don’t leave your heart concealed or withhold your deepest trials. I won’t reveal my secrets if you keep hid the power of the inmost thoughts of your heart. Discerning men should compare their careful words, first praising God, our father 2rightly, for he in the beginning bestowed on us our life and fleeting joys: mere loans he will recall.

Bjork’s edition of the Exeter Book, whose lineation I follow here, identifies the three parts of Maxims I as A, B and C. In all my translations, I resist the convention of capitalising epithets and pronouns for deity. In this, apart from the word “God” itself, I am following Anglo-Saxon scribal practice, which never uses routine capitalisation for names and other proper nouns. In such manuscripts, capitalisation is used only for ornament, or as a means of marking a textual boundary, i.e. in words or whole lines that mark paragraph, section or chapter divisions. The modern English words “capital” and “chapter” are etymological cousins. 1

2

14

Chapter One

These opening lines of Maxims I employ an archetypal framing device of wisdom discourses in many traditions: the debate or symposium. Whether in the verbal exchanges between Job and his comforters, in the conversations of Socrates and his followers and friends or the wisdom contest between Gylfi and his mysterious hosts in the Old Norse Gylfaginning, traditional wisdom discourses often take place in a specifically social and dialogic setting. This may reflect the roots of such discourses in their cultures’ pre-literate past, where such vocalised settings would have played a critical role in the preservation and transmission of a people’s store of life experience. In Maxims I, the narrator speaks to an unnamed “you,” who he invites to share his knowledge, experience and wisdom. Wisdom here is a medium of exchange, where one speaker’s words can prompt another’s, in a spirit of lively competition, fruitful conversation or both. The speaker’s language also points steeply inward, toward the springs of thought and will which Anglo-Saxon psychology always locates in the breast rather than in the head. He sets up an inner-outer polarity: “I won’t share my secret thoughts if you keep yours from me,” a reminder of the occult origins of thought that also emphasises the reciprocity of the exchange proposed, like the climate of goodwill a wise Anglo-Saxon lord must cultivate among his retainers, a careful ecology in which high regard and faithful service answer one another. Lords and wise men traffic in tokens of value, either gold adornments or polished wisdom-utterances, which pass back and forth between them and their retainers or disciples. Merely private thought or reflection (like greedily hoarded wealth) does no one any good until it can be shared. It is telling that in Old English the word inwidda (literally an “inward knower”) denotes a malicious deceiver who exploits the inwardness of his thinking to conceal his designs from others: a cloaked mental interiority masks dishonourable intention. This dialogic understanding of wisdom is perennial. Dialogues between gods, sages and other interested human parties occur in texts from every period of Near Eastern and European literature. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Plato’s accounts of Socrates’ conversations with his disciples to the symphonic orchestration of rabbinical voices in Judaic tradition to Boswell’s recording of Samuel Johnson’s table talk to Marxist dialectics, the play of voice answering voice in intricate dances of proposition, objection, agreement and disagreement has characterised a large swath of humankind’s wisdom discourses. This, in turn, should alert us to a corollary sensibility we will regularly encounter in Old English wisdom poetry. While its springs may

Wisdom’s Reach: Maxims I

15

be secret and inward, thought also possess an outward provenance. We can still speak of ideas that “pop” or “run” into our heads, like unexpected visitors or messengers, but that is a mere vestige of older sensibilities, like saying “bless you” or Gesundheit when someone sneezes. The Beowulfpoet tells us the idea of raising a mighty mead-hall be-arn (literally, “beran” or “raced”) into the mind of the Danish king Hrothgar (Beowulf ll. 67b-73). Speakers of modern English understand the verb “to think” as straightforwardly active: its subject “thinks”i.e. engages in mental activity more or less under his or her conscious direction. Though a few usages, such as “the thought just occurred to me” or “you’ve got another think coming,” might preserve some sense of that older understanding of mental activity as moved from without, not wholly under anyone’s control. Old English had two similar verbs, þencean (“to think”) and þyncan (“to seem” or “to appear”). The former gives us our modern “to think.” The latter has disappeared, but it remained in use into Shakespeare’s time and a little beyond: the Shakespearean “methinks” (literally not “I think” but rather “it seems to me” or even “it thinks me”) descended from Old English þyncan (“me þyncþ”) rather than þencean. That now-archaic verb preserves an older notion of thought as something external presenting itself to the human psyche, entering into it from outside. A famous scene from the first book of Homer’s Iliad illustrates this archaic conception of thought dramatically. Agamemnon has insulted the hero Achilles, provoking the latter’s man-killing rage. About to draw his sword and run Agamemnon through, Achilles is stopped by the intervention of the goddess of wisdom, Athena: [J]ust as he drew his huge blade from its sheath, down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena, the white-armed goddess Hera sped her down: Hera loved both men and cared for both alike. Rearing from behind him Pallas seized his fiery hair only Achilles saw her, none of the other fighters struck with wonder he spun around, he knew her at once, Pallas Athena! the terrible blazing of those eyes, and his winged words went flying: “Why, why now? Child of Zeus with the shield of thunder, why come now? To witness the outrage Agamemnon just committed?” ... “Down from the skies I come to check your rage if only you will yield . . . .

16

Chapter One And I tell you thisand I know it is the truth one day glittering gifts will lie before you, three times over to pay for all his outrage. Hold back now. Obey us [Athena and Hera] both.” 1

The goddess voices what we might take as Achilles’ own capacity for reflection. For us, such thought is a wholly inner process that each of us possesses as a private thinker, registering as sub-vocalised speech in our minds. If we believed we were actually hearing someone else’s voice in our heads, we’d seek professional help. Achilles “reflects” on his urge to kill Agamemnon out of hand through the very material agency of Athena’s seizing him by his hair, like a wayward beast, to restrain him. His thought happens to him, literally and violently. In our day we can talk about being “seized” by a sudden thought, but only metaphorically. Between Homer’s time and ours, the Middle Ages afford many literary instances of thought’s inward migration to become (at least as we conceive it now) a private mental faculty, taking place wholly inside our heads, more or less at our disposal and, usually, under our control. Obviously, modern depthpsychology and psychiatry have richly complicated this picture in ways that suggest our thought may, even now, not wholly answer to our conscious will and desire, but our notions of mental “normality” commonly demand that our private self remain more or less in charge of our conscious mental process. To be in confident command of our selves virtually defines consciousness for us. We might note too that the voice of such command is often dialogic: we talk to ourselves behind the muffling curtain of our skulls. Across all the poetry I consider in this book we can observe, from a unique historical vantage, a critical stage in how the antique conception of thought as a visitation from without migrates inward to become the modern conception of thought as the human mind’s private possession. At the outset of Maxims I, we hear that wise men “should” exchange sayings, presumably the expressed verbal fruits of their inward deliberations. My “should” translates a form of the Old English auxiliary verb sculan, which occurs frequently in Old English wisdom poetry. It is the ancestor of modern English “shall,” and its common meanings include “must,” “have to” and “be obliged to.” In wisdom poetry, however, it takes on a more specific meaning. Here it bears its usual wisdom-sense of customary

1

Homer, Iliad (trans. Robert Fagles), New York: Viking, 1990.

Wisdom’s Reach: Maxims I

17

action or identity: 1 exchanging sayings is simply what sages do, by virtue of being sages. Such utterances can sound to us like mere tautology (“Powerful wet stuff, that water”) or portentous statements of the obvious (“Hey, did you know fire burns wood?”). But we miss the whole thrust of wisdom poetry if we view it solely as information, or if we respond to it like some item of post-eighteenth-century propositional logic. The facts such poetry accumulates are like stones in a wall: hard, irreducible fragments of world-stuff that the artist of wisdom manoeuvres into a larger structure that depends on his careful placement of stone against stone. The definite just-so-ness of each individual stone is not the point: collectively, they answer to another purpose that no one stone on its own could even hint atestablishing a property boundary or keeping sheep safely penned. As Robert Frost’s neighbour says in “Mending Wall,” “Good fences make good neighbors”: the two conduct a neighbourly survey (from opposite sides) of their shared wall, which catches something of the cooperative/competitive polarity evoked by the opening of Maxims I. “Wise men exchange sayings,” the poet declares, followed by what, for any medieval Christian, would be the first item in any list of wise sayings: the praise of God, especially in his role as creator, without which there would be neither wise men nor world for them to observe. Life itself, and the will or desire that moves us as living creatures, is “lent,” bestowed only temporarily and subject to recall on short notice.2 We can begin to discern a characteristic pattern here, in which the exchanges of players in the wisdom game sound an echo of how life itself emanates from the living God and returns to him. Here we should note how this glancing evocation of death pays no attention to its origin in God’s curse on Adam and Eve for their disobedience in Eden. Death is simply one of the hard, found facts of existence and experience, like a piece of stone the builder must eye up with special care before placing in his wall.

Think of how someone, hearing about an unnamed animal that has a hump and a long neck and legs, might reply, “Oh, it must be a camel.” That is the primary force of wisdom poetry’s use of sculan. Lines 108-110 of the Old English verse lament known as The Wanderer express the same sentiment from a more existentially fraught vantage. The Old English word læne survives as the banking term “lien,” which refers to a loan (“lend” and “loan” are also related) taken out to purchase a property, which becomes forfeit if the borrowed moneys are not repaid. 1

2

18

Chapter One

ll. 7 - 12a 1 God belongs in glory, man on the earth from youth until old age. God, to us, is eternal. No event can turn him aside, nor anything oppress him. Not age nor disease can touch the almighty; his spirit unworn, he stays just as he ever was, the enduring prince.

This passage opens by observing the critical cosmic divide that runs through all of the medieval church’s teaching: God’s transcendent otherness as creator, in contrast with the contingent mortality of all humankind. God “belongs” in glory, man “belongs” on earth, yet that seemingly simple distinction triggers a number of complications. The poet here focuses on its temporal dimension: man passes from youth to age, while God is eternal. The subjection of human consciousness to time entails the unpleasant facts of mutability and mortality, which by definition can have no effect on the divine. God cannot be turned or distracted by events, and the common human ills of disease and ageing, at least in the fallen world, cannot touch him either. At the close of this passage, the poet uses different tenses of the verb “to be”“he is as he always was”to suggest a mode of existence that stands beyond all talk of past, present and future, characterising God as an “enduring” lord. My “enduring” translates the adjective geþyldig, which is commonly translated as “patient” or “long-suffering”; the related noun geþyld means something like “endurance” or “patience.” Its meaning is close to that of the Latin verb patior, whence modern English derives both “patience” and “passion.” The concept clearly at play here in Maxims I is what traditional theologians used to call God’s “impassability”: a state wholly beyond the excitability, emotion and suffering that attend our jangled nerve-endings in our passage through space and time. But to be geþyldig or “patient” in the Old English word’s most common sense is a key human virtue. A god who is ece (“eternal”) logically shouldn’t need to be geþyldig. 2 Even as the poet distinguishes the divine from the human, his language blurs the Each line of Old English poetry comprises two half-lines, referred to as the a-line and the b-line and identified as such in line-number references. Sometimes a strong clause boundary will fall in the space between an a- and a b-line, as here, where the passage I’ve translated reaches a natural closure in mid-verse. Which is why in my translation I’ve cheated a little with “enduring,” which could be either an inward or an outward quality: humans can endure, but so can mountains. 1

2

Wisdom’s Reach: Maxims I

19

distinction a little, in a way that signals to us that his “wisdom” discourse may not always observe the traditional niceties of early medieval theology, or may not observe them in the same fashion as more scrupulously orthodox religious discourses. In other reaches of medieval theology, particularly soteriology (salvation theology), it is common to speak of God’s “compassion,” “forgiveness” and “love,” all of which soften the gem-like hardness of his unchanging eternity. But here in Maxims I the poet has chosen precisely that “impassable” quality of the divine to contrast with the restless changeability of the human condition. To call him “patient” here is practically an oxymoron: this eternal, transcendent God can’t be geþyldig in the common sense of the word; yet somehow he is.

ll. 12b – 21 He grants us thought, with sundry inner states and many languages. Many an island sustains all kinds of lifethe measurer raised up these spacious lands, almighty God, for the human race and causes them to swarm with populations as differently behaved as they are numerous. Wise men with the wise should hold deliberation, one with another. Their spirits accordcalm strife and teach peace always when malcontents have earlier stirred things up.

In these lines, God’s relationship with his human creaturesa special case of his relationship with creation generallyis one of omnidirectional amplitude. He is the single point of origin, from which all the variety of the outward world flourishes. That outward variety is mirrored in the concomitant richness of the psychic world. God gives us “thought,” “intellect” and different “inner states.” The Old English mod that I translate here as “inner state” is the ancestor of modern English “mood,” but the Old English word could denote many kinds of interiority: “spirit,” “mind,” “heart,” “courage” or simply “inner disposition.” The icing on this cake is the many different languages with which humankind have also been gifted. The inclusion of specifically linguistic variety in the surging tide of blessing is a little surprising. Jewish and Christian traditions alike read the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 as an origin-fable for the profusion of different human tongues, with a moralising sting in its tail. God scrambles human language into a tangle of mutual unintelligibility

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to foil the tower-builders’ impertinent heavenward aspirationfor which linguistic variety is a punitive impediment rather than a blessing, imposed on humans who presume to engineer a material bridge to heaven. But for the author of Maxims I that same variety is the very spice of life, encouraging rather than discouraging communication and giving wise men scope to deploy their wisdom in fruitful, peace-keeping diplomacya lesson our centuries of later modernity would have done well to heed. The existence of “foreign” languages heightens consciousness and grounds differences of knowledge and perspective that can generate the exchanges of sayings among the wise which many wisdom poems commend. The next sentence makes the same point in a biological context, pointing to the world’s “many kinds of life” teeming on “many an island.” The image of islands suggests a scattered copiousness, like broadcast seed. This sense of amplitude expands further into the social dimension: God has summoned forth an equal number of both different peoples and different customs, producing a satisfying and inclusive symmetry. The poet makes no distinctions: these peoples are neither ancient nor contemporary, pagan nor Christian. He sounds this multicultural note as a high occasion for the wise of all places to speak with one another. Cultural differences and private human natures alike can give rise to troublemaking by “malcontents”: the Old English wonsælige means literally “the unhappy,” which can denote both the generically sad or those unhappy with a particular matter or circumstance. But even frictions and misunderstandings that might arise between different peoples can be settled by the intervention of the wise on either side, whose deliberations offer an exemplary model of peaceful relations. Practically an earlymedieval anticipation of the UN charter. The poem contemplates all of this without once referring to the wider context of the fall of Adam and Eve that, for medieval theology, was the well-head of all the strife and misfortunes that beset human history: the problem of evil stood rooted in tainted soil whose taint reached back, ultimately, to the fall of Lucifer and his cohort of rebel angels. No merely human agency could uproot it. These lines sound a curiously optimistic note on either side of the pre- and post-Christian watershed, which are balanced by the poem’s dark closing meditation on the murder of Abel by his brother Cain and its ramifications down the currents of historical time (see ll. 187-204 below). In a heroic poem such as Beowulf, peace is maintained, paradoxically and fatally, by recourse to a violence that sooner or later subverts whatever short-term good its protagonists manage to achieve. The author of Maxims I appears, for this moment in his poem

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at least, to evade the default sensibilities of both his pagan and Christian forebears in imagining wisdom as a kind of third way that can (in theory, at least) answer the human propensity for strife.

ll. 22 – 30 Good counsel is arrived at through insight, justice by the wise, virtue by the virtuous. Two make a wedded pair: woman and man bring children into the world through generation. A tree must cast its leaves upon the earth from mourning limbs. The fated shall go forth, the doomed perish, confronting every day their parting from the earth. The measurer alone will know where death is bound to light to escort us hence away from lands we know.

The three pairings that open this passage could be customary, necessary, archetypal or all three at once. “Counsel” (Old English ræd, “rede,” which also can be translated as “advice” or “interpretation”) sorts most obviously with “insight,” as its practical fruit, as “justice” is accomplished by “wise” men. The third pairing, of “virtue” with “the virtuous,” seems mere tautology, but none of these three pairings is as obvious as it appears at first glance. Is good counsel merely a consequence of insight, a goal achieved? Or do the two engender and signal each other, like M.C. Escher’s hands drawing each other? Similarly, do the virtuous simply emit their virtue, as the sun sheds its light? Or does the outward manifestation of virtue engender our perception of it in its engenderer? Chicken or egg? These might seem nice distinctions, but they all embody a reciprocal dynamic that powers nearly all extant Old English poetry. In the Anglo-Saxon poetic imagination, hierarchy always implies a mutual relationship; it’s never simply a matter of the higher imposing upon the lower. All relationships rest on different kinds of mutuality, wisdom poetry such as Maxims I insists. The basic principle of identity, A=A, B=B etc., can do no more on its own than catalogue isolated bits of the world and our experience of them. That is where wisdom might beginthe bricks in its foundations, as it werebut its higher structures can emerge only from an appreciation of the complex web of associations, resonances and reciprocities that embed every phenomenon in the world that impresses itself on human awareness. From such simple beginnings, the pursuit of wisdom can strike out along any number of conceptual lanes and byways,

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as the next lines demonstrate. There the speaker uses the concept of twoness to move his discourse in a new direction, beginning with the pairing of man and woman that introduces new life into the world. The next image is of a tree that sheds its leaves from “mourning” limbs. The branching tree 1 is a common emblem of generation and descent, as in the genealogical “family tree” or in casual proverbs such as “the apple never falls far from the tree” or “the bad seed.” It recurs, figuratively, in the image of the branching river of blood springing from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel that concludes Maxims I (again, see the commentary below on ll. 187-204). The juxtaposition of parenthood and the autumnal tree evokes both the physical and emotional dimensions of incarnate life in space and time, the joy of new life shadowed by mortality. Against the image of the autumnal tree, already fraught with death and season’s end, the next lines juxtapose those “keen to depart” (or “about to die,” Old English fus) and the “doomed” (fæge, cognate with modern English “fey”), a pair of near-synonyms that denote those marked by fate for death. This pairing of fus and fæge suggests yet another innerouter dichotomy: to be fus commonly denotes a kind of restlessnessmetaphysically itchy feet, if you willan inner disposition toward departure, while being fæge is a more broadly conceived condition of mind and spirit induced in the fus by the external agency of wyrd (an Old English word commonly translated as “fate” 2). The fæge can exhibit traits we would associate with depression: a distracted lassitude, loss of focus and anomie. 3 Those identified as either fus or fæge have entered death’s anteroom, to await its inevitable advent, though only God knows its precise schedule. We should note the existential orientation of this analysis: you know you must die, but not when, and the poet does not care to speculate why. God in his eternity has subsumed the traditional role of wyrd: he proposes and disposes and knows, but he’s not talking. The passage offers neither moralising nor consolation, no afterlife redress or moral accounting. Just another hard world-fact, is all. It declines the rhetorical thrust of just about any homiletic or other theological treatment of this same theme, which, looking backward, would inevitably invoke the The Old English word for “twig” or “branch,” twig, derives from twa (“two”). The modern reflex of wyrd, “weird” (as in Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” in Macbeth), retains something of the unsettling and uncanny aspect of the Old English conception. “Fey,” the modern adjective descended from fæge, like wyrd’s descendant “weird,” carries some vestigial flicker of the uncanniness that must have invested both the Old English words and what they denoted. 1 2

3

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sin of Adam and Eve as the root cause of our mortality. As we shall see again and again, Old English wisdom poetry tends to launch itself from this narrow ledge of experience, taking stock of what isthe facts and circumstances of life on earthwithout trying fully to explain anything. Instead, it seeks to marshal the details into intelligible patterns that allow us to negotiate the human traverse of space and time without analysing it, favouring occult alignments over rational tabulations of causes and effects.

ll. 31 – 38 The young replace those taken by disease, so the number of men on earth remains the same The human race would overrun the world if he who shaped it never thinned our ranks. Foolish the man who does not know his lord death often overtakes him unprepared. Wise men guard their souls, preserve their truth with righteous deeds. Blessed is he who thrives in his native land, wretched the man betrayed by friends. No joy for him who lacks his food necessity must clutch him for the time.

The notions already developedof generation and of fate’s or God’s mysterious disposition of men’s endscombine in a meditation on demographics. Even here a reciprocal dynamic holds: the young replace those death takes, 1 and death curbs overpopulation. Next we hear how death sorts the fool from the wise. The fool does not “know” (the Old English verb witan might also be translated as “acknowledge” or “recognise”) his lord. The Old English word translated here as “lord” is dryhten, an item of heroic vocabulary commonly pressed into service after the conversion as an honorific term of address for deityin traditional typography “the Lord.” Here the context seems double. In secular terms, that man is a fool who owes allegiance to no lord: Anglo-Saxon patterns of patronage left unaffiliated souls out in the cold with few and bleak prospects. More ominously, the spiritually unprepared man, who has not professed his faith in the lord, exposes himself to the daily risk of eternal In a later continental parallel to this notion, the twelfth-century De planctu naturae (“The Complaint of Nature”) of Alain de L’isle presents a Mother Nature figure who, in her workshops, runs a tight race with death, encouraging generation to stay ahead of depopulation. 1

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damnation, given life’s uncertainties, a common note of church teaching. Anglo-Saxon monks would have regularly encountered texts such as the opening verse of Psalm 14: “The fool has said in his heart: / There is no God above.” The wise, in contrast, “guard” their souls, also a homiletic commonplace, varied in the next observation that they also “preserve their truth with righteous deeds,” words that admit a little more of the heroic tradition’s concern for honour and straight-dealing. “Truth” here translates the Old English soð, the ancestor of early modern English “sooth” (as in “soothsayer”). Like the meanings of “sooth,” “truth” and “troth,” that of soð, in addition to “what is true,” shades over into “what is trustworthy” and, hence, “honourable.” Christian notions of moral righteousness and heroic notions of “true” speech and deeds here overlap indistinguishably from one another. The next lines extend the traditional perspective, taking an earthly view of a related opposition. They name the “fortunate man” who thrives in his native setting. His bliss is self-evident but explicitly contrasted with the state of the “wretched man” betrayed or abandoned by his friends or suffering for want of food. The contrast is no longer between different moral or spiritual dispositions but between different material and social circumstances, realised in terms (familiar to readers of Beowulf) of the making and breaking of mead-hall loyalties and the often harsh pinch of material necessity.

ll. 39 – 49 The heart that knows no guile is free from cares. The blind man always suffers because of his eyes: bereft of luminous vision, he cannot see the stars, the sun celestially bright, or the moon. An ache in his spiritan anguish only he who cannot hope for any change can know. The lord laid down that suffering for him, who has the power to overturn his grief, to restore the health of his head’s resplendent gems, if he knows his heart to be pure. The ailing man requires a physician. The young man must be taught, instructed and encouraged till he learns all he needs; until he’s been well trained, let him be fed and clothed. Let no one blame the immature child until he’s led to sense, until he’s proven himself. Then will he thrive among his people, grow daring of thought.

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The contrasts between happy and unhappy conditions here continue, with the guileless heart’s freedom from care set against the tormenting enclosure of the blind man in a darkened world. Does his placement here against the happy innocent suggest some sort of moral contrast? The poem is not at first explicit. Its Christian audience might have recalled the episode in John 9:1-3, in which Jesus’ disciples ask him to pronounce on a man’s congenital blindness: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind?” There Jesus dismisses such simplistic cause-and-effect moralising. The poet here makes no direct reference to the gospel episode, yet its presence is palpable. Jesus addresses the man’s blindness as an occasion for God to manifest his power in healing him. Note how the poem sympathises with its blind man’s suffering in a kind of obverse of Jesus’ interpretation: blindness denies its sufferer the sight of those celestial markers of God’s glory: the sun, the moon and the stars. The opening of Psalm 18“The heavens proclaim the glory of God”appears to be an inspiration behind one of the more luminous Old English wisdom poems, The Order of the World, which I discuss in chapter nine below. Yet the poet’s formulation here adopts no overt theological or moral stance, dwelling instead on the man’s existential privation with great poignancy, identifying the intense isolation imposed by blindness and the sufferer’s despair of any remedy or redress. Such isolation might remind us of the plight of the speaker in The Wanderer, who, though not blind, suffers intensely from his alienation, cut off from all human society and comfort. Here the poet returns to precisely the sort of moral theologising the previous lines had so self-consciously avoided: God has ordained this blindness as a “torment” or a “punishment.” Is this ordaining judicial? Does the blindness punish a specific sin? We are not told; instead, the poet observes that God can restore the blind man’s sight, if “he knows his heart to be clean.” The rhetoric seems tentative hereGod can cure him if he knows his heart to be pure. But if his heart is pure, why would he have been punished in the first place? Might his blindness have somehow compelled him to reflect on past misdeeds and repent? We can here recall Jesus’ admonition, which he delivers more than once to those he heals, to “go, and sin no more.” Again, in Maxims I we are not told the exact relationship between sin and physical blindness. The effect is pointillist, a hypothetical before and after with no connecting narrative of amendment in between. Typically, the wisdom narrative emphasises the existential aspect without explicitly invoking a higher moral argument or narrative. When the poet proceeds to observe that a physician is needful for an ailing person, does he speak literally? Or is it

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an allegorical invocation of the “soul’s medicine” motif common to medieval penitential discourses? The poet, leaving such questions unanswered, next swerves tangentially to scenes of pedagogy, of the “teaching, correction and encouragement” of a young man until he be “tamed.” The Old English verb trymman (more commonly trymian), which I translate here as “taught,” is richly evocative. Its basic meanings include “to strengthen,” “to fortify,” “to encourage” and “to arrange.” A trymmend is a “supporter” or “partner to an agreement.” The fundamental sense of the trym-/trum- root is one of good order and array. The notion of being trum in Old English covers a wide semantic field, as its later uses in phrases such as “fighting trim” and “to trim sails” recall. It covers notions of good order in terms of both bodily health and military organisation. The negative form untrumnes means “disease.” The related noun getrum denotes a well-ordered host, while trym can mean a specific measure: fotes trym means “a footspan.” In the world of predicative wisdom, educating the young means bringing their sometimes-wayward energies into coherent order. We are admonished to see to the child’s bodily needs for “food and clothing”perhaps a reminder of the poor wretch who a few lines before ran out of foodthus allowing him to be “tamed” once he’s been brought “to reason.” That is, to adult responsibility: “reason,” to an early medieval Christian, meant the power of the rational soul to discern good from evil and better from worse. Modern age-of-consent and criminal liability laws reflect an awareness of an equivalent threshold. The language of “taming” also suggests one of an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat’s prized leisure pursuits, falconry, for which wild falcons and hawks were captured and trained each year. Before a child has thus matured, the poet declares, let no one blame or otherwise find fault with his behaviour, until he has been allowed to “know himself” (hine acyþan), an almost Platonic formulation. Thus will he “prosper among the people” and become “valiant minded.” It is a typically Anglo-Saxon sensibility that self-knowledge should primarily mean knowledge of self in its social setting. This pedagogical scenario does not sound much like other medieval Christian teachings about child-rearing and human nature. St Augustine’s conception of original sin established that all human beings carry from birth some taint of Adam and Eve’s primordial transgression of God’s command in Eden. Old English homiletic injunctions concerning childrearing emphasise orthodox instruction and strict discipline of the “spare the rod, spoil the child” sort. How far such admonitions reflect actual practice is of course difficult to say, but we can note how this vignette in

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Maxims I regards the young as works in progress, with inner resources that, if properly nurtured and encouraged, will thrive to the benefit of society at large. The child requires “taming,” but that animal-husbandry metaphor suggests the fostering of innate virtues as well as the curbing of any innate vice. The poet goes as far as recommending that children should not even be criticised before they’ve achieved some degree of selfaware moral agency, as a way of encouraging their better natures. Again, the voice of wisdom speaks in notes that differ subtly but significantly from the commonly expressed religious/childcare orthodoxies of the poet’s time.

ll. 50 – 58 A strong spirit must be governed. Often a storm provokes the sea into a savage state. From far away the raging yellow waves begin to test how firm the land will hold. The cliffs withstand them; the winds whip over both. As the sea grows calm when the wind no longer wakes it, so nations make peace once they’ve been reconciled, securing firm accords where capable men and their companions govern fittingly. A king desires his sway, but hateful he who covets his subjects’ lands, while the king who promises them more will win their love.

The first line of this passage transposes the previous segment’s pedagogical concerns into an adult register: the powerful spirit requires governance. Once more we hear a double note of Christian and nativeheroic sensibility. In poems such as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, a “strong spirit” would represent an unqualified good, demanding discipline, of course, but lending its possessor the élan and fortitude essential to the pursuit of heroic reputation or dom (see the discussion of dom in ll. 70-79 below). To a Christian sensibility, however, the same strong spirit would court the sin of pride, stubbornly persistent in the human psyche since the fall of Adam and Eve. Rather than choose between these different registers, the poet turns to an image from nature to correlate them: the storm that rouses the sea to a fury. Like all the peoples of both the Mediterranean and the North and Baltic Seas, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a strong littoral culture, a consciousness of the liminal zone between dry land and deep water, where they undertook the

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better part of their navigations. For such peoples the sea served as a highway, perilous but less chancy than dry land as an avenue for travel and the passage of goods. From early Classical times into the Viking age, such voyaging was largely a coast-hugging business: coastal landmarks offered vital reference points for navigation, and the shore could provide quick shelter from pirates or the sea’s uncertain moods, even if on occasion it also thrust out sharp-toothed reefs, clinging sand-bars and grinding rocks. The point here is how the close observation and reading of coastal waters in such cultures would have been a critical proficiency, a consciousness of tides and skies and the play of the sea’s colossal forces against the land’s fixities as needful to life’s common business as sight and hearing. This “littoral consciousness” makes itself felt in a great many Old English poems, from the “hero on the beach” motifs in Beowulf, Elene and Andreas to the detailed language used by Old English poets to capture the beguiling play of rolling, coiling surf on sand and shinglean acute consciousness of shore lines as zones of departure and arrival. In addition, medieval Christian expositions of the account of creation in Genesis frequently cite God’s separation of sea from dry land as a supreme instance of his might as creator, a physical manifestation of his power over the centrifugal tendencies of primal chaos. This passage thus aligns the government of a strong (and thereby potentially wayward) spirit with the image of a wind-whipped surf whose waves test the power of the cliffs to withstand them. The walls hold fast, though the wind sweeps across seas and bluffs alike. This is reasonably observed meteorology, on the one hand, yet on the other it invites interpretation as psychological symbol or allegory. As the headland both sustains and contains the sea’s restive power, so the human capacity to govern our inner storms allows us some sort of stable platform from which to address both the tumults of the world and the inward upsets they may provoke. The boundary between reason and the unstable senses and passions that reason ideally governs represents a critical boundary space where fates begin and end. God’s breath, both wind and spirit, plays across this scene, as consciousness plays in the flutter of eyelid and breath, or in the quickening of leaf and wave by the invisible wind that blows where it will. The sea and land imagery here insists on no particular interpretation but allows them all. All are liminal scenes that reveal the play of hidden powers. As we shall see, such multivalent imagery is a common effect in most Old English wisdom poetry.

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A further associative sidestep asks us to liken a calm sea to the peace that can be joined between peoples after careful negotiations establish “firm accords.” A further analogy tells us kings rule best in the company of their advisers and companions, who can curb the vagaries of a monarch’s will. 1 To function properly, power demands containment, customary limits to its prerogative. The final lines here concede that a king can be jealous of his power and authority, while noting the balanced reciprocity at the heart of all good rule: however entitled the king’s will, its excessive, one-sided imposition, as when a king peremptorily seizes his subjects’ lands, will sour such relationships, while a liberal disposition will win hearts, especially if coupled with brisk enterprise in acquiring new lands to distribute among his thanes. Again there is a dynamic at the centre of the poet’s interest, a play of centripetal and centrifugal forces whose balanced tension underlies reality.

ll.59 – 69 Power sorts with pride, the daring with the brave both will be quick to venture into battle. An earl belongs on horseback, while his troops ride close behind or hold their ground on foot. A woman’s place is seated at her loom words leap to blame a straying wife, whose deeds encompass her as men enumerate her crimes. She often finds herself exposed. A man disgraced will hide himself in shadows; untarnished reputation bears the light. The head must secretly direct the hand the hoard lie ready in the treasury, the gift-seat stand prepared against the hour when men will share rewards. Greedy he who covetously reaches out for gold the man upon the high-seat has enough: his graciousness will claim its due from us if we have no desire to play false.

These final lines of part I begin by pondering how paired qualities commonly prized in heroic mead-hall societypower and pride, daring We might think here of the elemental chaos that breaks out in King Lear when Lear’s counsellors fail to dissuade him from abdicating his rule and fatally dividing his kingdom. 1

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and courage can also engender strife and commonly inspire both sides in human contentions. Other pairings are complementary. The nobleman mounts his horse, his men on theirs accompany him in an organised troop, who will back him in battle, holding their ground on foot (we might note in passing that the Anglo-Saxons never practised mounted warfare: for them horses served simply as transport). A sudden shift of social setting and register follows, though still examining needful bonds of human association, here between a woman and her domestic conditions, and the expectations they impose. A wayward woman, who steps outside her conventional roles, invites gossip and censure. Her transgressions crowd her as her neighbours tot them up, a claustrophobic enclosure that, ironically, leaves her exposed. A shamed man might skulk in shadows, but an intact reputation can stand unabashed under public scrutiny. After these reflections on the private and public social dimensions of reputation, this section of Maxims I finishes with the equally vital public dynamic of heroic repute, centred on the “hoard,” the treasure chest that stands beside the king’s “gift-seat,” i.e. his throne, from which he disburses the largesse that sustains his patronage, consolidating his company in ties of mutual regard and service. The king’s “head” must inwardly (perhaps “secretly”) direct his hand in this, in the sense that a good king must deliberate such disbursals in the privacy of his own thought: his decisions will be realised in outward gestures with material ramifications that will manifest his wisdom or folly. Such largesse must be freely given to serve as a just token of the king’s esteem for his retainers’ service. They in turn cannot presume on such largesse, lest the whole relationship become a matter of mechanism, of salary or tariff, more along the lines of modern wage-labour. Such a metred transaction, whatever modern ideal of distributive justice it may serve, could never have supported the ideals of honour and reputation that informed heroic culture among Germanic peoples.

B ll. 70 - 79 Frost will freeze, fire dissolve the wood. The earth must burgeon; ice will make a bridge water wear a helmetwondrously locking seeds in the ground. One shall loose the fetters in the frost: almighty God.

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Winter will turn away, good weather in its wake: the summer-hot sky, the sea that knows no rest. The path of the dead is deep and longest hid. Holly is to be kindled; the legacy of the dead distributed. Renown is best.

The second section of Maxims I opens with one of the more oftquoted passages both from this poem and from the whole of the wisdom corpus; one of its half-lines, forstes fetre (“the fetters of [or “in”] the frost”), has lent this book part of its title. Its first line is often cited as evidence of the Anglo-Saxons’ odd epistemological priorities. 1 Did they really need to remind themselves that cold water freezes and fire consumes wood? To regard this as naïve simplicity is a false condescension. If we assume that the typical maxim presents no more than a statement of fact, then we almost inevitably impose modern information sensibilities on what was a much differently contoured mental landscape in the Middle Ages. Registered as facts of the natural world, these observations might seem self-evident, but context and juxtaposition play a central role in how both Maxims I and Maxims II go about their business. The next lines establish a setting of natural process and metamorphosis: the earth sprouting new life, and ice “making a bridge”presumably creating a path across otherwise flowing water, thus crossing one natural movement with a fixity that allows human traffic to pass over at a right angle. In a subtle shift of perspective, that same water “wears” the ice like a helmet, while the earth’s seeds lie “locked”like the frozen water, but differentby the frozen soil to await their freeing in spring. God presides over all these withheld potentials in his omnipotence as a kind of cosmic Jack Frost responsible for binding and unbinding the “fetters” of his medium. His agency is subtle, however: the seasons bring a fair-weather thaw, in which God’s part is not directly observed. Winter simply departs as the sea throws off its icy helm and grows restless. Thus what at first appear to be simplistic statements of fact serve to register the deep checks and releases of the natural economy. So far the phenomena on display have been primarily meteorological and botanical, but the next lines introduce an antithetical turn in the “deep path of the dead,” which stays “longest” hidden, an analogue of Hamlet’s “unknown country” of no return. Of course, the medieval church asserted

1

Similar observations are voiced in a question put by Saturn to Solomon in Solomon

and Saturn II, ll. 302-308 (see chapter eight below).

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authoritative knowledge of the afterlife. But this mysterious “way of the dead” returns us to the existential precipice over which the funeral ship of another Dane, the legendary king Scyld, is dispatched in ll. 47-52 of Beowulf. The paganism of the sixth-century Scandinavians who populate that poem denies them sure knowledge about the afterlife: no one can say who “received the freight” of Scyld’s death-ship. This bit of Maxims I recalls that melancholy pagan agnosis, and deepens its air of mystery: why is holly kindled? It was a plant associated with a number of pre-Christian cults in many parts of Europe, so its naming here sits a little oddly against the poem’s Christian references. Is the distribution of the dead man’s goods merely the equivalent of executing a modern will? The context hints at some sort of ritual while specifying nothing in particular. The concluding observation, that “[r]enown is best,” identifies the successful warrior’s reputation as the most important achievement of heroic endeavour. This renown is most commonly denoted, as in these lines, by the Old English word dom. It is the ancestor of modern English “doom,” by way of a semantic shift that demands comment. Old English dom derives from the verb deman (the ancestor of early modern English “deem”), which means both “to judge” and “to esteem”: when a judge pronounces his “doom,” he renders judgment (another meaning of Old English dom). In the heroic context, the connotations of dom are wholly positive: the word means, more or less, “good” or “favourable” judgment or repute. Christian sensibilities later assimilated that notion of judgment to their expectation of God’s judgment of all human conduct on the last day. Domes-dæg (literally, “Doomsday”) thus meant not “day of calamity” but, more specifically, “day of judgement.” That day, in the homiletic discourses of the ninth and tenth centuries, represented a fearsome test to human consciousness, with the highest eternal stakes riding on the outcome of God’s dom pronounced on each and every individual soul, not all of whom would receive a pass into heaven. In addition, eschatological sensibilities, from long before the Anglo-Saxon era, had elaborated the scene of that last day with stretches of preparatory tribulation, which is why to say “doomsday” today (in suitably ominous tones) is to invoke some disaster-movie end-of-the-world scenario. But the dom or “doom” referred to here in Maxims I is wholly positive, indeed the whole point and desideratum of heroic endeavour. These first ten lines, including their deceptively simple opening observations about ice and fire, invite their audience to contemplate the far-reaching dynamics of change and mutability, from humble physical phenomena to the metamorphic passage of the human soul into and out

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of its abodes in time and space, dynamics to which the poem will refer repeatedly. They further draw our attention to the matter of legacy: of what flows from a particular life after its passage between birth and death, or in the disposition of a dead man’s goods, in the spring’s recovery of the life laid to rest across the preceding winter, in the signal flare of a heroic renown that is the successful warrior’s legacy to later generations.

ll. 80 – 91 To win a queen, a king must bargain with goods, with cup and rings. They both have first to learn the good of being liberal with their gifts. War will find its place within a man, battle will increase, a woman thrive, grow beloved of her people, hopefulkeep her counsels, prone to generosity with treasures and horses before the warrior-band, always and everywhere, she must first approach the prince’s presence, to bear the cup to him, her lord, extend it to the ruler’s hand, with counsel for both, joint rulers of the hall.

Relations between the sexes are here addressed, not for their role in the engendering of new life, but in fostering good will and wisdom in the mead hall. The man and woman here are king and queen. We first hear how a king must “bargain” for a queen with “cups and treasures.”1 Such a transaction would not involve mere chaffering: its elements touch wider spheres. The king’s wealth serves as a display of his competence as a ruler, including his capacity to command not only such riches but also the loyalty of his retainers and the respect of his foes. His largesse with such wealth would matter as much as its getting in the first place. The chronic violence of that getting in war contrasts starkly with the gracious ceremonies of the hall it helps to sustain. King and queen alike must learn the art of liberality. In Beowulf, the kingly gift-giving of a Hrothgar or a Hygelac is complemented by the conduct of their queens, Wealhtheow and Hygd, who bestow their own largesse on the guests and inhabitants of their halls. King and queen play distinctive roles within a strict protocol or choreography (seen repeatedly in Beowulf), in which the queen carries See also my discussion of ll. 43b-49 of Maxims II in the next chapter, which consider a woman’s limited options in the context of a negotiated marriage. 1

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the communal cup first to her lord before bearing it to each of his retainers in turn, addressing the occasion of the moment with her own words of counsel and celebration. This is the queen’s role, elsewhere called that of the frioðu-webba (“peace-weaver”), as critical to the happy functioning of mead-hall society as her husband’s authority, charisma and martial prowess.

ll. 92 – 105 The ship should be studded with nails, the pale board of linden-wood bound fast into a shield. When the ship stands anchored, the Frisian wife welcomes her beloved sailor back: his keel will have returnedher man come home, her own breadwinner. She summons him within, cleans his scummy clothes and gives him fresh, and yields on land to all his urgent love. A woman should be faithful to her man, though often they are charged with treachery. Many are true, but many keen to roam, make free with strangers while theirs are far away. Though he voyage long, a sailor has to hope his beloved waits, like him, for what can’t be rushed. If he survives unscathed, then home he comes should any opportunity arise, unless the sea once more arouses him, lays hands upon the anxious maiden’s joy.

The poet contemplates structures that hold amid time’s changes across a number of different registers. The ship’s nailed strakes echo the bound linden-wood of the shield; both must protect the human life behind them from the buffeting they sustain from waves or blades. The Frisian woman’s bond to her man performs a similar service. The peoples of Frisia were long acknowledged as exemplary seamen and shipbuilders. Once more a felt reciprocity charges the idealthe Frisian woman’s sympathy reaches out towards her returning sailor. His labour feeds her; she takes him in and attends to the needs of his heart and his body. The next lines in this passage enjoin fidelity yet introduce a note of fickleness and infidelity: many such women are true, but others entertain strange men while theirs are away. Once again the tone here is more matter-offact than moralising; church teachings offer regular cautions about the

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“weaker” sex who inherit their mother Eve’s susceptibility to temptation. But the end of this passage strikes a note both resigned and reciprocal: the sailor while on his voyage can only trust to his wife’s faithfulness on land, while his compulsion to return to the sea will cost her untold sleepless nights in turn. What began like a typical medieval complaint about female waywardness ends very differently, with a tableau of mutual care and trust between husband and wife that, in the face of life’s hardships, can function ideally like the solidarity of lord and retainer in the mead hall: never perfect and always at risk, but necessary if life is to proceed at all. The couple’s domestic uncertainties stand balanced against the outward perils to which the husband must expose himself at sea, just as his faithful wife may be subjected to the unsolicited attentions of other men in his absence.

ll. 106 – 118 The prosperous merchant, when he comes sailing home, will buy from its owners the stately residence. He’ll use wood and water, once the dwelling is his, and purchase food, should he require more, before he finally yields to his fatigue. He who eats too seldom will be sick. Even if someone sit him in the sun, he couldn’t survive on pleasant skies alone: however warm the summer, before he dies, he’ll be hopelessly enfeebled if he lacks a friend to feed him while he’s still alive. A man must nourish his strength with food, conceal his murder beneath the earth, below the soil, who thinks to hide it well. Yet though that death lie sunk in the dark, grave error it remains. The wretch will bend and sink beneath his sickness; justice will flower: good counsel helps him most and evil least, which chooses the worse path.

The poem next considers networks of exchange in a mercantile economy. A merchant, having returnedpresumably cashed up from some successful ventureis able to purchase a “stately” home and the wood, food and drink he’ll need to live and entertain in comfort. This brief vignette sketches the lineaments of a new world, its economy grounded in the getting and spending of capital. It eerily foreshadows the ever-more-imposing cash economies of later medieval Europe,

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economies eventually rooted in the abstract reckoning of value that money represents, divorced from a heroic culture’s grounding of value in ancestry and personal loyalty and valour. Why must he “buy more food should he need more”? Why might he need “more”? For simple nutrition? To lay in stores against future want? For some display of lavish hospitality? We are not told, beyond the cryptic caution that he must secure such provision before he becomes too meþe (“weary,” l. 110b). Has his recent voyaging fatigued him? Or the exertions of his getting and spending? We can only speculate, though in numerous scenes of heroic mead-hall feasting that occur in Old English poetry, weariness does not figure particularly. When, in ll. 1790b-1792a of Beowulf, Hrothgar retires from the floor of Heorot with his queen, his departure is a stately progress, more like the setting of the sun, accompanied by a new moon, than the mere easing of an old body’s need for rest. The traditional entertainments of the hall are self-propelling and -sustaining. Does Maxims I here implicitly contrast the conventions of such scenes with a sense of the table spread by the merchant’s hand being somehow less forthcoming, its joys somehow dimmer and lacking the zest of the hero’s feast? Could a merely purchased dinner somehow appear less sustaining than one laid on by the goodwill of a lord in his hall, a trifling mercantile transaction rather than a species of large-hearted bounty? Note that the merchant is given no social setting apart from his power to buy and sell. As far as we can see here, he dines in his stately house alone. It’s a tempting conceit, especially as the next lines address the condition of a sick man who’s lost his appetite. His need for human nursing is paramountunlike a plant, he can’t live on sunlight, and his hunger will prostrate him “if he lacks / a friend to feed him while he’s still alive,” as I have rendered the Old English, which is actually a bit starker: literally, “if he does not know who feeds him while he is alive.” The literal meaning is clear enough: unless someone feeds the sick man, he’ll die, but the words here connote more than just provision of food. They emphasise relationship over mere function, personal gesture over mechanical process. The provision of effective nourishment demands a social or communal context that mere economic transaction cannot provide. In an unexpected turn, the next lines associate the bodily vigour sustained by nutrition with the murder such strength can be turned to commit. This seems to anticipate how, in the meditation of ll. 191-200 below, the poem ends with a contemplation of the murder of Abel by his brother Cain and its psycho-historical consequences. If one commits so

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anti-social an act, he must of course conceal it “beneath the earth,” a precise antithesis of how the hero’s capacity for killing, properly directed against enemies and monsters, contributes to his renown. Killing too shameful to show itself results in a death that is a “grave error”: the poet says it ne gedefe, a phrase that pertains as much to the wider heroic ethos as to any specifically moral assessment, combining a sense of moral transgression with a sense of social unfitness or shamefulness. It simply will not do (a possible modern English equivalent of hit ne gedefe): such crime puts the world out of joint. This meditation concludes by observing how the “wretch” will have to “sink” beneath his “disease,” though whether the Old English adl (“disease,” “sickness”) names a physical or a moral pathology remains ambiguous: the word’s literal denotation is almost always “disease,” yet the passage associates this “wretched” man’s degradation with the “flourishing” of “justice.” Good counsel (ræd in the Old English) amid life’s uncertainties is the greatest help, while bad or evil counsel is useless. As an operation of human intellect and imagination, ræd plays a critical part in Old English poetry. The verb rædan can mean “to counsel,” “to interpret” or “to read.” Ræd is the direct ancestor of early modern English “rede.” Rædels, a derived abstract form, means “riddle.” Thus ræd incorporates elements of interpretation, decoding and the happy resolution of cognitive tangles. The charisma of effective leadership would have hinged in large part on the wisdom and insight inherent in a king’s ræd, both that given him by his counsellors and that of his own thoughts. Thus did his subjects mock the spectacularly inept King Æthelred (æþel, “noble” + ræd, “counsel”) with the nickname Unræd (“No-ræd,” “evilræd” or “useless-ræd”or all three). The modernisation of his nickname as the “Unready” misses the wicked joke. Ræd could be taken as one of the primary overall objects of wisdom poetry: good counsel or “rede” that effectively “reads” the riddles of experience.

ll. 119 – 127 Good prevails, in the provenance of God. Thought must be controlled, the hand directed. Sight in the eye, wisdom in the breast, where all the deepest thoughts of man reside. In every mouth there is a need for food, but meals will come at their appointed hours. Gold sits well upon a warrior’s sword, excellent keen tool of victory.

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Chapter One Treasures become a queen, a good poet his people, armed warfare men who thus defend their homes.

The first verse here exploits the single vowel-length distinction (reflected in the two words’ modern spellings) between “good” and “god,” both spelled with a single o in Old English. Both possess wide ranges of semantic nuance. The ancestor of our “good,” depending on context, can denote moral virtue, practical utility or the entire complex of inner resources and outer behaviours that constitute the “good” man in heroic tradition. Exactly what the Old English word behind our “God” denoted in its pre-Christian use is a difficult consideration, both psychologically and theologically. Modern notions of deity in the West reflect millennia of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology, both systematic and speculative. The habit of speaking about the transcendent and omnipotent god of later tradition as a “he,” a personality more or less human in its dynamics, is deeply engrained, even among those with little or no investment in any particular belief in such a figure. That habit of what I might call anthropopsychic discourse about deity was well settled into the Christian imagination of the early Middle Ages. By anthropo-psychic I mean the tendency of such god-talk to assume that the god in question possesses an inward nature, analogous to our own, that manifests outwardly in expressions of desire, will and action, as it does from within the psyche of any human being. But as in so much else, Anglo-Saxon theology, however orthodox or Augustinian, could be haunted by the dim memory of a preChristian imagination, especially in poetry, where diction and vocabulary preserve an underlay of pre-Christian discourse. Of which, in its original setting, we know nothing, of course. But when a homilist such as Ælfric or Wulfstan uses the word god (“God”), we can be reasonably certain he intends his audience to imagine the God of Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome, a god whose special nature I signal in my own neutral discourse with his traditional upper-case “G.” But almost any use of the same word by an Anglo-Saxon poet, even if he clearly intends to denote that highly determined notion of Christian godhead, can appear eccentric on closer inspection, responding to the tug of older imaginative centres that might still colour his diction, however invisible the actual pigments might be to us. Thus when the author of Maxims I expresses the notion here that “good” thrives and somehow “belongs with” or “pertains to” God (the Old English half-line, ond wiþ God lenge, could be translated “and belongs to God” or “and abides with God”), he speaks with a direct

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simplicity that masks the complex possibilities. Remember the manuscript spelling of god (“God”) was never capitalised, nor was the long “o” of the word for “good” marked, so the two words would look identical on the page, distinguished by only a slight difference of pronunciation. Does god (“good”) refer to moral virtue or practical competence? Conformity to some external standard of goodness? Or perhaps to some inner virtue or vitality that burgeons outward from all living forms? Any of these could be said to derive from the endlessly creative élan of God in the Christian sense. The next lines move the focus inward: both mentally and bodily, thought must be guarded, governed or restrained, while the hand (whose, we might ask: the artisan’s? the warrior’s? the secular lord’s?) must be guided or governed in the performance of its work. Sight as a precious sensory faculty is sustained in the physical vehicle of the eyeballs, while “wisdom” resides in what the Anglo-Saxons regarded as the bodily seat of all profound thought, the breast (think of how we can “speak from the heart,” which entails more than simply a high emotional intensity). The interaction of body with mind and spirit seems a central concern here, the body’s capacities enabling the inner mystery of the “I,” or ego-self as we might say now, to encounter, respond to and affect the world it finds spread before it. Humbler bodily circumstance follows: each mouth demands food, but meals proceed, ideally, at seemly regular intervals, a patterning of otherwise instinctual behaviour that is a hallmark of human culture. Or they follow some unpredictable schedule, leaving us prey to hunger. We are told that food suits the mouth, then that gold serves as a fit adornment for a warrior’s sword, or as a treasure bedecking the person of a queen. Before we can even decide if formal analogy is at play here, we are next told that the verse of a worthy poet elevates and celebrates many deeds of valour, followed by a reflection on the commission of those very deeds that ennoble their performers: men who fight to defend their homes against the ravages of war. This entire passage serves as a linked exposition of the Anglo-Saxon notion of virtue, which runs parallel to some Christian notions of virtue but also pursues its own sense of what might gedefe (“be appropriate,” “be of avail,” “be fitting”) in the context of heroic endeavour (see my discussion of ll. 106-118 above). In short order, it tracks from the purely physical virtue of food to social virtues of the mead hall, embodied in the physical displays of honourable ornament and the warrior’s willingness to accept the rigours and risks of defending it all.

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ll. 128 – 136 The shield belongs to the soldier, to the poacher his arrow, a ring to the bride; his books befit the scholar. The holy man will have his eucharist, the heathen man his sins. Woden made idols the one who wields all splendour has framed the heavens, the skies’ expanse: that is a god of power, the true and self-authenticating king, the saviour of souls, who will redress the whole of all we’ve suffered in life and, finally, at the end, will rule humankind, the very judge himself.

The first four lines of this passage proceed through a tightly constructed catalogue, in which each half-line aligns a human artefact or action with a figure typically associated with its use or commission. The first half-line of the Old English establishes the signature gnomic 1 syntax: Scyld sceal cempan (literally, “[The] shield must [go with the] soldier”). The auxiliary verb sculan needs no infinitive to complete a meaning, albeit a fluid meaning whose sense the audience must complete. The shield is obliged to do something? Acts according to its essential nature? Or does so with reasonable predictability? The shield must accompany the warrior? belong to the warrior? befit the warrior? All these, and more, are in play around the half-line’s terse utterance. Such a weave of syntactic and semantic ambiguity is a typical turn in wisdom utterances, leading them away from flat declaration towards a richness of possible and latent meaning that challenges the listener to complete the speaker’s thought. This gnomic syntax is the complement of the riddle, which demands its reader or hearer negotiate the play of its possible solutions by working its suggestive clues towards a single solution. While this first half-line refers unambiguously to a single relationship between the weapon and its wielder, it invites reflection on the many different ways that relationship might play out in the realm of lived experience. The next places the “shaft” or “arrow” against the poacher whose trade demands stealth and the ability to strike from a distance, as opposed to the warrior’s place in the shield wall, forthrightly shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades, toe“Gnomic” (from the Greek gnomikos, “thoughtful, knowing”) is an adjective used to describe anything pertaining to maxims or proverbs. An individual wisdom-saying can be called a “gnome.” “Gnostic” and “Gnosticism,” as it happens, derive from the same root. 1

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to-toe with his foes and hoping to prevail through stout resistance rather than subterfuge and flight. The ring and bride of the next line seem an abrupt turn though an obvious enough pairing even in our time. Once again their bare juxtaposition invites us to reflect on more than just the obvious significance of a ring in the context of marriage. The Old English word beag used here can denote a “ring” but also more generically a “treasure” or “precious object.” Is this ring purely a symbol or is it an instrument: the marker of the bride’s possession by her husband or a medium of exchange like the gold adornments passed between a lord and his retainers in the mead hall? The ring and bride nest within a dance of possibilities. As do the “scholar” and “books” of the accompanying halfline: scholars and students (the Old English leornere used here can mean either) of almost any time and place can appreciate this evocation of their relationship to books. Are the latter simply tools of their trade? Emblems of their vocation? Products? Or the hard taskmasters of the scholar’s labour? Once again all are facets of a whole; each complements the others. In the poem’s early-medieval milieu, the notions of books, scholars and learning inevitably suggest the life of the clergy, so the next half-line’s turn to the “holy man” and his “housel” (husl, “eucharist” or “consecrated host”) follows naturally enough. Like the scholar who labours over his books to effect meaning, 1 the priest operates upon the eucharist, through the liturgy of the mass, a thaumaturgical text that effects the bread’s transubstantiation into Christ’s own flesh, which is also God’s “word.” The scholar is both servant and master of his books. Having summoned God’s presence into the eucharist, the priest becomes as much servant as officiator or executive, ministering both to God and to his congregation, to whom he distributes the consecrated host, thus enabling God’s material grace to take bodily part in their communion. There can be no richer meditation on reciprocal relationships than that afforded by such eucharistic theology, and the condensed syntax of Old English poetry allows the author of Maxims I to evoke much of it in the tight turnings of a few half-lines. You could read the sequence of pairingsshield/soldier, arrow/poacher, ring/bride, books/scholar and eucharist/celebrantas a kind of riddle: what do all these associations have in common? Each involves an agent and an instrument. Each object allows its possessor to fulfil a specific role, but the range of the roles Another Old English word for “scholar” is bocere, an agentive form of boc (“book”), literally “booker,” i.e. “a person whose business is books.” 1

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invoked reaches from the poacher’s bush-covert to the priest’s public/cosmic thaumaturgy in the mass, by way of the marriage bed and the wide world of scholarship. That is an ample compass of human endeavour captured in a very small net of words! Yet that pairing of priest and host is followed by a wholly antithetical pairing that associates “heathen men” with their sins. Christian and heathen alike are capable of sin, but the eucharistic context of these few lines draws our attention to the Christian’s more instrumental access to God’s grace and forgiveness, a reciprocity from which the heathen is formally excluded, thus immuring him in hell with his sins forever, unless he converts and repentsthus “transubstantiating” himself into one of God’s elect. We can only speculate how the establishment of the Danelaw in the northeast of England as a consequence of Viking incursion and settlement might have kept the contrasting cultures of pagan Danes and Christian Anglo-Saxons in the minds of authors such as the poet responsible for Maxims I, if he wrote after the Danelaw had become a legal and social fact of life. The pagan’s beliefs are invoked in the next half-line, which, in a rare naming of the chief god of the Germanic pantheon, informs us that “Woden made idols.” This simple statement draws on a late-classical and early-medieval Christian understanding of the pagan deities displaced by the new faith as it took hold among the different peoples of Europe. The account that became church orthodoxy took definitive form in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. In his City of God, he mounted a defence of Christianity against traditionalist Roman critics who believed that the empire’s turn from its old gods to the new faith that had emerged from one of its far-flung eastern provinces was responsible for its “fall” and loss of control over its fortunes. Augustine’s case for Christianity sought to identify the old gods as impostors, originally illustrious humans whose memorial shrines had been infested by fallen angels who used their lingering powers over the human mind and earthly matter to contrive false miracles that led nearly all the peoples of the earth to forget the true creator and worship them instead. Thus all the figures of the Roman pantheon were in reality historical human figures whose memory had been corrupted by demonic interference. 1 The Anglo-Saxon homilist Ælfric updated Augustine’s account in a number of his writings, most comprehensively in a piece entitled De falsiis diis (“Concerning False

1

See my brief discussion of the Greek mythographer Euhemeros on pp. 121-122.

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Gods”), 1 where he includes the deities of the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral pagan traditions in an extension of Augustine’s discourse. Thus “Woden,” the name of the chief deity of those traditions (“Wotan” in German and “Óðinn” among Scandinavian peoples), might signal both the human and the fallen angelic origins of that false deity. A number of royal genealogies recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle include an ancestor named Woden, understood as an illustrious but human forebear. No doubt, at some time prior to the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion, kings might claim divine descent, and the cachet of such a claim left at least some of their Christian descendants reluctant to remove the name altogether from the list of their antecedents. Clearly Augustine’s historicising explanation sufficed to cleanse the name of its traditional pagan associations, at least for the monastic compilers of the Chronicle. Either Woden the fallen angel/false god or Woden the illustrious royal forebear could be said to have “wrought” idols, in the sense of being responsible for their cultivation, at one historical remove or another: the “original” human Woden by inadvertently lending his name or the fallen angels by directly distorting the beliefs of his people after his death. The remaining lines, which conclude part two, contrast the false and misleading “Woden” with the true God of Christian tradition, the governor of all times and the judge of human destinies. His identification as the “very judge,” whose reality and authority are self-authenticating, lays bare the false contingency of the “wrought” idols. The latter have a historical point of origin at the hands of some fabricator or other, which cannot be said of the author of reality itself. He is the sole divine artificer of eternity, whose inconceivable otherness can perceive the inward being of each soul, who he will judge, justly and finally, at the end of time. A greater contrastbut also a greater reciprocity between a cosmic outward dimension and the intimately human inward is scarcely conceivable.

C ll. 137 – 142 Counsel should be spoken, secrets inscribed, The song sung, good reputation earned, the judgment handed down, as the day speeds on.

In Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection (2 vols, ed. John C. Pope), Early English Text Society 259-260, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, vol. 2: ll. 667-724. 1

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Chapter One The virtuous man recalls a well-tamed horse: familiar, tested well, and soundly shod. Of such virtue no one produces too much.

Ræd, here translated as “counsel,” makes another appearance in Maxims I, this time as public performance, when we are told it should be spoken, evoking a typical mead-hall scene in which a lord and his senior retainers consider policy. In contrast with such public deliberation, “secrets inscribed” invokes the Anglo-Saxon concept of the run (“secret,” “private thought”). The word in Old English meant a “mystery” or something to be whispered in a conspiratorial fashion: the related verb runian means “to whisper” in precisely such a fashion. 1 Such mystery, we are told here, ought to be writan (“written”), but the original sense of the verb writan is “to inscribe” or “to incise,” and it is the verb commonly used to denote the cutting of runic inscriptions into wood, metal or stone. We needn’t get caught up in the unanswerable question of whether the runic alphabet was believed by the Anglo-Saxons to possess any occult properties. 2 To be æt rune is to sit in private deliberation, either in a group or in the mysterious depths of one’s own thoughts. The inscribing of runes was a specialised craft, its secrets not available to just anyone, with or without any idea that the runes could channel occult forces. The inscribed rune here implies a private wisdom, concealed from ordinary perception in the sphere of inward thought or deliberation, in contrast to the ræd that is to be delivered publicly. The line suggests as well how the run might pose a “riddle” (Old English rædels), to be solved or interpreted by the mix of reading and decoding that constitutes the semantic field of rædan. The next two lines comprise four noun-verb pairings, the infinitive forms of the verbs all dependent for their aspect on, once again, the gnomic sceal. The “song” sung and the “praise” earned share a mutually instrumental relationship in the heroic milieu, where the poet’s song serves as the ultimate vehicle of the hero’s dom, the prospect of which in turn motivates all of his endeavours. That very dom is next named (see also my discussion of ll. 70-79 above) as a reckoning or summing up of the hero’s achievements. 3 The next image, of a horse whose innate vigour answers to a taming human hand, might serve as an emblem of specifically It survives into Middle English as rownen and later disappears. The modern English word “rune” (meaning “a runic character”) is a seventeenth-century Scandinavian loan. See also the discussion of The Rune Poem in chapter four below. Despite the clearly secular heroic context here, the poet’s invocation of dom cannot exclude a sense of God’s final dom (“doom” or “judgment”) on all at the end of time. 1

2 3

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Christian virtue. In his Phaedrus, Plato uses the analogy of the soul as a charioteer governing an ill-matched team of horses, an image repeated in many later Latin writings. Here the tamed-horse image seems more in tune with those aspects of the heroic tradition that prize a quasi-stoic governance of inner passions. This passage moves nimbly from the notion of public governance, through modes of inward reflection, to the internalised mastery of the individual will that is the sine qua non of heroic virtue.

ll. 143 – 150 A man should hold with friends down every path; he’ll often detour far around the town where he knows no certain friend awaits. That man, unhappy, deprived of company, must take the wolves for companions, the beast all treacherous. Too often such a friend will savage him; fear enfolds the grey one, a grave the corpse. The grey wolf mourns its hungernot at all does it circle the tomb lamenting, not at all will it weep over slaughter and the violent death of men, for always it wants more.

The inward achievement of virtue should ideally be answered by the companionship of other souls of like quality. This is the bedrock of the heroic ideal that underlies its whole vision of social coherence. It is as much a public as a private good, as the scenes here illustrate, in their contrasting images of the companioned man who must stick fast by his mates and the friendless wretch who not only lacks fellowship but comes also to avoid its very possibility, in his alienated state shunning scenes of potential conviviality where he knows he has no place. His adoption of the wolf as his “companion” sounds a grim irony. In Germanic literary sensibility, the wolf is essentially a carrion animal that feeds on others’ misfortune and death. The heroic is above all social. The role of the “lone wolf” (a later Romantic conceptiontake a bow, Lord Byron) as an ambivalently idealised outsider and renegade would have been incomprehensible to any Anglo-Saxon member of a lord’s household retinue or dryht. Anglo-Saxon laws codify the proscription of the “wolf’s head,” their name for an offender formally excluded from human society. The speaker of the Anglo-Saxon exile’s lament known as The Wanderer tells of the psychological excruciation of a man shut out from the material

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and psychological comforts of a social place and identity. Such a man, this passage says, will most likely be turned on and torn to pieces by his lupine “companions.” In the wilderness, remorseless, unsocial brute strength proves the only measure of power and authority. Not surprisingly, then, fear attends the “grey one,” the wolf’s presence, akin to that of vultures hovering above the man dying of thirst in a desert. In Old English poetry, the wolf figures as one of the emblematic “beasts of battle” (along with scavenger birds like the raven or crow) who gather before, during and after skirmishes, instinctively anticipating a rich feast upon the bodies of the slain. A grave gapes for the dead man, as bitter ironies proliferate: the wolf mourns its hunger rather than the dead; it circles the tomb, not weeping for the dead and the violence that laid them there but in expectation of more flesh with which to feed its insatiable hunger. The outer cycles of bodily life and death, which human rituals such as burial seek to articulate in at least proximately intelligible gestures, are rendered unstable here by the thrust from within of the wolf’s immoderate and inarticulate appetite.

ll. 151 – 163 A wound needs bandaging. An unyielding man calls down vengeance. A bow for the arrowboth require alike a man to be their partner. One splendid gift is worthy of another gold should circulate. To the prosperous God gives wealth and takes it back again. The hall must stand into its own old age. The toppled tree puts forth the least new growth. The living tree must burgeon; trust will spread that rises up within the innocent heart. God pays no heed to the faithless, reckless man, his spirit bitter, incapable of trust. The lord created much, and as it stood so long ago, so he bid it remain.

The theme of reciprocity continues to work through a succession of different circumstances in these next lines. A wound demands binding, while a man of harsh will draws hardship upon himself. Are we to see bandage and hardship alike as correctives? Is a man of unyielding temper like an open wound? The next image approaches the poise of a Zen koan. Bow and arrow need each other to do their job, but both must be brought

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into play by human strength and dexterity, not to mention the ingenuity that fashioned them in the first place. The image captures the interplay of mind and matter in all human endeavour, with great precision. The next lines return us to the mead-hall ideal of largesse, the giving of gold whose circulation serves as the material embodiment of the reciprocal flows of goodwill that are the only guarantors of such a society’s continuing health. The fortune that brings such gold to hand operates, ultimately, at God’s sole discretion, who bestows and withholds as he will. The hall “must” stand, yet we know from most Germanic literature how such structures stand and fall according to the unstable fortunes of their inhabitants. The notion of a hall “ageing” suggests how the sometimes-desperate defences constructed by human societies against all that seeks to disintegrate them can have “all too short a date” and, like their mortal denizens themselves, are subject to the wear and tear of time that shreds all structures and fabrics. There follows an image of two trees in contrasting states, the first fallen and showing therefore the least signs of life and growth. Another potentially banal observation of the interruption of natural process that invites deeper consideration: the toppled tree, shorn off from its roots, has been cut loose from its exchanges with the living earth that has hitherto sustained it, a precise analogue of the dysfunctional hall-society whose networks of exchange and goodwill have been soured by ill will, distrust or treason. The burgeoning tree, like the sound society, is set atop upwelling springs of goodwill that flow from innocent, well-disposed hearts. The faithless man, we are next told, is multiply bound: unable or unwilling to contribute to any culture of reciprocal regard and support, he both diminishes whatever society he finds himself in and, internally, feels that diminution in the ebbing springs of his own psycho-spiritual vitality. Such a man is abandoned even by God, the creator whose vast creation still stands as he created it in the deeps of past time, whatever mayhem his fallen human handiwork may have inflicted upon itself.

ll. 164 – 175 Wise words befit every sort of man song the minstrel, discernment the common chap. There are, across the earth, as many deep thoughts as there are men: to each his private mind. He feels his solitude less who hoards a store of poetry, whose hands can caress the harp:

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Chapter One he possesses the gift of song God gave to him. Wretched he who has to live alone fate has decreed that he remain without friends. Better for him to have possessed a brother, that both should be the offspring of one man, should they both desire to hunt the boar or the bear that is a beast which swings a murderous paw.

Language and its relation to thought dominate the first of these lines. From the professional word- and song-smithing of the minstrel to the language of ordinary human conversation, a conscious attention to language, producing “wise words,” is both befitting and beneficial. Every single individual harbours a private mind, invisible to others but communicable in speech and song. Poetry lightens the existential burden of the isolated psyche. The scop’s skill, physically embodied in the light touch of hand on harp, articulates the raw data of experience as aesthetically heightened art. The poet here names it the very gift of God, who, in Christian tradition grounded in the opening of the gospel of John, is “the Word,” 1 the promise and the articulation of whole worlds. Against the internal solitude of deep thought and reflection stands its outward inversion as loneliness and isolation. A brother could help one so afflicted to manage the natural world’s confronting savageries, but if fate decrees otherwise, it cannot be. Shortly (see ll. 186-203 below), Maxims I will conclude with an extended meditation on Cain’s murder of his brother Abelcould the reference here to a hypothetically beneficent brother be an ironic foreshadowing? Without community and the gift of language that grounds any meaningful notion of community, words can splutter only purposeless monologue, and life reduces to simple predation, with the prize falling not to the most articulate hand but to the swiftest and most murderous paw.

ll. 176 – 185 Always should those warriors bear arms and sleep togetherno gossip should divide them till death should part them. They both should sit at chess and let their anger fade away, forget the bitter events that befell, and take their play John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” 1

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at the board. The idle hand is satisfied to take its pleasure at gambling, tossing dice. If the wide-bellied ship’s not running under sail, weary he who rows against the wind. Quite often that exhausted sailor’s reproached so he loses face and drags his oar on board.

The solidarity of warriors figures in the first of these linesanticipated in the hypothetical bear-hunting brethren of the lines immediately preceding. The thought seems to have moved on to a representative company, whose cohesion and internal loyalties should not be jarred by the ill-intentioned language of gossip. Such warriors should divert the potential for internal strife into a game, here the mock warfare of chess, whose stylised fighting is a species of play that unites rather than divides. The other sort of game invoked here, dicing, offers the possibility of recreational play but also another potentially disruptive social irritant. Still another collective activity, rowing, demands an equivalent commitment from each of its participants. The slacker, whether through malingering or honest exhaustion, is exposed by his dragging oar and faces exclusion or the compulsion to withdraw into a vexed solitude.

ll. 186 – 203 Corruption sorts with fraud, while cunning hands abet an assuring appearancethat’s how the dice are loaded. 1 Often they will fling words before they turn their backs. The cool operator is everywhere prepared. Feud has beset the families of men, ever since the earth first swallowed Abel’s blood. No single day’s misunderstanding that, for from it sprang torrents of wrathful blood far and wide, among many peoples, hatred curdled with death. Cain struck down his gentle brother and sought to keep that death hidden, but afterward it was known, far and wide, that relentless violence was ravaging men, all the earth’s inhabitants, who endured the clash of weapons everywhere, A speculative translation of the original’s cryptic þy weorþeð se stan forstolen (“in this way is the stone stolen”). The prior contexts of gambling and deceit suggests my transformation of the abused “stones” as “loaded dice.” 1

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Chapter One conceiving, forging, honing the deadly sword. The shield must stand ready, the spear on its shaft, the edge on the sword and the point upon the spear, the will of the stern, the helmet on the bold, but the coward’s mind is always the meagrest of hoards.

When the complex web of mutual regard and obligation that holds a society together begins to unravel, even the playing of games can become an arena of deadly conflict, governed by an amoral, ruthless, beggar-myneighbour pragmatism that values success over honour and goodwill. In a world of loaded dice, of words and knives alike wielded in quick hands governed by short-tempered minds, the “cool operator” must be “ready” indeed. Here we enter the dark stream of history, where the Christian doctrine of the fall of Adam and Eve resonates against the feud ethos of heroic culture. Abel’s blood, shed by the hand of his brother Cain, is drunk by the earth, and from it springs a river of blood, ramifying like a tree or a river delta as it flows down the stream of historical time, engendering murderous mayhem in every quarter of the world. “Relentless violence” (including that of the monster Grendel in Beowulf, whose ancestry the poet traces back to Cain in a variation of the same sensibility that finds expression here in Maxims I) hounds humankind. The horror unleashed by Cain’s primordial act of fratricide can be neither undone nor mitigated, yet the poem’s ending is not wholly bleak: the accoutrements of the heroic enterprisehelm and spear and swordcan be beautiful as well as deadly artefacts, and the minds and wills of the men who wield them can turn away from the malign, motiveless malice that set the whole cascade of death in motion in the first place: courage can face up to the worst, while the coward’s fear bankrupts his spirit. One stands and resists, another flees till cut down. There are no soft options, but some are nobler than others.

CHAPTER TWO THE ARROW OF TIME:

MAXIMS II

Before considering this poem, a few words about its manuscript setting are in order. Its title (assigned by modern editors, like the titles of all Old English poems) makes it sound like a companion piece to the Exeter Book’s Maxims I, which it both is and isn’t. The Exeter Book appears to have been compiled as an anthology of poetry. Whoever assembled its contentswhether a single editor/redactor or any number of hands over who knows how many yearstheir principle of inclusion was the condition of verse. Maxims II was transcribed into a different manuscript altogether, placed, along with one other shortish poem, between two long prose texts. The first is the Alfredian translation of the Historia adversos paganos (“History against the Pagans”) composed by Paulus Orosius, a contemporary of Augustine of Hippo. Often referred to simply as the Orosius by scholars, the Historia offers a history of the world intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian revelation’s understanding of the workings of divine providence in human affairs. 1 In the Cotton Tiberius B I manuscript, two relatively brief verse texts follow the Orosius: The Menologium and Maxims II. The former, whose title is a Latin word that means “collection of months,” gives an account of the major saints’ days and other religious festivals that constitute the liturgical year. Maxims II follows, and the manuscript ends with the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which gives prose synopses of major events in world history from 60 BCE to 1066, where it is interrupted, its last pages written in the hand of a scribe who appears to

In his famous preface to his translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, King Alfred names the Orosius as one of those books “most needful for men to know,” and thus high on his list of patristic writings he hoped to have translated into Old English. 1

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have worked without a native speaker’s familiarity with Old English and compiled entries that continue the text into the twelfth century. Thus Maxims II comes to its readers in the company of three texts that reflect the powerful interaction between human consciousness and time. The annalistic historical episodes recorded in the Orosius and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle literally count the years as a linear flow. Events occur so many years before or after the founding of Rome or before or after Christ’s incarnation, the two great anchor points of calendar time that orient Classical and Christian consciousness. The Menologium choreographs the liturgical year, which shapes time as cyclical recurrence. What sort of time scheme does a collection of maxims or proverbs effect and inhabit? The sceal- and bið-formulae typical of Old English gnomic utterance are technically present tense, but they point forward as well as backward in time. To achieve the status of a maxim, a process or a pattern of behaviour would have to have been observed repeatedly in the past, over a long enough stretch of time that it could then be taken as a predictor of future processes and behaviours. By the same token, we could say that a maxim articulates timeless realities or principles not conditioned solely by the accumulation of days into years and ages. With this in mind, let us consider what Maxims II might wish to tell its audience. It begins with a brief but wide-angle sketch of the world that comprises both traditional heroic and Christian elements:

ll. 1 - 5a A king keeps his realm. The walled towns can be seen from afar, giants’ clever works, footing this earth on well-wrought stone. In the sky the wind is swiftest, thunder loudest in its hour. Christ’s glories are great, fate most severe. 1

Though each item here announces what sounds like a self-evident and self-contained truth, the propositions resonate against one another in a manner both uncertain and suggestive. A king “holds” his realm, governs The original text can be found in The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, Vol. VI), (ed. Elliott van Kirk Dobbie), New York: Columbia University Press, 1942, and in Old English Shorter Poems: Wisdom and Lyric (ed. 1

and trans. Robert E. Bjork), Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. I have consulted both editions in preparing my translations.

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it, and stands foremost among its population. Cities stand out from the landscape with analogous prominence. Derived from Latin castrum, the Old English word for city used here, ceaster, commonly denotes a major conurbation, of the kind often defended in the Middle Ages behind walls, towers, and gates. 1 Kings and cities alike impose on what surrounds them. Both demand to be seen: the king on his throne, the city “visible from afar.” And both are human constructs: the city, in its complex design, is referred to here as “the cunning work of giants.” The phrase enta geweorc (“the work [or works] of giants”) is commonly used in Old English poems to characterise imposing architectural remains, possibly inspired by what was left of Roman structures that had been built in the centuries before the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestors had settled the land. The phrase has little to do with the giants of folklore, serving more as an all-purpose intensifier: such works are very old, very big, and imposing. The author further characterises them as “clever,” built with “well-wrought” stone. The passage suggests some analogy with an effective king’s command of his realm and the builders’ arrangement of the city’s stones that both beautifies the structure and enables it to withstand the passage of time, at least to a degree. In the next half-line the poet tells us of the wind’s swift stirring of the air, another sort of governing energy, whose airy lightness, invisibility and unpredictability contrasts with the stolid mass of stone walls or the imperative voice of a king’s commands. Thunder represents another domineering agency of the skies. In Germanic myth it was associated with the heavy-handed god Thor (whose Old English name, Þunor, is also the common noun “thunder”). Its rumblings are juxtaposed against the great þrymmas (“powers,” “splendours”) of Christ, followed by a dark assertion that “fate” is the “most severe.” Its alignment here in the same line with the transcendent glory of Christ lends it a gaunt power: once again we encounter the uncanny presence of wyrd, that mysterious halfpersonification which haunts the Anglo-Saxon poetic imagination from the depths of its Germanic past. Though commonly translated into modern English as “fate,” its resonances are more eerie and unsettling than those of that Latin-derived noun, which in modern English tends to express a post-facto perception of mere inevitability: “It was fate,” we might observe with equal conviction of a ghastly accident or a happy romance. What an Anglo-Saxon poet names when he uses the word wyrd It is a common element of English place names such as Manchester, Lancaster, and Winchester. 1

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is an altogether darker business, untouched by classical sensibilities, even when the word wyrd regularly glosses words such as fatum and fortuna in Latin manuscripts. The modern English reflex of wyrd, “weird,” carries some sense of its uncanny power: an agency without full personhood, a will or purpose without a face. The primary action of wyrd is to determine the moment of a man’s death (wyrd’s agency appears to have a bias towards masculine patients). In one sense nothing could be more definite: one is there, then one is not. Yet in another, nothing could be more uncertain: even in our rationally clocked and metred modernity, however near death’s approach, no one can predict the exact moment of anyone’s passing. In the violent uncertainties that attended Migration-Age Germanic cultures, death could ambush its victims unpredictably: an apparently invincible warrior might fall to a stray arrow, or to a moment’s lapse of attention in a fierce melee, or to disease or other accident. Who’d have seen that coming? Wyrd was thought to governor, at least, to dispenseall the wayward destinies to which human existence stood exposed. Between the material phenomenon of thunder and the uneasy Germanic metaphysics of wyrd, the poet invokes Christ’s “glories.” Does wyrd’s final position in this sequence, qualified by the superlative Old English form swiðost (“greatest,” “most powerful”; I have translated it here as “most severe”), somehow suggest that wyrd’s agency might still operate in the new Christian milieu, despite its pre-Christian provenance? Much depends on the semantic nuances of þrymmas (the Old English word I have translated as “glories”), which comprise elements of both imposing agency (“powers,” “forces”) and more aesthetic notions of “majesties” or “splendours.” Wyrd, in contrast, is identified simply as swiðost, an abstract qualifier that, despite its superlative attribution, does no more than identify wyrd as a mighty power. Here the figure of Christ appears to mediate between the material powers of the airs and the skies and the occult power of fate. In orthodox Christian thought, divine omniscience and omnipotence wield a supervening authority over any vagaries of chance or fate, which serve merely as its instruments, but here the agencies of sky, Christ, and fate are named in a sequence that makes them appear more as correlative powers.

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ll. 5b – 9 Winter is coldest, Lent the frostiest (it is the longest cold), summer sun-fairest (its heavens the hottest), the harvest triumphant, when men fetch in the year’s God-given fruits.

These lines combine a cyclical, seasonal vision of time with a sense of direction and progression. Each season is characterised by its most distinctive quality, again signalled with a superlative modifier. Winter is coldestthough the penitential season of Lent that follows is the “frostiest” and “longest cold,” combining its psycho-spiritual rigours with its seasonal duration. Spring in some stretches of England can take its time! Penitential teaching and practice call for protracted and coolly objective self-assessment. The act of penance takes place in the flow of time yet aims at eternity: Lent is also spring. The days of summer sun that follow answer the season of Lenten privation with swelling glory. The Old English word I’ve translated as “heavens,” swegl, means, broadly, “sky,” but it possesses many overtones. It is an exclusively poetic word whose dictionary definitions include “sky,” “heaven,” “the heavens,” “ether” (not the chemical compound but the ancient notion of a radiant medium that pervades the higher reaches of the cosmos above the earth) or “sun.” Its semantic resonance resembles that of the Greek word that gives us modern English “ether,” derived from the verb aithein, whose literal meaning is “to blaze” or “to blaze forth,” Both Old English swegl and the Greek aitheros seem to draw on some deeply embedded consciousness of the sky as a realm of radiant glory: think of a dazzling sunrise with long shafts of light bursting from behind cloud. In cultures whose sources of artificial light were limited to the candle, the torch, and the oil lamp, the sight of a sunrise or the full blaze of a night sky must have touched the common imagination in profound wayshard for us to imagine in our electrically lit age. Summer’s glory falls to earth as the harvest that opens forth in a glad burgeoning, its fruits characterised as “triumphant.” The Old English adjective here is a compound: hreð-eadgost (“most triumphantly blessed”). The first element is the noun hreð, another item of exclusively poetic vocabulary that means “triumph” or “victory,” whose context is commonly that of warriors who return flushed with triumph and laden with the spoils of victory, a powerful heroic equivalent to the fruits of a bountiful harvest, glad heralds of freedom from want through another

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winter. The second element, eadig, means simply “blessed” or “fortunate.” In bringing to men the “year’s fruits,” the harvest season epitomises the nurturing aspect of time, whose cycles can foster new life to swell the city’s population and the ranks of the king’s subjects, all under a divine providence that ensures the blessings thus realised.

ll. 10 – 12 Truth is trickiest, treasure is most precious, gold to each man, the old man wisest, with the wisdom of gathered years, who’s experienced much.

How are we to take the first proposition here? One modern editor of Maxims II finds the notion of “truth” being “tricky” or “deceptive” so unlikely that he plausibly emends the manuscript reading to give the passage a more conventional meaning, and there is ongoing debate about whether such emendation should be accepted. The manuscript half-line reads soð bið swicolost. The adjective swicol means “deceitful” or “misleading,” but the insular minuscule letters “c” and “t” closely resemble each other, which allows Dobbie to emend swicolost (“most deceitful,” “most misleading”) to switolost (