The Christian Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England: Approaches to Current Scholarship and Teaching 0859918416, 9780859918411

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THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND APPROACHES TO CURRENT SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING

Edited by PAUL CAVILL

H A. BftHWRB .

CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE ISSUES IN TEACHING AND RESEARCH ISSN 1740-9896

Series Editors Dee Dyas Helen Phillips The volumes in this series focus on key topics in the cultures of the past and the role of religion in these cultures. Each offers a collection of new essays by leading scholars, which aim to cover the major subjects in a particular area or period, and to provide teachers, researchers and students with the best of current thinking on the subject. They also discuss the issues involved in teaching, in an objective way, the often distant and sometimes alien concepts of the religious cultures of past centuries in a modern, secular, multi-cultural tociety.

THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN AN G LO -SA X O N ENGLAND

The essays collected here aim to open up issues in teaching and research relating to the Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition. They take a wide range of approaches, but are all concerned to set the sources under discussion in their original context of Christian ideas and influences, which are crucial to an informed understanding, but are not familiar to today’s readers. Some develop new approaches to familiar texts, such as Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, others deal with less familiar texts and genres to illustrate the influence of Christian ideas, from preaching to remembrance of the dead, and from the court of King Cnut to the monastic library. They provide essential background material for such matters as understanding the nature of the Bible, or the distinction between monastic and cleric in Anglo-Saxon England; others offer concise surveys of material evidence or genres; and show how themes can be used in constructing and evaluating courses teaching the tradition. Dr Pa u l Ca v il l teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Nottingham

© Editor and Contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2004 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 0 85991 841 6 BR 7 4 9

. C47

2004

The Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP 12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604-4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England : approaches to current scholarship and teaching / edited by Paul Cavill. p. cm. - (Christianity and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-85991-841-6 (alk. paper) 1. England - Church history - 449-1066 - Study and teaching. 2. Christianity and culture - England - History - To 1500 - Study and teaching. I. Cavill, Paul, 1956- II. Series. BR749.C47 2004 274.2'03 - dc21 2003013249

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

C ontents vii ix X

List o f Illustrations General Editors’ Preface List of Contributors Abbreviations

xi xiii

Introduction Pa u l Ca v il l PART I 1.

2. 3.

4.

APPROACHES TO SCHOLARSHIP

Gr a h a m D .C a ie Codicological Clues: Reading Old English Christian Poetry in its Manuscript Context Pa u l Ca v il l Christianity and Theology in Beowulf Ca t h e r in e Cu b it t Images of St Peter: The Clergy and the Religious Life in Anglo-Saxon England Ju d it h Je s c h Scandinavians and ‘Cultural Paganism’ in Late Anglo-Saxon England

1

15 41

55

5.

Ric h a r d M a r s d e n Wrestling with the Bible: Textual Problems for the Scholar and Student 69

6.

El is a b e t h Ok a s h a Memorial Stones or Grave-stones?

7. 8.

B a r b a r a Ra w Pictures: The Books of the Unlearned? Ph il ippa Se mpe r Doctrine and Diagrams: Maintaining the Order of the World in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion PART II

9.

91 103 121

APPROACHES TO TEACHING

Da b n e y An d e r s o n Ba n k e r t Medieval Conversion Narratives: Research Problems and Pedagogical Opportunities

10. Sa n t h a Bh a t t a c h a r ji An Approach to Christian Aspects of The Wanderer and The Seafarer

141

153

11. Hu g h M a g e n n is Approaches to Saints’ Lives 12. M a r y Sw a n Men da leofestan: Genre, the Canon, and the Old English Homiletic Tradition

163 185

13. Jo n a t h a n M. W o o d in g Some Issues in the Teaching of Insular Medieval Theology

193

Index

205

Illustrations M emorial Stones or Grave-stones? 6.1a 6.1b 6.2a 6.2b 6.3a 6.3b

Hartlepool VI Newent Winchester I Falstone Lindisfarne II Toureen Peacaun

92 94 95 96 98 99

Pictures: the Books o f the Unlearned? 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 709 (Weingarten Gospels), lv, Crucifixion London, British Library, Additional 49598 (Benedictional o f Æthelwold), 25r, baptism of Christ Cambridge, Trinity College, B. 15.34, lr, Christ as judge London, British Library, Arundel 155, 133r, St Benedict with the monks of Canterbury London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvii (Ælfwine Prayerbook) 65v, Crucifixion London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvii (Ælfwine Prayerbook) 75v, Trinity with Mary London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvi {Ælfwine Prayerbook), 19v, Ælfwine with St Peter

106 109 110 112 114 115 116

Doctrine and Diagrams: M aintaining the Order o f the World in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

After Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 328, p. 85. The order of the year in tetrads After Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 328, p. 7. The circle of the zodiac from Part One of the Enchiridion After Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 328, p. 9. The year and the elements from Part One of the Enchiridion After Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 328, p. 91. The year supported by the cardinal virtues After Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 328, p. 94. The year with tetradic correspondences and virtues

128 129 130 132 134

G eneral E ditors’ Preface This series addresses the challenge that the study of literature, history and material culture o f the past often poses for modern researchers, students and teachers, because the religious assumptions of previous centuries are remote from the worldviews of contemporary people. The volumes in the series aim to provide research, discussion, and critical perspectives on the role o f religion and the historical inter-relationships of religion, society and culture, each focusing on a particular period or topic. They are designed primarily for those in university research, teaching, and study, but their subjects and approaches are also likely to be of interest to readers and teachers more widely. Each volume offers a collection of essays by leading scholars and critics, providing an authoritative and balanced overview of the subject in the light o f current research. Central to the aims of the series is a conviction of the importance of the inter-relationship of research and teaching and the belief that the best teaching is that which is informed by the best contemporary research and thinking. The series is produced in association with the Christianity and Culture project, which seeks to explore how past religious culture can be studied and taught in modern multi-cultural, multi-faith, and in many respects secular, societies, in an objective and academic way. While the major part of each volume will be a sequence of specially-commissioned essays, designed to provide a comprehensive survey of a topic, and addressing the issues, information, and research relevant for an informed and up-to-date study of the religious culture of a past society and culture, volumes will also discuss how they can most effectively be presented, and made accessible, to students. Each book will therefore both give space specifically to consideration of methods of teaching historical religious culture, and contain essays in which teachers in higher education from a range of countries and contexts discuss issues and materials, and suggest approaches and answers.

Contributors Dabney Anderson Bankert, James Madison University, Harrisonburg Santha Bhattacharji, University o f Oxford Graham D. Caie, University of Glasgow Paul Cavill, University of Nottingham Catherine Cubitt, University of York Judith Jesch, University of Nottingham Hugh Magennis, Queen’s University, Belfast Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham Elisabeth Okasha, University College, Cork Barbara Raw, formerly of University of Keele Philippa Semper, University of Birmingham Mary Swan, University of Leeds Jonathan M. Wooding, University of Wales, Lampeter

Abbreviations Æ LS

ASE ASPR Bradley ASP CCSL Councils and Synods CSASE EEMF EETS OS EETSSS EHD HE JEGP LSE PBA PMLA

W.W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric s’ Lives o f Saints: Being a Set o f Sermons on Saints’Days Formerly Observed by the English Church, EETS OS 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881-1900; repr. in2vols, 1966) Anglo-Saxon England G.P. Krapp, and E.VK. Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 6 vols (New York, 1931-42) S.A.J. Bradley, trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1982) Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout) D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C.N.L. Brooke, ed., Councils and Synods with other Documents Relating to the English Church I: A.D. 871-1204, 2 vols (Oxford, 1981) Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (Copenhagen) Early English Text Society, Ordinary Series Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series D. Whitelock, ed. and trans., English Historical Documents I. c. 500-1042, 2nd edn (London, 1979) B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, ed. and trans., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History o f the English People (Oxford, 1969) Journal o f English and Germanic Philology Leeds Studies in English Proceedings o f the British Academy Publications o f the Modern Language Association o f America

Introduction PAUL CAVILL

This volume of essays examines the Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England from as wide a variety of approaches as possible. As Richard Marsden notes in his essay, Christianity is, or was, pre-eminently a religion of the book. But it was not only a religion of the book, but also of image and artefact, ideas and attitudes, of emotion and action, ritual and power. Christianity affected people through much more than ‘the book’ or literate production in general, though we give that aspect o f the tradition a degree of prominence. Christianity affected people also, for example, through laws and memorials, through pictures and stories, through its science and preaching. Moreover, as Marsden acutely shows, even within Anglo-Saxon Christianity there were many different versions of ‘the book’, the Bible. So the question might legitimately be raised whether we can in fact talk of ‘the Christian tradition’, and whether we ought not rather to talk of ‘Christian traditions’, since we are apparently talking about individual or local or time-conditioned responses, and even variation within the core text. What emerges from the approaches taken in this volume is that variation and divergence were understood and often appreciated by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. There was usually space within the tradition for personal response, for local preference, or meaningful variation. New challenges brought fresh responses. Patterns seem to have been more important than uniformity, and there were genuine attempts to hold Christian and other traditions in tension. The Christian tradition, as revealed and discussed here, is far less monolithic than sometimes appears; but it is undoubtedly a tradition that has a definable shape, and in turn shapes a definable world view. With all the possible variations, there is nevertheless a coherence of tradition underlying Anglo-Saxon Christian literary and cultural production. The variety of Christian expression can at first sight seem alarming to the teacher or student. It is not easy to grasp the basic conventions of conversion narrative, penitential doctrine, manuscript illustration, memorial inscriptions, hagiography or homily; to grasp the difference between monk and cleric, or the apparently abstruse reaches of valkyrieology or the computus - all of which are treated in this volume. Indeed, when in addition the text of the Bible itself is shown to be procrustean, and questions are raised about long-accepted interpretations of core vernacular texts like Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, it is small wonder that some are tempted to give up. But all of the essays here convincingly relate the issues treated to the Christian tradition and contempo-

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rary interpretation, and turn the potential difficulties of the material into fresh and stimulating ways of approaching and thinking about and teaching the tradition. The essays are divided for convenience into ‘research approaches’ and ‘teaching approaches’, and it must be noted that this is a convenience, a distinction relating to approach rather than to status. Most of the essays bridge the categories in some way. All the essays on pedagogy outline difficulties in Anglo-Saxon texts for modern teachers and students, and provide ways of dealing with these difficulties that acknowledge their existence, but creatively exploit them for a better understanding of and more active engagement with the world view that brought the texts into being. In the process, the essays also point to key resources in recent scholarship that give vital methodological underpinning to the approaches taken.

Research Approaches The research approaches in general take a consensus view and re-examine it, or take non-canonical texts and show how these fit into the Christian tradition or broaden our understanding of it. Graham Caie demonstrates the usefulness of manuscript evidence in determining what function a sequence of poems had in the piety o f the Old English period, arguing that although in different sections o f the manuscript, the poems Judgement Day II, An Exhortation to Christian Living, A Summons to Prayer, Lord’s Prayer II and Gloria I form a penitential sequence. He makes the important point that the immediate contextual evidence of the manuscript can both inform and intrigue students and give rise to useful discussion. In addition, it might be noted that while these poems are now ‘non-canonical’, they were for the Anglo-Saxons far more ‘canonical’ than the popular anthology pieces of today, as several of them are found in more than one version. This might give pause for thought to those who wish to understand the Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England in relation to modern preoccupations with poetic originality. Paul Cavill challenges the idea that the Christianity found in Beowulf is confused and confusing, and that the poem Tacks specific Christian references’. He argues not only that the poem does contain specific Christian references, but also that admitting to the poet’s use of the Bible in relation to Cain and the Flood but divorcing that from Christianity is creating a distinction without a difference. He goes on to demonstrate that the religious language and ideas of the poem show clear similarities with those of other explicitly Christian poems. And finally he suggests that the notion of the poem’s audience has been over-used, and probably misused in recent criticism of the poem, to limit the range of Christian reference and to exclude basic Christian interpretations. Catherine Cubitt’s essay explores what St Peter stood for in Anglo-Saxon England, and this leads her into discussion of the tonsure, the role of the clergy, marriage in the clerical orders, and much more. What emerges here is a much more varied and shifting ecclesiastical landscape in the Anglo-Saxon period

INTRODUCTION

than has hitherto been thought to have existed. And Cubitt shows that the negative attitudes of Anglo-Saxon monks to their clerical brethren has largely been adopted by modern historians, or that in pursuing the equally important history of monasticism, the history of the clerics has been overlooked. Judith Jesch’s essay persuasively presents the evidence for what she calls ‘cultural paganism’ among the Scandinavians particularly at the court o f Cnut. Cultural paganism involves the acceptance and use of images and ideas heathen in origin by people most likely broadly Christian in belief and practice. This suggests the existence of an attitude of tolerance, or indeed a positive value being given to their cultural background, among at least those of recent Scandinavian origin in late Anglo-Saxon England. English laws condemning paganism, hinting at specifically Scandinavian ideas, may refer to this context rather than to any thoroughgoing pagan resurgence. Like Cubitt’s essay, this one demands that we reassess the majority view in the light of evidence for the practices of a minority. In ‘Wrestling with the Bible’, Richard Marsden does a good deal of the hard work of wrestling for us. He gives a brief history of the early and medieval texts of the Bible, and presents diverting examples that illustrate the authority of even a mistranslated version of a biblical passage. He then brings the reader up to date with the vast array of biblical scholarship, which will in due course allow scholars and students to ascertain which o f the many variant texts o f the Bible were available to, and used by, writers o f the Old English period. This essay is a profound challenge to the very general consensus view that there is a single Bible, or indeed a single Vulgate, to which appeal can be made. But in keeping with the tenor of this volume, Marsden demonstrates the existence of a Christian, biblical tradition and enables us to make use of the texts accurately. The resources and assessment of biblical scholarship given in this essay are invaluable. Stonework makes a further appearance in this volume in Elisabeth Okasha’s essay. She asks an apparently simple question, ‘are various stones with names on them memorial stones or grave-markers?’ She expertly discusses the evidence on which an answer might be based, and then analyses a number of specific stones. The conclusion, that some stones might have been lapidary liberi vitae, reveals differences between medieval and modern memorial practice. But it also suggests continuity between manuscript liberi vitae, surviving in only very small numbers, and stones surviving in larger numbers but in less easily interpreted contexts. Once more, this is an essay that presents a coherent Christian tradition embracing different media. Barabara Raw discusses the role of pictures in books. This essay challenges the notion that pictures were always a kind of substitute for textual information and intended for the view of the illiterate. The pictures analysed in the essay are shown to have a variety of purposes: they show intense emotional involvement in the liturgy, they convey complex theological ideas, they illustrate relationships, and they express doctrine. Some notions that are only hinted at in Anglo-Saxon writings find expression in these pictures. The essay opens up a wider perspective on the Christian tradition, illustrating affective and doctrinal purposes (among others) of pictures.

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Philippa Semper also uses pictures, this time to show how potentially awkward classical ideas relating to the origin and make-up of the world were controlled within the scheme of Christian doctrine in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Like Graham Caie’s essay, this deals with what is now a ‘non-canonical’ text; yet the text itself was dealing with crucial issues for the Anglo-Saxons, matters that were central to their understanding of the world. Semper suggests that the diagrams in Byrhtferth’s work graphically construct a Christian world view and seek to subordinate disruptive material, controlling it within a literal Christian framework. Discussion of the diagrams shows how imaginatively and actively the Christian tradition was maintained in Anglo-Saxon England. All these essays on research approaches to the Christian tradition add something new and interesting to our understanding. Core texts and dogmas of modern critical consensus are re-examined; and texts and artefacts that shed light on marginal or awkward aspects of life in Anglo-Saxon England are discussed in a way that enlarges our understanding of the tradition. This continues in the second section of the volume, where more specifically pedagogical issues are addressed.

Pedagogical Approaches Dabney Bankert presents a fully-worked-out approach to teaching that had to rely on limited resources of knowledge in students, yet which resulted in an enriching and stimulating research-based course for them. As she discusses the course she devised, the models o f conversion narrative used, and the range of texts treated, it becomes apparent that the notion of ‘conversion’ is not at all simple. It is a central notion in Christian tradition, but a multivalent one. Modern theoretical approaches and medieval literary presentations of conversion fruitfully interact here. This essay engagingly demonstrates not only what can be done with limited student resources, but also how the resources students do have can be harnessed to excellent effect in medieval studies. Santha Bhattacharji takes the resources that most students of English literature have as the basis for further engagement with potentially puzzling aspects of medieval texts. While most medievalists are aware of critical theory, not all readily appreciate the potential application of its methods to medieval texts. Taking The Wanderer and The Seafarer as her prime examples, she considers the apparent disjunction of the sea-journey image in the first half of these poems, and Christian didacticism in the second half. She goes on to explore differance and the deferring of meaning at various levels, the riddling nature of Old English poetic language, and the possible relation of the experience of the Wanderer to that of the biblical writer of Ecclesiastes. Bhattacharji argues that students are amenable to exploratory approaches to texts and her essay demonstrates the attractiveness of just such an approach. Hugh Magennis’s article is both a concise description of hagiography as a genre and a creative examination of its potential in teaching and learning about the Anglo-Saxons and the Christian tradition. Magennis shirks none of the difficult issues in the saints’ lives - miracles and convention, violence and cruelty,

INTRODUCTION

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gender issues and sexuality, romance and escapism, heroism and failure - and insists they all have a place in thoughtful teaching. In addition, he provides a wide range of resources that will help equip the teacher in this area. If hagiography presents difficulties for the modern teacher and student, it usually has at least an element of strong narrative, and can therefore appeal as imaginative literature. Mary Swan tackles the problems posed by the homiletic tradition for modern students, where there is little narrative or literary appeal. She suggests approaches to the homily relating to performance and construction of identity through speech acts. The very unfamiliarity and strangeness of homiletic literature can be made productive in the classroom as students explore the nature and purpose of the rhetoric in its varied contexts. Again, this is an essay that opens up radical and creative approaches to an aspect of the Christian tradition. The final essay, from Jonathan Wooding, interprets data from a survey of postgraduate students of insular Christianity. The value of this material is that it shows how students develop skills and understanding in order to pursue their interests; in particular, they learn languages on the basis of need. Wooding suggests that this might lead teachers to consider a more pragmatic approach to student language-learning, in which existing digital resources could used to full benefit.

Teaching and Learning The aim of this volume is to present new material for consideration, and new approaches to established material, in relation to the Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England. Several of the articles are critical introductions to the material itself, and will be of immediate interest and use to established students and new teachers of medieval studies (Marsden, Bankert, Bhattacharji, Magennis). Other articles take a critical stance towards established interpretations, and bring new material into consideration (Cavill, Cubitt, Raw): these will feed into continuing critical debates, and will attract specialists, whether students or scholars. Others still develop distinctive treatments of specific material, and show how the material can be used in understanding better the Christian tradition (Caie, Jesch, Okasha, Semper, Swan, Wooding): these articles point out new directions and materials for research and teaching, new ideas that can be tried and developed.

Bibliography Some comment on the treatment of bibliographical material is necessary, as it varies from article to article. Though the purpose of a bibliography is seldom to include everything published relevant to the topic, a cumulative bibliography in a volume such as this might be thought to have that purpose. It would, however, be quite impossible to cover all the material relevant to the Christian tradition in Anglo-Saxon England within the space we have, and simply to list all the texts,

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studies and articles used would leave too many gaps. The authors therefore treat the bibliographical material in the way that best suits their intentions. Marsden and Magennis specifically deal with a very wide range o f material, and annotate their selections to direct the reader to the best available sources. Caie and Raw treat material within a much narrower spectrum, providing references to the main sources and editions, not all of which are readily available in the average library: here a smaller number o f references are provided to assist the reader in following up specific ideas or images. Bankert supplies a detailed list of sources and secondary works that relate to her topical approach to conversion, and this bibliography is as much a model of pedagogical method as the rest of her article. The remaining articles use footnotes to indicate texts and studies that have been used in the argument. The rationale here is that the texts and studies are discussed, and their usefulness might be judged on the basis of the argument. The authors offer comment in their articles, which will enable readers to assess whether and where, in pursuing the ideas further, the studies referred to might be of assistance. This is not assuming that readers will always agree with the authors, of course: the notes document evidence and opinions, which will be valuable to anyone wishing to develop a contrary argument.

Finally All of the essays in this volume take for granted the value of research and the necessity for creative and thoughtful teaching in medieval studies. Here, research is made accessible, and resources for creative teaching are made available. Each article makes its contribution in its own distinctive way, but the overall thrust of the volume is to show that acknowledging the Christian tradition in all its varied forms in Anglo-Saxon England does not close down interpretative possibilities, but rather it opens them up. These essays are essentially exploratory, and it is to be hoped that they will inform, stimulate and interest those involved in the study and teaching of Anglo-Saxon England and its Christian tradition.

Part I A pproaches to Scholarship

1 C od icological Clues: R eading O ld E n glish Christian Poetry in its M anuscript C ontext GRAHAM D. CAIE

S

TUDENTS today are keenly interested in the performance of the work they study. They want to know who the author, the scribe and the audience were, when and how a poem was presented and what the text looks like in its original form. Not all these questions can be answered when we teach Old English Christian poetry, but there are ways in which we can contextualise the works we teach and present them in their manuscript environment.

Texts in M anuscript Context Much has been done on the question of audience, readers and owners of late medieval vernacular manuscripts, and we have records of book ownership from wills and bankruptcy notices from this period. The mise-en-page and the compilation of manuscripts from the thirteenth century onwards provide hints as to use: for example, much evidence can be gleaned if the page is intricately glossed for a scholastic audience or elaborately illustrated for a courtly one. However, our knowledge of the practical uses and audience of Old English texts is relatively slight and the manuscripts yield fewer clues. There is little external evidence about audience and use of the poetry we teach and so we must rely on internal evidence.1 Barbara Raw has shown how punctuation in the Junius 11 manuscript, for example, is influenced by liturgical practices to aid oral delivery and that the fifty-six numbered sections in this manuscript might correspond to daily readings.12

1 See K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, CSASE 4 (Cambridge, 1990). 2 B.C. Raw, ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius IV , ASE 13 (1984), 187-207; B.C. Raw, The Art and Background o f Old English Poetry (London, 1978).

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Working with Facsimiles At any early stage of learning Old English, I believe that students should be presented with a manuscript facsimile of the work they are studying, if only to see the vast difference between the original and modern presentations o f the same work. The text in the manuscript is not immediately accessible to the student with its unfamiliar script, lack of punctuation, perhaps holes, erasures and scribal corrections, while the printed edition is a sanitised, clean reconstruction that is easy to read - if not to translate! Yet even though we cannot expect our students to read the text straight from the manuscript, they will immediately react to the presentation of the work on membrane. For example, the clarity of script, the careful preparation of the page and the meticulous work of the scribe reflect the prestige and sanctity of the work. The fact that vernacular Old English poetry is written in continuous lines, unlike Latin poetry of the same period, suggests that visual presentation for a reader was not important and that the work was intended for a listening audience. A similar conclusion might be drawn from the lack of illustrations accompanying religious verse, other than the line drawings in the Junius 11 manuscript, and from the fact that many poems are not separated from the preceding one. There seems to be no need to impress a reader or patron by having individual texts clearly and decoratively presented on separate folios. This, of course, can lead to problems, as seen in the debate surrounding Riddle 60 and The Husband’s Message in the Exeter Book. Probably the formulaic introduction of some of the poems, for example, the Hwcet at the beginning of Vainglory or Juliana or the We gefrunan that begins Andreas, may have been sufficient to indicate aurally a new work. By examining the facsimile the student will see that there are no titles preceding the poems: this makes differentiation between the individual texts sometimes hard, but also allows the students to make their own decision as to the meaning of the text. To announce that a certain poem is called ‘The Wife’s Lament’ immediately raises expectations and suggests an interpretation of the work. There is also the opportunity with orally delivered works for the narrator to play an important performative and interpretative role not recorded in the manuscript and to guide the listeners’ response. This lack o f contextual information, of course, gives the modern editor and reader an added responsibility and opportunity. We expect works to have titles and to see where one ends and the next begins. The editors of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series (ASPR), as well as S.A.J. Bradley in his translation of the corpus (Bradley ASP), helpfully present the texts in their manuscript order and allow us to read them in sequence. It is probable that if one had been reading or listening to a series of riddles, the occurrence of a poem such as The Wife s Lament might make one consider it a riddle too, especially as it begins, like many riddles, with the first-person singular pronoun. A religious poem followed by an elegy would also influence one’s reading or understanding of the latter work. On the other hand, students will also see when examining the manuscript facsimile that works such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, generally considered ‘companion poems’, are not together in the manuscript.

CODICOLOGICAL CLUES: OLD ENGLISH CHRISTIAN POETRY

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The Potential o f Teaching with Electronic Editions The best way in which to convey the Old English poem in its context is by means of electronic editions with accompanying digitised facsimiles of the manuscript page. The student can choose any combination of presentations of the text, from a translation of the text into idiomatic modern English at one extreme, to the manuscript facsimile at the other. In between these extremes there might be a transcription of the original text, a critical edition and/or a modernised edition. The facsimile and the transcription give the student the opportunity of being an editor and making decisions about punctuation, word division, sentence structure, titles, and links between poems. This then is as near as possible a reconstruction o f the experience that the Anglo-Saxon listener or reader had, including the decisions the first readers would have had to make. Such an approach avoids the danger of the poem being presented totally out of context, in splendid isolation and without any of the manuscript clues. The teacher might even prepare an electronic version of the text accompanied by translations which changed as the student emended punctuation or inserted capital letters; for example, if wyrd or frea were capitalised, the translation could change from ‘fate’ and ‘lord’ to ‘divine providence’ and ‘the Lord’.

Teaching Non-Canonical Texts I should like to examine the poems in one manuscript, namely Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 201 (hereafter MS C), in codicological context to see if any light can be shed on the connections between the poems, why they were included in this manuscript and if there are any clues that might point to readership or use in the eleventh century. All too often the familiar, ‘canonical’ poems are anthologised and traditional interpretations presented, while working with less common texts allows teacher and student to come with an open mind and fresh views. Questions raised by examining these poems in manuscript context might include the following: Where does one poem end and the other begin? Do such divisions matter in Old English verse? What is the significance of the large capitals in red? The five poetic texts are found on pp. 161-70 o f MS C, namely Judgement Day II (hereafter Jdg II), An Exhortation to Christian Living (hereafter Exo), A Summons to Prayer (hereafter Summons), Lord s Prayer II (hereafter L P II) and Gloria I (hereafter Glo I).3 The most appealing work aesthetically is Jdg II, and so it is generally separated from the other poems and discussed either in the context of eschatological literature or as an example of late Old English poetry. 3 I have discussed these poems in manuscript context elsewhere, e.g., in G.D. Caie, ed., The Old English Poem Judgement Day II: A Critical Edition with Editions o f ‘D e Die Iudicii' and the Hatton 113 Homily ‘Be Domes Dœge Anglo-Saxon Texts 2 (Cambridge, 2000) and in ‘Text and Context in Editing Old English: The Case of the Poetry in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201’, in D.G. Scragg and P.E. Szarmach, ed., The Editing o f Old English (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 155-62. There is some overlap between these articles and the present one.

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The fact that it appears with four other poems is rarely mentioned, and its manuscript context is usually overlooked. In retrospect I regret editing Jdg II in isolation and, if I were to practise what I preach, I ought to have included all five poems. I did, however, insert a section on the interdependence o f the poems in this group in my edition,4 but perhaps I can make amends in this article by suggesting a strong link between the first three poems and a possible link between all five and the ‘Benedictine Office’, a work that appears earlier in this manuscript.

M anuscript Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 201 The manuscript is mid-eleventh century and its provenance is unknown, although a strong case for a Worcester origin can be made.5 It was later bound with an Exeter manuscript, now pp. 179-272 of MS C, which contains inter alia the Capitula o f Theodulf. The original manuscript, pp. 1-178, comprises two major parts: section A, pp. 1-7 and 161-7, written in an early eleventh-century hand, contains a fragment o f the Old English version of the Regularis concordia (pp. 1-7) and Jdg II, Exo and Summons on pp. 161-7. MS C was altered and paginated by Matthew Parker in the sixteenth century with notations in his familiar red marks. He created a list o f contents by erasing the first thirty-eight lines of the Regularis concordia on p. 1. The bulk of the items in this manuscript are in section B, pp. 8-160 and 167-76, the latter part containing the poems L P I I and Glo I. As can be seen, the poems are in two separate, albeit linked, sections, in different hands with section B later than section A. This makes a case for viewing the poems as interrelated difficult, but my argument is based on codicological evidence, namely the intention of the manuscript compiler. The scribe who wrote LP II and Glo I deliberately used the same page as the scribe of section A and indeed followed the last line of Summons without a gap, as if stressing the thematic link.

Eschatology in M S C The poetic section begins with Jdg II on a new page and gathering and with large, green capitals announcing: ‘Incipit versus Bede Presbiter. De die iudicii. Inter florigeras fecundi cespites herbas flamine uentorum resonantibus undique ramis’ (This begins the poem by Bede, priest, ‘On the Day of Judgement’: ‘Among the blossoms of the fertile earth, with the branches echoing on every side with the wind’s breath’). The Bede poem mentioned is his De die iudicii, an extremely popular poem that is extant in over forty manuscripts. My reasons for selecting and editing the version in British Library, MS Cotton Domitian Al, folios 51r-54v, include the fact that it is a mid-tenth century, insular manuscript

4 See Caie, ed., The Old English Poem Judgement Day II, pp. 15-19. 5 Ibid., pp. 7-10.

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of Canterbury origins and it appears closest to the vernacular translation.6 There has been some doubt as to its author, but most editors accept Bede as the poet.7 The vernacular poem appears to be the source of a late eleventh-century Old English homily in the Worcester manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian, Hatton 115, folios 68r-70v, which begins ‘Her is halwendlic l a r . . . ’ (Here is healing instruction . . .). It is possible that this later homily was based on a earlier, non-extant prose version that was the source of the poem as well.8 MS C has been called a ‘hodge-podge’ o f diverse items, ‘a miscellaneous and not particularly careful compilation with no very evident sense o f order’.9 It contains the vernacular Apollonius o f Tyre, the ‘Benedictine Office’, and an Anglo-Saxon translation of part of the Regularis concordia, adapted for nuns. Many items, however, are by Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York, or are Wulfstanian in style. All of Wulfstan’s homilies, including the intermediate version of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, appear in MS C, along with thirty-three other Wulfstanian homilies.101It is highly likely that Wulfstan had a commonplace book, a volume that contained texts and documents that he frequently required, and it is possible that MS C belonged to, or at least was connected with, such a work.11 The theme o f eschatology also creates homogeneity throughout the manuscript. Five of the eight Wulfstan homilies are eschatological, as well as an anonymous homily on pp. 78-80, beginning ‘Leofan men ælmihti god us singallice manað and lærað . . .’ (Dearly beloved, Almighty God continually admonishes and teaches us . . .)12 and, of course, Jdg II. A final point of interest that concerns the poetry in this manuscript is the fact that section B contains the Old English prose sections of the work entitled De ecclesiasticis officiis, generally known as the ‘Benedictine Office’. Unlike the version found in Oxford, Bodleian, Junius 121 it does not contain works based on The Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Gloria within the Office, but versions of the first and last of these liturgical poems significantly occur directly later in the manuscript with the other poetic texts. As mentioned above Jdg II begins at the top of p. 161 at the start of a new quire in the hand o f scribe A, which has not been seen since p. 7, and is clearly announced as a new work with the rubric ‘Incipit [sic] versus Bede presbiter. De die iudicii: Inter florigeras fecundi cespites herbas flamine uentorum resonantibus undique ramis’ (This begins the poem by Bede, priest, ‘On the Day of Judgement’: ‘Among the blossoms of the fertile earth, with the branches echoing on every side with the wind’s breath’). This ‘rubric’ is in green ink, the 6 Ibid., pp. 32-39. 7 See M. Lapidge, Bede the Poet, the 1993 Jarrow Lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994). 8 See E.G. Stanley, ‘Studies in the Prosaic Vocabulary of Old English Verse’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971), 385^118, atpp. 389-90. 9 P. Clemoes, ‘The Old English Benedictine Office’, Anglia 78 (1960), 265-83. 10 Material in MS C recurs in manuscripts such as CCCC 190, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A 1, Copenhagen, Gi. Sam. 1595, which are directly connected with Wulfstan. 11 See D. Bethurum, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book’, PMLA 57 (1942), 916-29. 12 E.G. Stanley has edited this text, giving it the title The Judgement o f the Damned. It appears in ‘The Judgement of the Damned’, in M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, ed., Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 363—91.

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colour frequently chosen to begin new items in MS C, and it ends equally decisively with the colophon: ‘Her endað þeos hoc þe hatte inter florigeras. Þæt is on englisc betwyx blowende þe to godes rice farað and hu ða þrowiað þe to helle farað’ (Here ends this book that is called ‘inter florigeras’, that is in English, ‘amongst the blossoming ones’ who go to God’s kingdom and how those who go to hell fare). This has indeed some finality about it, but I believe that it is a clear signal that at this point in the performance the direct translation of Bede concludes and the poet-narrator’s own composition begins. The translator has produced a close and faithful translation of his Latin source, closer than one normally finds in Old English prose or verse, perhaps on account of the veneration in which Bede was held. The additions are generally fillers, intensifiers or synonyms in order to allow one hexameter to be translated by two vernacular alliterative lines. It is an exciting and frightening poem that leads the listener through hell and, to a lesser extent, heaven, and would undoubtedly have created a sense of terror and awe. An Exhortation to Christian Living This next section, the poem generally called An Exhortation to Christian Living (Exo), commences with ‘Now I shall teach you . . .’: Nu lære ic þe swa man leofne sceal, gif þu wille þæt blowende rice gestigan.

(1-2)

It begins with a red not a green capital, akin to those that begin sections throughout Jdg II (,Summons to Prayer also begins with a red capital and immediately follows Exo). This first line of Exo with its front-shifted Nu ‘Now’ implies a natural progression beyond Jdg II, this time with a more didactic and less imaginative approach. ‘Now I shall teach you, dear man, what you must do if you wish to ascend to that blowende rice “blossoming kingdom”.’ The vision of heaven at the end of Jdg II is full of references to flowers and indeed the poem in the initial rubric and final colophon is called ‘inter florigeras’. The blessed are called ‘blowende þe to godes rice farað’ (blossoming ones who go to God’s kingdom). So having described heaven in floral terms, the poet will now teach the individual (for the second personal singular form is used) how to be saved. The poem, as one might expect, is less interesting than Jdg II, and has hence received scant critical attention, but I believe it plays an important role in the didactic purpose of this group of poems. Fred C. Robinson suggested that Exo and Summons might be one and the same poem, and I can see no reason to query this discovery.13 The earliest editors decided to call them two separate works and few have been sufficiently interested in them to check the manuscript context. A Summons to Prayer The theme of Doomsday recurs in Exo and Summons and thus creates another link between all three poems. Summons is also visually linked to the previous

13 F.C. Robinson, ‘ “The Rewards of Piety”: Two Old English Poems in their Manuscript Context’, in P.J. Gallacher and H. Damico, ed., Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (Albany, NY, 1989), pp. 193-200.

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poem, Exo, with no space, no green initial letter and it begins with the connective Þœnne. A further link is the theme of penance that permeates all three poems, in this case the need to confess in prayer in the confiteor pattern. Summons is macaronic and this fact may have made editors consider it a separate work, but other poems, such as The Phoenix, also conclude with a macaronic section - after a Latin translation. The first line of Summons is ‘Þænne gemyltsað þe, N[omen], mundum qui reget. . . ’ (Then he who rules the earth will have pity on you, N.). The abbreviation N leaves space for the penitent’s name, and gemyltsad þe . . . echoes penitential homilies. As in the other poems the individual penitent is addressed by the singular þu, thus suggesting that this work is intended for a priest’s use in private confessional - an important clue as to the use o f the poetic section. Summons concludes the three penitential poems, which began by creating the appropriate mood of introspection, fear and guilt in Jdg II, followed by a terrifying scene o f Doomsday and a briefer image of a flowery heaven. Then the listener, or penitent, is immediately led forward to the next stage in the pilgrimage of penance that begins in Exo with the admonitory ‘Now I shall teach you . . .’, while Summons concludes with the necessary confession and what amounts to an absolution. The three poems, then, have the same didactic aim as a penitential sermon, namely of encouraging the sinner by fear and remorse to confess and be absolved.14 As the church was increasingly stressing the need for private confession, there also arose a demand for works that would prepare the penitent for confession. These works were not part of penance per se, but might be called ‘penitential literature’, the aim o f which was to instil the correct mood in the penitent.15 How the poem might have been used It is interesting to note the use made by the homilist in the Hatton homily that shares much material with Jdg II. The homily begins: ‘Her is halwendlic lar and ðearflic læwedum mannum þe þæt læden ne cunnon’ (Here is healing and necessary instruction to the laity who know no Latin). The homilist’s aim and audience are clear: it is to be an instructive work on the healing powers of confession for the laity. Healing is a major theme in Jdg II in which Christ appears as the Physician, healing the wounds of sin by poultices and plasters {Jdg I I 80). The homilist changes the singular þu occurrences to the plural and omits the joys of heaven, content with the horrors of hell to create a penitential mood in his congregation. Significantly, he states that it is important to know the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, if one is to reach ‘the blossoming kingdom’, as an Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer and Gloria (though not the Creed) immediately follow the three poems. As mentioned above, these two poems are added at a later date in the rounded hand of scribe B, who was responsible for most of the works in section B. If there is a link between this group of two poems and the preceding three, it can 14 See A.J. Frantzen, The Literature o f Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983), p. 194. 15 Ibid., pp. 6-12 and 185-7.

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only have been consciously achieved by the compiler of the manuscript. The use of macaronic poetry links both groups of poems, as Summons and the two final poems both have Latin and Old English half-lines. The scribe or compiler begins L P II immediately after Summons with virtually no break. These two poems are not simply versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Gloria; they are vernacular poems that elaborate and greatly expand the original lines. The thirteen lines of the Latin prayer are increased to an independent poem of 125 lines. These two poems are closely linked linguistically and thematically so that they might be called ‘companion pieces by the same author written at the same time’.16 Both poems appear to be devotional exercises, simply based on the two Latin prayers. The longest section in LP II, based on et dimitti nobis debita nostra, is on Doomsday and the terror in the world and the revelation o f all hidden secrets. And in Jdg II Bede himself claims to have translated the Lord’s Prayer and Creed into English, although these works are lost. The poems as penitential literature I believe that evidence for the unity of the poems can be found outside the poetic section and in an earlier part of the manuscript, namely in the ‘Benedictine Office’ on pp. 112-14 of MS C. James Ure suggests that LP II and Glo I were written as organic parts of the ‘Benedictine Office’, as there are significant parallels that might aid an appreciation of the poetry, although some fifty pages separate the two sections.17 In the Junius 121 manuscript the paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer and Creed appear within the Office. The ‘Benedictine Office’ is a misleading name, as it is not a liturgical work at all. It contains vernacular introductions to the set offices and has a didactic aim. The fact that it is in English suggests a non-clerical audience, as does the omission of the introductions to nocturns and matins, as the laity would not be involved in the night offices. It has been suggested that the aim of this work like the poetry - was to prepare the laity or lay brethren in a monastic institution for confession and for that reason the Lord’s Prayer and Creed were included. The fact that LP II and Glo I are in the same scribal hand as the Office is no major evidence of linkage, as this hand was responsible for the majority of items in this manuscript. More significant is the fact that a version of the De confessione appears twice in MS C - first after the Office on pp. 115-17 and again directly after the five poems on pp. 170-1. The De confessione is a directive to priests on confession and its reappearance might suggest that the compiler of MS C viewed both the Office and the poems as penitential literature.18 Yet again the repeated theme of Doomsday unites both poems and Office. For example, in the Introduction to Nocturns the poet stresses the need to be spiritually awake in preparation for the parousia. The Office is now generally accepted 16 L. Whitbread, ‘The Old English Poems of the “Benedictine Office” and Some Related Questions’, Anglia 80 (1962), 3 7—49, at p. 41.1 am indebted to L. Whitbread for his work on these poems. 17 J.M. Ure, ed., The Benedictine Office: An Old English Text (Edinburgh, 1957), pp. 3-4. See A. Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982). Is See Frantzen, The Literature o f Penance, p. 139.

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as being written by Wulfstan, who, as archbishop, had a responsibility for the laity as well as the clergy. MS C reflects the breadth of Wulfstan’s interests and responsibilities with law codes, vernacular sermons and concern for social wellbeing, as seen in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos}9 A suggested audience Both the Office and the collection of vernacular poetry might well have served, therefore, a similar, didactic function for a lay audience, in particular the secular clergy. They might well have been literature aimed at helping the reader to meditate in preparation for penance. There is one final clue in the manuscript that might help our search for the use of the poems and their readers, and it comes from within Jdg II. The poet, who keeps unusually close to his source for an Anglo-Saxon translator, greatly embellishes and expands the initial landscape scene in Bede’s poem: Inter florigeras fecundi cespitis herbas, Flamine uentorum resonantibus undique ramis, Arboris umbriferae maestus sub tegmine solus, Dum sedi, subito planctu turbatus amaro, Carmina praetristi cecini haec lugubria mente (1-5) (While I sat sad and alone under the covering of a shady tree, among the flowering grasses of the fertile earth, with branches echoing on every side from the wind’s breath, I was suddenly disturbed by a bitter lament. I sang these mournful songs because my mind was sad ...)

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Hwaet! Ic ana sæt innan bearwe mid helme beþeht, holte tomiddes, þær þa wæterburnan swegdon and urnon on middan gehæge (eal swa ic secge); eac þær wynwyrta weoxon and bleowon innon þam gemonge on ænlicum wonge and þa wudubeamas wagedon and swegdon þurh winda gryre. Wolcn wæs gehrered and min earme mod eal wæs gedrefed. Þa ic færinga, forht and unrot, þas unhyrlican fers onhefde mid sange.

(Lo! I sat alone within a grove concealed with sheltering cover in the middle of a wood where the streams of water murmured and ran midst an enclosure, just as I say. Pleasant plants also grew and blossomed there midst the throng in this unique meadow; and the trees swayed and murmured through the force of the wind. The clouds were agitated and my poor mind was sorely disturbed. Then suddenly, afraid and depressed, I raised up in song this doleful poem.) Bede’s introduction is compressed and obviously symbolic with allusions to garden, wind and disturbed trees which his clerical audience would undoubtedly91 19 See S.B. Greenfield and D.G. Calder, A New Critical History o f Old English Literature (New York, 1986), pp. 90 and 94.

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have understood. The vernacular poet expands on this section, probably to make sure that his lay audience is aware of the symbolic significance of the nature description. He adds streams, a grove, an enclosure (gehcege), a plain and clouds. The first-person pronoun now appears at the beginning of the Old English poem (cf. sedi in line 4 of the Latin), thus stressing the importance of the persona. The sense o f maestus . . . solus as ‘sorrowful and alone’ in line 3 is not present so early in the translation (9-10), where a pleasant scene with overtones of paradise is evoked. The initial mood in Jdg II is one of protection and security. The persona sits within a grove, covered with a sheltering roof, and the grove in turn is enclosed in a meadow. Such additions underline the symbolic nature of a garden that prefigures heaven. Man is surrounded by worldly beauty that reflects eternal joy, but such beauty should also remind him of the need to start on his spiritual pilgrimage from this world. In addition the stirring of the branches þurh winda gryre (8) ‘through the force or horror of the winds’ reminds the persona and the reader that nothing in this world is perfect. The trees and clouds are personified, both gehrered (8) ‘shaken’, ‘agitated’, or gedrefed (9) ‘disturbed’ like the mind of the persona. This disturbance of paradise leads him to remember the need to be ever-mindful of the Last Things and so begins his lamentations and the meditations on hell and heaven. The vernacular poet wishes to trace a spiritual journey from the initial state of enjoying this life to the disturbing, but necessary, state of confessing sins and preparation for one’s end. More hints are given to the lay audience than Bede’s clerical audience, as the subtle allusions in the Latin might be missed by the laity. The sequence of events is not so far from a number o f the Old English elegies in the Exeter Book, in which the audience’s attention is caught by the graphic description of the persona’s physical and spiritual dilemma before the more didactic section commences.20 By comparing the Old English version of this Doomsday poem with its Latin source we can see that the changes the vernacular poet made were in order to accommodate a lay audience, just as the ‘Benedictine Office’ with its omission o f night offices and use o f the vernacular also seems to be adapted for the laity. The poetry in MS C and the Office were probably intended for private use among the literate laity in and outside the monastery, for example as devotional exercises recommended by a confessor. Jdg II was probably chosen, as in the later homily, for its vivid and personal account of how everyman, although enjoying the protective delights of this world, needs to think of his end-days. He needs to remember his sins, ask forgiveness from Christ the Physician when there is still time and before the Day of Judgement. The ensuing visions of hell and heaven should be enough to make him wish to repent, and when in that penitential state the compiler of this devotional booklet concludes the imaginative poem and begins two works, Exo and Summons, that give practical advice on how to reach ‘that blossoming kingdom’ of heaven. At a later stage the compiler of section B in the manuscript, responsible for pp. 8-160 and 167-76, recog-

20 See further Santha Bhattacharji’s essay in this volume.

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nising the function of the three poems, added immediately after them two other devotional poems, LP II and Glo I, which were particularly fitting, given the importance of the Lord’s Prayer in the act of penance. The first three poems might have circulated independently as a booklet before being copied by Wulfstan into his collection o f useful works in a commonplace book and then the last two added at a later stage.

Some Conclusions Some of the above suggestions for the use of the poetry must remain speculative, but I firmly believe that by a close examination of the manuscript that preserves the textual witness it is possible to glean clues and cues about the audience or readership, as well as the aims and function, of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry. The student can learn about problems facing an editor, of the importance of punctuation, capitalisation and the giving of titles to works. The value of using electronic editions with their potential for displaying manuscript facsimiles and transcriptions, as well as critical editions, modernisations, translations, notes and glossary, should not be underestimated. It is now possible for the undergraduate student to experience the Old English poem virtually in its original context.

Bibliography Bethurum, D., ‘Archbishop Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book’, PMLA 57 (1942), 916-29 Caie, G.D., ed., The Old English Poem Judgement Day II: A Critical Edition with Editions o f ‘D e Die ludicii’ and the Hatton 113 Homily ‘Be Domes D æ ge’,

Anglo-Saxon Texts 2 (Cambridge, 2000) ------, ‘Text and Context in Editing Old English: The Case of the Poetry in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201’, in D.G. Scragg and P.E. Szarmach, ed., The Editing o f Old English (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 155-62 Clemoes, R, ‘The Old English Benedictine Office’, Anglia 78 (1960), 265-83 Frantzen, A.J., The Literature o f Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983) Greenfield, S.B. and D.G. Calder, A New Critical History o f Old English Literature (New York, 1986) Hughes, A., Medieval Manuscripts fo r Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982) Lapidge, M., Bede the Poet, the 1993 Jarrow Lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994) O’Brien O’Keeffe, K., Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, CSASE 4 (Cambridge, 1990) Raw, Barbara, The A rt and Background o f Old English Poetry (London, 1978) ------, ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 13 (1984), 187-207 Robinson, F.C., ‘ “The Rewards of Piety”: Two Old English Poems in their Manuscript Context’, in P.J. Gallacher and H. Damico, ed., Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (Albany, NY, 1989), pp. 193-200

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Stanley, E.G.,

‘Studies in the Prosaic Vocabulary of Old English Verse’,

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971), 385—418

------, ‘The Judgement of the Damned’, in M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, ed., Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 363-91 Ure, J.M., ed., The Benedictine Office: An Old English Text (Edinburgh, 1957) Whitbread, L., ‘The Old English Poems of the “Benedictine Office” and Some Related Questions’, Anglia 80 (1962), 37-49

2 Christianity and T h eology in Beow ulf PAUL CAVILL

T^EOW ULF is often the focus and starting point for debate about Christian X j tradition in vernacular poetry. Discussion about this poem seems to reflect and epitomise the trends of scholarship, from the ‘search for Anglo-Saxon paganism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the reassertion of various kinds o f Christian understanding in the middle years of the twentieth century, to a sense of uncertainty as to the import of the religious elements more recently.1 The subject of the Christianity o f the poem has not lost its fascination: certainly the list of books and articles on the poem grows year by year, and the majority have to engage at some level with the issue.12 Even translations of the poem, most recently and notably Heaney’s, have to adopt some position in relation to this matter.3 It may be as well to start with an attempt at delineating what the issues are in relation to the Christianity expressed in Beowulf. Hygelac, the historical character called Chlochilaicus by Gregory of Tours in his History o f the Franks, and the man who is Beowulf’s king and uncle in the poem, died in a raid on Frisia in the early 520s.4 This piece of evidence (with much else in the poem) locates the area and era in which the poem is set as south Sweden and Denmark in the sixth

1 E.G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Cambridge, 1976, rpt 2000) remains the standard discussion of this subject as it appears in works from the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. F. Klaeber, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’, Anglia 35 (1911), 111-36,249-70,453-82; Anglia 36 (1912), 169—99; D. Whitelock, The Audience o f Beowulf (Oxford, 1951); D.W. Robertson Jr, ‘The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory’, Speculum 26 (1951), 24-49; M.B. McNamee SJ, ‘Beowulf - An Allegory of Salvation?’, JEGP 59 (1960), 190-207; M. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf{London, 1970) - these works explored particular views of the Christianity of the poem. More recently, T.D. Hill, ‘The Christian Language and Theme of Beowulf, in H. Aertsen and R.H. Bremmer Jr, ed., Companion to Old English Poetry (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 63-77 and E.B. Irving Jr, ‘Christian and Pagan Elements’, in R.E. Bjork and J.D. Niles, ed., A Beowulf Handbook (Exeter, 1997), pp. 175-92, have expressed some uncertainties about the nature of Christianity in the poem. The works cited are, of course, only some of the more notable contributions. 2 It was, for example, one of the topics discussed early in the summary articles published in ASE: ‘Allegorical, Typological or Neither? Three Short Papers on the Allegorical Approach to Beowulf and a Discussion’, ASE 2 (1973), 285-302; there was also a discussion of Beowulf in P.B. Rollinson’s paper, ‘The Influence of Christian Doctrine and Exegesis on Old English Poetry: An Estimate of the Current State of Scholarship’ in the same volume, 271-84, at pp. 276-80. 3 S. Heaney, Beowulf: A New Translation (London, 1999). 4 See R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study o f the Poem . . . , 3rd edn with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 2—4.

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century. Hence the story relates to a time in English and Scandinavian history when the Germanic races in these areas were heathen. We do not know how the story of Beowulf came to England, we cannot be sure when or where the poem was first written down, and we do not know precisely why it was written. So we do not know whether Christianity was a recent arrival and heathenism still a threat, or Christianity was long-established and heathenism a cultural memory. Nor do we know when the poem was composed, or if the process of composition was the also the process of writing down. So we do not know whether the poem as we have it was the product of a long evolution through successive oral tellings, thus possibly retaining elements from times when heathenism was practised; or whether it is the product of a single poet with an interest in the past and a knowledge of tradition, who composed as a Christian. We can attribute the manuscript we have to Christian scribes, but we cannot identify the scribes with the poet; and we do not know what contribution the scribe who first wrote it down, or indeed any later scribes, might have had to the poem. Scholars build arguments and make assumptions about these matters based on their perceptions of the style, imagery, subject-matter, sources, language and context of the poem, and it is proper that they should, as these form the basis of interpretation. The generally accepted salient facts in relation to religion in Beowulf, however, seem to reduce to two: that the poem deals with characters who were historically heathen, and that the poem as it is recorded in the manuscript is the product of a Christian poet. It is this duality, heathen characters and Christian poet, that gave rise to some of the debates already mentioned. A variety of accounts o f the poet has emerged: he was a ‘monkish redactor’ who prised Christian references into an existing heathen poem; an allegorist who gave clues to an overarching Christian meaning embedded in a heathen story, and reckoned on an audience steeped in the learning of Augustine and Gregory the Great; or, more recently, a poet who used stray images and bits of Christian tradition in his action-fantasy without any serious religious purpose. In what follows, I will discuss various aspects of what I perceive to be the consensus of current or standard works of scholarship on Beowulf in the belief that (as Dorothy Whitelock wrote a long time ago) ‘some material can be shown to be masquerading as established fact when it should still be regarded as open to doubt’.5 1 will discuss the interpretation o f crucial passages and terms, examining the validity of accepted views, in the belief that an accurate understanding of the poem’s text and context is still an essential part of interpretation. It is almost universally accepted that Christian elements are part of the texture of the poem. If these elements are misunderstood or obscured, an important aspect of the poet’s art will be underestimated. I do not believe the poem is a sermon, a tract or an allegory; indeed I believe its interest for the modern student and scholar derives at least in part from the fact that it is none of these things. But it is Christian, and the attempt to discern the nature of its Christianity is important.

5 Whitelock, Audience, p. 1.

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M itchell’s and Robinson’s Edition I start with, and focus on, the observations made by Mitchell and Robinson on the Christian elements in their recent edition of Beowulf;6 not, I hasten to add, because Mitchell and Robinson are outrageously biased one way or another, but rather because they conscientiously try to steer a middle path in their interpretation of the significance o f the Christian elements in the Old English poem. On the way, I bring in discussion of the views of E.B. Irving Jr, Kenneth Sisam and others who have made significant contributions to scholarship. But if these scholars collectively have limitations, they lie in the lack of precision in the statements they make about the Christianity o f Beowulf, an excessive reliance on some unreliable criteria of interpretation, and their treatment of the ideas and language of Beowulf as quite different from those of the rest of Old English poetry. One o f the problems in trying to steer a middle path is the temptation to generalise from an impression, rather than from detailed treatment o f the evidence. This seems to be particularly the case throughout the scholarly literature in relation to the Christian elements in Beowulf Mitchell and Robinson try to avoid this temptation by making clear where they disagree with each other in this matter. Mitchell believes that the poet was not much concerned with Christianity or paganism, and he reads the poem in that light; Robinson sees the ‘blend o f heroic and Christian’ in the poem as ‘subtle’ (p. 34). But this does not prevent them from falling into the trap of impressionistic generalisation. Summarising the episode o f Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, they distort the clear import of the text: ‘[t]he fig h t. . . proves more difficult [than that with Grendel] and the hero nearly dies, being saved only by the lucky discovery o f a supernatural sword that enables him to dispatch the ogress’ (p. 23). The episode runs over a fitt-division, and this is the text: Hæfde ða forsiðod sunu Ecgþeowes under gynne grund, Geata cempa, nemne him heaðobyme helpe geffemede, herenet hearde, ond halig god geweold wigsigor; witig drihten, rodera rædend, hit on ryht gesced yðelice, syþðan he eft astod. Geseah ða on searwum sigeeadig bi l. . .

(1550-7)7

(The son of Ecgtheow, warrior of the Geats, would have perished then in the spacious depths, if the mail-coat had not saved him, the hard battle-mesh, and holy God, the wise lord, brought about victory in battle; the ruler of the skies rightly and easily decided it after he got up again. He then saw a victory-blessed sword among the armour ...)

6 B. Mitchell and F.C. Robinson, ed., Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford, 1998). 7 For Old English verse, I use throughout the texts of the ASPR editions.

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Clearly, the discovery of the sword was not merely ‘lucky’, but providential, and the hero was not saved ‘only’ by the discovery of the sword, but by the mail-coat and especially by the decision of God. There are three half-lines on the mail-coat and six on the decision of God. It is difficult to say precisely what God does, but the poem is clear that the outcome depends on him. It is, moreover, unclear that the sword is ‘supernatural’: it is described as huge and old, the work of giants (as other ancient marvellous objects are, compare Andreas 1235, Wanderer 87, Ruin 2, among others). It works much as other swords do, and it is the corrosive blood of Grendel that makes it dissolve (1605-11), not any magical property it has. The account the editors give here is misleading when examined in the light of what the poem actually says. The religious language is unambiguous in itself, but the ideas expressed are not at all simple. It would not be strictly true to say from this passage that God helped Beowulf: it is more that God’s will is expressed in Beowulf’s victory. The syntax indicates that the poet is dealing with two kinds of explanation for the result of the fight, one contingent, the other immutable. The co-ordinating conjunction ond ‘and’ in 1553b separates the conditional sentence (with the verbs hcefde and gefremede in the subjunctive) ‘he would have died if the mail-coat had not saved him’ from the definite sentence (with the verbs geweold and gesced in the indicative) ‘God brought about victory in battle’.8 These are distinct yet equally operative - that is the significance o f ond - and it is only in Beowulf’s account of the fight in 1652-76 that the two are put together, when the hero claims that God both protected him (1658) and enabled him to see the sword (1661—4). The simplicity of Beowulf ‘being saved only by the lucky discovery of a supernatural sword’ is deceptive: it masks both the Christian nature o f the passage and the complexity of its expression. On the Christian elements in Beowulf, Mitchell and Robinson are commendably candid, admitting to differences of view between themselves as to the extent and importance o f these elements. But before they express their differences, they summarise what they think of as the consensus view like this: As we turn to the Christian elements, we must note that there is no mention of any of the great dogmas of Christianity - the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or the Ascension - or of the name of Christ himself. Of the possible references to the Bible, there is not one which cannot be traced to the Old Testament: Cain and Abel . . ., ‘the slayer. . . who shoots from his bow with evil intent’ (lines 1743b-44 and note), and the sððfœstra döm (line 2820b; see Psalm 98.9 and Ecclesiastes 3.17) are typical examples. Good reasons can of course be adduced to explain why a Christian poet might have felt that Christ the Redeemer would be out of place in the pagan world he was portraying 8 Bradley ASP is slightly misleading at this point in his translation, which reads, ‘Ecgtheow’s son . . . would have perished then down in the vast deep, had not his battle-corslet. . . afforded him help; and were it not that holy God held sway over victory in war’ (p. 452). My emphasis indicates what Bradley has added, changing the second sentence into a conditional like the first, which it is not. Heaney omits the and\ ‘had the strong links and locks of his war-gear / not helped to save him: holy God / decided the victory’ (p. 51).

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and we can easily see from The Wanderer and The Seafarer how a situation expressed in pagan terms could lead to Christian moralizing. But the absence of specific Christian references has led to the great differences of opinion about what Klaeber called ‘the Christian coloring’ of Beowulf, (p. 33) The first point here is indisputable; much of the rest is questionable, though widely accepted. Editors do not have to explain everything, but if the ideas given here were in fact true, they would positively demand explanation. Why should the poet refer only to the Old Testament and exclude specific Christian references? What good reasons can be given to explain why Christ would be out of place in the pagan world? And if ‘a situation expressed in pagan terms’ could lead to ‘Christian moralizing’, why does it not do so, according to the editors, in Beowulf! In my view, much of the paragraph quoted above is misconceived.9 There is a slide from ‘Christian elements’ at the start, then to ‘references to the Bible’ and then to ‘specific Christian references’. The absence of certain ‘great dogmas’ leads inexorably but illogically to ‘the absence of specific Christian references’. In much of this debate, it is unclear precisely what constitutes an ‘element’ or a ‘reference’. The scholars I disagree with seem to take a ‘reference’ or an ‘element’ to be a direct and obvious quotation from a definite source, while I take it to mean a characteristic idea or an allusion. In the course o f this essay, I will point out what I think are some of the sources for the Christian references I discern in the poem. But to name just a few, the dogmas of judgement and hell, of creation and a single omnipotent God, are examples of what I consider to be specifically Christian elements, and they are found abundantly in the poem. I stress they are specifically, not necessarily exclusively Christian, though it would be pertinent and not unreasonable to ask what might be the source of these ideas if not Christian. But on the assumption that the examples cited in the summary are those where the writers feel their case to be strongest and the consensus view to be most unassailable, I want to take issue with the notion that of the biblical references in the poem, ‘there is not one which cannot be traced to the Old Testament’. Deeper discussion of the references suggested by Mitchell and Robinson should clarity how the poet is using his biblical knowledge. The ‘typical examples’ of Bible references are not as specifically Old Testament as the writers seem to believe.10 Cain is mentioned in the New Testament in Hebrews 11:4, I John 3:12, and Jude 11. And in the second of these instances the connection is made between Cain and the devil, an idea not present in the Old Testament, but one that undoubtedly informs the portrait of Grendel as Cain’s descendant in the 9 What the ‘pagan terms’ of the situation in The Wanderer and The Seafarer might be I will leave to the imagination of the reader. See further Santha Bhattacharji’s article in this volume. 10 The comment from Mitchell and Robinson, ‘[o]f the possible references to the Bible, there is not one which cannot be traced to the Old Testament’, it is worth noting, echoes a point made by Whitelock. She wrote, ‘[i]t is quite true, as has frequently been commented on, that the biblical references are confined to Old Testament events’ (Audience, p. 6). The last word quoted is the most significant, and seems to have been missed by Mitchell and Robinson and many another commentator. But even with that word, the assertion is misleading.

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poem: ‘Cain ex maligno erat et occidit fratrem suum’ (Cain was of the wicked one and killed his brother, I John 3:12).n In Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ to Beowulf, he makes reference to ‘the slayer. . . who shoots from his bow with evil intent’ (1743b-44), and the note in the Mitchell and Robinson edition suggests this ‘could be reminiscent of Psalm 11.2 or of Ephesians 6.16 or of the preternatural archers (elves, witches or pagan gods) who in the OE charms afflict their victims with debilitating elf-shot’ (p. 106). There are numerous references to bows and arrows and shooting in the Old Testament, of course, and Psalm 11:2 is one of many. But it is not splitting hairs to note that in the context of Hrothgar’s speech, it is a psychomachia that is being spoken of. These are not literal arrows, or even arrows of ‘preternatural archers’ that ‘afflict their victim with debilitating elf-shot’. They are spiritual arrows o f the evil spirit (wergan gastes, 1747b) just as are ‘the fiery darts o f the most wicked one’ in Ephesians 6:16. They do not make the one attacked ill, they make him proud and niggardly. This is not to say that Hrothgar’s speech follows Ephesians in detail, and that the poet probably knew Prudentius, simply that of the suggested sources for the idea of ‘the slayer . . . who shoots from his bow with evil intent’, one is a good deal closer and more pertinent than the others and it happens to be the New Testament one. The treatment of soðfæstra dom in Beowulf (2820b) in some recent criticism has tended to overlook obvious senses in favour of the linguistically possible ones.1 12 In considering this passage it will be necessary to look beyond biblical 1 references to the idiom and syntax of the Old English. First, however, the cross-references to Psalm 98:9 and Ecclesiastes 3:17 given by Mitchell and Robinson in their discussion read as follows: venit [Dominus] iudicare terram, iudicabit orbem terrarum in iustitia et populos in aequitate ([The Lord] cometh to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with justice and the people with his truth) and, et dixi in corde meo iustum et impium iudicabit Deus . . . (And I said in my heart: God shall judge both the just and the wicked

...)

11 All biblical quotations are from R. Weber, ed., Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 4th edn rev. by B. Fischer et al. (Stuttgart, 1994), and the translation is The Holy Bible: Douay Version (London, n.d.). 12 There is considerable discussion of this phrase. Early commentators saw the ambiguity of it within a generally Christian frame of reference, e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, PBA 32 (1936), 245-95, at p. 284, M.P. Hamilton, ‘The Religious Principle in Beowulf, PMLA 61 (1946), 309-31, at p. 328, and E.G. Stanley, ‘Hæþenra Hyht in Beowulf in S.B. Greenfield, ed., Studies in Old English Literature in Honor o f Arthur G. Brodeur (New York, 1963), pp. 136-51, at p. 143. S.B. Greenfield, ‘Beowulf and the Judgement of the Righteous’ in M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, ed., Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 393-407, takes for granted in his title the interpretation of soðfœstra dom that is in dispute. See also Bliss’s article in n. 21 below, and the general discussion above for accounts that implicitly and explicitly deny Christian reference.

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Possibly the point of these references for the editors is that they combine the notion of judgement with a word that has connotations of truth or justice.13 But once again, these are general references to judgement that could be paralleled a dozen times from the New Testament and hundreds of times from later Christian literature, and it seems unreasonable to restrict the reference, if it is to be general, to the Old Testament.14 A more important point is that the Beowulf passage, if it refers to judgement at all, is ambiguous about who is doing the judging. The note in Mitchell and Robinson on soðfœstra dom observes, ‘[t]he syntax is ambiguous: söðfœstra could be either subjective genitive “judgement by those speaking the truth” or objective genitive “judgement passed on those who are firm in truth” ’ (p. 147). If the first alternative is selected the above biblical references are irrelevant, since it is not God who is judging. If the second alternative is selected, it serves to indicate how far the editors have gone in reducing or obscuring or making ambiguous the Christian vocabulary of the poem, because both usage and biblical echo here suggest a gloss for soðfœst such as ‘just, righteous’. Klaeber glosses the word ‘true, righteous’ and adds ‘cp. Lat. “iustus” ’,15 and the quickest of glances at the two hundred or so examples o f the word and its variants will show that that is how it is used throughout Old English verse, whether it is used as an attribute of God, or of people, souls, deeds, words, or whatever.16 So where does the curiously specific gloss ‘those speaking the truth’ come from? The Bosworth-Toller dictionary gives a sense ‘HI. true in speech, veracious1,17 and as a gloss for Latin verax, soðfœst occurs several times in prose.18 But it is difficult to find a verse example of the Old English word that fits Mitchell’s and Robinson’s gloss ‘truth-speaking’ precisely. Some examples merge into it, and soðfœstnes not infrequently has ‘truth(-speaking)’ as a connotation. But I can find no example where the general sense ‘true, right, just, righteous’ does not fit the context of the word soðfæst in verse better than the more specific ‘truth-speaking’. And what of the gloss ‘firm in truth’? It might be argued that the etymology of the word is precisely reflected in the gloss, but the editors do not feel the need to give etymological glosses for other words such as

13 But it should be noted that neither of these passages supports the idea that judgement is ‘by those [plural] speaking the truth’. And it is curious that both quotations contain the element iust-, which the glossary seems to shy away from associating with soðfæst. 14 E.g. Matthew 11:12, 12:36, John 5:27, 12:21, Acts 7:7, 17:31, Romans 2:5, 16, 3:6, I Corinthians 5:10, II Thessalonians 1:5, II Timothy 4:1, Hebrews 10:30, 12:23, II Peter 2:9, among very many others. The Old English poems on Judgment Day, and the currency of the theme in Old English prose and poetry reinforce the point. 15 F. Klaeber, ed., Beowulfand the Fight at Finnshurg, 3rd edn (Boston, 1950), p. 400. 16 The information about Old English usage is derived from the online Toronto Old English Corpus, ed. A. DiP. Healey and R.L. Venezky. 17 J. Bosworth and T.N. Toller, ed., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (London, 1898; repr. 1973), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Supplement, ed. by T.N. Toller, with rev. and enlarged addenda by A. Campbell [1972] (London, 1921; repr. 1980), s.v. soðfœst. See R.M. Liuzza, ed., The Old English Version o f the Gospels, EETS OS 304 (Oxford, 1994), Matthew 22:16, Mark 12:14, John 7:8, 8:26, for example. But for the latter two references, it is disputable that uerax refers only to speech.

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hlaford, so why this one?19 The significance of these glosses is that in trying to be as interpretatively neutral as possible, the glossators exclude the idiomatic Christian senses that the word had throughout Old English poetry. Moreover, the note in Mitchell and Robinson fixes on the ‘judgement’ sense of dom to the exclusion of the ‘glory, fame’ senses (among others) admitted in their glossary, though these senses are not there allocated to this line. In 2820, dom means only ‘judgement, determination’ according to the editors’ gloss. There is a tendency for words like sawoi and gast, when collocated with soðfœst in Old English poetry, to state, or imply, that such souls or spirits are either in heavenly bliss, or soon to be so: see Exodus 544, Andreas 228, Christ 53, Guthlac 22, 567, 790, Phoenix 540, 589, and The Death o f Edward 2 and 28.20 This is in fact one important part of the meaning ‘righteous’ in Christian terminology: the idea that the judgement is already decided, and glory is the destiny of the righteous. Once again, the scholarly apparatus of the Mitchell and Robinson edition excludes a perfectly acceptable and demonstrably idiomatic meaning from the line. This is an extreme example of a self-denying ordinance, because Mitchell himself has very ably argued for the ‘traditional’ interpretation (that is, that the phrase might mean, as Tolkien put it, ‘the glory that belongs (in eternity) to the just, or the judgment of God upon the just’) against the assertions o f A. J. Bliss.21 Bliss absolutely rejects the ‘traditional’ interpretation on the basis that, among other things, the objective genitive never occurs with dom (it does, as Mitchell demonstrates22) and that ‘[i]n Beowulf the word sawoi is not used in a Christian sense: it normally means “life-spirit”, that which leaves the body at death’ (p. 50).23 But Bliss does not reckon with the use of sawoi in 184, where the soul is quite evidently spiritual and eternal. And Bolton, when he writes of these lines on Beowulf’s death that ‘the belief that the soul departs the body at cremation, not at death, appears to be Germanic’, forces an unnaturally precise chronology on to 2817-20. Bolton suggests that it is only when Beowulf is cremated that his soul leaves his body, when what the poet seems to be saying is that he spoke and then he died. There is no linguistic indication that the departure of the soul is specifically linked with the cremation:

19 There are also numerous examples of collocations where the meanings ‘truth-speaking’ and ‘firm in truth’ for soðfœst would be impossible, or decidedly odd: for example, mod, sunne, weg, weorc, word. 20 Mitchell cites most of these references in ‘Beowulf, Lines 3074—3075: The Damnation of Beowulf?’, in On Old English (Oxford, 1988), pp. 30—40, at p. 35. 21 Mitchell, On Old English, and A.J. Bliss, ‘Beowulf, Lines 3074-3075’, in M. Salu and R.T. Farrell, ed., J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam (Ithaca, 1979), pp. 41—63. 22 Mitchell, On Old English, p. 35; and it is perhaps also worth noting that the plural soðfæstra is used in both objective and subjective genitive constructions with other words, e.g. soðfæstra leoht ‘[Christ] the light of the righteous’, Elene 7a, and soðfœstra sawla ‘the souls of the righteous’, Andreas 228, Guthlac 22 and frequently. 23 This opens up a little back-alley in scholarship: of this passage, him o f hreðre gewat / sawoi secean soðfæstra dom 2819-20, C.L. Wrenn observed, ‘[t]his seems to be a specifically Christian statement from its choice of words’, C.L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London, 1953), p. 225. In the third edition of Wrenn’s Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London, 1973), W.F. Bolton changed this note to read, ‘[t]he belief that the soul departs the body at cremation, not at death, appears to be Germanic’, p. 199.

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Þæt wæs þam gomelan gingæste word breostgehygdum, ær he bæl cure, hate heoðowylmas; him of hreðre gewat sawolsecean soðfæstra dom. (2817-20) (That was the last word from the old man, from the thoughts of his heart, before he chose the pyre, the hot surges of flame. From his breast...) Bliss uses his statement about sawol to dismiss Tolkien’s significant point relating to the verb-phrase: dom, Tolkien argued, ‘combined with gewat secean . . . must mean either the glory that belongs (in eternity) to the just, or the judgement of God upon the just’ (p. 42). Bliss, however, prefers to render the passage in question ‘his spirit departed from his breast, hoping for the esteem of the true-judging’, commenting that esteem after death is a commonplace in Old English poetry, and that loflifgendra in The Seafarer 73 ‘corresponds closely to soðfæstra dom’ (p. 50), and thus removing the idea that this passage might refer to the afterlife. Bliss’s parallel of myne and sohte in 2572 (in Bliss’s translation, ‘The shield protected life and limb for the famous prince for a shorter time than he had hoped [or expected]’) for the collocation of sawol and secean (p. 50) ignores the fact that secean is used in an absolute construction without an object in 2572, and in 2820 with an object. But both the participial form of Bliss’s translation, ‘hoping’, and the vagueness attributed to the verb secean, weaken the sense.24 As Mitchell notes in his article, ‘one would expect the infinitive to express the object of the journey’ (p. 34). Indeed Klaeber notes in his edition that ‘in the old Germanic languages the vivid idea of “motion” (considered literally or figuratively) was predominant in many verbs which are now more commonly felt to be verbs of “rest” ’ (p. xciii), and lists secan as one such verb.25 This is confirmed by every appearance of sentences containing a verb-phrase with finite forms of gewitan and infinitive secean in Old English verse.26 The point is, then, that Beowulf’s soul is going actively to seek soðfæstra dom, with the two verbs gewitan and secean reinforcing each other. So, by way of parallel, in 2949-50, ‘Gewat him ða se goda . . . fæsten secean’, Ongentheow leaves the battle for the safety of his fortress: ‘the good man we n t . . . to seek the stronghold’. And finally, the point of the passage in The Seafarer is that loflifgendra ‘the praise of the living’ is to be earned by the noble man here and now, ‘ær he on weg scyle’ (before he must die), ‘þ æ t . . . his lof siþþan lifge mid englum’ (so that his glory might live afterwards among the angels): it is not to be sought or hoped for at death, by which time it is too late. One can only say that Bliss’s assertion that ‘the standard translation of soðfæstra dom can hardly be defended’ (p. 49) is, as Mitchell puts it, ‘demonstrably false’ (p. 34). We are then left with the question whether the idiomatic uses in Old English verse of the main words in 2819-20 justify Wrenn’s assertion that the traditional 24 Neither Mitchell and Robinson nor Klaeber glosses secean so colourlessly. 25 The note is quoted with approval by Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 2 vols (Oxford, 1985), § 1122. 26 By Boolean search of the Old English Corpus, using the Toronto text abbreviations, with the line numbers referring to where the sentence begins: Gen 1460, 1730, 1816, 1964, 2005, 2018 (with sidian in addition), 2098, 2264, 2294, Dan 440, And 225, 696, 977, 1675, Phoen 320, Rid 2 1, Rid 16 1, Wife 9 (withferan in addition), R id 93 \,B eo 662, 2949, Brun 53, M Sol204.

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Christian interpretation is both possible and plausible. With Mitchell, I think they do. In almost any other Old English poem, there would be little difficulty in rendering him of hreðre gewat sawol secean soðfæstra dom as ‘from his breast his soul went to seek the glory of the righteous’, or ‘from his breast his soul went to seek the judgement of the just’, or even as Heaney rather colourlessly translates, ‘[h]is soul fled from his breast / to its destined place among the steadfast ones’ (p. 88). I am aware that patterns of usage are not absolute, and that in some ways Beowulf is a special case.27 The word soðfæst, for example, only occurs once in Beowulf, so it is difficult to talk about patterns of usage within the poem. But that makes it all the more important to heed other uses. The treatment of these lines in the Mitchell and Robinson edition and elsewhere excludes the possibility of a Christian interpretation for no very good reason. So far, I have suggested that what has emerged as something of a consensus view about the Christianity of Beowulf fails to do justice to the evidence of the poem and of Old English poetry in certain specific points. The notion that the poet was somehow doctrinally deficient, in that he only uses the Old Testament, has been undermined a little, but perhaps needs more discussion, as does the associated notion of ‘the absence of specific Christian references’. Klaeber adduced many of the biblical parallels to concepts and phrases in the poem in his articles ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’, but Fred Robinson suggests in his British Academy lecture that Klaeber’s work in the articles and his edition had the unfortunate effect of ‘encouraging scholars to assert an exclusively Christian Beow ulf. . . and to deny altogether the secular, pre-Christian element in the poem’.28 That mistake can be avoided. But it will become clear that

2? Bliss’s argument about the soul is a case in point. Here we can discern a particular pattern of usage in Beowulf broadly in line with Bliss’s observation; but there is no doubt that the soul in 184 is not merely the ‘life-spirit’ that leaves the body at death, but an enduring spiritual entity that can suffer eternally. The strong possibility is that in 2820 the poet has in mind the eternal spiritual entity also, since the glory or judgement {dom) is ‘the object of the journey’ expressed by the verb secean. 28 ‘Beowulf in the Twentieth Century’, PBA 94 (1996), 45-62, at p. 59.1 know of no scholar who denies the pre-Christian, secular element: it is, after all, pretty obvious. The particular passage discussed by Robinson as an example of Klaeber’s overstating the case, however, is not quite so dogmatic on Klaeber’s part (‘The praise of the hero’s mother is possibly a biblical reminiscence . . .’, Klaeber’s edition, pp. 166-7, my emphasis), nor so convincing on Robinson’s part, as he suggests. Hrothgar remarks that ‘hyre ealdmetod este wære / bearngebyrdo’ (the creator of old was gracious to her [Beowulf’s mother] in her child-bearing, 942b-6a), and Klaeber adduces Luke 11:27, ‘Blessed is the womb which bore thee . . .’, with the words ‘possibly a biblical reminiscence’, as quoted above. Robinson remarks, ‘[a] compliment of this kind would seem to be so commonplace that it would seem inadvisable for an editor to declare it a “biblical reminiscence” But two comments may be made: first, the Bible is full of commonplaces; second, Hrothgar attributes the favour to ealdmetod ‘the creator of old’, a unique word that, at least, gives a religious twist to the commonplace, and, at most, aligns it with the biblical reference in that the Bible context might distinguish Christ (who is being praised) from God the Father, ‘the Creator of old’ (who blessed his mother). A.G. Brodeur goes so far as to translate ealdmetod as ‘Ancient of Days’, a reference to Daniel 7:9, 13,27, in The Art o f Beowulf (Berkeley, 1959), at p. 191. In this biblical context the antiquum dierum ‘the Ancient of Days’ is distinguished from the quasi filius hominis ‘one like the son of man’, and the traditional interpreta-

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despite some self-imposed limitations of expression, the poet’s world view is specifically Christian and conditioned by the whole Bible, not just the Old Testament. Mitchell and Robinson deal with two passages in particular when they write of their different approaches to interpreting the Christianity of the poem: 90b-98, the scop’s song of creation, and 175-88, the condemnation of the Danes’ heathen worship. Robinson remarks that the song of creation sung by the scop in 90b-98 ‘is not the Christian creation of Genesis, but a creation ascribed by the pagan Danes to whatever god they knew’ (p. 34). But how do we know? In the text, the scop’s song of creation is clearly conditioned by the Genesis account: there is one almighty creator, who creates an earth bounded by water, the sun and moon to light the earth, plants and animals. It would be hard to find or produce a closer approximation to the account of creation in Genesis 1 in eight-and-a-half lines of Old English poetry, and indeed hard to find anything less like the mythological accounts of origins in Eddie or other Germanic poetry, as Klaeber noted (‘Elemente’, p. 114). It is clear that the writer was making no attempt to reconstruct a pagan Danish creation song, but was having the Danish scop sing of the creation as the writer believed it really happened. And in this he had the theological warrant of St Paul, who wrote of those who did not know Christ or the truth of God, ‘invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mimdi per ea quæ facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur sempiterna quoque ejus virtus et divinitas’ (For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity, Romans 1:20).29 It could be argued further that the apparent omnipotence and uniqueness of the deity appealed to by the characters are Christian features; these notions certainly correspond to nothing we know of the Germanic gods. But even this has been interpreted as ‘a rather stark picture’, and as E.B. Irving Jr comments, ‘[i]t is o f . . . a God alone, unaccompanied by his usual werod of angels, a God seen from earth’s view point as an absentee landlord, remote and isolated. He is fundamentally King and Battle-Leader.’30 Irving draws this rather contradictory conclusion (‘alone’ and ‘King and Battle-Leader’ do not naturally go together in Anglo-Saxon culture) from an analysis of the vocabulary used for God in the poem. He remarks that there are none of the ‘genitive plural constructions with such meanings as “God of hosts” or “Lord o f angels’” . This is not in itself strictly accurate, since there is a scribal error at 2186, drihten wereda ‘lord of hosts’, rightly emended to drihten Wedera ‘lord of the Geats’; but equally common genitive plural constructions such as deeda demend ‘judge of deeds’ (181), heofena helm ‘lord of the heavens’ (182), rodera rædend ‘ruler of the tion of the vision is that the Ancient of Days represents God the Father, and the ‘one like the son of man’, Christ. 29 A point made by M. Goldsmith, Mode and Meaning, p. 52, also by F.C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, TE, 1985), p. 93, in. 31, and somewhat further developed in P. Cavill, Maxims in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 99-105. 30 ‘The Nature of Christianity in Beowulf, ASE 13 (1984), 7-21, at p. 16; see also Irving’s essay in the BeowulfHandbook, p. 186, where he writes of God as ‘the great and austere King of Heaven, perpetually at war with an evil force of trolls and demons .. .’

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skies’ (1555), ylda waldend ‘lord of men’ (1661), waldend fira ‘lord of men’ (2741), sigora soðcyning ‘true king of victories’ (3055) occur frequently enough. And besides, calling God weroda drihten would hardly lessen the impression that he is ‘fundamentally King and Battle-Leader’. In his Appositive Style Robinson adds something to Irving’s argument about the way God is depicted. He notes that the ‘two-part terms meaning “God’s son” ’, and the very common words nergend and hælend (both meaning ‘saviour’) are lacking: these terms ‘[rjeferring too specifically to the second person of the Trinity. . . are . . . avoided completely by the Beowulf poet’ (p. 43). The poet, according to Robinson, ‘adopts the God terms of his pre-Christian characters when he refers to God himself’ (p. 43), though not, he concedes, without any differentiation between his characters and the narrative voice. But if it is true that God is not depicted as accompanied by angels, and that Christ is not specifically mentioned, in the terms of the poem God is nevertheless an ever-present benevolent providence, a father, a giver o f gifts and one who enables people to do right.31 It is not clear that anything the poet or characters say of, or attribute to, God is in any sense reconstructed heathenism or markedly different from the range of attributes of the deity in Christianity. And it is demonstrable that the writer’s ‘God terms’ are as Christian as those of the poets o f (for example) Andreas, Christ and The Dream o f the Rood. By far the majority o f words for God in Beowulf we used specifically o f the second person of the Trinity, Christ, in these Christian poems; so there is nothing distinctively pre-Christian, nothing ‘remote’ or ‘Old Testament’ about the vocabulary of Beowulf per se.32 Indeed, the main expression that Irving notes to be lacking in the poem, ‘God of hosts’ (and we might add the more frequent idiom in both the Bible and Old English verse, ‘Lord o f hosts’) - in the Vulgate, Dominus (Deus) exercituum - is one of the commonest ways o f referring to God in the Old Testament, and only occurs in the Old Testament.33 The image o f God as ‘an absentee landlord, remote and isolated . . . fundamentally [a] King and Battle-Leader’, is an impression that perhaps needs modification in the light of the ‘God language’ of Old English, or indeed the narrative thrust of the poem. On the condemnation of the Danes’ heathenism (175-88), Robinson points 31 The extensive range of terms for God is listed by Klaeber, ‘Elemente’, pp. 114-27. 32 The terms for God in Beowulf in the following list are specifically (but not exhaustively) matched by terms referring to Christ in Andreas, Christ and The Dream o f the Rood: œlmihtiga 92, And 445; alwalda 955, Chr 1364; anwalda 1272, DR 153; drihten 108, DR 101 \ feeder 188, And 330; frea 27, DR 33; god 13, And 326; kyningwuldor 665, wuldurcyning 2795, And cyninga wuldur 899, wuldurcyning 1430; lijfrea 16, Chr 15; meotod 110, And 446; rœdend 1555, And 816; scyppend 106, And 396; soðcyning 3055, Chr 1228; waldend 1661, DR 53. One curiosity, given the prevalence of images of Christ as judge, is that demend 181 is not a term used unambiguously of Christ in Old English verse. The fact that feeder is used of Christ in And 330 (as it is in the genealogy of King Æthelwulf in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 855,primus homo etpater noster est Christus ‘the first man and our father is Christ’, C. Plummer, ed., Two o f the Saxon Chronicles Parallel:. . . On the Basis o f an Edition by John Earle, 2 vols (Oxford, 1892-99; repr. 1929), I, 66) might suggest that Old English ‘God terms’ were assumed to be Trinitarian in the sense of applying to the Godhead generally unless otherwise stated. The term godes gœstsunu for Christ occurring in Chr 660 and 860, and specifically mentioned by Robinson, raises some theological problems if over-literally interpreted the translation ‘spiritual son’ underemphasises the fact that Christ was begotten; ‘Spirit-Son’ might be thought to contuse the persons of the Godhead. 33 With dominus in the nominative case, it occurs 175 times according to my concordance.

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out that the poet ‘comments on the sadness of the fact that, as the Danes in their ignorance prayed for salvation, they were assuring their own destruction, since the pagan idols were really devils in disguise’ (p. 34).34 Here Robinson captures the emotion of the passage, but not the precise sense of what the poet is saying: Hwilum hie geheton æt hærgtrafum wigweorþunga, wordum bædon þæt him gastbona geoce geffemede wið þeodþreaum. (17 5-8a) (Sometimes they promised sacrifices at heathen shrines, prayed with words that the slayer of souls might bring about help for the distresses of the people.) The people are praying for relief for their troubles rather than salvation (which in this context, of course, is a loaded word), and they are not, in the poet’s understanding, praying to devils, but to the devil himself, the gastbona, the ‘slayer of souls’ of the New Testament.35 In other words, they are seeking temporary, physical help at the risk o f eternal, spiritual death. The bitter irony of the situation outlined in the passage depends on a Christian understanding of spiritual reality. The poet quite clearly distinguishes in this passage between what his characters think they are doing, and what he knows they are doing. He sympathises with their plight, but he does not identify with their world view and he does not exclude, indeed quite clearly asserts, a specifically Christian interpretation of the spiritual world. There are other specifically Christian dogmas that form part of the fabric of the poem, in addition to the idea of an immanent God and a personal devil. The eschatology of the poem, as expressed in 183b—88 et passim, particularly the 34 This comment refers to the Old Testament commonplace, repeated frequently in Christian sources, ‘omnes dii gentium daemonia at vero Dominus caelos fecit’ (For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens, Psalm 95:5) and ‘omnes enim dii populorum idola Dominus autem caelos fecit’ (For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the Lord made the heavens, I Chronicles 16:26). Robinson refers to the commonplace in Appositive Style (p. 45) to make the slightly more subtle point that the Danes in their ignorance of the true God do not know that he is heofena helm ‘guardian of the heavens’182; he seems to have conflated this analogue with what the poet actually says. 35 Old Testament and New Testament devils are quite different, as can be illustrated by their uses in the Bible. The uses of the term SuxfioXog and diabolus in the Septuagint Greek and the Vulgate Latin Old Testament versions is illuminating. Broadly, óláfkúoo in the Greek Old Testament is either an opponent, an enemy, or a gainsayer, a slanderer. Haman, the man who conspires to wipe out the Jews in the book of Esther, is repeatedly called ðtáfioAog (7:4, 8:1-5). Jerome translates this word as hostis ‘enemy’ and adversarius ‘adversary’. The other examples of Greek óuifirúog in the Old Testament (I Chronicles 21:1, Job l:6-2:7, Psalm 108:6, Zechariah 3:1-3) all derive from Hebrew satan(as) and Jerome translates predictably as Satan ‘the accuser’. In another place, Jerome translates satan as adversarius (I Kings 11:14). The devil as tempter, father of lies, deceiver, fallen angel, spiritual archenemy of God and man, and denizen of hell, is an inter-testamental (wisdom 2:24) and New Testament character. The Apocalypse of the New Testament, Revelation 20:2, unites the image of the snake-tempter from Genesis, the arch-fiend, and the accuser and sees him bound in the bottomless pit: et adprehendit draconem serpentem antiquum qui est diabolus et Satanas et ligavit eum per annos mille (And he laid hold on the dragon the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.)

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ideas of a post-mortem judgement and hell, is Christian in the sense that it reflects a developed, specifically New Testament understanding of the spiritual realm.36 In the Old Testament, Hebrew sheol, Greek hades and Latin infer(n)us refer to the invisible realm of the dead, the world below, the dismal destination of all who die. This place has few of the characteristics of the fiery New Testament hell, gehenna, in for example Matthew 5:22, 18:9,37 which is very clearly depicted by the unchanging fire in which souls suffer in 185-6a. The association of hell and heathens, suffering, constraint, evil spirits, devils and demons is absolutely consistent in Beowulf Hel(l) in the poem is neither the gloomy nether world of the Old Testament, nor the gloomy realm of the goddess Hel as depicted in Scandinavian mythology, but the New Testament hell depicted in many an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, a gaping mouth lurid with flames.

How Concerned was the Poet with Christianity? Bruce Mitchell, in his section of the introduction on the Christian elements of Beowulf in the Mitchell and Robinson edition, is chary of seeing ‘conscious designs’ in the poem. He does not believe that there is ‘one meaning to Beowulf (possibly a reference to theories that Beowulf is an allegory of salvation, or similar) and agrees with Kenneth Sisam that ‘in this work the poet was not much concerned with Christianity and paganism’. From my analysis so far, the proposition that the poet was not much concerned with paganism is reasonable. The poet does not reconstruct heathen belief in its particularity, but treats it generically as a range of practices seen from a Christian perspective. The notion that the poet was ‘not much concerned with Christianity’ is rather more difficult to justify: it is the view also apparently taken by Irving, who concludes his discussion of ‘Christian and pagan elements’, ‘what a poet talks about and gives full attention to well over 95 percent of the time is what he or she is interested in and what the poem is chiefly about, and thus it is what readers and critics should 3® See further the discussion in P. Cavill, Maxims in Old English Poetry, pp. 99-105. 37 Aldred, the glossator of the Lindisfarne Gospels, renders infer(n)us with hell, but gehenna with tinterga. See Matthew 5:22, 29, 30, 10:28, 18:9, 23:15, Mark 9:42(43), 44(45), 46(47), Luke 12:5 for gehenna, and Matthew 11:23, 16:18, Luke 10:15, 16:23 for infer(n)us. The only exception to the pattern is Matthew 23:15 where filium gehennae is rendered sunu cursunges, and cursung is an alternative gloss in Matthew 5:29. Other translators and glossators (compare the text in Liuzza, The Old English Version o f the Gospels) generally use held) indifferently for both. For parallel texts, see WW Skeat, ed., The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian and Old Mercian Versions (Cambridge, 1871-87). 38 The references to he(l) in the poem are these: feond on helle 101b, ‘fiend/enemy from hell, hellish fiend’, i.e. Grendel; hceþenra hyht, helle gemundon 179, ‘the hope of the heathen - they remembered hell’, of the Danes when they turned to heathen worship and looked for help from the gastbona ‘the slayer of souls’; þœs þu in helle scealt / werhðo dreogan 588b-9a, ‘for that you must suffer punishment in hell’, Beowulf speaking to Unferth about the latter’s involvement in the death of his brothers (Mitchell and Robinson retain the reading helle despite some misgivings, p. 67); godes andsaca . . . helle hœfta 786b-8b, ‘the enemy of God . . . captive of hell’, i.e. Grendel; feorh alegde / hœþene sawle; þær him hel onfeng 85lb-2, ‘he gave up his life, his heathen soul; hell received him there’, of Grendel dying in his fen; he . . . gehnœgde helle gast 1273b-4a, ‘he subdued the hellish spirit’, of Beowulf defeating Grendel. The passage towards the end of the poem relating to the (apparent) curse on the treasure of the dragon’s barrow, 3069-73, refers to the curse lasting until domes dæg ‘day of judgement’ (or more probably ‘the Day of Judgement’), with guilt and constraint in hellbendum ‘in the bonds of hell’ for the one who would disturb the hoard.

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give their attention to’ (p. 189). The problem I find with such assertions as Irving’s is that they are inadequate for comprehending the world view of the poet: what the poet takes for granted informs what he or she writes or composes all of the time, but is not analysed or justified precisely because it is taken for granted. The significance of the Christian references does not lie in only the percentage of lines containing them:39 other criteria are at least as important, such as the way they are used in authoritative judgements on action and character, and the prominence given to God’s control of events.40 Sisam neatly summarises the evidence for his view that ‘the poet was not much concerned with Christianity’ in seven pages entitled ‘Note B: Christianity in Beow ulf in his book The Structure o f Beowulf.41 He starts from the notion that the poet depends on ‘the sympathy of an audience who belonged to a christianized community’,42 and examines how the poet deals with this constraint in four points. The last of Sisam’s points is that the biblical allusions are those that ‘stick in the minds of children. There are no references to the Gospels’, which is more strictly true than the statement that all the biblical references are to the Old Testament - but it depends on us being able to imagine a Christian theology without the gospels 43 For his first point Sisam notes that ‘hœðen always has an evil connotation’, being used ‘only once of men, in the much-debated passage where Hrothgar’s people turn to idols for help; it is twice applied to their enemy Grendel (852, 986)’. He thinks ‘sympathy would be lost if the heathen character of the heroes was emphasized’. He also thinks it is inconsistent for the Danes to turn to idols, presumably because this contrasts with what he sees as the ‘simple monotheism’ (p. 75) evidenced in Hrothgar’s and the other characters’ speeches. But Christine Fell has shown that the semantics of 175-88 give no warrant for a translation involving idols and temples, and translates instead ‘they offered worship in pagan cult centres’.44 The poet is not referring to specific heathen practices, but heathen worship in general. This accords with the fact that the poet makes it clear that it is the devil to whom they appeal. The point is perhaps that the heathen, those who pray to the devil and do not know God, and the predatory 39 By way of example, the Hebrew book of Esther in the Bible contains no reference to God. It is not for this reason to be regarded as less than religious, though the ‘deficiency’ was redressed by additions in the Septuagint. Here a ‘historical novella’ tells the origin of the Jewish festival of Purim and the significance lies not in the number of times the deity is referred to, but in the context of later religious practice. The story has a greater significance than the characters are themselves aware of, without being in the least allegorical. See further W.E. Mills, ed., The Lutterworth Dictionary o f the Bible (Cambridge, 1990), p. 264. 40 It is notable that the condemnation of the Danes’ heathenism, the comment on Beowulf himself at his death, Beowulf’s condemnation of Unferth, all of which are discussed here, and many other comments like them, are expressed in recognisably Christian terms. See further S.B. Greenfield, ‘The Authenticating Voice in Beowulf ,ASE 5 (1976), 51-62. 41 K. Sisam, The Structure o f Beowulf(Oxford, 1965), pp. 72-9. 42 See also below for some commentary on the use of assumptions about the ‘audience’. 43 While it is true that not everything in any Christian theology is immediately derived from the gospels, in the sense in which I use the word ‘reference’, there are many references in Beowulf to the gospels: see above, n. 38, for some sources of the idea of hell. 44 C.E. Fell, ‘Paganism in Beowulf. A Semantic Fairy-Tale’, in T. Hofstra, L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald, ed., Pagans and Christians: The Interplay Between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, Germania Latina 2 (Groningen, 1995), pp. 9—34.

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monsters like Grendel, are self-condemned (a position taken by St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans). This is an unambiguously Christian view of heathenism. But there is some ambiguity later in the poem. The adjective hœðen is used twice of hoards, with similar evil connotations: the dragon guards a heathen hoard and heathen gold (2216, 2276). In both cases, this refers to ancient burial practices: the hoard contains cergestreon ‘ancient treasures’ (2232), buried by a race on geardagum ‘in past times’ (2233) who died cerran mcelum ‘in ancient times’ (2237); and the dragon had already been guarding his hoard for 300 years (2278) when it was broken into. The ambiguity lies in the fact that when the dragon’s hoard is (apparently) transferred into Beowulf’s burial mound, the practice is not called ‘heathen’, nor the treasure itself: the gold is ‘eldum swa unnyt swa hyt æror wæs’ (as useless to men as it was before, 3168). There are certain parallels here with The Seafarer 97-102, where the poet remarks that gold cannot help the dead. The poet seems to use the word ‘heathen’ to condemn distant (Danish), ancient and general paganism. But the poet leaves open the issue o f the fate of those like Beowulf who are never described as ‘heathen’; and he allows that burying treasure with the dead hero is merely wasteful and foolish. In this way, the poet acknowledges the historical fact of heathenism, and he locates it in the metaphysical distance, long ago and far away. But through his hero he seems to be exploring ambiguity, the possibility that there might be some grey in the church’s black and white on the question of the spiritual fate of those who lived before Christianity was preached.45 Sisam’s second point, that ‘there are few references to distinctly heathen practices’, has been reinforced by Fell, who argues for example that heel sceawedon in 204 attracts no adverse comment because it does not mean ‘took the omens’ (as Sisam believed), but ‘waved goodbye’. Fell has further suggested that the funerals in the poem are historical fiction composed by a poet in Christian times imagining a heathen past; the detailed parallels between the funerals in the poem and those in the archaeological record from heathen times are slight. The question of ‘idol-worship’ or heathen practice has been mentioned above, and the poet makes it clear that it is only an alternative to Christian prayer in the sense that it appeals to the devil rather than to God. The explanation for this treatment might not be that ‘idol-worship was felt to be a present danger to Christianity’ as Sisam suggests, but that folk religion and superstition were. At any rate, the absence of detailed polemic against heathenism is no proof of indifference to Christianity, perhaps rather o f a strong confidence in its present and continuing pre-eminence. 45 Bruce Mitchell recounts various sources that suggest that there was a mix of Christianity and heathenism in Anglo-Saxon England of the seventh and early eighth centuries, and adds Alcuin’s famous question, Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ (pp. 34-5). Although Alcuin’s letter illustrates the interest felt at the time in the stories of, and the fate of, the heathen, it does not tell us anything about heathenism, or its practice, or conversion to Christianity, in Anglo-Saxon England: if anything, it suggests that the practicalities of dealing with English heathenism are in the past. There is a considerable difference between saying that idol-worshippers should not become priests, and that monks should not hear tales of heathen heroes. In a chapter on Beowulf in P. Cavill, Anglo-Saxon Christianity (London, 1999), pp. 109-25, I suggest that the fate of heathen ancestors is one of the central questions addressed by the poem.

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Sisam’s third point is that The poem shows no interest in theological niceties. For example, Grendel, a devil (939, 1680), tried to escape and join the multitude of devils (secan deofla dedrceg 756). When he plunged into the mere, mortally wounded, ‘Hell received him’. But Beowulf thinks of him as awaiting God’s decree on Judgement Day (977 ff.). No attempt is made to explain the apparently different conceptions. The most obvious fact about these references to Grendel and his fate (as also the poet’s characterisation of him as hæðen) is that they all see him as hell-bound, though each expresses it in a different way. But Sisam has also missed the similarity between the treatment of Grendel in Beowulf and the treatment of devils in, for example, Cynewulf’s poetry. In 755-7, Grendel wants to escape to where he belongs: Hyge wæs him hinfus, wolde on heolster fleon, secan deofla gedræg; ne wæs his drohtoð þær swylce he on ealderdagum ær gemette. (His mind was on flight; he wanted to flee to his hiding-place, to seek the noisy company of devils. What he experienced there was like nothing he had ever met with in his life before.)46 The devil who attacks the eponymous heroine o f Juliana has a similar experience: Ða hine seo fæmne forlet æfter þræchwile þystra neosan in sweartne grand, sawla gewinnan, on wita forwyrd. Wiste he þi gearwor, manes melda, magum to secgan, susles þegnum, hu him on side gelomp.

(553b-58)

(Then the girl let him, the enemy of souls, go after his time of suffering to the punishments of destruction, to seek the darkness in the murky depths. He, the messenger of wickedness, was all the more conscious that he [had to] tell his fellows, the servants of torment, how it had turned out for him.) This devil confesses that he has never encountered anyone like Juliana, ‘ic ær ne sið ænig ne mette / in woruldrice w if þe gelic’ (I never, ever, met with any woman in the world like you, 548-9). And he longs to escape to hell and the company of his fellows. Hell is where devils belong, where they come from and

46 The note in the Mitchell and Robinson edition of Beowulf, p. 73, gives ‘ “to return to the hubbub of devils”, i.e. the company consisting of Grendel himself and his mother’ as a translation and explanation of this phrase. However gedreag, gedrœg has two main linked meanings, ‘a multitude’ and ‘the noise made by a multitude (of people, etc.)’ (compare Andreas 43, 1555, Christ 999, The Wife’s Lament 45), and a company of two hardly seems adequate. The topos of the saint’s life, where the devil sent to tempt the saint is defeated and longs to return to hell and the noisy company of its own kind, seems to fit the Beowulf context better; see the passage from Juliana below.

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where they go to. Cynewulf also tells us that Juliana’s persecutors, Eleusius and thirty-four of his men, died at sea hroþra bidæled, hyhta lease helle sohton (68lb-82) (deprived of joys, without hopes, they sought hell) - much as, when Grendel runs away to die in his hideout at the mere, . . . dreama leas in fenfreoðo feorh alegde, hæþene sawle; þær him hel onfeng.

(850b-52)

(without joys, he gave up his life, his heathen soul, in his swamp-refuge; hell received him there.) These judgements on Grendel and Eleusius’s company are given confidently in the authorial voice. But Cynewulf cannot be unreservedly confident about the judgement on himself, and neither can Beowulf be certain about Grendel. Both have to wait for God’s judgement. Grendel, in Beowulf’s view, will be gripped and bound in pain until the final judgement: Ðær abidan sceal maga mane fah miclan domes, hu him scir metod scrifan wille.

(977b-79)

(there the crime-stained man must await the great judgement, what the pure Lord wishes to impose on him.) In one of Cynewulf’s signatures, the same notion is expressed for all the sinful: Þær sceal forht monig on þam wongstede werig bidan hwæt him æfter dædum deman wille wraþrawita. (Christ 80lb-4) (There [at the last judgement] many, fearful and accursed, must await in that place what terrible punishments he wishes to adjudge to them according to their deeds.) Similarly, in another of his signatures, Cynewulf trembles at the prospect of judgement (here the runes possibly signify the poet himself): Cyning biþ reþe sigora syllend, þonne synnum fah .E.W. ond U. acle bidað hwæt him æfter dædum deman wille lifes to leane. (Juliana 704b-8a) (The King, the giver of victories, will be severe when, stained with sins, .E.W. and U. await what he wishes to adjudge for them, according to their deeds, as a reward for life.)

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And he goes on to ask his audience to pray for him on þam miclan dæge ‘on that great day’ (723) when God þurh þa sciran gesceaft scrifeð bi gewyrhtum meorde monna gehwam. (728-9a) (by his pure decree will impose recompense on everyone according to their deeds.) There is a remarkable similarity of both concept and vocabulary in these passages, and when we put Beowulf alongside Cynewulf, we can see quite clearly the parallels between the two poets. Moreover, both notions - the immediacy and present reality of hell, and the necessity of waiting for the last judgement - the presence of which in the poem Sisam sees as theological indifference on the part of the Beowulf poet, are equally biblical.47 Grendel is captivus inferni, helle hæft ‘prisoner of hell’ (788a) according to the poet, and will remain bound in evil bonds to await the great judgement (977-9) according to Beowulf. The difference is one of perspective: Beowulf is showing humility before the judgement of God and ignorance of the nature of Grendel, while the poet in his authorial voice can assert the facts. Cynewulf similarly shows humility about himself and people in general, but knows that devils, murderers, and all the condemned, belong in hell. No-one seems to feel that Cynewulf was confused, or had no interest in theological niceties. The fact that the poet of Beowulf chooses to raise a number o f different but unconflicting possibilities about Grendel’s nature and fate seen from different perspectives might suggest not a lack of interest in theological niceties but the exact opposite. Sisam goes on to make two further general points, one about the nature of the characters and the other about the audience of the poem. Of Beowulf himself, Sisam writes, p. 78, There is no criticism of anything Beowulf says or does, however unchristian it may be. His doctrine of revenge, his eagerness for material rewards and earthly fame, his silence about a future life, all pass without comment. His satisfaction that God cannot blame him for the murder of kinsmen (2741 f.) is paralleled in the poet’s earlier praise: ‘he did not slay his comrades in their cups’ (2179 f.). Revenge, reward and fame are all key points of heroic duty which there is no reason to suppose the poet or almost anyone else in Anglo-Saxon England thought of as unchristian in a warrior. As for Beowulf’s ‘silence about a future life’, there is no character in the poem who has as much to say on the subject. His deferring to the judgement of God with reference to Grendel has already been noticed. He is forthright in condemning Unferth to hell for his involvement in the death o f his brothers, ‘þæs þu in helle scealt / werhðo dreogan’ (for that

47 The parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 implies that the rich man goes straight to hell (in tormentis, verse 23); while the parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25:31-46 depicts a set-piece last and final judgement in pastoral imagery.

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you must suffer punishment in hell, 588b-89a). And Beowulf’s ‘satisfaction that God cannot blame him for the murder o f kinsmen’ is precisely such a reference: . . . me witan ne ðearf waldend fira morðorbealo maga, þonne min sceaceð lif of lice. (2741-3a) (the ruler of men will have no cause to accuse me of the murder of kinsmen when my life passes from my body.) There is a consistent pattern in these references: Beowulf seems to associate murder with blame and punishment in the afterlife. Sisam implies what Irving states clearly: ‘The judging God is Christian, but killing kinsmen is a Germanic deadly sin.’48 The distinction is unnecessary, since of course kin-slaying is a Christian deadly sin too: I John 3:15 ‘omnis homicida non habet vitam æternam in se manentem’ (no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself) makes the same association o f murder and punishment in a context that refers to Cain as the archetypal kin-murderer (already mentioned above in relation to reference to Grendel as Cain’s descendant), and talks about the duty of laying down one’s life for others. As Beowulf reviews his life in preparation for death, having fought the dragon and given his life (as he sees it) for his people, this biblical passage has a great deal of resonance.

The A ‘ udience’o f the Poem The notion of the understanding of the audience is one that has been helpfully exploited in the interpretation of the poem over the years.49 The notion is used to set the poem in a context in which there is a reciprocal relationship between the poet and the people for whom he was composing. This is a perfectly reasonable notion: it would be strange for Cynewulf to ask for people to pray for him, for example, if no-one ever read or heard his poetry, and if no-one ever prayed. But in recent scholarship, assumptions about the poem’s audience have been used to limit, and define what the poet might mean, and here the notion o f the audience has become an obstacle. Assumptions about the audience clog the discussion of Mitchell and Robinson, Sisam and many others. There are perhaps two facts that need to be kept in mind. First, we do not know that there was an audience for Beowulf beyond an original scribe or scribes and two copyists: we have no record of any performance, and we can only talk in the most general way about an audience. Second, no poet, teacher or preacher would ever exercise their vocation if they had to rely on an audience understanding everything they said. We have a poem that was composed and copied in a Christian Anglo-Saxon

48 E.B. Irving Jr, Rereading Beowulf {Philadelphia, 1989), p. 113. 49 Especially Whitelock, Audience, and P. Wormald, ‘Bede, “Beowulf” and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’, in R.T. Farrell, ed., Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour o f the 1300th Anniversary o f the Birth o f Bede, British Archaeological Reports British Series 46 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 32-95.

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context - this context is broadly what Whitelock was discussing in The Audience o f Beowulf - but we do not have a clearly definable audience for Beowulf It is unwise, therefore, to interpret the poem in the light of too precise assumptions about its audience. Sisam writes, ‘[i]n weighing the Christian element in Beowulf we have to consider what laymen with a not very distant heathen background would readily absorb and remember’ (p. 76). Mitchell and Robinson are in agreement that ‘the poet was speaking over the heads of at least part of his audience and t h a t . . . the audience was not a homogeneous one’ (p. 34, and echoing Appositive Style, p. 40). These are large and entirely unverifiable assumptions about the audience, and they deflect attention from what the poem says to what the least educated of the supposed audience might have taken it to mean. These assumptions, moreover, lead to confusion. For Mitchell, the poet wishes to avoid ‘shocking or repelling the devout. To this end, he deliberately blurs such questions as damnation and the fate of the righteous heathen on the death of Beowulf, shirking these issues in the interests of Christian propaganda.’ But it is an odd kind of propaganda that ‘blurs’ crucial questions that it should be making clear; and if some of the audience were as ‘devout’ as the editors assume, they might well be shocked by the ‘shirking’ o f these issues. Mitchell and Robinson side with Sisam against Whitelock on the ‘audience’ question. Whitelock expressed the view that ‘the audience of Beowulf was thoroughly acquainted with the Christian religion’ for various reasons, among which was the notion that the emphasis of missionaries would be on major doctrines such as the redemption by Christ, and ‘the detailed stories of the Old Testament could be left till later’ {Audience, pp. 6-7). Given the focus on Cain and the Flood, Whitelock surmised that the audience was sufficiently educated in the Christian tradition to be secure in the gospel doctrines and well enough aware of the Bible to know these stories. Sisam rejects this view, arguing instead that ‘Genesis was in the forefront o f Christian teaching to laymen’, and broadly that the Christianity of the poem is ‘elementary’: Certainly the primary task of missionaries and priests was to teach the Gospel. Yet Cædmon began with the Creation, not with the Passion: and according to Bede, he later worked through the Old and New Testament under his instructors. When wise Bishop Daniel advised Boniface how to convince heathens by argument, he suggested subjects more akin to Genesis than to the Gospels. There are confusions here. Cædmon was neither missionary nor priest; he became a poet and a monk, and there is a certain poetic appropriateness about beginning both these vocations with a consideration of the beginning o f all things, his poetic creation beginning with the Creation of the world. And as he worked through the subjects o f the catechism, he made poetry that helped others to take their faith seriously: he did not, according to Bede - and Bede is our only source - convert them.50 50 The story of Cædmon is in Bede, HE iy 24, pp. 414—21. V Day, ‘The Influence of the Catechetical “Narratio” on Old English Literature’, ASE 3 (1974), 51—61, notes that ‘the narratio exercised a

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The letter of Daniel to Boniface is different. Daniel argues that the heathen should be allowed to keep the idea o f gods begetting others, at least temporarily, because it very clearly raises issues of origins that cannot be answered by a polytheistic kind of theology.51 . . . altercantes interroga: quis ante natos deos mundo imperaret? quis regeret? unde autem vel a quo vel quando substitutus aut genitus primus deus vel dea fuerat? (Ask the disputants: Who controlled the world before the birth of their gods? Who ruled it? . . . And whence and by whom and when was the first god or goddess appointed or begotten?) And towards the end of his letter Daniel writes, Et ne quasi de legitimo semper a principio . . . deorum jactitent imperio, intimandum eis: cunctum prius mundum idolorum deditum culturae, donec Christi gratia - veri omnipotentis Conditoris Rectoris uniusque Dei notitia inluminatus - vivificatus reconcilitusque Deo est. (And in order that they may not boast of the rule of the gods . . . as legitimate and in existence from the beginning, they must be told that once all the world was given up to the worship of idols, until by the grace of Christ it was illumined with the knowledge of the true, almighty Creator, Ruler and One God, restored to life and reconciled to God.) Sisam seems to be arguing that the audience of Beowulf would need this kind of questioning and teaching. But the poet makes clear that even the characters of the poem already have some ‘knowledge of the true, almighty Creator, Ruler and One God’, and that they relapse under extreme pressure into heathenism swylc wœsþeaw hyra ‘such was their practice’ (178), at least hwilum ‘occasionally’ (175). The change of tense between this passage and the Wa bid / Wei bid maxims in 183 and 186, a change from a past, historical situation, to a present and continuing spiritual reality, is marked. The difference between the characters who ne cuþon . . . ne wiston . . . ne cuþon, who did not know God and his worship, and the one who is allowed {mot) to seek and ask for the protection of the Father’s embrace, is also marked. If this tells us anything about a wider audience, the people the poet might have been addressing, it is that the poet saw their situation as significantly different from that of the characters. One last observation is worth making about the audience of the poem. A very long succession of scholars has made the suggestion that parts of Beowulf, particularly the Christian parts, were interpolated. The suggestion has been given new life by Michael Lapidge, who discerns the influence of vernacular decisive influence on the composition of Christian vernacular poetry at the very start, or at least so Bede thought, for his famous description of the corpus of Caedmon’s poetry is no less than a description of the catechetical narratio as well’ (p. 54). The point here is that catechetical teaching presupposes conversion and is not explicitly a means to it. 51 The Latin text is from A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, ed., Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Oxford, 1871; rpt 1964), III, 304-6; the translation is from EHD, pp. 732-3.

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preaching in 1758-68, for example, and suggests that it is interpolated, and ‘cannot be earlier than the tenth century’, while arguing for an early eighth-century date for the archetype. This conclusion, even if it is flawed,52 adds some weight to the arguments I have been making above, that Beowulf echoes and uses (within limits) the normal discourse of Christianity. But if, as Lapidge suggests, the scribes added their own material to the poem, and the poem passed through several stages of editing before reaching its final form, then that form is the product of the only ‘audience’ for the poem we can be certain of. And the corollary is that if Christ and much of Christian dogma are omitted, they are not omitted by accident, or oversight, or theological inadequacy, or ignorance: poet and scribes had opportunity to supply them, but did not. But in fact the Christianity of Beowulf is not as odd as most commentators have suggested. The Beowulf poet’s failure to mention Christ is also a failure of the poets of the Old English (and Old Saxon translated) Genesis and Exodus, who also tend mostly to allude to the Old Testament - unsurprisingly, perhaps. But are we to suppose that they (poets or poems) are not specifically Christian? The question is not at all flippant because the poet of Exodus, for example, allows himself Christian references to death, judgement and the fate of souls within a pre-Christian context in a fashion rather analogous to that of the poet of Beowulf. Þis is læne dream, wommun awyrged, wreccum alyfed, earmra anbid. Eðellease þysne gystsele gihðum healdað, murnað on mode, manhus witon fæst under foldan, þær bið fyr ond wyrm, open ece scræf yfla gehwylces, swa nu regnþeofas rice dælað, yldo oððe ærdeað. Eftwyrd cymð, mægenþrymma mæst ofer middangeard, dæg dædum fah. Drihten sylfa on þam meðelstede manegum demeð, þonne he soðfæstra sawla lædeð, eadíge gastas, on uprodor, þær bið leoht ond lif eac þon lissa blæd. (Exodus 532b-47)53 (This is temporary, sin-corrupted happiness granted to exiles, the allotted time of wretches. The homeless sorrowfully rule this guest-hall, as now the arch-thieves age and early death share power; they are 52 M. Lapidge, ‘The Archetype of Beowulf, ASE 29 (2000), 5—41, at p. 39. The argument is flawed at this particular point, however, in that it equates the earliest written vernacular homilies with the earliest vernacular homilies. Lapidge argues that the interpolation he detects ‘cannot. . . have been in the hypothetical early-eighth-century archetype, since there is no evidence of vernacular preaching at that early date’ (p. 39); but Bede tells us that King Oswald interpreted Aidan’s Irish vernacular for his English listeners in the early years of the seventh century (HE III, 3), and in the nature of the case, there must have been a great deal of unrecorded vernacular preaching, in addition to this, over succeeding years. 53 Text from ASPR I, with the exception of the punctuation at 538; for the running together of the two sentences in ASPR, see P.J. Lucas, ed., Exodus, rev. edn (Exeter, 1994).

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anxious in mind, aware of the place of wickedness fixed under the earth, where there is fire and serpent, an open, eternal pit of every evil thing. The judgement day will come over earth, the most powerful of forces, a day marked by deeds: the Lord himself will judge many at the place of assembly; then he will lead the souls of the righteous, blessed spirits, to heaven, where there is light and life and also the abundance of grace.) The poet of Exodus generalises from what has happened in his story, namely the overwhelming of the Egyptians by the Red Sea, to the judgement day that Christians know will come. God will judge; the fiery pit of hell and the light of heaven await (we remember that King Hreðel ‘chose God’s light’ when he died, ‘godes leoht geceas’ (2469), with the souls o f the righteous (soðfœstra sawla, compare the discussion of soðfœstra dom above) being taken to their happy destination. The Exodus poet takes the trouble to explain how he knows this, but he does not lumber his poem with references to Christ or the incarnation or all the other doctrines that scholars think should be present in Beowulf. The story has Christian meaning, which he adroitly draws out; we have to suppose that he felt no necessity to say more. Neither Exodus nor Beowulf deal with Christian times, but there is nevertheless in both poems an overarching and timeless spiritual reality to which events point. It was because of this spiritual reality - heaven and hell - that Christ was born, died and was raised from death to save souls, and over this reality that he reigns eternally. This was spiritual reality for the poet of Exodus as much as for the poet of Beowulf

Conclusion It seems to me, then, that the summary statement on the Christian elements of Beowulf in the edition of Mitchell and Robinson needs some modification. True, there is no mention o f the historical events o f Christianity the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or the Ascension - or of the name of Christ himself’; but the whole poem reflects a view of the spiritual world that is specifically Christian. The poet makes reference to Old Testament biblical history (Cain and Abel, the Flood, and so on), but at various points the poem and the characters express a New Testament understanding of God, the devil, judgement, heaven and hell; and indeed of the Old Testament. The poet makes a perfectly reasonable distinction (for an Anglo-Saxon Christian, at least) between history and revelation: the creation, flood and giants of Genesis were to him history, the shared history of the world, as they were apparently to King Æthelwulf, whose genealogy is traced back through Woden, to Noah, to Adam;54 heaven, hell and the devil were revealed truth about spiritual reality. The Danes could be unaware of the later historical events of Christian faith and history, as the poet knew they were, but he himself did not or could not imagine a world that was not poised between the heaven and hell of revelation.55 Thus we

54 See above, n. 32 for the reference. 55 A point made in slightly different terms by B.C. Raw, ‘Biblical Literature: The New Testament’ in

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can only postulate a ‘lack of specific Christian references’ on the Beowulf poet’s part by supposing him to have had a language that was more or less sui generis and unconnected with the rest of the Old English poetic vocabulary. In reality, for the Christian ideas he chooses to use, the poet employs mostly the standard words and images that were current in the range of Old English poetry now extant. My purpose here has been to document (and to argue with) trends in the representation o f Christianity in Beowulf. Christianity is often passed over, diminished or excluded by various means: philological, analogical, or by invoking the understanding of the audience. The half-truths that the biblical allusions are only to the Old Testament and that Beowulf lacks ‘specific Christian references’ continue to be circulated, without real consideration of the detailed evidence or of the implications of such statements. The desire for neutrality on the part of editors and commentators sometimes works to remove from consideration legitimate interpretations o f the text. Editorial mystification only tends to obscure aspects of the Beowulf poet’s art. I am not setting out a new interpretation of the poem. In particular I am not arguing that the character Beowulf was necessarily ‘saved’, or that there is no ambiguity or difficulty about the Christian elements of the poem. But I am suggesting that the Christianity o f the poem is much more ordinary and less idiosyncratic than has been asserted over recent years. The poet knew his theology and understood the world in Christian terms, even though he excluded some great dogmas o f the church from his poem. He thought deeply about the religious meaning of his work, I believe, even as he chose to focus on fights against monsters as the bones of the story. It seems to me that it is the audience of the poem in the last half-century that has been confused about the Christianity of the poem, not the poet or whatever contemporary audience the poem might have had.56

Bibliographical Note I make reference to a range of scholarship in the footnotes, but there are two books that will be of particular interest for scholars or students wishing to read more: they are L.E. Nicholson, ed., An Anthology o f Beowulf Criticism (Notre Dame, IA, 1963), where the focus o f the collection is predominantly on the issue of the poem’s Christianity; and E.B. Irving Jr, ‘Christian and Pagan Elements’, in R.E. Bjork and J.D. Niles, ed., A Beowulf Handbook (Exeter, 1997), pp. 175-92, where the main stages of the debate are lucidly summarised.

M. Godden and M. Lapidge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 221-A2, esp. p. 227. 56 I would like to thank Richard Marsden and Helen Philips for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

3 Im ages o f St Peter: The C lergy and the R elig io u s L ife in A n g lo -S a x o n England CATHERINE CUBITT

T

EACHING the religious history of the early Middle Ages can be both a stimulating and frustrating experience. It requires not only the desire to excite the imaginations o f one’s students but also the creativity to find new ways of explicating ancient and alien cultures, and to devise new approaches to much-discussed themes and works. The cult of the saints is a topic that directly engages the curiosity of many students and is a powerful vehicle for introducing undergraduates to the many levels of meaning contained in early medieval texts, but at the same time it demands an engagement with the now often abstruse religious culture of the past. This essay takes one aspect of the cult of St Peter the Apostle, the most popular saint of early Anglo-Saxon England, and uses it to explore the nature of religious life in Anglo-Saxon England. Teachers of the Anglo-Saxon Church generally present it as an institution crowded with monks, nuns and saints in which the most potent religious institutions were the monasteries. I shall argue that symbolism of the cult of St Peter can be used to reveal a more varied picture in which the clergy - those consecrated to the service of the altar but not necessarily pledged to Benedictine or other norms o f community life - played an important part. This leads to a re-evaluation of the nature of pastoral care and to the question of continuity between the early English church in the time of Bede and that of the tenth and eleventh century when Benedictine monastic reform was promoted by the monk-bishops, Æthelwold of Winchester, Oswald of Worcester and Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. The single most outstanding issue for all those involved in the teaching early medieval religion is simply the ignorance in religious matters of students, most of whom will never have set foot in a church. This must be set against our scholarly tradition, which is learned in the extreme and which for much of the subject has been formed by generations of scholarly monks and priests reaching back to Mabillon and through to Duchesne, Delehaye and Vogel to name but a few. I was tempted to say, reaching back to Bede himself.1 This temptation reveals an apparent continuity o f tradition, which has had a number o f results. Firstly, that many things, often quite complex technical matters, were assumed by such 1 On this tradition, see J.L. Nelson, ‘Medieval Monasticism’, in P. Linehan and J.L. Nelson, ed., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 576-604, atp. 583.

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scholars that no longer can be taken for granted. One typical example here is a knowledge of the Bible, its stories and sayings. Thus in teaching the papacy, one finds that one must go back to first principles and explain Peter’s role as a disciple and apostle, bring explicitly to a student’s attention the famous words, ‘Thou art Peter and on this rock will I build my church’ (Matthew 16:18) and endeavour to explain the rudiments of papal theory. Another example, again taken from the topic of my essay, is the distinction between clergy and monks: one lost on undergraduates, with the result that their understanding of the tenth-century Benedictine reforms is fairly fundamentally impaired. This distinction affected the rules governing the behaviour of the religious: monks undertook religious vows, eschewing not only (in theory) personal property but also sexual activity whereas the lower orders of the clergy were allowed to marry. Therefore when the tenth-century reformers criticised the lax lifestyles of the clergy, they were often applying monastic standards of continence. On one level, the answer to this problem of undergraduate knowledge is simple: a lecture that outlines the basic structures of the church hierarchy and other such matters. This serves the purpose well and removes the need to spend seminar discussion time on essential but basic facts. This information could also be conveyed by the use of a CD-ROM that students could be assigned to use on their own in order to make up this background. The aural and visual resources of a CD-ROM are the ideal method of showing students the richness of the Christian tradition, giving the possibility of reproducing an early medieval monastery and its liturgy at the same time - one might even use a reconstruction of St Peter’s Rome for this.2 Such a CD-ROM would be both a pleasure for students to use and an excellent pedagogic tool. Among existing resources, the CD-ROM of the Utrecht Psalter, which was produced in conjunction with the Dutch exhibition on that manuscript, provides a way of introducing students to the complexities of biblical exegesis that can capture their imagination.3 On the other hand, one should not be purely negative about the secularity of present-day students. It enables them to look at the early Middle Ages through fresh eyes, untrammelled by the colourings of later historiography and traditions. It is an advantage, for example, in teaching the early medieval papacy not to have to begin by explaining how unlike the post-Gregorian papacy it was, but rather to be able to spend time discussing its similarity to other post-Roman episcopates in the new successor states. It reminds one also of how tightly one’s own understanding of a subject is bounded by the scholarly tradition - certain topics have gained a significance beyond their merit through their prominence in historiographical debate.4 The early medieval church is to most undergraduates

2

One is helped here by excellent textbooks, for example, B. Hamilton, Religion in the Medieval West (London, 1986), J. Lynch, The Medieval Church: a Brief History (London, 1992), C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: the Forms o f Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 3rd edn (Harlow, 2001) and most recently, M. Dunn, The Emergence o f Monasticism. From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2000) and J.L. Nelson, ‘Medieval Monasticism’, pp. 576-604. 3 The Utrecht Psalter. Picturing the Psalms o f David, Universiteit Utrecht (Utrecht, 1996), available from Universiteitsbibliothek Utrecht, postbus 16007, 3500 DA Utrecht, Wittevrouwenstraat 7-11. 4 For this scholarly phenomenon, see S. Franklin and J. Shepherd, The Emergence o f the Rus 750-1200 (London and New York, 1996), p. xxi, on Sevcenko’s Law of the Dog and the Forest.

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a very curious affair. And so indeed it was. Our students’ awareness of the distance between the present and the past is a bonus - historians need always to be mindful that the past is different and it is surprisingly easy to forget this. On the other hand, students bring with them a greater awareness of symbolism, multivalency and the ideological uses of ideas and images. They are open to new ways o f reading texts. And here we early medievalists have an important advantage in that we can base so much of our teaching on the primary sources. Students are extremely responsive to this and often find early medieval history in this respect a refreshing change from the study of later periods which can often dominated by secondary literature. We are fortunate that so many early medieval texts are now available in good modern translations.5 The existence of so many texts in translation enables one to introduce students to the skill of close reading, which is often one for which they have had little preparation at school. Hagiography is an excellent medium for teaching and highlights the importance of genre, authorial intent and audience in the evaluation of a source. This in turn is a useful way of dispelling the crude notion of bias that so many history undergraduates bring to their reading of a text. The starting point for this discussion of the religious life is a number o f references to St Peter as being tonsured like a clerk. Why was the saint so described? Answering this question leads to an exploration of the place of the clergy in the early Anglo-Saxon church. This can be used as an example of the way in which encouraging students to read their texts carefully and seek explanations for the things that they do not understand can open up important issues in the study of the church. Saints’ cults can be valuable and sensitive indicators of shifting currents in the religious life and can alert us to important developments. The cult of St Peter was the premier cult of seventh- and eighth-century England as the lists of church dedications compiled by Wilhelm Levison and Mary Clayton show.6 In Levison’s reckoning of dedications of the seventh and eighth centuries, St Peter totals 22 dedications as sole patron and seven with Paul, Mary comes second in this poll for popular saint with 18, Andrew comes third with seven and then a handful recorded for other universal saints. Peter is in Christian tradition the Prince of the Apostles named first in Gospel lists of these and a member of Christ’s most intimate group of disciples. It was to Peter that Christ entrusted the power o f binding and loosing, and whom he described as the foundation of his church (Matthew 16:18-19). Marytred in Rome, Peter was regarded as its first bishop, and it was from his biblical pre-eminence that the claims of the papacy to pre-eminence within the universal church derived. The English devotion to Peter originated ultimately from the Augustinian mission sent by Pope Gregory, and among their contemporaries the English were probably the most enthusiastic adherents of his cult and of papal claims to 5 Here the two series, one published by Liverpool University Press, Translated Texts for Historians, and the other by Manchester University Press, Manchester Medieval Sources, have performed an invaluable service, particularly in translating M l texts rather than excerpts. 6 M. Clayton, The Cult o f the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, CSASE 2 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 123-38; W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University o f Oxford in the Hilary Term, 1943 (Oxford, 1946), pp. 259-65.

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supremacy.7 Peter’s cult is integrally bound up with the city of his martyrdom and with his shrine there. One imagines the English were not only in awe of the princely Apostle and his successor, Gregory, but bowled over by the decaying magnificence of his city and its churches. This English devotion took many forms, which have been well-studied: imitation of the Roman liturgy, of church architecture, pilgrimages and appeals to the jurisdictional authority of the see and so on.8 For Bede, for example, St Peter represented the unity of the Church in obedience to Roman customs. In his homily for the Chair of St Peter, he wrote that: The blessed Peter . .. received in a special way the keys of the kingdom of heaven and pre-eminence in the power of judging, so that all believers throughout the world might understand that anyone who separates themselves in any way from the unity of faith or of this fellowship cannot be absolved from the bonds of sin, nor can they enter the gate of the heavenly kingdom.9 Peter’s power o f binding and loosing, and his role as gatekeeper of heaven, here acts as the ‘ultimate deterrent’ for those who might deviate from the norms of his see, a point not missed by King Oswiu at the Synod of Whitby, who closed the council and decided the paschal question by saying, ‘Since [Peter] is the doorkeeper I will not contradict him . . . otherwise when I come to the gates of the kingdom o f heaven, there may be no one to open them .. ,’.10 Other aspects of allegiance to Rome were also attributed to Peter, the Roman Easter reckoning, for example, and the Roman tonsure. These were directly attributed to Peter’s personal authority, and were both the subjects of conflict in seventh- and eighth-century England with the Irish church and its adherents. In his letter to King Geraint, Bede’s contemporary, Aldhelm discusses Peter’s

7

On the cult of Peter, see T. Zwölfer, Sankt Peter Apostelfiirst und Himmelspforier: seine Verehrung bei den Angelsachsen und Franken (Stuttgart, 1920); E. Ewig, ‘Der Petrus- und Apostelkult im spátrömischen und frankischen Gallien’, in his Spatantikes und Frankisches Gallien. Gesammlte Schriften (1952-1973), Beihefte der Francia 3.2 (Munich, 1979), pp. 318-54. 8 See, for example, Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 15—44, J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Rome and the Early English Church: Some Questions of Transmission’, in his collected papers, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 115-37, and A. Thacker, ‘In Search of the English Church and the Cult of Roman Apostles and Martyrs in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries’, in J.M.H. Smith, ed., Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West. Essays in Honour o f Donald A. Bullough (Leiden, 2000), pp. 247-77. 9 D. Hurst, ed., Bedae Venerabilis Homeliarum Evangelii Libri II, CCSL (1955), I, 146: ‘beatus Petrus . . . specialiter claues regni caelorum et principatum iudicariae potestatis accepit ut omnes per orbem credentes intellegant quia quicumque ab unitate fidei uel societatis illius quolibet modo semet ipso segregant tales nec uinculis peccatorum absolui nec ianuam possint regni caelestis ingredi’. My translation is from L.T. Martin and D. Hurst, trans., Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols, Cistercian Studies (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991), II, 203. 10 Bede, HE III, 25, pp. 306-8, quotation from pp. 306-7: ‘Et ego uobis dico, quia hic est hostiarius ille, cui ego contradicere nolo; sed in quantum noui uel ualeo, huius cupio in omnibus oboedire statutis, ne forte me adueniente ad fores regni caelorum non sit quie reserat, auerso illo qui claues tenere probatur’ (full quotation of the passage). And see Stephan of Ripon, Vita sancti Wilfridi, chapter 10, B. Colgrave, ed., The Life o f Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 20-3. And see also J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), pp. 67-8 on the particular link between Peter and early medieval kings.

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adoption of the tonsure in the form of a crown.11 Peter chose this form for three reasons, in imitation o f Christ’s crown o f thorns, to invite the derision of the pagan Romans, and that ‘the priests of the Old Testament and the New might be distinguished by their habit and tonsure’. Old Testament priests wore a tiara while those of the New a crown, which Aldhelm describes as ‘a circular golden perimeter which girds the head of kings. And so each sign is expressed on the head o f clerics, in the words of St Peter: “You are a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood.” ’112 Thus Peter acted not only as a symbol of allegiance to Rome but also as an exemplar of the priestly life.13 This close association between Peter and the tonsure can be observed in pictorial representations as well as in literary evocations o f the saint, which have been well discussed by John Higgitt. He notes, for example, that Peter is portrayed with the tonsure in the form of a crown in the Maeseyk Gospels, a Northumbrian manuscript of the first half of the eighth century.14 The Petrine tonsure was worn not only by priests but by all grades of the clergy. Although worn by monks, it was seen primarily as a clerical custom. Thus, according to Bede, the Pictish king, Nechtan, when writing to Abbot Ceolfrith of Wearmouth/Jarrow about the Roman practices, enquired about ‘the shape and method of the tonsure by which it was fitting that clerks should be distinguished’.15 Moreover, in Bede’s account o f a miracle at Selsey, Peter is explicitly described as wearing a clerical tonsure: a small boy, sick with the plague, was visited by Peter and Paul; when later questioned closely by a priest, the child described his saintly visitors thus: ‘Their robes were magnificent and their faces joyful and beautiful. .. nor did I think that any men could have such grace and beauty. One [Peter] was tonsured like a cleric and the other [Paul] had

11 On the different forms of the tonsure, see L. Trichet, La Tonsure (Paris, 1990), and J. Higgitt, ‘The Iconography of St Peter in Anglo-Saxon England, and on St Cuthbert’s Coffin’, in G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe, ed., St Cuthbert, His Cult and his Community to AD 1200 (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 267-86, atp. 271. 12 R. Ehwald, ed. Aldhelm, Opera, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auctores Antiquissimi (Berlin, 1919), p. 483, ‘ut sacerdotes veteris et novi testamenti in tonsura et habitu discernerentur’ and ‘corona autem latitudo aurea est circuli, quae regum capita cingit. Utrumque itaque signum exprimitur in capite clericorum Petro dicente: Vos estis genus electum, regale sacerdotium’; translation from M. Lapidge and M. Herren, trans., Aldhelm: the Prose Works (Ipswich and Cambridge, 1979), p. 157. See also Trichet, La Tonsure, pp. 35-92, at pp. 76-8 on its attribution to St Peter, and Higgitt, ‘The Iconography of St Peter’, pp. 267-85, at p. 271. On the cultural significance of the tonsure and hairstyles, see E. James, ‘Bede and the Tonsure Question’, Peritia 3 (1984), 85-98, and pp. 86 and 93 on the clerical significance of the tonsure. 13 See J. Vielliard, ‘Notes sur l’iconographie de Saint-Pierre’, Le moyen áge sér. 2, 30 (1929), 1-16, at p. 8, cited in C. Kinder Carr, ‘Aspects of the Iconography of St Peter in Medieval Art of Western Europe to the Early Thirteenth Century’, diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1978, pp. 12-13. 14 Higgitt, ‘Iconography of St Peter’, pp. 281-5. See T.H. Ohlgren, Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Catalogue c.AD. 625 to 1100 (New York, 1986), p. 19 and J.J.G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century, A survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 1 (London, 1978), ill. 96. For a wide-ranging discussion of the iconography of Peter, see C. Kinder Carr, ‘Aspects of the Iconography of St Peter’, pp. 12-13 and for the tonsured Peter as the image of a priest. I owe this valuable reference to Emma Pettit and Jane Hawkes. 15 HE V, 21, pp. 532-3: ‘de tonsurae modo uel ratione, qua clericos insigniri deceret’. An excellent account of the meaning of the Roman adherence of this letter is given by R. Gem, in ‘Towards an Iconography of Anglo-Saxon Architecture’, Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), 1-5.

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a flowing beard.’16 Higgitt comments that this passage may not only indicate that Peter wore the tonsure in the form o f a crown but also that he was clean-shaven, another characteristic of clerks.17 References to the Petrine tonsure therefore are likely to indicate that its possessor was a clerk, not necessarily a monk. It is therefore possible that when St Cuthbert is described in the anonymous Life as taking the Petrine tonsure and entering the monastery of Ripon, the author was probably not attempting to give his hero a unassailable Roman past, as some have proposed, but may have meant that Cuthbert took holy orders, presumably entering one o f the lower ranks. This explanation would resolve the discrepancy between Bede’s statement that Cuthbert became a monk later when he entered Melrose and the anonymous author’s account of his taking the tonsure at Ripon.18 Peter’s peculiarly priestly status was stressed in a number of sources: for example, in the late eighth- or ninth-century Anglo-Saxon private prayer book, the Book of Cerne, certain prayers to Peter appeal directly to his role as shepherd of a flock.19 It can be seen too in the late Saxon period in the description of Bishop Æthelwold o f Winchester’s church at Thorney where the western part dedicated for use by the clergy and people was consecrated to St Peter, while the eastern presbytery and northern porticus were consecrated to St Mary and Benedict respectively.20

Clerical Life in Early Anglo-Saxon England The study of saints’ cults can therefore alert us to important issues in the history of the Anglo-Saxon church. Peter’s portrayal as a clerk opens up the question of the place o f the clergy in the seventh- and eighth-century church, which has not received much prominence in modern historical writings. One reason for this neglect is because of the tendency within modern scholarship to regard the early monastic life in England as undifferentiated and to suggest that distinctions

16 HE i y 14, pp. 378-9, ‘attonsus erat ut clericus’. 17 Higgitt, ‘Iconography of St Peter’, p. 272. 1* Anonymous, Vita sancti Cuthberti II, 2: ‘seruitutis Christi iugum tonsuraeque Petri formam in modum corone spinae capud Christi cingentis Domino adiuuante susceperat. . . ’ (he had by the Lord’s help taken upon him the yoke of bondservice to Christ and the Petrine tonsure after the shape of the crown of thorns that bound the head of Christ, Colgrave, pp. 76-7); Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti prosa, chapter 6, ‘[Boisil] obtinuitque apud eum, ut accepta tonsuram fratrum iungeretur consortio. Quod ingressus monasterium, confestim aequalem caeteris fratribus uitae regularis obseruantiam tenere’ ([Boisil] obtained permission from him for Cuthbert to receive the tonsure and to join the fellowship of the brethren. And entering this monastery, he sought at once to observe the rules of the regular life equally with the other brethren, Colgrave, pp. 174—5). Both vitae ed. and trans. B. Colgrave, Two Lives o f Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940); see also Colgrave’s note on p. 317. On this see too C. Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity Between Pastor and Solitary’, in Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, St Cuthbert, pp. 21 44, at pp. 23,27, who sees this as a sign of the Anonymous’s anxiety to disassociate Cuthbert from Irish monasticism. 10 A.B. Kuypers, The Prayer Book o f Aedeluald the Bishop, Commonly Called the Book o f Ceme (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 158-60, on which see M. Brown, The Book o f Ceme. Prayer, Patronage and Power in Ninth-Century England (London and Toronto, 1996). 20 Gem, ‘Towards an Iconography’, p. 14.

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between different forms of the religious life were later, post-Carolingian categories.21 For example, Patrick Sims-Williams has written, Some students of the early period distinguish ‘monasteries’ from ‘minsters’ in the sense of major churches served by groups of secular clergy living a communal life though not under Benedictine monastic vows. Such a distinction is anachronistic before the late Saxon period. The apologists of the tenth-century monastic reform distinguished between regular (that is, Benedictine) houses and irregular houses, and described their unreformed predecessors as clerici or canonici . . .; the latter, however, if they had had a spokesman might well have described themselves as monks and their institutions as monasteries.22 Such arguments have been strengthened by Sarah Foot’s valuable observation that the word monasterium in early Anglo-Saxon England was used to describe a wide variety o f religious communities.23 The clergy consisted of those consecrated to the clerical grades who lived under the authority o f their diocesan bishop. In Merovingian Francia, these might live as part of the bishop’s familia, or as clerici canonici (those maintained by a stipend from the bishop) as a community attached to a large church, or as members of the rural clergy.24 The life of clergy living in community became increasingly influenced by the ideals of the monks, and equally the monkish life too had been infused by clerical practices. For example, a community o f clergy might be regulated by some sort of rule while the monastic office had adopted services from the clerical liturgy and, with the development of the private mass, monks more commonly became priests. This growing together of the two groups of religious displeased the Carolingian reformers and from the mid-eighth century, legislators attempted to separate the two, particularly by the imposition of the Benedictine Rule upon monks and that of Chrodegang of Metz upon clerks.25 There is evidence for the clergy in the early Anglo-Saxon church: Bishop Wilfrid, for example, despite his championing of the Benedictine Rule and numerous monastic foundations is never described by Stephen of Ripon as taking monastic vows but only the clerical tonsure.26 Donald Bullough has 21 On canons and the clergy, see C. Dereine, ‘Chanoines, des origines au XlIIe siécle’, Dictionaire d ’histoire et de géographie écclesiastiques 12 (Paris, 1953), col. 353—405; J. Siegwart, ‘Der Gallo-frankische Kanonikerbegriff’, Zeitschrift schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 61 (1967), 193-244; J. Semmler, ‘Mönche und Kanoniker im Frankenreiche Pippins III. und Karls des Grossen’, Untersuchungen zu Kloster und Stifi. Veröjfentlichungen des Max-Planck Instituts fur Geschichte 68 (Gottingen, 1980), pp. 78-111; R. SchielFer, Die Enstehung von Domkapiteln in Deutschland, Bonner Historische Forschungen 43 (Bonn, 1976). 22 P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England 600-800, CSASE 3 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 116. And see too J. Semmler, ‘Mönche und Kanoniker’, pp. 78-111; Schieffer, Die Entstehung von Domkapiteln, esp. pp. 97—131. 22 S. Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon Minsters: A Review of the Terminology’, in J. Blair and R. Sharpe, ed., Pastoral Care Before the Parish (Leicester, 1992), pp. 212-25. 24 Dereine, ‘Chanoines, des origines au XlIIe siécle’, pp. 353-75. 25 Semmler, ‘Mönche und Kanoniker’, pp. 78-90. 26 The dominance of a monkish interpretation of the sources is reflected for example in Patrick Wormald’s otherwise admirable article, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’ in G. Bonner, ed., Famulus Christi. Essays in Commemoration o f the Thirteenth Centenary o f the Birth o f the Venerable Bede

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recently shown how Alcuin addressed the clerical communities of a bishop in a different style from his writings to houses of monks, reserving for the latter terminology like ‘regularis vita’ and ‘congregatio’.27 There is moreover evidence to suggest communities of clergy might exist other than as the familia of a bishop. Bishop Cedd of Essex, for example, set up two communities at Bradwell on Sea and Tilbury where his priests and deacons assisting him in the mission could live.28 Felix describes Guthlac as becoming a clerk at Repton, and this vita only uses the word ‘clericus’ for Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics. There is, therefore, substantial evidence for the clergy in the seventh- and eighth-century English church, which should be set beside allusions to St Peter as clerk. Both these sets of sources use precise language to describe clerks and monks and indicate that contemporaries could and did distinguish between the two.

St Peter - Husband, Father and Clerk There is another aspect o f the symbolism of St Peter that requires attention - his marital history - for Peter had been a married man before his response to Christ’s call and was traditionally thought to have fathered the Roman saint, Petronilla. It was probably this phase in his career that led to a certain decline in his favour in the tenth and eleventh centuries in England, the period of the Benedictine reforms. Mary Clayton has shown how the Prince of the Apostles was effectively elbowed aside by the Queen of Heaven, Mary the Virgin, who was seen therefore as the most powerful and appropriate patron of the new houses of virgin Benedictine monks.29 Clayton singles out Peter’s married rather than his clerical status as the reason for this change. These two explanations are of course compatible: Peter as clerk and priest and Peter as husband essentially represented the same evil as far as the monastic reformers were concerned. The late Saxon homilist and proponent of monastic reform, Ælfric, felt moved to explain in his sermon, the Chair of St Peter, that (London, 1976), pp. 141-69, at p. 144: ‘St Wilfrid . . . whose claims to be an orthodox Benedictine are nowadays preferred to Biscop’s, ignored the Rule’s provisions for the succession and adopted an attitude to oblates more characteristic of Gallic than of Benedictine monasticism.’ 27 D. Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, ASE 22 (1993), 93-125, esp. pp. 95-101. See also the address of Boniface’s letter to the English church, Boniface, Epistolae, in M. Tangl, ed., Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistolae Selectae I (Berlin, 1916), no. 46, p. 74, which distinguishes monks and clergy. 28 HE III, 22. 29 M. Clayton, Cult o f the Virgin Mary, pp. 122-38, esp. pp. 137 and 270. Clayton’s suggestion that in the tenth century the dedication of some houses was changed from Peter to Mary does not take into account the evidence for monasteries consisting of a number of churches - a church dedicated to Mary may have been added. See also M. Clayton, ‘Centralism and Uniformity Versus Localism and Diversity: The Virgin and Native Saints in the Monastic Reform’, Peritia 8 (1994), 95-106. For the importance of virginity in English monastic reforms, see C. Cubitt, ‘Virginity and Misogyny in Tenthand Eleventh-Century England’, Gender and History 12 (2000), 1-32, and the cults discussed by P. Hayward, ‘The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-Century English Hagiology’, Studies in Church History 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 81-92, idem, ‘Suffering and Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, c.400-800’, Studies in Church History 31 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 67-80.

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Peter had a wife before he was converted to the family of Christ, but he afterwards renounced worldly desires, and conjugal intercourse, because Christ ordained chastity in the world, and all his followers followed him in chastity. As Peter indeed said to him, ‘Behold we have left all things in the world .. .’.30 Clerical celibacy was an important theme of Ælfric’s pastoral teaching, and occupies a significant part of his pastoral letters in Old English and Latin to Bishop Wulfsige of Sherborne and Archbishop Wulfstan of Worcester and York. In these, and in the preface to his translation of Genesis, Ælíric commented that priests in his own day used Peter’s own marriage and family to justify priestly marriage. Sexual relations were expressly forbidden for bishops, priests and deacons in his writings. The response of Archbishop Wulfstan (who may not have been himself a monk) appears to have been muted since there is evidence that he took a more relaxed view o f the marriage o f deacons.31 Virginity was an essential spiritual and physical quality for the new monastic movement, which valued sexual purity above all other virtues. It castigated the old religious order for its sexual licence. Wulfstan’s life o f St Æthelwold describes the clerks at Old Minster, Winchester in these terms: cathedral canons involved in wicked and scandalous behaviour, victims of pride, insolence, and riotous living to such a degree that some of them did not think fit to celebrate mass in due order. They married wives illicitly, divorced them, and took others .. ,323 Sexual abstinence seems to have been the essential quality that distinguished a monk from a clerk in the tenth century. B ’s life of St Dunstan describes how the saint took the clerical tonsure at Glastonbury and studied the religious life there. Dunstan however was tempted by the devil with love for women, and wished to marry a certain young woman, rejecting the admonitions of his uncle, Arch-

30 ÆLS I, 232-3: ‘Petrus hæfde wif ærðan þe he wære gecyrred to cristes hirede ac he wiþ-cwæð siððan woruldlicum gewilnungum and wifes neawiste forþan þe crist astealde clænnysse swa swa petres cwæð cuþlice him to: Ecce nos reliquimus omnia. . . ’ (Peter had a wife before he was converted to the family of Christ, but he afterwards renounced worldly desires, and conjugal intercourse, because Christ ordained chastity in the world, and all his followers walked in chastity, even as Peter indeed said to him . . . ‘Behold we have left all things . . .’). See also M. Godden, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. The Second Series. Text, EETS SS 5 (London, 1979), pp. 56—7 —all sexual activity forbidden for priests and deacons because of the service of the altar, but not for those in clerical orders lower than deacon. Then he cites Peter and the other apostles who repudiated their marriages and families. See also Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis, lines 23, 29, in S.J. Crawford, ed., The Old English Version o f the Heptateuch [and] Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis, EETS OS 160 (London, 1922), pp. 76-80, at p. 77. 31 As noted by Whitelock in Councils and Synods, p. 278, n. 2: Wulfstan omitted deacon and minster priest from chapter 82 of the first Old English Letter, and permitted ‘other kinswomen’ to cohabit with priests where Ælfric is more limiting. In one version of his Institutes o f Polity, he omitted the category of deacon from those in orders to be degraded if they marry. 33 M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom, ed. and trans., Wulfstan o f Winchester, Life o f St Æthelwold (Oxford, 1991), chapter 16, pp. 30-1: ‘canonici nefandis scelerum moribus implicati elatione et insolentia atque luxuria praeuenti, adeo ut nonnulli illorum dedignarentur missas suo ordine celebrare, repudiantes uxores quas inlicite duxerant et alias accipientes . . .’. Translation from this volume.

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bishop Ælfheah, to become a monk. It was only after a serious illness that he decided to reject female blandishments and be consecrated as a monk.33 Dunstan’s projected marriage would have been entirely legal if he had been in minor clerical orders. Canon law only forbade marriage to bishops, priests and deacons. The minor ranks of the clergy (acolytes, exorcists, readers) were able to marry and enjoy sexual relations with their wives. Deacons, priests and bishops were forbidden marriage but men already married might be ordained to the higher ranks of the clergy. Ordination was prohibited for men who had remarried after being widowed. Married priests and deacons had to live in continence after ordination, but the rulings vary as to whether married clergy should live as brother and sister or whether the couple should separate. Some rulings condemn those who leave their wives on ordination.3 34 The Old Minster clerks in 3 the passage quoted are castigated for their uncanonical second marriages and for their unlawful first marriages, which suggests that they had married after ordination.

M arried Clergy in Early Anglo-Saxon England The existence of married and sexually active clergy in the tenth and eleventh centuries had never been doubted (primarily because of the reformers’ invective). However the possibility that these may have been present in the earlier period has rarely, if ever, been discussed. This results in the scholarly portrayal of the Anglo-Saxon church as effectively divided between the golden age of monasticism in the seventh and eighth centuries and the revival of Benedictinism in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This picture of discontinuity requires readjustment to accommodate the existence of episcopal clergy and other clerical communities in the age of Bede. The presence of clerical communities bridges the divide between the early and late Saxon church. The importance of clerical celibacy was certainly discussed in the seventh and eighth centuries. Bede, for one, was much exercised by the issue and returns to the topic a number of times in his biblical commentaries. His anxiety was rooted in the belief that sexual activity rendered invalid the sacramental powers of the priest - to approach the altar after intercourse was to pollute it, a sin that corresponded to the unforgivable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.35 33 B’s Vita sancti Dunstani, in W. Stubbs, ed., Memorials o f Saint Dunstan, Archbishop o f Canterbury, Rolls Series 63 (London, 1874), pp. 3-71, chapters 5, 7, pp. 10-11, 13-14. 34 C.A. Frazee, ‘The Origins of Clerical Celibacy in the Western Church’, Church History 41 (1972), 149-67. 35 Sister M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll, The Venerable Bede: his Spiritual Teachings, Catholic University of America Studies in Mediaeval History New Series 9 (Washington, 1946), p. 153. This important but neglected work discusses fully clerical celibacy in the works of Bede and has been my guide to his commentaries in this and other respects. Carroll writes, ‘in one place [Bede] implies that the priest who, guilty of fornication, approaches the altar for the Holy Sacrifice, will not be forgiven in this world or in the next’, see D. Hurst, ed., Bede, In primam partem Samvhelis Libri ////, Bedae Venerabilis Opera II, CCSL 119 (1963), p. 30: ‘maiori miseria peccauit uir in dominum cum idem sacerdos fornicatione contaminatus ad altaris sacrosancta mysteria non solum indigne tractanda sed et indignus accessit. Et quidem terribilis contra huiusmodi praesumptores Heli sententia personat, sed

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Even prayer was impossible in the immediate aftermath of sex —Bede therefore concluded, from the biblical precept to ‘pray without ceasing’, that the religious should not marry.36 In his commentary, the De tabernaculo, he repeats the canonical position on priestly marriage: ‘Without [chastity], no one can assume the priesthood or be consecrated for the ministry of the altar, that is, unless he will either remain a virgin or dissolve the covenant of union that he has contracted with his wife.’37 This chastity should only be embraced voluntarily, though: ‘However, you shall not impose the yoke of this sort of continence upon any of them by force, but if any wish to be priests and to serve at the altar, let them of their own free will cease to be servants of wives.’38 In his commentaries, Bede condemns clerical marriage and teaches that sexual activity is incompatible with service at the altar. His remarks are explicit and not spiritualised or allegorical: they appear to address a concrete situation and are made within the context of works that he wished to be used for teaching. The evidence of these teaching texts can be supplemented with that of Theodore’s Penitential, which contains a number of rulings concerning clerical marriage.39 A bishop, priest or deacon who has unlawful sex should be degraded (I, ix, 8); priests or deacons who had married a ‘uxorem extraneam’ (foreign woman) should be deposed (I, ix, 4); any cleric committing adultery should also be ejected from the church. Ordination is refused to anyone who has had a concubine or married a widow (I, ix, 6, 10). Penance is laid down as the punishment for a bishop who touches or kisses a women and for a priest who kisses a woman (I, vii, 1, 2). Baptism performed by a fornicating priest is invalid (II,

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multo terribilior ipsius iudicis sermo qui dicat: Quicumque dixerit uerbum contra filium hominis remittetur ei, qui autem dixerit contra spiritum sanctum non remittetur ei, neque in hoc seculo neque in futuro.’ D. Hurst, ed., Bede, In Epistolas VII Catholicas, III, 7, Bedae Venerabilis Opera Omnia II, CCSL 121 (1983), pp. 179-342, at p. 244: ‘[Paul] impediri ergo orationes officio coniugali commemorat, quia quotienscumque uxori debitum reddo, orare non possum. Quod si iuxta alium apostoli sermonem sine intermissione orandum est, numquam ergo mihi coniugo seruiendum est ne ab oratione cui semper insistere iubeor ulla hora praepediar’ ([Paul] mentions, therefore, that prayers are hindered by the conjugal duty, because as often as I perform what is due to my wife I am not able to pray. But if according to another statement of the apostle we must pray without ceasing, I must never gratify my conjugal duty, lest I be hindered at any hour from prayer, in which I am ordered always to persevere). Translation from D. Hurst, trans., Bede the Venerable: Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1985), p. 96. Carroll notes that Bede interprets Peter’s words as directed towards the religious since in many other passages, he commends marriage for the laity and argues against those who condemn it (Carroll, The Venerable Bede, pp. 241-2). D. Hurst, ed., Bede, De Tabernaculo, Bedae Venerabilis Opera II, CCSL 119A (1989), p. 121: ‘. . . illam castimoniae portionem quae ab appetitu copulae coniugalis cohibet proprie designant sine qua nemo uel sacerdotium suscipere uel ad altaris potest ministrium consecrari, id est si non aut uirgo permanserit aut contracta uxoreae coniunctionis foedera soluerit’. Translation from A.G. Holder, trans., Bede: On the Tabernacle (Liverpool, 1994), p. 140. Hurst, Bede, De Tabernaculo, p. 121, ‘. . . nulli tamen uiolentum huiusmodi continentiae iugum impones sed quicumque sacerdotes fieri ac ministerio seruire altaris uolunt ipsi sua sponte uxorum serui esse desistant; quod ubi perfecerint et in suscepto semel continentiae proposito ministros se sanctuarii atque altaris fore consentiunt aderit lex diuinia. . . ’. Translation from Holder, Bede: On the Tabernacle, p. 140. Theodore’s Penitential, in A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, ed., Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Oxford, 1869-71), III, 173-231. On this see A. Frantzen, ‘The Tradition of Penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 11 (1983), 23—56 and T. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitential of Archbishop Theodore and the Indicia Theodori', in M. Lapidge, ed., Archbishop Theodore CSASE 11 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 141-74.

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ii, 12). These penitential rulings therefore repeat the canonical position that bishops and priests married before their higher consecration should not indulge in any sexual activity, but suggest that men who had entered in acceptable marriages (rather than certain types of union forbidden by the church) could be consecrated to the highest religious grades. They may also imply that married cohabitation continued after consecration to the priesthood since they condemn sexual activity where Bede had attempted to rule that the marriage should be dissolved. Further evidence of clerical marriage in Anglo-Saxon England can be found in the eighth-century Dialogues of Archbishop Ecgbert of York. These reiterate the canonical ban upon the ordination of twice-married men (or those who have married widows) to the grades of bishop, priest and deacon .40 Moreover, in a further passage, Ecgbert states that the observance of the fourth Ember fast had been established in the English church from the time of Archbishop Theodore and was practised by ‘not only clerks in the monasteries, but also laymen with their wives’ who all ‘went to their confessors, and cleansed themselves with lamentations and with almsgiving from the participation of carnal concupiscence during these twelve days . . .’ This may suggest that both laymen and clerks took part in sexual activity. What is the significance of this material? It has numerous implications for understanding the early English church and undermines a number of assumptions prevalent in the existing literature. One can use it, for example, perhaps to shed new light on Bede’s letter to Ecgbert where his criticisms of the monasteries established by thegns should be interpreted in the light of this evidence. He describes how these noble founders of false communities rose from their marriage beds to attend to the business of their monasteries. He uses explicitly monkish vocabulary to describe these houses but the real model for their lay founders could have been a clerical household, consisting of a married priest or clerk in lower orders rather than a community of monks.41 It enables us to imagine a more varied ecclesiastical landscape than the usual monastic dominance portrayed in the secondary sources suggests, one replete not only with monastic communities of different sorts but also with bishops and their clergy, local priests and those in lower orders. It also has important implications for the prevailing model of the implementation o f pastoral care in early Anglo-Saxon England. According to the ‘minster model’, as it is called, the cure of souls was administered from large monastic churches which were responsible for large territories. Recent studies have modified this view and allowed for more variety in the nature of these monasteries but still stress the community as the primary vehicle for the cure of souls.42 However, the existence of clerical families,

40 Ecgbert’s Dialogues, 15, in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, III, 410. 41 Bede, Epistola Ecgberti, chapter 12, in C. Plummer, ed., Venerabilis Baedae opera historica, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), pp. 405-23, at pp. 415-16: ‘laid monachis imperantes’, ‘non monachis ibi congregant’, ‘obaedientia monachica’. Nor does Bede refer to the service of the altar by these thegns and their communities but only to ‘quid intra septa monasteriorum geri debeat’. See Cubitt, ‘The Clergy in Anglo-Saxon England’, Historical Research, forthcoming, on this matter. 42 For the ‘Minster model’ and its reception, see J. Blair, ‘Debate: Ecclesiastical Organization and Pastoral Care in Anglo-Saxon England’, Early Medieval Europe 4 (1995), 193-212, and E. Cambridge and D. Rollason, ‘Debate: The Pastoral Organization of the Anglo-Saxon Church: A Review of the

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married deacons and priests, suggests that some o f those responsible for the cure of souls may not have lived in religious communities, but rather as a family unit, raising the possibility that these may have staffed village churches.43 The significant presence of clergy, married or unmarried, also indicates much more continuity between the seventh and eighth centuries and the tenth and eleventh. The tenth-century reformers castigated their contemporaries for the absence o f strict Benedictine standards and for the sexual laxity of the regular clergy, harking back to the golden days of Bede for an image of a truly monastic church.44 But the eighth-century church was probably also dominated by communities of clergy and staffed by priests and deacons for whom sexual abstinence was not part of their job description. The intervening century, when Viking raids afflicted the country, may have seen a decline in monastic vocations but it did not necessarily create a new order of clergy.45 Saintly symbolism, then, and particularly that o f St Peter, can be used to open up issues in ecclesiastical history that might otherwise appear dry and rebarbative but which also have important bearing on modern historical debates. Research feeds into teaching, and it is fitting to conclude by some discussion of the symbiotic relationship between the two. It is perhaps misleading to stress the gap between the religious ignorance of our students and the learning of their teachers since we all belong to a secularised society in which Christianity has ceased to be the formative influence. We all share in this and few of us can command the sort of finger-tip knowledge of the Bible and the Fathers that scholars of previous generations often possessed. Much of our time, therefore, as students ourselves o f the early medieval world, is taken up with regaining such knowledge and rediscovering ways of viewing the early Middle Ages that would have been commonplace to them. It is likely that the different aspects of St Peter’s symbolism would have been obvious and unremarkable knowledge to, say, a scholar like Wilhelm Levison. But we too benefit from the sort of distance mentioned earlier with regard to our students. Our approaches to the study of early medieval religion are informed by other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology and seek to understand the otherness of early medieval society.46 The presence of the clergy in early Anglo-Saxon England has been overlooked chiefly because of the predominant interest of scholars in the history of monasticism, and particularly of the Benedictine Rule. The clergy may have failed to

43 44 45

46

“Minster Hypothesis” Early Medieval Europe 4 (1995), 87-104. As Blair notes, p. 193, it is very much an evolving model, refined through debate and discussion. I have pursued these speculations in ‘The Clergy in Anglo-Saxon England’, forthcoming. A. Gransden, ‘Traditionalism and Continuity During the Last Century of Anglo-Saxon Monasticism’, Journal o f Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989), 159-207. On married priests in the intervening period see, for example, the addition made by Alfred to Augustine’s Soliquies, Tc cwæðe þeah þæt hyt si preostum betere næbbe ðonne habbe’ (I say that it is better for priests not to have wives than to have them), T.A. Carnicelli, ed., King’s Alfred Version o f St Augustine s Soliquies (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 72, cited by M. Godden, ‘King’s Alfred’s Preface and the Teaching of Latin in Anglo-Saxon England’, English Historical Review 107 (2002), 596-604, at p. 602. See the comments of M. de Jong, ‘Introduction. Rethinking Early Medieval Christianity: A View from the Netherlands’, Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998), 261-75, esp. pp. 266-7 and Nelson, ‘Medieval Monasticism’, pp. 586-7.

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enter into discussion of the early English church not because commentators were unaware of them, but because they were viewed as unremarkable and irrelevant to the more pressing purpose of establishing the nature of early English monasteries.47 Teaching the Christian tradition can provide new avenues to exploring the complexity of the Christian life and the multivalency of its symbols.

47 See the extensive and illuminating discussion of Bede’s view of the clergy in Carroll, Venerable Bede, pp. 239^19, a volume published in 1946.

4 Scandinavians and ‘Cultural P aganism ’ in L ate A n g lo -S a x o n E ngland JUDITH JESCH

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EDIEVAL Scandinavian texts are often used to illuminate early Anglo-Saxon paganism (about which we otherwise know very little), despite the grave problems of chronology, genre and cultural context that make such an attempt quite perilous.1 The same texts can provide somewhat better (though certainly not infallible) evidence for paganism in Scandinavia itself.12 In this essay, I attempt to determine whether some such texts can also provide evidence for an imported Scandinavian paganism in late Anglo-Saxon England, and thereby to explore the extent to which Anglo-Saxon Christianity co-existed with alternative modes of thinking. Assuming that the earliest Scandinavian settlers in England were not Christians, it is of interest to ask to what extent and for how long Scandinavian immigrants continued to use the reference points of their ancestral culture and religion. In attempting to delineate the possible contours of Scandinavian paganism in late Anglo-Saxon England, I will also consider some English evidence.

Conversion and Christianisation The fact that we know as much as we do about the pre-Christian religion and mythology of Scandinavia is due in part to its relatively late conversion to Christianity and in part to the antiquarian zeal of medieval Christian Icelanders who preserved much of Scandinavia’s cultural heritage in writing from the twelfth century onwards. The conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity was a long-

1 E.g. R. North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature, CSASE 22 (Cambridge, 1997), esp. pp. 2-10, and passim. In this essay, I use the terms ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen’ interchangeably, the latter particularly when following an Old English text that uses hœþen. While ‘pagan’ is derived from Latin, and ‘heathen’ from the vernacular, neither term is neutral, both implying Christian disdain. There is no non-judgemental equivalent, except for the strictly chronological (and therefore inaccurate) ‘pre-Christian’. 2 The classic statement is E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion o f the North: The Religion o f Ancient Scandinavia (London, 1964). More recent scholars tend to emphasise ‘myth’ rather than ‘religion’, e.g. M. Clunies Ross, ‘The Conservation and Reinterpretation of Myth in Medieval Icelandic Writings’, in M. Clunies Ross, ed., Old Icelandic Literature and Society (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 116-39.

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drawn-out process that had its roots in the ninth century, but which did not begin in earnest until the tenth, and was certainly not completed until well into the eleventh, in some remote areas even the twelfth, century.3 Even the conversion of the Icelanders, presented as a single act of national will at the General Assembly in the year 1000, was not quite as sudden as the medieval historians portrayed it .4 Many of the settlers who arrived on the island about a century before, especially those who came from the British Isles, are said to have been at least nominally Christian, yet the burial evidence shows that tenth-century Iceland was largely heathen .5 In 1000, the decree by the Lawspeaker that Iceland would become Christian made some crucial concessions to the heathens in relation to sacrifice, infanticide and the eating of horsemeat (íslendingabók, chapter 7).6 We do not know exactly how long these concessions were allowed to stand, but should probably reckon with a transitional period of a couple of decades at least, perhaps longer. This distinction between ‘conversion moment’ and ‘conversion process’, or between ‘conversion’ and ‘Christianisation’, seems particularly relevant in Scandinavia and Iceland, where the Christianisation process seems to have been longer than elsewhere.7 In contrast, it is often assumed that the conversion of the Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles was both thorough and rapid, especially in what was later to become the Danelaw.8 That this would be thought to be more rapid than the conversion o f the homelands or Iceland is hardly surprising, given that the settlers in England were in a minority in a well-developed Christian society, though the evidential basis for such an assumption is not clear. There are no contemporary sources that tell us directly of their conversion, and there is also a general absence of more indirect evidence. And the question is particularly complex because it is also inevitably bound up with the question of the nature and extent of the Scandinavian settlement of England: how many, where and 3 Much has been, and continues to be, written about the conversion of Scandinavia. For some useful recent summaries, see L. Abrams, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia’, ASE 24 (1995), 213 49; L. Abrams, ‘History and Archaeology: the Conversion of Scandinavia’, in B.E. Crawford, ed., Conversion and Christianity in the North Sea World (St Andrews, 199S), pp. 109-28; S. Brink, ‘New Perspectives on the Christianisation of Scandinavia and the Organisation of the Early Church’, in J. Adams and K. Holman, ed., Scandinavia and Europe 800-1350: Contact, Conflict and Co-Existence (forthcoming, Turnhout, 2003). 4 For a survey of the written sources for the conversion moment, see J. Jochens, ‘Late and Peaceful: Iceland’s Conversion through Arbitration in 1000’, Speculum 74 (1999), 621-55. Orri Vésteinsson explores the process by which Iceland became a fully Christian country after that moment in The Christianization o f Iceland: Priests, Power and Social Change 1000-1300 (Oxford, 2000). 5 Adolf Friðriksson, ‘Viking Burial Practices in Iceland’, in Kristján Eldjárn, Kuml og haugfé ór heiðnum sið á íslandi (Reykjavik, 2000), pp. 549-610. 6 Jakob Benediktsson, ed., íslendingabók. Landnámabók, íslenzk fornrit 1 (Reykjavik, 1968), pp. 3-28, at p. 17; translated in e.g. G. Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga (Oxford, 1986), pp. 143-55, at p. 150. 1 For this distinction, see P. Foote, ‘Historical Studies: Conversion Moment and Conversion Period’, in A. Faulkes and R. Perkins, ed., Viking Revaluations (London, 1993), pp. 136-44, and, for the Danelaw, L. Abrams, ‘Conversion and Assimilation’, in D.M. Hadley and J.D. Richards, ed., Cultures in Contact. Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 135-53. 8 D. Hadley, ‘Conquest, Colonization and the Church: Ecclesiastical Organization in the Danelaw’, Historical Research 69 (1996), 109-28. D. Whitelock, ‘The Conversion of the Eastern Danelaw’, Saga-Book 12 (1937—45 ), 159-76, at p. 161, contrasts the quick conversion of East Anglia with the greater tenacity of heathenism in Northumbria.

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when? Recent work by Lesley Abrams on the conversion of the Danelaw suggests that ‘much of the Scandinavian population . . . might not have been brought into the Christian fold until after they had lost their political independence’, i.e. at some time in the mid- to late tenth century, and that this conversion ‘marked the beginning and defined the nature of the integration of Scandinavians into Anglo-Saxon England ’.9 Rather than once again rehearsing this much-rehearsed problem for which we have so little evidence, I should like instead to consider another question for which there is similarly little evidence, but which is much less often discussed: that of Scandinavian paganism in England, particularly whether it can be traced in the late Anglo-Saxon period and specifically in the eleventh century. That the first Scandinavian settlers in England were pagan seems indubitable, but the interesting question is how long, and in what contexts, knowledge of their ancestral culture survived among the immigrants who, however numerous, were never more than a minority in a thoroughly Christian England.

Scandinavian Paganism in England? Although the evidence is minimal, there are scraps to suggest an active knowledge of certain elements of the pre-Christian Scandinavian religion and mythology in late Anglo-Saxon England. With the Scandinavian experience in mind, we might ask if this evidence simply reflects a long-drawn-out conversion process in the Danelaw, like that in the Scandinavian homelands where Abrams has argued that ‘Scandinavians in general were not greatly moved to adopt the new religion ’. 10 Alternatively, we may prefer to interpret Scandinavian paganism in late Anglo-Saxon England as a form of what I should like to call ‘cultural paganism’: an acceptance of certain aspects of the heathen past in a society that is otherwise officially Christian, in particular an acceptance of references to pre-Christian beliefs and myths in certain cultural and social contexts, as was done in medieval Iceland. In the eleventh century the question is complicated by the fact of Danish rule from 1016 to 1042, giving us two possible contexts for Scandinavian paganism, the society of the established settlers of the Danelaw, and the ruling institutions of the new regime. While the established settlers are more than likely to have been Christians by this time, the accession of Cnut brought new waves of immigrants from Scandinavia, some of whom may not have been Christian before they arrived, or if so then only very recently or partially converted. Even Cnut himself, though he seems to have taken great pains to be seen as a proper Christian king once he became sole ruler of England, was of uncertain religiosity on his accession. Only two sources refer specifically to his baptism. A scholium appended to Adam of Bremen’s late eleventh-century History o f the Archbishops o f Hamburg-Bremen says that Cnut took the name of Lambert on 9

L. Abrams, ‘The Conversion of the Danelaw’, in J. Graham-Campbell, R. Hali, J. Jesch and D.N. Parsons, ed., Vikings and the Danelaw (Oxford, 2001), pp. 31-44, at p. 40. 10 ‘History and Archaeology’, p. 123.

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baptism, but does not say when or where this was.11 The contemporary Aquitainian chronicler Adémar of Chabannes claims that Cnut was not baptised until after he became king of England. 112 Adémar may not have been especially well informed, while Adam does tell us that Cnut’s father Svein Forkbeard promoted Christianity in Denmark and Norway in his maturity, after a less than pious youth: ‘He then had idolatrous rites destroyed forthwith and by edict ordered Christianity to be received in Norway. At that time, also, he appointed a certain bishop Gotebald, who came from England, to teach in Scania.’13 Adam probably overstates Svein’s heathenism for purposes of his own, so his acknowledgement that Svein also promoted Christianity makes it possible, even likely, that Cnut had in fact been baptised before becoming king of England.

‘Cultural Paganism ’at the Court o f Cnut The surviving English sources paint Cnut as a pious king, friendly to the church . 14 But, while there is no evidence that he ever practised the heathen religion in England, it is clear that Cnut not only allowed but even encouraged what I have called ‘cultural paganism’, the use of heathen motifs and vocabulary in certain literary and artistic contexts. The best evidence for this is to be found in the poetry composed and performed at his court and preserved in later Icelandic sources. 15 This poetry has been studied by Roberta Frank, who draws attention to its pagan imagery.16 More recently, Matthew Townend has tried to delineate its possible contexts of composition and performance, and concludes that, as Cnut spent very little time in Scandinavia, most of the poetry of his reign is likely to have been performed, if not actually composed, at his court in England, which he thinks was most likely in Winchester.17 An excellent example of this ‘cultural paganism’ at the court of Cnut is the sadly fragmentary Knútsdrápa of the otherwise unknown poet Hallvarðr Háreksblesi, surviving only as odd stanzas and half-stanzas quoted for a variety o f reasons in a variety of Icelandic prose texts. 18 Despite being in Old Norse, this poem was very clearly intended for performance in an English context:

11 W. Trillmich and R. Buchner, ed. and trans., Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der Hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches (Darmstadt, 1978), p. 290; F.J. Tschan, trans., Adam o f Bremen. History o f the Archbishops o f Hamburg-Bremen (New York, 1959), p. 91. Julia Barrow has pointed out to me that the name Lambert suggests Cnut may have been baptised ‘in the Empire, or at the hands of clerics sent from the Empire’. 12 P. Bourgain, R. Landes and G. Pon, ed., Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon (Turnhout, 1999), p. 173. 13 Tschan, Adam, p. 83; Trillmich and Buchner, Quellen, p. 276. 14 M.K. Lawson, Cnut. The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London, 1993), pp. 117-60. 15 For an assessment of the extent of Old Norse court poetry composed in England (including at Cnut’s court), see J. Jesch, ‘Skaldic Verse in Scandinavian England’, in Graham-Campbell e ta l, Vikings and the Danelaw, pp. 313-25. 16 R. Frank, ‘King Cnut in the Verse of his Skalds’, in A. Rumble, ed., The Reign o f Cnut, King o f England, Denmark and Norway (London, 1994), pp. 106—24. 17 ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur. Skaldic Praise-Poetry at the Court of Cnut’, ASE 30 (2001), 145-79. 1* I cite the text and translation presented in J. Jesch, ‘Knútr in Poetry and History’, in M. Dallapiazza,

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