What Old English Poetry Values

The idea

Old English literature is the oldest layer this exam tests, and it rewards knowing a small number of works and the culture they share. After the Romans left Britain by four hundred ten, Angles, Saxons and Jutes made England, and their language, Old English, is ours at its root. Their poetry was sung by a scop before it was written, and only four manuscript books of it survive. Its line is two alliterating half-lines split by a caesura, and its figure is the kenning, the compound metaphor that calls the sea a whale-road and a lord a gold-friend. Bede, writing his Latin Ecclesiastical History by seven thirty-one, made conversion his subject and preserved the story of Cædmon, the cowherd who sang the beginning of creation. Beowulf, over three thousand lines in one scorched manuscript, follows a Geatish hero through three fights: Grendel in Heorot, Grendel's mother in her lair, and the dragon that kills him, with only Wiglaf at his side. Its values are the comitatus, loyalty to a lord who rewards with treasure, and wergild, the payment that ends feuds, but Hrothgar's warning against pride shows the poem questioning the code it praises, and its Christian framework over a pagan story is still debated. The Dream of the Rood turns the Crucifixion into a battle, Christ a young warrior and the cross his loyal retainer. The Wanderer and The Wife's Lament are elegies of exile, asking where the lost things have gone, and Judith makes a biblical heroine a warrior. The riddles describe and never name. Read any passage from the period for these marks, and the exam's questions about it become questions about loyalty, loss and a faith arriving in a warrior world.