2. OE Literature: Surveys, Critical Analyses
a. Denmark
The Danish study of OE literature in the twentieth century began with the publication in 1901 of
Illustreret Verdens-Litteraturhistorie (The Illustrated History of World Literature), volume three. In an essay on “Oldengelsk Litteratur,” Adolf Hansen (1850–1908) – distinguished historian of English literature
1 Hansen, Engelsk Litteraturhistorie. and translator into Danish of poets such as Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, and Swinburne
2 Hansen, Oversatte engelske Digte. as well as of
Beowulf3 Hansen, Bjovulf. – contextualizes OE literature within Danish and English history during the Migration Period, much as Fredrik Rönning had done in his 1885 Danish survey of OE poetry.
4 Rönning, “Den oldengelske digtning,” pp. 1–2. The Germanic tribes coming to the British Isles drove the Celts to the peripheries of the region and brought with them their native heathen literature and its traditions. But those traditions were eventually influenced by Celtic ones; Hansen’s assertion of this premise is one of the first in the history of OE studies.
5 Henry Morley seems to be the first, in 1873, in his A First Sketch of English Literature. For the most recent work on the topic, see Wright, The Irish Tradition, and Ireland, The Gaelic Background. Hansen states that
it is easy to see which of these two [peoples] had the best prospect of becoming the Conqueror. The ancient Bard of the Celts, Ossian, sang of his people: “They went out to battle, but they always fell.” They were unfit to form the foundation of a great and victorious nation. But they were perfectly suited to contribute valuable spiritual elements of a fine and beautifying kind to such a nation.
6 “det er let at se, hvem af disse to der havde mest Udsigt til at blive Sejrherre. Kelternas gamle Oldtidsbarde Ossian sang om sit Folk: ‘De drog ud til Kampen, men de faldt altid.’ De vare lidet skikkede til at danne Grundvolden for en stor og sejrende Nation. Men de egnede sig ypperligt til at tilføre en saadan Nation værdifulde Aandselementer af fin og forskønnende Art.” Hansen, “Oldengelsk Litterature,” p. 6.He further observes that “as time passed, in addition to the influence that gradually took place through the blending of the races, English literature in many different ways drew material and inspiration from Celtic sources.”
7 “Og alt som Tiden skred, har--foruden Paavirkning gennem den Raceblandning, som efterhanden fandt Sted--paa mange forskelige Maader engelsk Litteratur hentet Stof og Inspiration fra keltiske Kilder.” Ibid., p. 6.Hansen does not elaborate on the notion of Celtic influence on OE literature, but as he surveys the aesthetic characteristics of OE poetry, including the use of kennings, variation, and war and treasure and nature imagery, he does note that later English literature is grounded in OE and thus affirms a continuity in the history of English literature. OE poets’ depictions of sea voyages, as seen in
Beowulf and “The Seafarer,” for instance, we hear echoed in Shakespeare’s
Pericles and
The Tempest and in Dickens’
David Copperfield, in Byron’s “Childe Harold,” and in “Swinburne in our day, when he puts the waves’ own long rocking into the rhythms he writes about them.”
8 “Swinburne i vore Dage, naar han lægger Bølgernes egen langlige Vuggen ind i de Rytmer, han skriver om dem.” “Oldengelsk Litteratur,” p. 13. There are therefore some distinct features of OE poetry “from which later English poetry rises as from a foundation of uncut granite.”
9 “fra hvilken den senere engelske Digtning hæver sig som fra en Grundvold af utilhugget Granit.” Ibid., p. 16.The most recent exploration of OE literature in Danish is by Keld Zeruneith (1941–), Emeritus Reader at the University of Copenhagen and member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Zeruneith is a poet, literary critic, historian, and prolific author, well known in Old Norse (ON) studies for his work on the sagas and in modern literary studies for his biographies of three famous Danish poets; he is equally well known in Classical Studies for
The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, from Odysseus to Socrates (2007; original Danish 2002), for which he won Denmark’s most prestigious literary award, the Søren Gyldendal Prize, in 2004.
10 Anon., “Keld Zeruneith.” Zeruneith brings his considerable breadth of scholarly and linguistic expertise and depth of poetic and psychological insight and knowledge to bear upon OE studies in
De sidste tider: Hedenskab heroisme kristendom: en angelsaksisk overgangshistorie (The Last Times: Paganism Heroism Christianity: An Anglo-Saxon Transitional History, 2017).
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Figure 8. Keld Zeruneith, 2019.
He begins his foray into OE literature with two simple but profound observations: 1) OE poetry is first and foremost a poetry of the soul,
11 De sidste Tider, p. 15. and 2) created as it was during a time of upheaval, it says a great deal about problems we face today, such as existential angst, melancholy, and a feeling of alienated homelessness arising from the radical changes occurring in the world and in our value systems.
12 Ibid., p. 16. The poetry’s power derives from its transitional nature, its syncretic amalgamation of Germanic verse form with Christian content. Both the person of Guthlac and the poems about him are emblematic of this syncretism. Guthlac, the Anglo-Saxon warrior, is transformed into St. Guthlac, the warrior of the Lord, and his Christian story is told in OE verse form, with all its alliterative resonance and heroic trappings, as the saint engages in single combat with the devil.
13 Ibid., p. 27. Zeruneith touches on a number of OE texts as he fleshes out his thesis, including “The Franks Casket,” the poems of Cynewulf and Cædmon, “Widsith,” the elegies (especially “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”), the biblical paraphrases, and, most prominently,
Beowulf, to which Zeruneith devotes about one third of his book (see chapter 5 below for his book-length development of his views on
Beowulf). All in all, Zeruneith’s study is a stimulating apology for OE poetry in the modern world, not just in Denmark.
b. Sweden
Although Sweden has not produced a survey of OE literature per se in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the work of one scholar, Ernst Kock (1864–1943), could be viewed as such a survey in the aggregate, albeit more of a textual-critical than a literary survey. Kock’s biographer, Erik Rooth, describes Kock in his private life as a lovable, loyal, entertaining human being, a
homo ludens and skilled sailor, who loved playing all kinds of games including cards and chess and billiards and who was also an accomplished musician, especially on the violin.
14 Rooth, “Ernst Kock.” His playfulness occasionally impinged on his professional life as a Germanic philologist, as when he titled one of his works to fit the volume in which it was included. “Jubilee Jaunts and Jottings: 250 Contributions to the Interpretation and Prosody of Old West Teutonic Alliterative Poetry” formed part of a Festschrift volume of
Lunds Universitets Årsskrift to celebrate the 250th anniversary –
Jubileum – of the founding of Lund University, where he was Professor of German.
As a practitioner of descriptive syntax and textual criticism, however, Kock was deadly serious and is considered on a par with the notable Germanic philologists Eduard Sievers and Andreas Heusler in his remarkable ability to work across the old Germanic languages and in his finely tuned ear for Nordic verse and style.
15 Ibid. With great precision and speed, he produced a wide range of publications on Old West Germanic alliterative poetry in which he considered the West Germanic languages as a unit and therefore found connections among the literatures that were previously unrecognized. The chief of these publications (which touch on various aspects of over forty OE poems) are “Jubilee Jaunt and Jottings” (1918), “Interpretations and Emendations of Early English Texts” (1904, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923),
Fornjermansk forskning (1922), “Plain Points and Puzzles, 60 Notes on OE Poetry” (1922), and “Notationes Norroenæ: Anteckningar till Edda och Skaldediktning” (1923). The last item, which contains 197 notes in which Kock frequently cites OE in his discussion of ON poetry, has had the most impact.