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A fascinating collection of texts from a lost period. I wish there were such readable texts for the immense expanse of Sanskrit Literature. Gaurinath Jha's

Many similarities with ancient sanskrit poetry - the charm poems (e.g. Bethlem) remind one of the charms in atharvaveda. The lists as mnemonic devices were the essence of the sUtra tradition.

Excerpts

the “King’s English” or standard written speech which had grown current all over England by the end of the tenth century. In this form of Old English nearly all the vernacular writings of the period were set down, and the scribes, in copying older writings, usually made them conform to the new standard of speech, though they might let an old spelling, here and there, go unchanged. 5

597 AD: Christianity comes to England

English history (as distinguished from prehistory) begins in the year 597.
The Roman and Irish missionaries taught the English to make those written
records from which the historians glean their knowledge of early England
and the particular records written in the vernacular give us our earliest
documentation of the mother tongue. Then as now this tongue went by the
English name. 

[FN. Throughout historical times the adj. English (used in the absolute
construction) has been the regular name for the language spoken by the
Germanic inhabitants of Britain. From the seventeenth century onward, the
adj. Anglo-Saxon (a learned coinage of modern times) has had more or less
currency as a synonym of English; [but] this meaning has never become
familiar to the general public, and most scholars now call the language in
all stages by the name which it has always had among those who spoke it:
namely, English.  The usual division by periods gives Old English (beginnings
to 1100), Middle English (1100 to 1500), and Modern English (1500 to present
day). Linguistically speaking, this division [like all such divisions] is
more or less arbitrary.]

Germanic origins of English

Its nearest kinsman was the speech of the Frisians. Closely kindred tongues,
too, were Saxon and Franconian (or Frankish), the two main dialects of Low
German. [modern representatives of Franconian Low German : Dutch and
Flemish].  The dialects of High German, and those of Scandinavian, had
features which made their kinship to English less close.  English was akin to
all these neighboring tongues, and to Gothic, in virtue of common descent
from Germanic, a language which we know chiefly through its offspring, as it
had split up into dialects at a date so early that the records of it in its
original or primitive state are few. Germanic in turn was an offshoot of
Indo-European, a hypothetical tongue which we know only through the many
languages which are descended from it. To the Indo-European family of
languages belonged, not only English and the other children of Germanic, but
also Latin (with its offspring, the Romance languages), Greek, the various
Celtic and Slavic languages, Persian, Sanskrit (with other languages of
India), Armenian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Latvian, etc.

Here, however, the kinship is so remote that it is overshadowed by a
connection of another kind: a fellowship, so to speak. Latin, for instance,
is only remotely linked to English by common descent from Indo-European, but
it is closely linked to English by common participation in European life. The
fellowship between English and Latin, it must be added, has always been
one-sided; Latin has done the giving, English the taking, and this because
Latin, the language of the Church and the vehicle of classical culture, had
much to give and found little if anything that it needed to take.

That English has many words taken from Latin is a fact familiar to
everyone. Such words began coming in even before the migration to Britain
(e.g., street and cook), and they have kept coming in ever since. Less
familiar, perhaps, are the so-called semantic borrowings: native words with
meanings taken from Latin. Two examples will have to serve: god-spell
(modern gospel), literally “good news,” is a translation of Latin evangelium
(itself taken from Greek), and its meaning is restricted accordingly; þing
(modern thing) originally had in common with Latin res the meaning “(legal)
dispute, lawsuit,” whereupon, in virtue of the equation thus set up, other
meanings of res came to be given to the Old English word, including the
meaning most common today.  But the fellowship with Latin affected English
idiom and style as well as vocabulary; thus, the Latin mundo uti “live”
reappears in the worolde brucan of Beowulf.

In the Old World of medieval times, four great linguistic
cultural empires flourished side by side: Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and
Chinese. 7

Dropping of Germanic Inflections

Germanic was a highly inflected speech; Germanic and Latin were at about the
same stage or level of inflexional complexity. Modern English, on the other
hand, has a rather simple inflexional system and relies largely on word order
and particles, devices not unknown to Germanic but less important than they
are today in expressing syntactical relationships. How far had simplification
gone by the year 1000? Among the nouns it had gone pretty far, though
grammatical gender did not break down until Middle English times.

[FN. Nearly all Old English nouns belonged to one of three declensions:
a-stems, o-stems and nstems.  In the plural all these had a three-case system
of inflexion: one form for the nom. and acc., one for the gen. and one for
the dat. (Modern English has a two-case system: one form for nom. dat. acc.,
another form for gen.). In the singular, the à-stems had a three-case
inflexion parallel to that of the plural. (Modern English likewise has a
two-case system parallel to that of the plural). The other two declensions,
however, had a two-case inflexion of the singular: one form marked the nom.,
the other the oblique case. (The neuter n-stem nouns had a different two-case
system: one form for the nom.  acc., the other for gen. dat.). Moreover, by
the year 1000 the distinction between nom. and oblique had been lost in the
singular of o-stems, and tended to be lost in the singular of n-stems. The
consequent inability of speakers to make case distinctions in these
declensions may have had something to do with the Middle English tendency to
give a-stem. inflexion to the o-stem and n-stem nouns. At any rate, this
tendency existed and was carried through (to the incidental destruction of
grammatical gender), and the modern inflexion of nouns is only a somewhat
simplified form of the old a-stem inflexion. Other Germanic declensions, of
which only remnants or traces appear in Old English, were i-stems, u-stems,
s-stems, r-stems, þ-stems, nd-stems, and monosyllabic consonant stems.]

Among the adjectives, simplification went more slowly: the elaborate double
system of adjectival inflexion characteristic of Germanic and kept to this
day in German was kept in Old English too, and was not wholly given up until
the fifteenth century. Much the same may be said of the demonstratives:
that in Old English still had twelve forms as against the three current
today (the, that, those), and this still had ten forms as against the two
of today (this, these).
[the indeclinable definite article the occurs in Old English
annals - in annal 963 of the Laud text of the Annals]

In the inflexion of the personal pronouns, however, the beginnings of the
modern three-case system appear as early as the text of Beowulf, where we
find the datives me, þe, him used now and then as accusatives; thus, him
thrice occurs in accusative constructions (lines 963, 2377, 2828). This use
led later to the loss of the personal (and interrogative) accusative forms,
the old dative forms doing duty for both cases. The Germanic system of verb
inflexion also underwent marked simplification in Old English.


This loss of many inflexional endings was part of a change much wider in
scope, and phonetic rather than inflexional in kind... 

English shared with the other Germanic tongues a system of pronunciation by
which the first syllable of a word was stressed at the expense of the other
syllables;22 these, by progressive weakening, underwent reduction or were
lost. Most of the many monosyllabic words in Old English go back to
Germanic words of two or more syllables, and most of the dissyllabic words
go back to Germanic polysyllables. The tendency to reduce or get rid of the
unstressed syllables set in more than once in Old English times.

II Anglo-Latin Writings

Few people ever master a language not their own, and writings done in an
alien speech rarely rise above the level of school exercises. Now and then
some genius transcends these limitations, but, even so, his work usually
remains an aesthetic curiosity, of little consequence in the literary
scheme of things.

The custom of composing in Latin came to England with the missionaries of
the Church, and the English converts (more precisely, those of them in
training for holy orders) learned to read and write Latin as part of their
professional education. Christianity, though Jewish in origin, had grown up
in the Hellenistic world, and Greek accordingly became the language of the
early Church. In the course of the third century, however, this linguistic
unity was lost: Greek, kept in the east, yielded to Latin in the west as
the masses there gradually gave up their native tongues and took the idiom
of their Roman rulers. Into this lingua franca of the west St. Jerome
translated the Bible; in this common speech his contemporary St. Augustine
of Hippo2 and other Church fathers wrote. By A.D. 597, when the conversion
of the English began, a rich Christian literature in the Latin tongue had
come into being.  The Church made this literature accessible to the
converts, along with secular and pagan literature in the same tongue.

We know very little about the state of Latin learning among the English
before the synod of Whitby.  After that synod (one of the great
turning-points in English history) the reigning pope sent Theodore of Tarsus
to England to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury and to make as fruitful as
possible the victory of the Romanizers at Whitby. 



Map of Counties of England, and some locations mentioned. 
[Wessex = kingdom in SE: Sussex, Surrey, Essex, Kent]

Synod of Whitby

from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15610a.htm:
The Christianizing of Britain begun by St. Augustine in A.D. 597 was carried
on with varying success throughout the seventh century. One great hindrance
to progress lay in the fact that in Northumbria the missionary impulse was
largely Scottish (i.e. Irish) in origin, having come through St. Aidan from
Iona. In certain matters of external discipline, notably the observance of
Easter, the English and Celtic traditions did not agree. Thus when the
Northumbrian King Oswy and his household were keeping Easter, his queen, who
had been brought up in the south under the Roman system, was still
fasting. The consequent inconvenience and discord must have been extreme. 

In 664 a fortunate opportunity occurred of debating the matter, and a
conference took place at the monastery of St. Hilda at Whitby or
Streanoeshalch. King Oswy with Bishops Colman and Chad represented the Celtic
tradition; Alchfrid, son of Oswy, and Bishops Wilfrid and Agilbert that of
Rome. A full account of the conference is given by Bede and a shorter one by
Eddius. Both agree as to the facts that Colman appealed to the practice of
St. John, Wilfrid to St. Peter and to the council of Nicaea, and that the
matter was finally settled by Oswy's determination not to offend
St. Peter. "I dare not longer", he said, "contradict the decrees of him who
keeps the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven, lest he should refuse me
admission". This decision involved more than a mere matter of discipline. The
real question decided at Whitby was not so much whether the church in England
should use a particular paschal cycle, (see EASTER CONTROVERSY) as "whether
she should link her fortunes with those of the declining and loosely
compacted Irish Church, or with the rising power and growing organization of
Rome". The solution arrived at was one of great moment, and, though the
Celtic Churches did not at once follow the example thus set, the paschal
controversy in the West may be said to have ended with the Synod of Whitby.]

The monastic school at Canterbury

With Theodore went his fellow-monk, Abbot Hadrian, as chief helper in the
work. Both were men of learning, at home in Latin and Greek. They set up at
Canterbury a monastic school which worked wonders.

Within a generation England became the chief seat of scholarship in western
Europe, and that golden age of the English Church began through which the
English people made the greatest of all their contributions to civilization.
During this momentous period England led the world and set the course of
history as she was not to do again until modern times.

Colonial (Latin) Literature

Aldhelm or Ealdhelm (d. 709) [was from Wessex, and became the bishop of
Sherborne (S England; in Dorset) ].  Wrote the major poem De Virginitate
(2904 lines).  

He had great gifts, but his education proved too much for them.

Overawed by the postclassical literary culture which his teachers hammered
into him, he took it as he found it and made it his own, without thought of
criticism. p.14

[The same could be said for much Indian English writings during the Raj.]

Ancient Alphabets : Futhark

The English of heathen times knew how to write, it is true. They brought
with them from the Continent a futhark or runic alphabet of twenty-four
letters, and to this in the course of time they added several new signs of
their own.  But the runes were epigraphic characters, and their use was
therefore limited to inscriptions, cut or hammered out on hard surfaces
(e.g., the pommel of a sword, the sides of a monumental stone, the top or
sides of a box).  p.20


    The Elder futhark ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ alphabet - the earliest runic script, with the
    names of each letter and what these names meant.  image source: omniglot.com

With the introduction of Christianity a great change took place. The
missionaries brought parchment, pen and ink, and the custom of writing
literary compositions down. They also brought the Roman alphabet.

The English futhark, epigraphic though it was in origin and history, might
perfectly well have been used for writing with pen and ink on parchment, but
the foreign missionaries and their English pupils associated the Roman
alphabet with this kind of writing and used it, not only in copying Latin
texts, but also in making English texts. Yet the old runes were not given up
for centuries. They were kept alongside the new letters, and the co-existence
of two kinds of writing naturally led to overlapping. 

On the one hand, letters might be used in inscriptions; on the other, runes
might be used in manuscripts. The two runes thorn and wynn, indeed, were
added to the alphabet, as symbols for sounds wanting in postclassical Latin
but common in English. And the new practice of recording literary
compositions had its effect on native epigraphy: thus, the Dream of the
Rood [was an] epigraphic as well as manuscript record.

Old Germanic verse

[none of the scansion theories are definitive.]

The rhythm of the verse grew naturally out of the prose rhythm (as we saw
above), by a process of metrical heightening and lowering. A metrically
heightened syllable is called a lift (German hebung); a metrically
lowered syllable, a drop (German senkung).

Only a syllable that took or might take a main stress in the prose rhythm was
subject to metrical heightening; in the same way, only a syllable that lacked
or might lack stress in the prose rhythm was subject to metrical lowering. We
do not know just how the metrical heightening and lowering were brought
about, but time as well as stress played a part, and such verse as was sung
or chanted necessarily made use of pitch patterns different from those of
ordinary speech. The metrical heightening might be reinforced by
alliteration8 or rime, giving a major lift. A lift not so reinforced is a
minor lift.

The basic metrical unit was the short verse, made up of a varying number of
syllables, at least one of which was a lift.  Usually the short verse had two
lifts. Such a verse might stand alone or in series. We illustrate with a
passage from a legal text, Hit Becwæð [an early text on the holding of
property]: 

	ne plot ne ploh, 		nor plot nor plowland,
	ne turf ne toft, 		nor sod nor site,
	ne furh ne fotmæl, 		nor furrow nor foot-length,
	ne land ne læse, 		nor tillage nor pasturage,
	ne fersc ne mersc, 		nor fresh [water] nor marsh,
	ne ruh ne rum, 			nor rough [land] nor open [land],

	wudes ne feldes, 		of wood nor of field,
	landes ne strandes, 		of land nor of strand,
	wealtes ne wæteres. 		of wold nor of water.  [p.23]

A few pieces of gnomic wisdom,
however, have come down to us in lines or couplets. Exeter Gnomics, 158,

	licgende beam læsest groweð
	a fallen tree grows least

may serve to illustrate the one-line gnomic, while Age mec, 117–118,

	biþ þæt selast þonne mon him sylf ne mæg
	wyrd onwendan þæt he þon wel þolige

	that is best, when one himself cannot
	amend his fate, that he then put up with it

exemplifies the two-line gnomic. 26

IV The Old Tradition: Popular Poetry

The oldest Germanic verses extant are two metrical lists of names, recorded
in works of the first and second centuries of our era. Such a metrical list is
technically known as a thula. [The term comes from Iceland, where the genre
flourished.] 

Tacitus in his Germania (A.D. 98) gives us a two-line thula the names of
which appear, of course, in Latinized form.2 This thula has for us a special
interest for another reason: it is our first record of the English name. The
thula reads thus:

	Reudingi, Auiones, Anglii, Varini,
	Eudoses, Suardones, Unithones.

Widsith

[Widsith is an old English poem of 143 lines, found in a compilation from
the 10th c., the Exeter Book. ]

thula [catalogue poem] from the sixth century incorporated in Widsith
(lines 18-33): 

The first couplet may serve to show the structure and subject-matter of this
thula:

	Ætla weold Hunum, Eormanric Gotum,
	Becca Baningum, Burgendum Gifica

	Attila ruled the Huns, Ermanric the Goths,
	Becca the Banings, Gifica the Burgundians.

This is a list of kings; each king (30 are listed) is identified in terms of
the tribe he rules.

Such terms are to be taken as no more than a part of the mnemonic
machinery. In general, thula composition seems to have had a highly practical
purpose: that of making it easier to remember the names listed. 33

[each name] presumably brought to mind in the hearer things that we miss,
or know little of. The artistic worth of a list has always lain in the
associations which its names evoke. 33

Bethlem

The two variants of Bethlem have some importance for the textual critic,
and are therefore given here (the same translation will serve for both):

	Lyre:
	Bæðleem hatte seo buruh,
	Þe Crist on acænned wæs.
	Seo is gemærsod geond ealne middangeard.
	Swa þyos dæd for monnum mære gewurþe.

	Þeofend:
	Bethlem hattæ seo burh ðe Crist on geboren wes.
	Seo is gemærsod ofer ealne middangeard.
	Swa ðeos dæd wyrþe for monnum mære.

	Bethlehem is called the town that Christ was born in.
	It has become famous the world over.
	So may this deed become famous in men’s sight.

Lyre gives us the better text, but the two non-classical verses with which it
began displeased somebody, and he made them into one line by putting geboren
for acænned. Evidently a Christian spell could not always hold its own against
the classical tradition. 40

[full version: Metrical Charm 5: For Loss of Cattle ]

The heroic poem

Under the year 937 in the Old English Annals is recorded a poem of 73 lines
in praise of King Athelstan of England and his brother Edmund.  The occasion
for the poem was a battle which the brothers fought and won “at Bruna’s
borough (stronghold),” against an invading force of Scots and Vikings, led by
Kings Constantine and Anlaf. The poet, after praising the brothers and
telling of their foes’ losses on the field of battle, goes on to praise the
English army:31

				The West-Saxons
	pressed on in force all the day long,
	pushed ahead after the hostile army,
	hewed the fleeing down from behind fiercely,
	with mill-sharp swords. The Mercians withheld
	the hard handplay no whit from a man
	of those that with Anlaf came over the waves,
	by ship invaded our shores from abroad,
	warriors doomed to die in warplay…. (lines 20–28)

He continues with the flight of Constantine and Anlaf, told with relish and
elaborated with passages of exultation. The last section (lines 57–73) falls
into three parts: (1) the triumphant homecoming of the brothers; (2) the fate
of the bodies of the slain; and (3) the following historical comment:

				So vast a slaughter
	of men never yet was made before this
	on this island of ours with the edge of the sword
	(if we take for true what is told us in books
	or by the old and wise), since from the east hither
	the Angles and Saxons came up, to these shores,
	over broad waters sought Britain out,
	the keen warsmiths, overcame the Welshmen,
	the worshipful kemps, and won the land. (lines 65–73)	

The poem is done with high technical skill.  The transitions in particular
show the poet’s mastery of his medium. Noteworthy, too, is a nationalism
which goes beyond loyalty to the king’s person or to the reigning dynasty.
The reference to books, alongside oral tradition, marks the poet a clerk
rather than a scop [courtier] and his poem a writing rather than a speaking.

[some of the best courtly poems deal with defeat rather than victory]

The same, notes A.K. Ramanujan, is true for some old Tamil (Sangam) poetry.
see Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and 
the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil (1985).

Love poetry

Three love poems have come down to us in the Exeter Book: the poems
Eadwacer and Lover’s Message mentioned above, and a poem of 53 lines
called Wife’s Lament or Complaint.11 Two of these, Eadwacer and Wife’s
Lament, purport to be by women. 

Eadwacer is one of the most obscure poems in the English language. We make no
attempt to interpret it, but quote two passages remarkable for their power
and beauty:

	I waited for my wanderer, my Wulf, hoping and fearing:
	when it was rainy weather and I sat wretched, weeping;
	when the doughty man drew me into his arms—
	it was heaven, yes, but hateful too.

	Wulf, my Wulf, waiting for thee
	hath left me sick, so seldom hast thou come;
	a starving mood, no stint of meat, (lines 9–15)
		tr. K. Malone, Ten Old English Poems, 1941

[This poem is clearly reminiscent of the viraha poems of classical
sanskrit (and also Tamil).  See Daniel Ingalls' elegant translations from
Vidyakara's Subhasitaratnakosa, An anthology of Sanskrit Court poetry 
(1965). 

The Wife’s Lament likewise makes trouble for the interpreter, though here
the difficulties are far less serious. The poem is in the first person
throughout. 

The speaker is a woman who has lost her husband’s favor and has been
forced, by him, to live alone, in a cheerless wooded spot. She applies several
uncomplimentary epithets to the house she lives in: herh-eard “heathenish
abode,” eorð-scræf “hole in the ground, tomb, hovel,” eorð-sele “hut.” Such
terms of denunciation need not be taken too literally. Her unhappiness finds
expression in the following passage (among others):

	Fallen is this house: I am filled with yearning.
	The dales are dim, the downs [i.e., hills] are high,
	the bitter yards with briars are grown,
	the seats are sorrowful. I am sick at heart,
	he is so far from me. There are friends on earth,
	lovers living that lie together,
	while I, early and all alone,
	walk under the oak tree, wander through these halls, (lines 29–36)

She tries to console herself by reflecting that

	it is the way of a young man to be woeful in mood,
	hard in his heart’s thought,…(lines 42–3)

and by drawing a picture of such a man (her husband) himself alone and in
misery, but she finds this picture not so consoling after all, and ends
with the dismal saying,

			hard is the lot
	of one that longs for [one’s] love in vain, (lines 52–3)


[more love poems in ch.XII of part II: Middle English]

Contents

Part I. The Old English period (to 1100)

    I. Folk, State, and Speech 					  3
   II. Anglo-Latin Writings 					  12
  III. The Old Tradition: Poetic Form 				  20
   IV. The Old Tradition: Popular Poetry 			  32
    V. The Old Tradition: Courtly Poetry 			  45
   VI. Religious Poetry: Cædmon and His School 			  60
  VII. Religious Poetry: Cynewulf and His School 		  70
 VIII. Religious Poetry: Poems on Various Themes 		  78
   IX. Secular Poetry 						  88
    X. Literary Prose 						  96

Part II. The Middle English period (1100–1500)

    I. General Characteristics of the Period 			  109
   II. The Survival of the Native Tradition (1100–1250) 	  117
  III. The Ancrene Riwle 					  127
   IV. Anglo-Norman Literature 					  135
    V. Early Latin Writers 					  143
   VI. Wit and Wisdom 						  152
  VII. For Their Soul’s Need 					  158
 VIII. The Arthurian Legend to Layamon 				  165
   IX. The Romance: I 						  173
    X. The Romance: II 						  185
   XI. The Omnibus of Religion 					  200
  XII. The Lyric 						  208
 XIII. Richard Rolle and Other Mystics 				  225
  XIV. The Alliterative Revival 				  232
   XV. Piers Plowman and Other Alliterative Poems 		  240
  XVI. Chaucer: I 						  249
 XVII. Chaucer: II 						  258
XVIII. Other Contemporaries of Chaucer 				  264
  XIX. The Beginnings of the Drama 				  273
   XX. Ebb Tide 						  288
  XXI. Looking Forward 						  300

Bibliographical Supplement 					  313