The Beginnings of English Literature

The Beginnings of English Literature

If we wish to trace English Literature to its very beginnings, we must revert to the days when the Angles and Saxons had not yet set foot on the land of Britain. These men, were bold and fearless, they loved fighting and thirsted for adventure, they revelled in the perils of the sea, and their Sagas tell of fights in which the supernatural is blended with the real. Portions of earlier sagas are included in Beowulf, a narrative poem of more than 3.000 lines which was probably written in its present form in the ninth century. It relates the deeds of Beowulf, a DAnish hero: how Beowulf sails from Sweden to Denmark in order to help his brother Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall and domains are ravaged by a monster of human shape called Grendel. In a terrible encounter, Beowulf tears away the monster's arm; but though mortally wounded Grendel escapes, leaving tracks of blood which lead to a distant sea-cave. Life and joy return to the hall of Hrothgar; but, resolved to avenge her son, Grendel's mother appears and carries off a Danish thane. Beowulf follows her into the sea, kills her, and finding in her cave the corpse of Grendel, cuts off the monster's head and carries in to Hrothgar.

When the latter dies, Beowulf is proclaimed king. Fifty years later, a new fight takes place between Beowulf, white with age, and a fire-breathing dragon; Beowulf slays the fiend, but dies of his fiery breath; ; the hero is burned on a pyre amid universal lamentation. The Latin influence, which had been practically swept away by the English Conquest, began to reassert itself at the end of the sixth century, when Augustine was sent by Gregory the Great to preach the Gospel to the English People, in 597. Canterbury became from this time a centre of Latin culture; but the study of Latin remained confined to the monasteries; on the language of the people and on the literature of the time its influence was insignificant. The poems written in the seventh and eighth centuries are pagan in spirit, and if in some of them Christian thoughts or references occur, these are obviously superadded elements, very different in tone from, and in most cases written at a much later date the main body of the pieces. These poems are written in an alliterative language of purely Teutonic stock; they sing of the hardships of the sailor's life, of the struggles which await the wanderer on his weary way, and they express the strange emotion that would take hold of him, in the midst of the storm or in the bleakness of northern fogs; fear mixed with reverence, terror merging into worship; a note which will be heard time and again in English literature. Two fine samples of this early poetry are The Wanderer and The Seafarer.