Week 01, Course Intro, Bede, Rood

Welcome to E211, British Literature to 1760

Spring 2007 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Abrams, M. H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vols. 1ABC. 8th. ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 1 ISBN 0-393-92833-0. A separate text is Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 0-192-80512-6.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Notes on Bede and “The Dream of the Rood.”

Notes on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, “Caedmon’s Hymn” (24-27)

One recurrent pattern that Bede’s story about this early poem reminds us of is the way prophetic or poetical gifts to an individual involve anxiety, and sometimes suffering. Caedmon doesn’t suffer, but he’s a simple rustic who has been granted the gift of visionary singing—his task is to set parts of the scriptures to verse. He doesn’t understand why he should be given such a gift since he’s illiterate and not of high station in life. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Caedmon is an ordinary man transformed into a purveyor of extraordinary and prophetic messages.

Medieval literature often dramatizes the great gap between the human and the divine posited by Church theology. Post-lapsarian humanity (humanity “after the fall”) has distanced itself from God, and the relationship between words and things, words and intentions, has become deranged. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians describes the dilemma well: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:11). I think the dramatization I’ve mentioned is responsible for much of medieval literature’s continuing appeal, for its “pathos.” It seems like a simple thing—there’s a dreadful gap between us and god. But a lot can happen “in between,” so to speak: if you’ve read Dante’s Divine Comedy, you know how hard it was for the Pilgrim Dante to get hold of his once-earthly love Beatrice, who has to be reminded by other saints in the heavenly chain of command to turn towards Dante and help him find his way through “the dark wood” of mid-life spiritual travail. Beatrice, now free of earthly limitations, basks directly in God’s heavenly light (il primo amore, or primal love) that pulses through the cosmos. But Dante does not, or at least his earthly senses can’t yet feel that love and light the way Beatrice does. No wonder Beatrice seems to have left him behind. The distance between the Pilgrim and Beatrice is in part Dante’s way of dramatizing the gap between the human and the divine—a gap in feeling, understanding, and appreciating. Or consider the Pearl Poet’s dramatization of an imaginary dialogue in Pearl between a grieving father and his departed child—the child lectures him sternly at times on points of theology, rather like Dante’s Beatrice does to the Pilgrim. The poor father’s vision brings him some consolation, but for much of the poem it reminds him how far he is from his beloved daughter and from a proper appreciation of God and His inscrutable ways.

What promises to bridge the divide between humanity and God, at least over time? Well, faith does, with inspired language pointing the way. This point brings us back to Caedmon’s inspired hymning: Bede’s recounting of the old story dramatizes the gap I’ve mentioned, and acknowledges the seeming incommensurateness of the vessel God has chosen through which to speak to fallen humanity. But Caedmon’s words inspire faith nonetheless. So his is an uplifting, hopeful story, and Caedmon’s life pattern turns calmly monastic—he accepts the gift he has been given, and sings to benefit others. Charitas (charity, the quality of sharing one’s affection and gifts with others) reigns in this simple man’s actions.

Bede didn’t live beyond the 730’s CE (Christian Era), but here is a précis of early English history:

The original British tribes were conquered by Rome from the time of Julius Caesar onwards to 401 CE, when, under pressure from other parts of their empire, the Romans gave up trying to deal with the troublesome “Brits.” Then disunity caused the Celts to seek protection, and the result was the migration during the 400’s-500’s CE into England of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes Frisians, and Franks from Denmark and Germany.

Conversion to Christianity: “By the year 550 CE, the native Britons had been converted to Christianity and the religion became firmly established within their culture. Attempts by the Britons to convert the Anglo-Saxon pagans were futile. At the end of the sixth century through the successful efforts of a Christian mission led by Augustine, a representative of the Roman church, Christianity was established within the highest echelons of English society by the prompt conversion of the kings of Essex, East Anglia, Northumbria, and Kent. Sees were then established at Canterbury, Rochester, London and York. However, the four kingdoms soon relapsed into paganism, and initially, only Kent was reconverted. The evangelistic initiative then passed to the Scottish church and by the end of the seventh century, England had been reconverted.” (Source: Kim Woods, U of Texas at Arlington) Then just before 800 AD began the famous Viking invasions, which lasted until the end of the 800’s when Alfred the Great captured London from the Danes. Engla-Lande takes its beginning now as a common term.

During the 900’s (Tenth Century) we have the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms or the heptarchy (Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Wessex): “The early Anglo-Saxon society was organized around clans or tribes and was centered around a system of reciprocity called comitatus. The eoldorman expected martial service and loyalty from his thanes, and the thanes expected protection and rewards from the lord.” (Source: Kim Woods, U of Texas at Arlington, to which this account is generally indebted.)

Finally, we get the Norman Invasion of 1066. William of Normandy was a French aristocrat, and for hundreds of years thereafter, the English throne was more or less “French.” The French and English are separate but deeply interrelated kingdoms.

Notes on “Dream of the Rood” (900 AD or earlier) (page 27-29)

As with the Caedmon story in Bede, this dream vision plays on the temporal gap between the dreamer and the time of the Holy Cross or Rood. The dreamer is reminded vividly of the great spiritual significance of Christ’s Crucifixion. Ordinary wood is given voice—that’s personification, of course, a common device in medieval literature. As the poem suggests, there’s an affinity between the suffering of Christ and the pain of the natural world: “all creation wept.” Why is the poem necessary in terms of doctrine? Why the need for dream visions? Well, a recurrent pattern in the Bible, as one consequence of the Fall, is the way people only seem to learn their lesson: in truth, pride drives them on and sin-induced dullness makes them act stupidly, forgetting whatever spiritual truths they have learned. This obduracy on the part of human beings makes vivid reminders and lessons necessary—so the Cross on which Jesus was transfixed is made to testify in his favor as an instance of what the Victorian author Thomas Carlyle, although in a very different, secularized context, would call “Natural Supernaturalism”: the miracle of the ordinary, rightly understood.

What lesson does the Dreamer take away from his encounter with the speaking Cross? Clearly it’s a lesson about faith, but I will leave it for students to characterize. What interests me about the poem’s ending is how the words of the Cross lead to a vivid, dramatic image, what Sir Philip Sidney (a Renaissance critic and courtier-poet) might call a “speaking picture” with the power to inspire human beings to virtuousness. The significance of imagery is great in poetry generally, of course, but that statement is probably even more true of medieval literature, which has a tradition of powerful iconography to supplement its reliance on the written and spoken word. Many people, after all, were illiterate during the Medieval Period, and they received their doctrine either by the spoken word or through images they saw while at church, and at some points from morality and mystery plays put on by traveling actors.