Anglophone Literature Ph. D. Exam

I. RELIGIOUS POETRY

Religious poetry seems to have flourished in northern England-Northumbria-throughout the eighth century, though most of it has survived only in West Saxon transcriptions of the late tenth century. Monks produced not only manuscripts, masonry, sculpture and missionaries but also a lot of Christian poetry. Much of it consists of retellings of books and episodes from the Old Testament. Much of this religious poetry is anonymous, but the names of two poets are known: CAEDMON(d. c. 670), the first English poet known by name, and CYNEWULF(late eighth or early ninth century). They wrote on biblical and religious themes. According to Bede Caedmon became the founder of a school of Christian poetry and the he was the first to use the traditional metre diction for Christian religious poetry. This period of Old English poetry is called "Caedmonian". All the old religious poems that were not assigned to Caedmon were invariably given to Cynewulf, the poet of the second phase of Old English Christian poetry. With Cynewulf, Anglo-Saxon religious poetry moves beyond biblical paraphrase into the didactic, the devotional, and the mystical. The four Anglo-Saxon Christian poems which have the name of Cynewulf are Christ, Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles. All these poems possess both a high degree of literary craftsmanship and a note of mystical contemplation which sometimes rises to a high level of religious passion. One of the most remarkable poems written under the influence of the school of Cynewulf is The Dream of the Rood,by some it is attributed to the same Cynewulf, Andreas, and The Phoenix. Another significant Anglo-Saxon religious poem is the fragmentary Judith. The final part of Guthlac, a poem of 1370 lies, is probably Cynewulf's.

The most important Anglo-Saxon Latinist Clerks were the Venerable Bede(673-735) and Alcuin (735-804); both came out of Northumbria. To them and to those like them English Literature owes the preservation of the traces of primitive poetry.

The Venerable Bede tells us that he was born in 673 and brought up in Wearmouth Abbey. A few years later he moved to the monastery of Jarrow where he spent his whole adult life. He was the most learned theologian and the best historian of Christianity of his time. He was a teacher and a scholar of Latin and Greek, and he had many pupils among the monks of Wearmouth and Jarrow. He wrote the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum"(Ecclesiastical History of the English People) and finished in 731. By that year he had written nearly 40 works, mostly biblical commentaries. Bede died in 735.

On one such occasion he had left the house in which the entertainment was being held and went out to the stable where it was his duty that night to look after the beasts. There when the time came he settled down to sleep. Suddenly in a dream he saw a man standing beside him who called him by name. "Caedmon", he said, "sing me a song." "I don't know how to sing," he replied." "It is because I cannot sing that I left the feast and came here." "What should I sing about?" he replied. "Sing about the Creation of all things," the other answered. And Caedmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator that he had never heard before[...] When Caedmon awoke, he remembered everything that he had sung in his dream, and soon added more verses in the same style to a song truly worthy of God.

1. Read the extract from Bede's History and write a summary of the story of Caedmon. Paraphrase Caedmon's Dialogue with the man he saw in his vision and use reporting verbs in the past tenses.

The glory of Alfred's reign is Alfred himself(849-901) writes George Simpson. It was under his influence that the earlier poetic works, which had almost all been written in the Northumbrian dialect, were transcribed into the language of the West saxons. King Alfred played an important role in this literary movement. He surrounded himself with scholars and learned men, learnt Latin after he was grown up, and began to translate the works which seemed to him most apt to civilize his people. In this way he became the father of English prose-writers. He himself is credited with a translation of the Universal History of Orosius. He translated (or ordered to translate) Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Angles. Much more important, and among the best of Alfred's works, is the version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae. The first great book in English prose is The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, inspired though not written by Alfred. In some monasteries casual notes of important events had been made; but under Alfred's encouragement there is a systematic revision of the earlier records and a larger survey of West Saxon history. The great Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a series of annals which start with an outline of English history from Julius Caesar's invasion to the middle of the fifth century and continues to 1154.