CHAPTER XXIII CYNEWULF We know the names of only two writers of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and these two are Caedmon and Cynewulf. We know that Caedmon was a Northumbrian of Whitby, but we do not know whether he wrote any of the poems which bear his name. It is different when we think of Cynewulf. Many believe him to have been a Northumbrian, but we do not know this with any certainty. But we do know some of the poems he wrote; he has signed four of them with his name―Juliana, the Christ, the Fates of the Apostles, and the Elene. There is a fifth writing. the Riddles - which most persons think he has also signed with his name. In the four first he signs in this fashion. He puts the runes which spell his name into certain connected and personal verses in the midst, or at the end, of each of these poems; and Kemble was the first to discover that these runes, when placed together, made up the poet's name. Owing to this discovery it occurred, as we have seen, to Leo that the first Riddle contained in a charade the syllables of Cynewulf's name, and that in this way the Riddles were also signed. Attached to the four signatures, if I may call them so, there are four personal statements in which something of his character and part of his life are vividly portrayed. Moreover, the last riddle which I have translated in the first chapter is, if we allot it to him, as vivid a description of himself as a young poet, as the personal descriptions in the signed poems are of himself as a religious man in old and middle age. We possess then not only his name, but we can also realise him as a man; and he is not unlike some of our own poets, though so many centuries have passed away. He is, for instance, as personal as Cowper, and in much the same way. No other of the Anglo-Saxon poets has this fashion of talking about himself, and it is so unique, and the manner of it so distinct, that when I find it in a poem which is not signed by him - in the Dream of the Rood it seems to me to be as good as his signature. The question as to whether he was a Northumbrian or not has been elaborately argued to and fro, and Wülker, with all these warring arguments before him, concludes that the matter remains doubtful until further evidence, for or against, is supplied.1 I have, however, a few suggestions to make in confirmation of my belief that he was a Northumbrian, or at least lived in the North; and I am not aware (though it is probable enough) that they have been made before. The first is, that if Cynewulf wrote the Riddles · and far the greater number of critics think he did he was well acquainted with a storm-lashed coast bordered with cliffs; with the life and business of sailors in their ships, and that the seas which he knew were not only tempestuous but frequently weltering with ice. It seems incredible that the writer of the riddles on the Anchor and the Tempests, to say nothing of others, could have lived inland in Mercia, or on the low-lying coasts of East Anglia, or on the southern coasts of Wessex where ice was never seen in the sea,2 and where seamanship in the eighth century was at a very low ebb. The Christ is also full of sea allusions; the cliff-barrier between sea and land is once, at least, vigorously seen; and the famous passage, translated at vol. i. p. 256, is written by one who had been a sailor, who knew the pains 1 A full discussion of the whole question will be found in Wülker's Grundriss, pp. 157-164. 2 This welter of sea and ice which, frequently spoken of in Beowulf, is there no doubt a remembrance of the Baltic frosts, is also spoken of in the Seafarer and the Riddles, and other poems which belong, as I think, to Northumbria. It would not be seen, I have said, on the Anglian or Wessex coasts, but it is seen to this day on the Northumberland coasts, especially where the great sand-flats extend far out to sea, and are covered daily by the tide. In the course of a severe three days' frost, the sand-flats become one vast ice-field, many hundreds of acres in extent and five or six inches in thickness. The tide daily breaks this up and carries the broken masses about; fresh ice forms on the vacant parts, and this is again broken up, till, as the storm comes in, the welter of ice and water is amazing. "Where, as happens in such extremity of cold as we experienced" (and I quote from Abel Chapman's Bird Life of the Borders, p. 165) "in the winter of 1878-79, and again in January 1881, the frost continues unbroken for weeks at a time, the phenomena created by the ice and tide are almost incredible save to those who have witnessed them. The masses of detached ice, split up by their own weight into fragments of all sizes and shapes and carried here and there by the currents, drive helter-skelter in the tideway, and along the lee shores are thrown up into ridges and rugged piles, extending for miles along the shore. Outside this glacial barrier of stranded blocks, the floating floes, carried along by the strong tide currents, grind and crash against each other, piling up table on table till they become miniature icebergs, and form a spectacle such as few have seen outside the Arctic regions." If this took place in Northumberland in 1881, what must it have been in the eighth century, when the winters, owing to the vast extent of the forest land, were much colder than now, and the snowfall much heavier. The Northumbrian poets saw this continually, and described it, but the Wessex and Mercian folk did not see it at all. and longing of a seaman's life, and who spoke to men who, being themselves seamen, would understand him. It is not a passage which a poet, writing in Mercia or Wessex, was likely to have written. Again, if we allot the last part of the Guthlac to Cynewulf, and we may do so with the greatest probability, the supposition that he was a Northumbrian of the seacoast is strengthened. The voyage over the fens is turned into a seavoyage. It is as if the poet knew nothing of the reed-fens, but described what he did know- a passage by sea from one point of the coast to another. If, again, we allow that one of his school or he himself wrote the Andreas, the Northumbrian origin of Cynewulf is so far strengthened. The scenery of that poem closely resembles the coast-scenery of the North. The writer was evidently a sailor; there is even, as I hold, a personal statement of this in the poem.1 No inland man, no Mercian, is likely to have written that voyage. Moreover, I do not know of any place on the coast of Wessex where a sea-poet was likely to write. Many such places did exist on the coast of Northumbria - Whitby, Hartlepool, Jarrow, Tynemouth, Lindisfarne, Coldingham, -all centres of learning and all in constant sea-communication. Many stories in Baeda make us aware that sailing, and in rough seas, went on continually along that coast. The atmosphere of the Christ and the Elene, and of the end of Guthlac, to say nothing of the Andreas, is as Northern as that of the sea-pieces in the Riddles. An "atmosphere" is perhaps poor evidence, but it is of value when it goes with other probabilities. Moreover, it is not such weak evidence as it seems. One might say, for example, that Tennyson could never have lived on the Northern coast. atmosphere is of the gentler lands and coasts below the Humber; and I can no more conceive the Elene and the Riddles, Guthlac and the Andreas, being written on the Southern coast or inland, than I can conceive Maud being written at Bamborough or Whitby. His The second suggestion is that we have no proof that any school of native poetry existed either in Mercia or Wessex, while we have plain proof that a good school did exist in Northumbria. The simplest probability then is that poems of so high a class as the Christ, the Elene, and some of the Riddles, arose in a country where native poetry had been practised and nurtured for fully a century. Thirdly, I make another suggestion as to the Northumbrian origin of these poems of Cynewulf, by comparing the personal 1 Lines 498-499. 1 sentiment of them with the historical conditions of Northumbria. All the personal portions are marked by regret and melancholy, not only for himself and his sins, but for the state of the world in which he lived. He speaks in the Christ of how a man should nourish his soul, "while this world, speeding through its shadows, still shines for him, so that he lose not, in this fading tide, the blossoms of joy." The time is barren in which he lives. Life is "a dangerous stream of immeasurable waves, and these are stormy oceans on which to and fro we toss, here in this weak world, over the deep seapaths." These might be only personal phrases referring to his spiritual state; but they take a more national significance when we read, in the Elene and the Fates of the Apostles, how wealth is fleeting under heaven; how all the treasures of earth glide away like water, or pass like the wind which rushes through the sky and then is shut in silence and in prison. Even more remarkable are the expressions in the introduction to Guthlac. "The glory of all the fruit of earth is smitten with eld; all the kinds of growth change away from loveliness; the latter tide of every seed is now weaker of virtue; therefore no man may dare to hope· face to face with this world's change that the world will bring him any fair delight."2 This note of retrospective melancholy, which is the undertone of all these poems, does not suit the life men lived in Mercia when Æthelbald and Offa, with only a short break of disaster between them, lifted Mercia into prosperity and fame, from 716 to 796; nor does it suit the national life of Wessex after the battle of Burford (754). Wessex was then looking forward, in fine fighting condition, active and young. Its position would kindle a poet into hope rather than inspire him with a melancholy regret. But Northumbria was exactly in the state which would be likely to produce the half-sad, half-despairing note of Cynewulf, who finds all his joy, not on the earth, but in the world to come. This argument depends on the supposition that Cynewulf's signed work was written in the latter half of the eighth century. This is, however, generally confessed. We cannot place the Christ and the Elene until twenty or thirty years after the death of Baeda. We should have to place them even later if we thought that Cynewulf was born about the date of Baeda's death, as some persons have thought. I conjecture that he 1 Lines 1584-1586, 850-856. 2 No doubt such phrases belong to all sermonising. But they do not occur in the Caedmonian poems; and, moreover, Cynewulf was, I believe, a layman. was born twenty years or so before Baeda's death, that he wrote the Riddles somewhere about 730 when he may have been twenty-five years old, and that the date of the Christ and the Elene varies from 750 to 780, when he may have been from forty-five to seventy years of age. As to the forward limit of their date, we need not discuss whether they belong to a time after the reign of Ælfred. Few persons, I imagine, hold that view. The question is, when did Cynewulf cease to write? and I think he had done so before the first Viking incursions on the coast of Northumbria. There is not a single allusion to these terrible strangers, and, given a writer so personal as Cynewulf, so sensitive to the sorrows of the world, it is very strange, if he were then writing, that not a trace should be found in his work of events like the storming of Lindisfarne and Jarrow, which terrified all Northumbria and brought horror to the heart of Alcuin far off upon the continent. The argument is stronger if we think that the Dream of the Rood is Cynewulf's last poem. It is extremely personal at the close, but not a word is there of the dreadful blow which fell with so dire a threat in it on Northumbria in 793. I hold then that Cynewulf had ceased to write before that year. These are the suggestions that I make concerning Cynewulf's date and his dwelling-place. It is easy to throw doubt on his Northumbrian origin, but is very difficult to prove that he was not a Northumbrian. The probabilities point the other way. As to the statement that his poems, being in the West Saxon dialect, are most probably West Saxon, it proves too much. It would prove that all Anglo-Saxon poems are also West Saxon, for they are all in that dialect; and the further statement that there is nothing in his language to testify to a Northumbrian origin is not true, and if it were, might only prove that the West Saxon translator was an intelligent and clever fellow. The next matter is his life and his character. What do we know about them? The character of a poet may be partly inferred from his style, from his mode of seeing and thinking of the things concerning which he writes, from the changes in his writings as he grows older. But very little weight belongs to such inferences unless we have some known foundation to build upon. We do possess this in the case of Cynewulf. We have four distinct revelations of his feelings and thoughts in poems signed by himself. Inferences then which do not quarrel with these known things are, in this case, of some value, |