And when he had thus sung he pushed on the plough and cut the first furrow; and then he stayed himself and, looking on the upturned earth, he sang again a very ancient verse Then the farmer took of each kind of meal and let knead a broad loaf with milk, and laid it under the first furrow and sang again grant us gift of growing, Blossoming brightly, blessed become ! And when he had so sung, the work was done, and he drove the plough on through his acre. But Cynewulf walked on, nor was he fated to leave the place till he had heard something more heathen still. For now a little way in the wood he came to a hill whence the trees had been cleared, and he saw a man crouching doubled up upon the ground in sudden pain of a stitch caused by witchcraft; and another, who stood by, held a shining linden shield over him as if to guard him from weapons shot at him, and was anointing him with a salve made of fever-few and the red-nettle, which had grown through convent at Corvei, in which this line begins "Eostar, Eostar, eordhan modor." Nothing seems to follow from this clerical error. The name remains mysterious, and I am glad of it. As to the rest of the song, it breathes the pleasure and worship of ancient tillers of the soil in the labours of the earth and in the goods the Mother gave. It has grown, it seems, out of the breast of Earth herself. Nor are the next four lines less remarkable and less heathen. Earth is here the mother of men. The surface of Earth is the lap of the goddess; in her womb let all growth be plentiful. Food is in her for the needs of men. "Hale be thou, Earth!" I daresay this hymn was sung, ten thousand years ago, by the early Aryans on the Baltic coasts. The next four lines - Acre full-fed-are partly heathen, partly Christian. On the whole, we are placed in these songs in that early time, after settled agriculture had begun, when the "Cornfield," as Professor Rhys says, "is the chosen battlefield where the powers favourable to man make war on those other powers that would blast the fruits of his labour." And if we wish to bind up this ancient English Earth Religion with Northern names of gods, we may think of Frigg, Woden's wife, who is the Earth goddess, and of Thor her son, the god of husbandry," the farmer's friend," whose bolt cleaves the stormclouds that threaten the grain and disperses the blighting mists, who marries Sif, the yellow-haired goddess of the cornfield. Beyond this there is a literary quality in this old song, and in the Stitch-Charm that follows it, which, from its delightful naturalness, from its close clinging to the subject, and from its contrast to the conventional Christian poetry, pleases the ear and the imagination. a fence,' and waybroad (plantago), which it was his habit, for he was a witch-doctor, to keep by him, having first boiled it in butter, that he might heal those whom the fierce elves shot with their spears. So Cynewulf drew near to listen, hiding in the fringe of the wood, and he heard the man singing this pagan song, which told of fierce witch-wives riding over the hill and flinging spears. Loud were they, lo, loud, 2 as over the land they rode; as over the hill they rode. from this spite thou mayst escape thee! if herein thou be! 3 Out little spear Out little spear Sat the smith thereat, Out little spear he, underneath the shining shield, will I send another smote a little seax out; if herein thou be! Six the smiths that sat there Out little spear, making slaughter-spears: in be not, spear! flake of iron hard, If herein there hide or shot into the flesh, (or shot into the bone), 1 Through a sieve. The Romans had this custom. They laid a sieve in the road, and used the stalks of grass that grew through it for medical purposes. - Grimm, Chapter on Herbs. 2 Elf-shooting, etc., is a common superstition in England. Indeed, it ranges from Shetland to Cornwall. Here is a Scandinavian instance: "That same autumn Hermund gathered a party and went on his way to Borg, intending to burn down the house with Egil in it. Now as they came out under Valfell, they heard the chime of a bowstring up in the fell, and at the moment Hermund felt ill, and a sharp pain under his arms, and the sickness gained on him.” 3 "In dock-out nettle.- Nettle in, dock out."- Troilus and Cressida. In Sussex a poor woman is cured of a scald on a Sunday evening by an old wife who bows her head over the wound, crosses two of her fingers over it and breathes upon it, repeating these words There came two angels from the north, Out Fire, in Frost, In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Folk-Lore: Northern Counties (Henderson), p. 171. Flee, witch, to the wild hilltop and help thee the Lord! 1 Then the strange chant ended, the witch-doctor bid the man take the seax and dip it into water; but Cynewulf had heard enough, and we bid him farewell as he entered the forest paths. 1 I have taken Sweet's reading. CHAPTER X THE SEA THE English, at least in the north of England, were close observers not only of the natural aspect of the Earth, but also of the Sky and the Sea; and the proof of this lies in the number of words they invented to express the different appearances of these two great creatures. The changes of the Dawn from the first gray tinge of the heaven to the upward leap of the Sun; the changes of the Evening from the light left by the setting sun to the last glimmer of it before dead night, have each their own specialised words. The fiercer phases of natural phenomena were also watched and described with minuteness by the poets. Cynewulf dedicates eighty lines to the story, hour by hour, of the birth, the growth, and dying of the Tempest. But no natural object engaged them so much as the Sea, and for no object have they so many names. Their treatment of it in verse deserves a chapter in a history of English poetry. Such a chapter will bring together a number of descriptive passages, so varied in form and in imaginative sentiment that we shall be able to estimate the range of the natural description of the Angles, its limits and its excellence. No critical analysis of mine could make this estimate or give this insight into the way in which the English saw nature, half as well as the series of examples which I shall translate, and which describe the doings of the great Being who of all the living things of the world awakened in them the most profound emotion. A shoal of simple terms express in Beowulf the earliest seathoughts of the English. But, still uncontent, the singers compounded these simple terms with other words, in order more fully to image forth the manifold impressions they had received of the doing of the great waters. Double, sometimes treble words were used to picture, if possible, the waves in storm and the ships that rushed through them. Many more than those in Beowulf were invented by Cynewulf, whose imagination wrought like the surges he described; but at present our task is confined to the sea and the seamen as they appear in Beowulf. The simplest term is Sae, our sea, and it has the general meaning which we attach to the word. To this they added Waeter, the great wet world beyond the land, which, when the adjectives deep and wide were prefixed to it, meant, it seems, the ocean. Then came Flod, our flood. This was the outpoured sea which flowed into and filled the hollows of the earth. The same word expressed anything that flowed the tide, a river, the rush of an inundation. Correlative with this was Stream, which, when used of the Sea, probably meant the ocean river that went round the world, then the general flowing of the deep, and especially the apparent movement of the whole body of the sea in waves to the coast. Again, the term Lagu belonged to the Sea, as to all waters. The Sea was the great Pool, and considered as lying in a hollow; this word for it seems to express in poetry the sea at peace. There are certainly no words compounded with it in Anglo-Saxon poetry which suggest water in great disturbance. Mere, another ancient term for the Sea, is of frequent occurrence, and means the desert waste of waters. Another word is Holm. As men stood on the beach or on the ship's prow they saw the wide waters raised up, as it were, around them, or lifted into a mound on the horizon, and this common aspect of the Sea they called Holm. It was the up-mounding of the Ocean; and Hunferth exactly expresses this when he says that the Holm bore Breca up on the strand. Hence it came to mean the high waves, each wave like a rounded height, and then the whole high going of the waves, and further the deep ocean itself, which was conceived as heaved upwards, like the coil of a great serpent, from the abyss below. This abysmal bottom of the deep was Grund, a word which, in connection with certain other words, is mixed up with a sense of dread, with that which was unfathomably unknown — the great cavernous bed of ocean, the hiding-place of primæval and deadly creatures, born of the slime, the grounded-dust that covered the foundation rock of the world. One giant line in Lycidas gives me this ancient impression Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world. 1 Lagu-flod and lagu-stream are, however, two components, and these may be instances of that use of lagu for flowing water on which Earle dwells in his notes to the Anglo-Saxon charters, though I do not understand how lagu can ever come to mean a flowing thing. Compounded with flod and stream, it means, I think, the flowing sea in its peace. |