CHAPTER XIX THE "DANIEL" AND "CHRIST AND SATAN" THE Daniel follows the Exodus in the Junian Manuscript, and is in the same handwriting as the Genesis and Exodus. It is a long poem of 765 lines, and its end is wanting. The writer wished, I think, to connect it with the Exodus, and there is an introduction of some forty verses which takes up the history of the Israelites at the Exodus, and sketches it as far as the appearance of Nebuchadnezzar on the scene. After that the poet paraphrases, with some closeness, and with much dryness, those portions of the book of Daniel which have to do with the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, the story of the three children, and the feast of Belshazzar. There is scarcely any dialogue to enliven the story, and though the text of the Bible is treated with some freedom, the freedom is unrelieved by a single touch of imagination. It is a dreary poem. How any one in the world can say, as some have said, that the Daniel was written by the same poet who wrote the Exodus or the Genesis, passes belief. The only passages which have any life are those which are borrowed from the Song of the Three Children in the Apocrypha, and this, with other interpolations, has been partly worked into the Daniel from the Azarias of the Exeter Book.' I have already drawn attention to the threefold translation varied into three different aspects of nature of the phrase which concerns the cooling wind which blew in the fiery furThis is the one oasis in the desert of Daniel. As to its date, some say that it was written after Ælfric, others that it belongs to the time of Elfred. Its inferiority makes us say that it does not matter a pin when it was written. nace. It is another matter when we come to the second part of the poems which pass under the name of Caedmon, and which are 1 The text supposes that the first seventy-five lines of the Azarias were worked into the Daniel. But the more probable supposition is that the Azarias was a rifacimento of a portion of the Daniel. in a different and later handwriting from the first part. Grein has given to this collection of psalm-like poems the name of Christ and Satan. They are a kind of Paradise Regained. They treat, first, of the Fall of the Angels; secondly, of the Harrowing of Hell, of the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Judgment Day; and thirdly, of the Temptation. The first, second, and third poems are not (and the best German critics agree in this) one poem, but three fragments of separate poems. Groschopp, who has treated of them in a distinct work, considers them to be three fragments taken out of one united poem, which a later "restorer" has attempted to bring into a unity of his own. There are but few who think that he has proved his point. The great interest of his labour lies in this that his investigation of the language of the poems makes it more than probable that they are older than the rest of those contained in the Junian MS. He even supposes, from the antique form of the Anglo-Saxon, and from the resemblance of the subjects treated to those mentioned in Baeda's account of Caedmon's works, that we may have here some of the work of the Caedmon of Baeda.1 Wülker disagrees with him, and thinks that Ten Brink's view that the Christ and Satan is later than Cynewulf much more probable. The extreme simplicity, directness, and rude passion of the narrative, make it likely, in my opinion, that this set of poems is earlier than the rest of the book, except, perhaps, some portions of Genesis. Dialogue, which has died out in Exodus and Daniel, and the representation of a situation in long speeches rather than in description, return upon us in these poems. The human interest is thus made greater; nor are the characters ill-sustained. They are, at least, alive; and this is especially true of Satan, whose character, as painted here, is more various, more the object of the writer's pity, more full of regret for all he has lost, even for those he has led with him to ruin, than the Satan of Genesis B. The poetry has a clear clang, a sharp descriptiveness which is nearer to oral than to written After the dreary waste of Daniel it is a comfort to come upon this rugged, varied and somewhat primæval mountain side of song. verse. 1 The first three parts of the first poem on the Fall of the Angels, as if they were separately made, end with three similar hymns of praise. They are like three lays, into which a Scôp might divide his one subject, to be sung on three separate evenings; and such may have been the form of some of Caedmon's religious songs. The others, too, may be separate Cantatas, within a general paraphrase of the history of redemption. 2 This has, however, nothing to do with their supposed antiquity. The description of hell has some new elements in it, and these seem, though I do not wish to make too much of this, to belong to a time when the Northern idea of the realm of the dark death-goddess Hel had begun to be influenced by the Christian Hell. If that conception mingled at all with the hell now before us, we might be able to suggest a conjectural date for this poem. The Northern Helle is not a place of punishment or filled with fire, nor is it dwelt in by the evil only. All go down to it save the heroes who die in battle even Brynhild and Balder. It lies low down to the North, in a pale, mistworld (Niflheimr), covered with night, very cold, swept with winds; with gates, a great hall where the goddess dwells, a fountain in the midst where dragons and serpents lie, and twelve roaring rivers, gloomy and joyless. Muspell is the fireworld in the South, and no human beings ever pass into it. Various fragments of this conception appear in the hell of this poem. Fire-breathing dragons are at its gates, and serpents swarm in it. There is a hall in it, in which Satan wanders like Hel. It is cold and dark, and over it broods abysmal cloud. Those who wander in it are black-visaged. These are the heathen fragments. The Christian hell-in which the name of the goddess was changed into the name of a placeis made a realm of fire, like Muspell, but unlike Muspell is filled with human souls as well as demons. This place is vigorously described in these poems. It is sunk deep in the lowest abyss, "underneath high Nesses," a new image in the description of hell. This is twice repeated, and links the conception of the place to the medieval notion of the last pit of hell. Below these, as if on their strand, the fiends sometimes assemble and mourn. The cliffs stand round a "deep, tossing, and weltering sea of fire, greedy and ravenous - a loathsome lair." This heaving and leaping sea is Hell's floor "an ocean mingled with venom and with venom kindled." Serpents move in it and twine round naked men; adders and dragons dwell in it (in Judith hell is called a "hall of serpents"); its wind-swept hall is filled with anguish. The devils wander to and fro in it howling in woe; and twelve miles beyond the gates of this narrow realm of hate the gnashing of their teeth is heard in the abyss of space. The gates are huge, dragons sit at them, and they are fast shut and immovable, save when Christ comes upon them, when they are battered down to the noise of thunder at dawn. When Satan speaks, fire and poison fly from his lips with his words, and flicker through hell, and he is as restless in hell as he is said to be on earth in the book of Job. The very distance from Palestine is given. Hell is 100,000 miles below the Mount of the Temptation. This is as definite as Dante. Much of this is freshly imagined, and its possible nearness to heathen thought gives it a greater interest than the later mediæval conceptions possess. The first poem, The Fall of the Angels, begins with a praise of God as Creator, and with a sketch of the fall of Satan into hell. Then the "Old One" wails for his loss of heaven, and for the fiery ruin in which he lives. He is far more convinced of his sin than the audacious devil of Genesis. "I may never hope," he cries, "to have again the better home I lost through pride." A new motive is now introduced. In the Genesis all his companions love him and are on his side. Here they reproach and scorn him. "With lying words thou hast deceived us; God thou wast; thyself wast the Creator-so thou saidst; a wretched robber art thou now, fast bound in bands of fire.' Another curious phrase is the following, where we meet with the Son of the devil, as if in heaven he had imitated God and sent his son forth as master. "Full surely thou saidst that thy son was the creator of man; all the greater are now thy pains." Again Satan takes up his complaint, and repeats in different phrases the same motive-regret for heaven, hopelessness of return, the present horrors of hell. A third time he takes up the same cry; and then a fourth time, the words flying from him in sparks likest to poison, he bursts out into a passionate agony of vain repentance 164. O thou Helm of banded hosts! O high glory of the Lord! O thou might of the great Maker! O thou Middle-Earth! O thou dazzling day-light! O delight of God! O ye angel hosts! O thou upper Heaven! O that I am all bereft of the Everlasting Joy! reach unto the Heaven, Never with these eyes of mine upwards look again; Sounding clear the clang of the clarions of God. "Woe and torment, exile must I bear, wander a wide wandering in wretchedness and care, for I strove to drive from His throne the Lord of Hosts." This is the first song in the poem, and it ends with an outburst on the poet's part of warning to men, and of a prophecy of the joy of heaven. The second song of the poem begins at line 225, and is a repetition of the first, save for the expression of Satan's vague hope of God giving him back his seat in heaven; and it ends as before with a religious psalm of the poet's. A third song begins to the same motive at line 316, and the whole poem ends with another hymn of the bliss of heaven at line 365. These three songs are like three lyrical poems sung at different times to the same theme, and placed in the manuscript one after the other. The second complete poem of this part of the Junian Caedmon is on the Harrowing of Hell and begins at line 366. It is a subject, as I have said, which always attracts the imagination. In this treatment of it, some things are novel and interesting, and seem to belong to an earlier and more simple time than that in which the separate poem in the Exeter Book on the Descent into Hell was written. Speeches rather than dialogue fill it, and its scenery is vivid and well arranged. It begins with a sketch of the fall of Lucifer into hell, and then breaks abruptly into the subject. Anguish came on hell, thundercrash before the Judge, as he bowed and shattered the gate of hell, but joy was in the heart of men (that is, of the good spirits in prison) when they saw the Saviour. But full of horror were the fiends, wailing far and wide through the windy hall. "Terrible is this, since the Storm has come to us, the Hero with his following, the Lord of Angels. Before him shines a lovelier light than we have ever seen, since we were on high among the Angels. So will now our pains be deeper." Then-for now the poet repeats his motive in order to introduce the speech of Eve,-then came the Angel-cry, loud thunder at the break of day. The Lord had overcome his foes-warfeud was open on that morning, when he came to lead forth the chosen souls of Adam's race. Yet Eve could not look upon the glow of joy till she had spoken, and her speech occupies nearly forty lines. It may mark the early origin of the poem, that the important place among the souls in Hades is given to a woman. She tells the story well; she makes picture after picture of hell before the Saviour's coming. He listens courteously to the end. She begins with the story of their fall, speaking for Adam and herself. "Our guilt was bitterly recompensed; thousands of winters have we wandered in this hot hell, dreadfully burning. But now, I beseech thee, Prince of Heaven, that I with all my kinsfolk may go up from hence. Three nights ago came a servant of the Saviour (this is Judas) home to hell. Fast is he now in prison, yet he told us that God Himself would enlighten this house of hell, our dwelling." Then, from this happy invention of Judas, his message and his fate, she turns to describe how the news was received by all the Old Testament saints waiting in hell. |