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! reach unto the Heaven, O that I am all bereft of the Everlasting Joy! 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. 432. Then uplifted each himself, On his hands he leant. on his arm he set himself, yet was every one Then she reached out her hands and besought the King of Heaven through the office of Mary. "Thou wert in truth, O my beloved Lord, born into the world of my daughter, now it is plain that thou art God." She ended, and Christ, driving the fiends deeper into hell, took upwards with him all the host of the redeemed. "That was fair indeed, when they came to their fatherland, and with them the Eternal to his glorious burg. Holy prophets put forth their hands and lifted them into home," and they sat down to feast. Then, as in an assembly of English nobles, Christ rose and made his speech to them—and the phrase with which he begins recalls the Witan: "Wise spirits" he says, and in his turn he gives another account of the fall and of its punishment: "O'twas woe to me," he cries, "that the work of my hands should endure the chain of the prison-house. Then I came on earth and died. Well it was for you that the warriors pierced me with spears upon the gallows tree." So spake the Ward of Glory on the morning of the Resurrection. The poem turns then to describe the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, and the Last Judgment, and each fragment closes with a separate outbreak of religious warning and joy. As in the previous part, this similar ending suggests that these were each isolated songs, here collected and placed together by a later editor. There is nothing in them of any special worth. At line 665, another fragment of a separate poem, inserted out of its historical place, relates a part of the story of the Temptation. It is only remarkable for the mocking speech of Christ when he repels the tempter on the mountain, such a speech as an English warrior might have made to his foe: "Go, accursed, to the den of punishment, but I bid thee take no jot of hope to the burghers of Hell; but promise them the deepest of all sorrows; go down, and know how far and wide away is dreary Hell. Measure it with thine hands, and grip against its bottom. Go, till thou knowest all the round of it; from above to the abyss measure how broad is the black mist of it. Then wilt thou understand that thou fightest against God. Go with speed, and before two hours are passed, thou shalt have measured thine allotted house!" So he fell down to dreadful pains — down towards hell, and first he measured with his hands the torment and the woe, and then (as he descended) the lurid flame smote upwards and against him, and then he saw the captives lie below him in hell, and then the howl of the demons reached his ear when they saw the unholy one return, and then he on the bottom stood. And when he was there it seemed to him that to hell door from the place where he had been was 100,000 miles by measure. And he looked round on the ghastly place, and there rose a shriek from all the lost, and they cried aloud to the Lord of their kingdom -- 733. There! be ever thou in evil! Erst thou wouldst not good. With this fine passage close the poems that bear the name of Caedmon. Whatever their several dates be, they are a noble beginning to English song. Whoever be their several writers, they owe their impulse to the man who on that night took care of the cattle in the monastery of Hild. Honour from all the English race, from all the poets, greatest of the English race, is due to his name. He was the first (and I borrow some of Ebert's phrases) who, like a Scop singing heroic tales, sang to the people in their own tongue the tales of the Old Testament and the subject-matters of Christianity. He showed how this new material might be assimilated by the genius of the people. He made the bridge which led to the artistic poetry which begins, after him, to handle the same subjects. The old singers of heathendom, crossing it, became the new singers of Christianity. CHAPTER XX "JUDITH" AND OTHER CAEDMONIAN POEMS THE followers of Caedmon were many, Baeda says, and the phrase proves that there was a number of Northumbrian poems on Christian subjects at the time of Baeda's death in 735. Some of these poets adopted, no doubt, Caedmon's method, which may have been hymnic, and among them there were simple paraphrasers of the Sacred Books, men who sang only for the monastery and not for the mead-hall. But there were others, as we see plainly from the Exodus, who, while they followed him, passed far beyond simple narration. They conceived their subject in somewhat of a Saga fashion, and recited their work to please the warriors, the king, the thegns, and the freemen as they sat in the hall at the mead. The religious element is of course introduced, and the poem, half war, half religion, touching heathendom with one hand and Christianity with the other, equally excited and instructed the feasters. Of this type is the Judith: a poem of the cycle of Caedmon, written, it is most likely, in Northumbria, and which we may perhaps roughly date at about the middle of the eighth century. Had this long and important piece of work been by Caedmon, as some have said, it would not, I think, have been omitted from Baeda's catalogue of the poet's work, nor passed over without a distinct reference, among the plurimae sacrae scripturae historiae which he ascribes to Caedmon. Moreover, the form in which the poem is cast, its unity of story which can be discerned even in the portion left to us, its careful composition and its rhythmical changes bear witness to a time 1 1 The writer of Judith, like the writer of Genesis B, has frequent recourse to those long swelling lines when he is excited, which, while retaining the three alliterative stresses-two in the first half of the line, one in the second; sometimes only one in the first half- allowed the poet to insert at the beginning of each half line as many unaccented syllables as he chose. Hence the third letter-stress is almost always on the last word but one of the line. |