Renaissance

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RENAISSANCE

Oct. 2nd, 97. Beowulf and the Elegies. The Anglo - Saxon Epic. Old English Poetry

6th BC c. Britannia was inhabited by the Celts - indigenous population. 1st - 5th AD c. conquered by Caesar - Roman colony. 5th c. AD - new invasion by the Anglo-Saxons - Germanic tribes driven from the invasion of the Huns, became Brits - chain reaction. The Celts were pushed in the Western and North-western parts. The Anglo-Saxons came from Denmark and Sweden, and settled down in Britain - primitive social organization - tribal: earls (masters) and churls - servant absolutely dispossessed, act as warriors or workers. Their culture was closely associated with the sea. The Anglo- Saxons founded 7 kingdoms in GB - Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia. The struggle for supremacy - rivalry brought success to different kingdoms. First Kent, then Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex - reign of king Alfred the Great. Danish invasions from the north across the water, Alfred in control of all the kingdoms, the Danes localized in North England. This is the OE period 7th - 11th c.

1066 Norman Conquest - French speaking - ME period dawns with it. The history of England changed.
6th c. - christianisation of Anglo-Saxons due to a Roman missionary in Kent - centre of English church today, the Celts were Christianised earlier.
There were four dialects - Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon in Wessex, and Kentish - these were the kingdoms that had supremacy.
OE literature can be divided in: secular and Christian literature. Basically works written in verse. Prose started developing later. Verse - more primitive and natural way of expression.

Secular poetry - genre divisions:
(i) gnomic verse (connected with knowledge) - lists of proverbs and sayings arranged in verse form.
(ii) mnemonic verse - facilitates memorizing. Literature is oral, access only through public readings. Even in the 14th c. common public readings, Chaucer read in public. Verse is easier to memorize when heard - mnemonic function of literature.
(iii) riddles - give the atmosphere of the times, picture of the details of everyday life, visual picture, and imagery. 2 lays - poems glorifying Germanic heroes, tragic atmosphere. 3 epics - many destroyed, preserved Beowulf (rewritten many times). Expansion of the lays, deal with a string of hero exploits; their purpose is to glorify the hero - superhuman character but mixes with other ordinary humans on equal footing. We have bits and pieces of other such epics.

Lyrical poetry - called elegies "Lament of Dear", "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", "The Ruins of Bath". Dramatic monologues - complaints about solitude, lack of comfort and hope, conditions and insecurity of life, inevitability. The pagan goddess of fate Wyrd most important. Secular poetry was written and sung by scops - poet and entertainer of the halls of the king. When literature was distributed orally, only privileged people had access to it.

Christian poetry - Latin, lot of monasteries, imitated pagan past stylistically, impressed by its stylistic fineness.
Bede "Ars Metrica" - one of the first books of poets in post classic. "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" - material from English monasteries, proud source of history of those days. Alcwin - 8th c, fine style, theological work. Cadmon and Cynewulf - poets on biblical epics, used figures from the Bible, not only saints but also warriors, oriented to poets and subjects from legends of church lives of saints, models of righteous behaviour. This anticipates the rise of the romance - mystical visions, saints, and martyrs. Not courage and strength but concerned with fortitude - virtue enables you to resist sin. Depicts state of mind, full of tears and pathos. Rhetorical language deviates from the norm of the OE period.
Alfred - 9th c. to early literature prose in the dialect of the Wessex started a school of writings - philosophy, geography. Anglo-Saxon chronicle 7 manuscripts, 4 versions - impersonal, unornamented. Followed by several other schools - Dunston, Aelfine, and Bishop Wulfstan.

Beowulf is entirely preserved; it consists of some 3200 lines. Probably it was written in the early 8th c. and it is preserved in a 10th c. West-Saxon manuscript (like most of the early English writings). The poem is based on old Germanic legends, in the tradition of the continent (where they come from). It refers to historical events which have been recorded in chronicles of the time; the two placed on the Baltic shores (the original home of the Anglo-Saxon) in the 6th c. The historical event around which the story revolves is the reign of king Hygelac of the Fricians. The main character is not Hygelac himself, but Beowulf, who is Geat (Gaut) (ethnic definition), member of the Gautar tribe. In the poem, Beowulf arrives in Denmark to rescue the king there, whose name is Hrothgar, from a monster - Grandel. This monster comes to the newly made mead-hall, pesters Hrothgar and his warriors nightly. The monster and his mother live in a cave, at the bottom of a lake; i.e. they are water monsters, which perform their deeds mainly on land.

Beowulf is seen to arrive at Denmark, which is described in a very nice way with many details. Then, Beowulf and his warriors settle and wait for the night to come. During the night, he fights with Grendal and manages to tear one of his hands - runs away and hides. His mother comes to seek a revenge, but she is chased away too. Here comes the point in which Beowulf must follow them to the lake - he goes under the water, there is a fight. He kills them both, and now he can go back home. That is the end of the first part. The second part of the poem takes place later on in Beowulf's life where he has become king of the Geats (after Hygelac's death). Now he is challenged by another monster - a fire-dragon.

Beowulf is much older now and less capable of escaping easily from such battles and while fighting - he is injured and dies off from his wounds. His followers bury him in a great style.

The structure of the poem is a simple one, it introduces two stories - the first one is about the water creatures that have to be destroyed, and the other one is some kind of essence that is a associated with fire. Some scholars have suggested that this might be interpreted as a solar myth in which the cultural hero fights against the forces of nature. It is an epic poem and as such, it reveals some heroic code. This code does not necessarily have symbolic value, but every now and then, we are led to believe that there is another dimension in the poem. We are certain that we are facing a hero of a super human dimension. The hero is not pious and God hearing Christian of later writings, but rather primitive possessing the traditional pagan virtues of strength, courage and loyalty. He is the ideal medieval warrior taming the forces of the natural world. At the same time, Beowulf has the virtues of the new Christian knight: mildness, courtesy, and justice.

The structure of the poem is uneven, interrupted by a lot of digression, repetition and retrospections. There is no neat line of development we can follow chronically and logically from the beginning until the end. Probably it is written by a learned poet, although anonymous. We judge by the contents that the obvious influence on it is of Virgil's Aeneid. We also can say that the epic is didactic and edifying. Beowulf is a mixture of Christian and pagan elements - a Christian revision of pagan legends. No pagan Gods are mentioned, instead we have names and events from the Bible, probably those are later accretions in the poem.

The length of the rhythmic wave, the line fuses into sth greater, what is important here is the verse of the paragraph. This makes the poem sound more solemn and important as a statement. When we have neatly stopped lines then the poetry tends to sth like a song in which it is very easy to establish parallel structures. In this poem there are no easily established parallel structures, it runs all and long, any motion is expressed by a long sentence that runs through a number of lines. Oct. 6th, 97 : Medieval Romances and Ballads. The Spirit of Gothic Ren. The Arthurian Legend. The Gawain Poet

It is marked by the flowering of the Middle Ages, its social organization and culture and at the same time the obvious rise and anticipation of a very different period. Very few major traces of the period, of the context of the literary development, there was a further growth of industry and commons in England, the strengthening of the middle class - the freemen, the townsmen - the people who organized themselves on a democratic basis into new structures of community and power. Also in this period there was a change in the psychology of the nation - growth in the confidence and rise of nationalism. It was no longer the Anglo-Saxon language, but a synthesis of it and French - language which little by little will substitute the different dialects. The war with France (1337 - 1453). These conditions help to bring poverty and misery on a large scale. New laws were introduced - they hardened the relationship b/n masters and peasants and people employed on the land. There was a sturdy increase in the wage labor, which created new social scheme and problems. In addition to these, we should say about the first serious pestilence in England, the so-called Black Death in 1348, in which 1/4 of the population died. It created the feeling that mankind was sinful and was thus punished by God.

1381 Tylor and J. Ball lead a peasant revolt. More important to the period is the religious heresy of Wycliffe (1328 - 1384), an Oxford scholar. Teaching the supremacy of the king over the church; it anticipates the nationalist movement. It bases its claims on national independence. A very important feature of this heresy is the idea of predestination and direct communication with God. When you are predestined from birth, the church cannot help you, it can only sell you a pardon at the end of your life. If man can communicate directly with his Creator, the church becomes irrelevant. Thus, the Bible needed to be translated for the very first time. Later this teaching was carried to an extreme, coming close to utopian communism.

The alliterative revival - first half of the 14th c. in the West of the country. It is a revival of the old traditional techniques and poetic structure. B/n the end of OE period and the 14 c. we have a very large span in which poetry was written after the Continental tradition - the rhymed verse - classical meter - Greek and Latin - stressed - unstressed, or short and long vowels. In the 14 c. in the West people were more conservative than the cultural center and thus the traditions were kept alive. Within the alliterative school, we have such writings as romances, mainly historical - "The Wars of Alexander", "The Destruction of Troy", "The destruction of Jerusalem", "Morte d’ Arthure", "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight". We also have religious poetry, largely allegorical - long narrative poems that contain a lot of lyrical characteristics, a mixture of the epic and the lyric. The three most important of them are found in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain, and most likely they were produced by the same author, who we refer to as Gawain Poet. These three poems are: The Pearl, Passions, and Purity (the manuscript dates from around 1370). Last in this group of writings comes the social satire Piers Plowman.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - in some ways it is a typical romance story, but still very different. It starts in Camelot during the New Year season when all knights have gathered to celebrate. A challenger appears - a knight in green. He challenges king Arthur and Gawain defends his king. Gawain is offered the first blow and he chops off the green knight's head. Surprisingly he picks it up and leaves. Gawain is supposed to meet him in one year's time and till then is left in suspense about the Green Knight's identity.

Eventually he prepares for the journey, but nobody knows where the Green Knight lives. Gawain travels through the Western part of the country (very nice description of the landscape throughout different seasons; this interest in nature and details was not typical of the period). In the third section Gawain at last arrives at a castle and is invited to spend some time there since it is X-mas Eve. The host tells him that each day he goes hunting and whatever he brings back will be given to his guest, and respectively whatever Gawain gets in the castle should be given to the host. As soon as the host leaves his wife tries to seduce Gawain who decides to be loyal to his host. The first day he exchanges a kiss for a deer; the second - a boar for two kisses; on the third he exchanges a fox for two kisses, but Gawain does not give him the girdle green which is magic. He thus fails in his chivalric code. The host has to give him the first blow. Gawain manages to slip away, not because he is afraid but as a natural reaction. Only the third time thus he stands still, and the Green Knight leaves him a scar. Then he reveals himself as the lady of the castle and at the same time the knight. The scar will show that Gawain is not perfect. When he returns to Camelot, all the knights decide to wear green. The story is ironical, told in great circumstances and psychological details, which is unusual (G's feelings, the portrait of the lady). All this points to a new interest in man, which is usually associated with the Ren The romance is a series of adventures and usually does not follow a particular narrative structure. However, here we have a plot with two interconnected adventures. Structure - 1001 stanzas of different length, not rhymed, five rhymed lines - called Bob and Wheel follow each stanza. Movement from allegory to symbolism.

Langland
(partially true) Piers Plowman - the Dreamer has a vision of the bustling world around him. Here the clergy plays a central role. Lady Meed appears; she stands for the financial award. She is going to marry another allegorical figure called Falsehood. They are accused by Conscious and are put to trail. Reason - another allegoric figure; the Seven Deadly Sins. The goal - a moral reform of the community.

... sets out on a pilgrimage for Truth (standing for God). He meets Piers, a simple laborer of the land, and asks him to be his guide. Piers however has to plow his land first since each estate is supposed to perform certain functions. He sticks to the rules and thus the experiment of this organization collapses. Piers gets a pardon, decides to give up material possessions and turn to prayers and penance. He has called the Vita, Do-Well, Do-Bet, and Do-Best, the three categories of righteous life. He has to choose. Do-Well is the life of usefulness and honest work; Do-Bet - charity, approaching the life of the virgin; Do-Best - the life of the clergyman who has acquired the perfection of the bishop.

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