Old English literature (other poems) and Middle English Literature

1. Old English literature

• Anglo-Saxon England: 5th century to 11-12th century – conversion to

Christianity.

• The poems that have survived were transcribed by monks.

• Old English literature: heroic age, epic battles ans legendary mythic
figures conveyed in a formal and dignified poetry, dealing with concepts
of fate, honor, vengeance, social duty, loyalty to one's lord or to God.

• Beowulf and the representation of a society that is characterized by

violence – the misconceptions of Anglo-Saxon England, based on an
expression of conventional story-types (monsters and heroes).

• The pagan ethical code: loyalty to chief and tribe

• Christian influence: the altruism of the main character, his sacrificial
death and the lament for his death as a similar aspect of elegy, the
monsters as allegories of the forces of evil and darkness to be fought and
defeated by the hero.

• King Alfred (849-99 a.C): English navy, education, system of national

and local government, law courts, tax-collecting.

• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (9th century): a history of England from the

Roman invasion (55 b.C.) to 1154.

• A vigorous vernacular literary culture: epic and lyric poetry (religious

themes), two poets – Caedmond (7th century) and Cynewulf (9th
century).

• Epic X lyric poetry:

Epic: centered on the exploits of a particular hero; involving historical facts

with mythology, written from a third-person perspective.
Lyric: focused on an individual emotion or experience, written from a first-
person point of view.

• Elegy: The seafarer and The wanderer

Elegy: traditionally a short poem named after its meter, the elegiac meter. The
elegiac meter would use alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter.

>>Dactylic hexameter is a type of meter that consists of three syllables, the first
stressed and the following two unstressed. Hexameter is each line containing
six feet. A line of dactylic hexameter would contain 18 syllables.
>>Pentameter is a form of meter that consists of five feet (syllables). Each foot
could contain 1, 2 or 3 syllables. For example; Iambic feet contain two syllables
each and dactylic feet contain three.

Since the 16th century, elegy became a term for mournful poems that lament
something or someone’s death.

• The seafarer and The wanderer:

• sea imagery conveying the idea of exile and loneliness (conditions to a
Christian path of self-denial);
• life on earth as transient and characterized by violence and death or
insignificant pleasure;
• perception of life as a struggle;
• religious as a literary and ethical frame imposed upon an intransigent
reality.

• Anglo-Saxon view of life: ambivalence – pain of existence and a

“triumphant” search for comfort, stoical resignation, sense of melancholy.

• Melancholy (Susana Kempf Langes, em Walter Benjamin: Tradução e

Melancolia):
Na perspectiva freudiana - um delírio predominantemente moral. O “eu” do
melancólico cinde-se (aqui, entre a sua existência 'mundana' e sua aspiração
'religiosa', 'espiritual'), e uma parte analisa criticamente a outra. Alternância
entre momentos de profunda tristeza (fase depressiva e/ou melancólica
propriamente dita) e momentos de grande entusiasmo, caracterizados por um
excesso triunfalista de autoconfiança (fase maníaca).
• The seafarer and The wanderer / Beowulf - ambivalence, pagan past and
new christian values.

• Battle poems: traditional values of strength and courage

• The battle of Brunanburh (battle against the Scots and Vikings invaders,
with the victory of Anglo-Saxon England, in 937); The battle of Maldon
(against the Danes, in 991).

• The battle of Maldon (in: THORNLEY. An outline of English literature):

• Overtly Christian poems: The dream of the rood – Christ compared to a

heroic warrior (influence of the pagan literary tradition)
 • The metaphor of the rood (witness to the crucifixion) – the value of art
and learning in a harsh and military society – contradiction of Anglo-
Saxon period

• Old English language:

• language of the invader (there were older celtic languages in Britain);
• spoken and written for eight centuries (from 5th to 12th c.);
• derived from German dialects;
• always existed alongside Latin (for education, literary and administrative
purposes);
• it existed through different varieties;
• with the Norman conquest, it became subordinated to Latin (language of
education and religion) and French (language of the court and the
government) – the hiatus in the vernacular written culture.

• The interface between Old English and the texts that deal with violence
(p. 13).

2. Middle English Literature

• After a strange period of hiatus, following the Norman conquest (1066),

in the 14th century, a vernacular literature reappears, in written in Middle
English language.

• A shift from alliterative verse to rhymed metrical verse.

• Literature: long-term consequences of the Norman Conquest in the years

between 1350 and 1400.

• Writers: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland and the Gawain poet.

• William Langland: Writer of the alliterative poem "Piers Plowman"

(1370-90) that contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of
Robin Hood tales. It precedes and influences Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
There is a mix of theological allegory and social satire, concerns the
narrator/dreamer's quest for the true Christian life in the context of
medieval Catholicism.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A late 14th-century Middle English
chivalric romance (The chivalric romance poeticized the exploits of
knights, performed in the name of glory, love, and moral perfection). It is
one of the best known Arthurian stories. It draws on Welsh, Irish and
English stories, as well as the French chivalric romance.

• Saxon subjection and the change of the status of general mass of English
people – “churl” (thane) replaced by feudal villein.

• Peasants' Revolt (1380) and the revival of literary activity

• Norman French used in official and literary context from 1066 until 1350

• Anglo-Norman (French) dialect of the new ruling class

• A confident vernacular literature only re-emerges after 1350

• In 1362, English became a permitted language in law courts and, in 1385,

English became used in schools.

• Lexical loans from French and deletion of many Germanic words

• Middle English Literature: diverse voices (including works written by

women), variety of genres: courtly (chivalric) romances, religious
dramas, prose narratives, lyric poems.

• Chaucer’s Canterbury tales general prologue: