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Old and Middle English Literature Lecture

Handout

1. Introduction [first slide]: Brief comments on the chronology of Medieval

Literature:
a. Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature: written in Old English,
in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the
Norman Conquest of 1066. Main work: BEOWULF
b. Middle English literature: written in the form of the English language
known as Middle English, from the 12th century until the 1470s. Main
work: THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer
2. Old English Literature [second slide: a page from Beowulf]. Some
characteristics of Old English:
a. Political context: The Anglo-Saxons were the Germanic tribes the
Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and also probably to a lesser degree
some other Germanic tribes arrived in England probably around the
year 500 AD. At first: England divided into several kingdoms. The vikings
come in the 9th centurty.
b. In grammar, Old English is distinguished from later stages in the history
of English by use of a set of inflections in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and
pronouns, and also (connected with this) by a rather less fixed word
order; it also preserves grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives. //
In vocabulary, English is much more homogeneous than later stages in
the history of English. Most borrowings from French and Latin would
come later. 1
3. BEOWULF [third and fourth slides]
a. PLOT : The poem is set in Scandinavia. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats,
comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall
in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After
Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also
defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland (Götaland in
modern Sweden) and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period
of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally
wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body
and erect a tower on a headland in his memory.
b. TEXT (READ BEGINNING OF BEOWULF –DISCUSS)
4. Middle English Literature [fifht Slide]. Some characteristics of Old English:
a. Political context: In conjunction with the Norman Conquest of England
in 1066, the language use in the Middle English period also went
through a vast change. While the ruling elite spoke strictly French
because of their Norman heritage, English remained the language of
the commoners. “Why didn’t the use of English fade throughout time?”
you might ask. There are two distinct reasons for this: 1. English was

1See “Old English, Overview”, Oxford English Dictionary.

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/old-english-an-
overview/ Last access: 1st Feb. 2018.

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already too established among the Englishmen despite William’s

attempts to move in with French; and 2: The Normans began
immediately intermarrying with the Englishmen, creating a HUGE
impact on English vocabulary and grammar.
b. Grammar: the majority of the changes brought about through the
conquest have much to do with inflection and spelling. Because those
who chose to continue speaking English were forced to improvise
depending on their region, they were forced to call upon Latin, French,
and even Scandinavian traditions. Therefore, and incredible degree of
variation is found in spelling, inflection, and vocabulary usage
depending on regional variation. Because of these influences on the
English language, much of the Old English morphology changed to
become staple characteristics of the Middle English period. For
example, the use of strong inflections was reduced and most nouns lost
their gender identification (pronouns being the exception)2

5. THE CANTERBURY TALES [sixth slide]

a) CHAUCER: Medieval social theory held that society was made up of
three “estates”: the nobility, composed of a small hereditary aristocracy; the
church; and everyone else, the large mass of commoners who did all the real
work. By the late fourteenth century, however, these basic social categories
became more complex and unstable: birth, wealth, profession and personal
ability all played a part in determining one’s status in a world that was rapidly
changing economically, politically and, therefore, socially. Chaucer’s life and
his works, especially THE CANTERBURY TALES, were influenced by these forces.
A growing and prosperous middle class was beginning to play increasingly
important roles in church and state, blurring the traditional class boundaries.
Chaucer was born into this “middle class”. Chaucer was the son of a
prosperous wine merchant in London. Instead of apprenticing Chaucer to the
family business, his father was able to place him, in his early teens, as a page
in one of the great aristocratic households of England, where he learned the
manners and skills required for a career in the service of the ruling class, as a
personal attendant and in a series of administrative posts. For example, he
took part in several diplomatic missions to Spain, France and Italy. Chaucer was
a hardworking civil servant who wrote poetry as a diversion. The diplomatic
mission that sent Chaucer to Italy was in all likelihood a milestone in his literary
development. This visit brought him into direct contact with the Italian
Renaissance – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. These writers provided him with
new subject matter and new modes of representation. Boccaccio provided
sources for The Canterbury Tales, and for his longest poem, Troilus and
Criseyde, one of the greatest love poems in any language. Chaucer also wrote
moral and religious works, chiefly translations. He made a prose translation of
the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman

2See “Characteristics of the Time Period”. Middle English 1000-1500. <

https://middleenglish1100-1500ad.weebly.com/characteristics.html> Last
Access 1st Feb. 2018.

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stateman Boethius while in prison. The Consolation became a favourite book

for the Middle Ages, providing inspiration and comfort through its lesson that
worldly fortune is deceitful and ephemeral and through the platonic doctrine
that the body itself is only a prison house for the soul that aspires to eternal
things. Chaucer’s writings were many faceted: they embrace prose and poetry;
human and divine love; French, Italian and Latin sources; secular and religious
influences; comedy and philosophy. Moreover, different elements are likely to
mix in the same work. This Chaucerian complexity owes much to the wide
range of Chaucer’s learning and his exposure to new literary currents on the
Continent but perhaps also to the special position he occupied as a member of
a new class of civil servants. Born into the urban middle class, he attained the
rank of “esquire”. His career brought him into contact with bourgeois and
aristocratic social worlds, without his being securely anchored in either. He
was born a commoner, and continued to associate with commoners, but he
did not live as a commoner. Situated between two social worlds, belonging to
neither, he had the gift of being able to view with both sympathy and humour
the behaviours, beliefs and pretensions of the diverse people who comprised
the levels of society. Chaucer was able to be both involved in and detached
from a given situation.

b) PLOT: [ONE IDEA TO HIGHLIGHT: “FROM THE EPIC OF OLD ENGLISH

TO ROMANCE IN MIDDLE ENGLISH LIT.”] We readers find Chaucer directly in
his poetry. Few English poets speak more freely in the first person. He speaks
so, not only in short poems, but also in every one of his major narrative pieces.
The pilgrim narrator in The Canterbury Tales, as in other narrative works
(written in verse), speaks of what he has dreamed, read or seen in a manner
which the reader soon learns to recognize as characteristic – the author’s own
voice.
The Chaucer of all these poems is a retiring, bookish man, with little
first-hand experience of life, least of all in the great matter of love. He can
therefore do no better than report faithfully what he dreams, reads, or
observes of the world and its ways. Often he is puzzled by what he finds, and
at times he even apologizes for what he is forced (for some reason) to report.
Since the “matter” of his stories is not of his own making, it cannot be always
to his taste. He cannot be blamed for “immoral” issues. He must not be
blamed. It embarrasses him, purportedly, to report tales of deviant sexuality,
for example, of a woman’s infidelity, but, he tells us, he cannot omit this kind
of reality from his faithful record of the pilgrim’s performances. This is, of
course, a mask, often a comic one: It creates the illusion of a free-standing,
independent reality which surpasses the poet’s own understanding.

Inspired by Boccaccio, in 1347 he began The Canterbury Tales and

probably continued to work on it till the end of his life.
There was a pilgrim road that led from London to Canterbury, where a
famous English saint, Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been
murdered in his cathedral in 1170. Medieval pilgrims were notorious
storytellers, and Chaucer used a fictitious pilgrimage as a framing device for a

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number of stories. Collections of stories linked by such a device were common

in the later Middle Ages. The most famous medieval framing tale besides
Chaucer’s is Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten different narrators each tell
a tale a day for ten days.
The Decameron contains tales with plots analogous to plots in The
Canterbury tales, but these stories were widespread, and there is no proof that
Chaucer got them from Boccaccio.
The plan was grandiose: some thirty pilgrims, each to tell two tales on
the road to Canterbury and two on the way back to London, giving a total of
120 tales in all. Of these Chaucer’s literary executors found only twenty-four
among the poet’s papers after his death in 1400. They became an instant and
lasting success. In these tales he achieved his aim: to match the variety of
pilgrims with a corresponding range of narrative genres, secular and religious,
high and low. For example, there are courtly romances (the upper literary end)
and comic tales (lower end).
Whereas in the Decameron the ten speakers all belong to the same social elite,
Chaucer’s pilgrim narrators represent a wide spectrum of ranks and
occupations, which was not “realistic” – it is highly unlikely that a group like
Chaucer’s pilgrims would ever have joined together and communicated on
such seemingly equal terms, and in verse. The variety of tellers is matched by
the diversity of their tales – there are contrasts in genre, style, tone and values
or worldvision.
There is a fascinating accord between the narrators and their stories, so that
the story takes on rich overtones from what we have learned of its teller in The
General Prologue and through the interchanges among pilgrims, which link the
stories , and the character itself grows and is revealed by the story s/he tells.
Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously – that of the individual tale and
of the pilgrim that tells the tale.
Several tales respond to topics taken up by previous tellers. The types of
people that Chaucer’s fictitious pilgrimage includes - even the Wife of Bath –
were standard types throughout medieval literature, particularly in a genre
called “estates satire”, which sets out to expose and criticise typical examples
of corruption at all levels of society. They are social stereotypes of late-
medieval society drawn with unusual realistic details. What uniquely
distinguishes Chaucer’s prologue from more conventional estates satires, such
as Piers Plowman, is the suppression of overt moral judgment.

a. TEXT (READ BEGINNING OF THE CANTERBURY TALES –DISCUSS-)

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