Summary:

The narrator of the poem begins by describing a damaged stone wall "wrecked by fate". The old
houses around it are falling apart, their roofs are caving in, their towers are crumbling, their
gates are broken, and frost clings to the mortar.

The unnamed craftsmen who built these structures over a hundred generations ago are now
buried in the ground. The surviving walls have outlived the inhabitants of many kingdoms. The
structures have withstood violent storms even when the main gate gave way to nature's fury.

A craftsman used his determination and intellect to build this city. He used metal rods to create a
strong foundation. The narrator describes the man's technique as a "marvel". When it was
complete, the city boasted majestic halls and numerous bathhouses. The mead hall was always
filled with the loud and boisterous clamor of the military men. Soon, though, fate altered the
course of this thriving metropolis.

The plague ravaged the population, and even the strongest men could not withstand the
pestilence. The city builders and warriors perished alike, leaving empty ramparts throughout the
city. Without the human resources necessary to maintain it, the city fell into decay.

Now, the poem continues, the courts are crumbling and tiles are falling off the arches. The proud
city where men dressed in gold, their cheeks red with wine, would lavishly celebrate their wealth
has since been reduced to piles of stone.

The courts were made of stone and heated baths surrounded by walls. The poem's last few
discernable fragments could indicate that the baths somehow connect to the city's noble
inhabitants, but it is unclear.

Analysis:

This short poem is incomplete in its present form because the manuscript was partially
destroyed by a fire (legend has it that that a branding iron fell upon the codex when it was
facedown). However, it is still a clear testament to the lyrical beauty of Old English poetry.
Author and literary critic Kevin Crossley-Holland describes "The Ruin" as "an antiquarian's
delight", conveying the message that "everything man-made will perish, and that there is no
withstanding the passing years." He does not find the poem depressing, but rather, he believes
that it inspires "admiration and celebration." Indeed, while it has some similarities with other
Anglo-Saxon pieces, "The Ruin" contains no evocation of suffering, anguish, or exile.

In "The Ruin", the narrator describes what he sees before him: a ruined, empty city which is just
a shell of its former glory. It is clear that time has ravaged this place, but that the true catalyst to
its destruction was the plague that killed nearly all of its inhabitants, including the strongest men.
The narrator conjures up vivid images of the loud revelry that used to emanate from the mead
hall, where gold-clad soldiers would toast their wealth. Unfortunately, as the narrator notes,
their hardiness was no match for the power of nature. Even after the plague, nature's forces
continued to bear down upon the city with furious storms. However, some of the walls have
lasted for several generations. It was common for Anglo-Saxon writers to focus their work the
ravages of nature like disease, intemperate weather, and the destruction of crops. Sometimes,
they would invent a character that embodied nature's threat, like Grendel in Beowulf. The "Ruin"
also expresses the belief, similar to that in "Deor", that all things pass in time. People will always
die and buildings will decay because time will keep marching forward.

Most scholars believe that the titular ruins are in the present-day city of Bath. During the time of
the poem's composition, however, Bath was the Roman city of Aquae Sulis. Like the poem
describes, Aquae Sulis was surrounded by outer walls and had bathhouses, grand temples, and
halls. If the poet was indeed describing Aquae Sulis/Bath, then the poem may date from the Mid-
Seventh century, when King Oswic of Hwicce controlled the area.

Scholar Stephen J. Herben believes that the poet was writing about The Roman Wall. Many critics
claim that Bath is the only location in England that possesses the characteristics described in the
poem, but Herben suggests that Hadrian's Wall and the "associated complex of Roman
settlements, Corstopitum, Chesters, Housesteads, and the like" also fit the description. The first
twenty-five lines of the poem allude to towers, battlements, bathing houses, and banqueting
halls, all of which are present at Hadrian's Wall. Additionally, Herben notes that treasure
mentioned in the poem dovetails nicely with the real treasure that was distributed around
Hadrian's Wall and the surrounding areas.

As for the hot water, Herben believes that it represents the aqueducts at Halton Chesters. The
lines of the poem do not specifically say that the water was issued from the earth; "they may
more justly be taken to mean that the heated water was run copiously into the baths." Herben's
short article promoting "The Ruin" as Hadrian's Wall is merely one theory, but it helps reinforce
the fact that many of the Anglo-Saxon poems are complex, inscrutable, and ambiguous in their
meaning and that modern readers may never truly understand their intended meaning.

Of these, ‘The Ruin’ is one of the shortest, partly because it is incomplete: the one surviving
manuscript was badly burned in a fire at some point over the last millennium. ‘The Ruin’, aptly
enough, survives only as literary ruins. But this also makes it an odd (if inadvertent) precursor to
that great modern fragmentary poem about a ruined city, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. When
Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound and other modernists (such as the imagist H. D.) were ‘making it new’
in modernist poetry in the early decades of the twentieth century, they looked back to classical
fragments as a source of inspiration. Sappho’s poetry may have only survived as fragments and
was once whole, but fragments, the modernists realised, could be used as a deliberate literary
device to evoke the ruined mess of modern civilisation. These fragments, as Eliot later had it in
his 1922 poem, could be shored against our ruins.

In summary, ‘The Ruin’ (or what remains of ‘The Ruin’, anyway) describes a deserted Roman city
somewhere in England, most probably Aquae Sulis, now better known as Bath. The poet
compares the ruins he sees before him with the mighty structures that once stood there. As the
opening line has it, ‘Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon’; or, in Michael Alexander’s
translation, ‘Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.’ (‘Wierd’, etymologically related to our
modern-day adjective ‘weird’, was an Anglo-Saxon catch-all term that refers to ‘fate’, ‘the way
things happen’, and, ultimately, ‘death’.) The poem that follows, over the course of just under 50
lines, refers to ‘towers fallen’, ‘rime on mortar’, ‘roofs ruined’, ‘grey lichen’, the fall of kings, and
many other symbols and emblems of decay. The poem is interested in linking stones to people:
the ‘wielders and wrights’ who built this mighty city are now ‘long gone’. As the modernist poet
T. E. Hulme put it in his own fragmentary meditation on the brevity of life and passing of all
things, ‘Old houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling.’

As Michael Alexander – the scholar who did so much to bring Anglo-Saxon poetry to a wider
audience and who translated ‘The Ruin’ while he was still an undergraduate in 1959 – notes in
his prefatory material in The Earliest English Poems (Penguin Classics) , ‘The Romans had held
this province for four centuries before the Angles came; and they had been gone three centuries
when this poem was written.’ This places ‘The Ruin’ at some point in the eighth century, some six
centuries before Chaucer; when we reflect that Chaucer himself, in many ways so remote from
us, was six centuries before the modern age, we get a sense of just how long ago ‘The Ruin’ was
written.

Alexander invites us to imagine the Anglo-Saxon author of ‘The Ruin’ – whoever he may have
been (and assuming it was a ‘he’) – wandering the overgrown streets of the ruined Aquae Sulis,
at a time between the heyday of Roman occupation and the rebuilding in stone of much of the
city, post-Norman Conquest in 1066. Again, such an idea makes ‘The Ruin’ a remarkable
precursor to Symbolist and modernist poems about the city, from Charles Baudelaire’s
perambulations around Paris to Hope Mirrlees’ day in the life of the French capital in her
extraordinary Paris: A Poem (1919) and T. S. Eliot’s city poems, whether ‘Rhapsody on a Windy
Night’, ‘Preludes’, or The Waste Land. In this respect, the anonymous author of ‘The Ruin’ may
well be literature’s first flâneur.

A fragmentary poem of forty-eight lines, whose date and author are unknown. References to hot
springs (11. 39, 41) naturally sug-gest Bath as the city described. Bath may have been plundered
by the Saxons; in the Chronicle, under date 577, we read, 'This year Cuthwine and Ceawline
fought against the Britons — and took three cities from them, Gloucester, and Cirencester, and
Bath.' R. G. Collingwood (Roman Britain, London, 1923, p. 58) writes: ' The towns of Roman
Britain seem as a rule to have perished more or less violently about the beginning of the fifth
century, and when, some time later, the Anglo-Saxon settlements gradually began, the towns
were mostly, perhaps all, blackened and silent ruins. Nor were the new settlers quick to rebuild
them; for they were not by habit or inclination town-dwellers.' It will be noticed that the poet's
interest is elicited by the fact that the walls are of stone, and relics of an age of greater men and
mightier builders. Heorot, the wooden palace of King Hrothgar, was, like this towered city, ' high
and pin-nacled,' but destined also to be destroyed (Beowulf Zi ff. Cf. p. 16, above).

Roman Bath
There is a legend that Bath was founded in 860 BC when Prince Bladud, father of King Lear,
caught leprosy. He was banned from the court and was forced to look after pigs. The pigs also had
a skin disease but after they wallowed in hot mud they were cured. Prince Bladud followed their
example and was also cured. Later he became king and founded the city of Bath.
In reality it is not known exactly when the health-giving qualities of Bath springs were first
noticed. They were certainly known to the Romans who built a temple there around 50 AD. The
temple was dedicated to Sul, a Celtic god, and Minerva the Roman goddess of healing. (The
Romans hoped to please everybody by dedicating it to both gods). They also built public baths
which were supplied by the hot springs. In the 60s and 70s AD, a town grew up on the site of
Bath. It was called Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sul. In the late 2nd century a ditch was dug around
Roman Bath and an earth rampart was erected. It probably had a wooden palisade on top. In the
3rd century, it was replaced by a stone wall.

In the 4th century, Roman civilization began to decline. The population of Roman towns
decreased and trade shrank. The last Roman soldiers left England in 407 AD. What happened to
Bath afterward is not known for certain. Some people probably continued to live within the
Roman walls and Bath was probably still a market for the local area. However, the old, grand
Roman buildings fell into disrepair and were replaced by simple wooden huts.

Saxon Bath
After the Romans left the Saxons invaded Eastern England. In 577 AD they won a battle at
Dyrham. They then captured Bath, Cirencester, and Gloucester. The Saxons took over the
settlements and life went on.

In the late 9th century Alfred the Great created a network of fortified towns across his kingdoms
called burghs (from which we derive our word borough). If the Danes attacked all the local men
could gather in the nearest burgh to fight them. Bath was one such burgh. By the 10th century, it
had a mint. So by that time, Bath must have been a flourishing, although small, community. In
973 Edgar, the first king of all England was crowned in Bath.