A Very Brief Overview of Old English Literature

Here are the lecture notes from today's class. You can find other short histories of Old English literature in the introductions in your Norton Anthologies or other survey course texts.

I. Old English literature is the oldest vernacular European literature. It began with Caedmon, supposedly, who was inspired to use the heroic idiom to put Christian stories into poetry.

II. Learning and literacy flourished in the North of England until the Viking raids began.

III. By the reign of King Alfred, learning had deteriorated. Alfred instituted a reform of learning, requiring literacy of all public officials and educational programs in vernacular and Latin languages for children. Several prose works were translated as “the most necessary for all men to know”: Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, St. Augustine of Hippo’s Soliloquies, and the Orosius’s History against the Pagans. Translated at the same time, perhaps by someone at Alfred’s court, is Bede’s Historia. Alfred’s court also began the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

IV. In the century following the emergence of the house of Wessex, a reform movement began in several monasteries. Called the “Benedictine Reform” of the 10th century, it caused a resurgence of trained monks and adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict. The reform, combined with the eventual payoff of Alfred’s educational scheme in the previous generation, caused a surge in manuscript production and in composition. At this point, Old English has a literary dialect, something no other vernacular would accomplish for centuries. This standard dialect was Late West Saxon; its most noteworthy practitioner was Abbot Ælfric, who wrote 3 series of homilies as well as translations of the Bible.

V. A word on manuscripts: production and survival.
* mostly made in monastic houses.
* written on parchment, created from treating animal hides (mostly sheep)
* copied in quires (booklets made from a single sheet).
* several were destroyed by Vikings. Several more were destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century

*several of the ones that do survive are in the “Cotton” section of the British library.

Keep going on your reading. On Thursday, we're going to keep working on translation in pairs. Start marking your books to help familiarize yourself with the sorts of information found therein--pronouns, noun declensions, verb conjugations, etc.

The Anglo-Saxons and How They Got That Way

Here are the links about the Prittlewell finds.

A few of the Sutton Hoo treasures can be seen here. You can probably find more with google.

Lecture notes from Tuesday's class on Anglo-Saxon history:

According to legend, the Anglo-Saxons were invited by the Celtic king, Vortigern, who was being harassed by the Picts. The Anglo-Saxons, led by Hengist and Horsa, showed up and decided they’d just take the land themselves.

We have this story only from Bede. He’s a historian who wrote in 730 about early English history. We know him chiefly for this, the author of the Historia Ecclesiastica, although contemporaries knew him as an expert on chronology (he largely popularized dating from the birth of Christ).

At any rate, a slew of Germanic invaders showed up and colonized. This interaction did not end up in a host of Celtic words entering English, for whatever reason. The AS were pagan when they came and displaced the Christianized Celts. The conversion of the AS came from two directions—Ireland and Rome.

Serious attempts were made at conversion starting in 597. St. Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the people. Supposedly Greg had seen some AS slaves for sale in the marketplace in Rome and was saddened by the thought that all these people weren’t being saved. He punned, supposedly on their names (angli/angeli), the name of their king (aelle / alleluia), and the name of their kingdom (deiria / de ira). Again, we have this from Bede.

As conversion took place, the Anglo-Saxons began using their native styles of poetry and oral recitation to relate Christian stories. This is the main thrust of the story of Caedmon, a cowherd at the abbey of Whitby under the supervision of Abbess Hild. Caedmon received divine inspiration in a dream and after that was able to compose verse in the heroic style about Biblical stories.

Early Anglo-Saxon literature mentions spectacular treasures, the truth of which was confirmed by the finds at Sutton Hoo (see link above).

"Anglo-Saxon England" is a misnomer. For most of the period between 450 and 1066, there was no unified political state. Even after all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were under one king, the kingdom was not identical to modern-day England.

In the late 8th century, Vikings from Denmark began raiding monasteries. By the ninth century they were trying to invade in earnest. They moved down from a strong base around York, until the only kingdom still under the Anglo-Saxon rulers was Wessex.

However, the king of Wessex, Alfred the Great, managed to hold them off. After the battle of Eddington in 878, he and the Vikings drew up a treaty that left him the southern part of Britian (Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Kent) and allowed the Vikings Northumbria. Whew! Otherwise, English might sound very different.

Indo-European and Two Famous Linguists

Announcement: if any of you mean to be registered in 360 to fill your writing requirement, please tell Norma Wells immediately! Currently, we show no-one taking this as a writing req., so she's going to cancel that section.

Today's lecture focused on what we know about the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their language, and their culture. We will also discuss how we have any of this knowledge, since they left no written record.

First, some web links:

Mark Damen's terrific web page on Indo-European. He also talks about Jakob Grimm.

Here are some pictures of Corded Ware pottery.

Another web page that gives more detail about IE.

Here is a map of modern-day Europe. It shows the Black Sea.

Lecture notes from today. Focus on knowing Grimm, Ventris, and what they did. Also know that Indo-European is the ultimate parent langauge for modern English.

Lecture:

I. We can reconstruct IE words from existing (or defunct but written) IE languages. This was facilitated in the early 19th century by the formulation of Grimm’s law.
Jakob Grimm—who’s heard of this guy? Who’s heard of the fairy tales? Seen that wretched movie? In fact, Grimm was primarily a philologist—a scholar of old languages.

Grimm wrote, among other things, a 2-volume Geschichte der deutschen Sprache in 1848.

Grimm wanted to find out what he could about old German words and forms, so he went to regions that used dialect. The people didn’t particularly want to talk to him, so he started asked them to just tell stories. He didn’t even start out interested in Fairy Tales!

Grimm realized that Germanic consonants began shifting as the language fragmented from IE, but before East, West, and North Germanic separated themselves. Once he had figured out the pattern of change, he could predict what the ancient Germanic forms had been, many of them closer to Latin or other IE languages.

This made it easier to assess which words the original Indo-European peoples had in their language, and from that, we can make some surmises about their culture.

II. What we can deduce about the IE people (often called the Proto-IndoEuropeans to distinguish them from modern IE language speakers)?

They probably originated in the central steppes of modern-day Russia, perhaps north and east of the Black Sea. They don’t seem to have had a word for “ocean,” which suggests that they were inland people. They had a word for snow, and none for vine, so were probably not Mediterranean. Perhaps they were the Kurgan peoples.

They were patriarchal and patrilineal (names from the dads)
They were polytheistic, with a “Day-father” (deus-pater)—a sun god?
They had plows and pottery. They had wheeled carts but no spoked-wheel chariots. Some scholars have suggested that the original IE people produced “Corded Ware,” a very beautiful early pottery.
They liked threes. They had 3 elements, 3 “classes” of people (priest, warriors, farmers). We still preserve this in our culture—why 3 points in a 5-paragraph essay, rather than 2 or 4? Why do we do things on “the count of 3”? We divide such complex things as socio-economic class into Upper, Middle, Lower. Blame the Indo-Europeans.

We know they began to move into Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent pretty early. We aren’t sure if this was a migration in search of arable land, or a military invasion.
The Dorian invasions about 2000 BCE in ancient Greece were certainly IE peoples. But who did they drive out? If it was a native peoples, that would imply that IE invasions were mostly military in origin.

III. Linear B
Arthur Evans in the early 1900s had found a site on Crete, called Knossos, which had several inscriptions in it in a language he called “Linear B.” Examples of it were also found on the Greek mainland. Evans postulated a “Minoan” culture (after the Greek legend of King Minos—him with the labyrinth and the Minotaur) that had conquered Greece and spread its highly technical and artistic culture over the natives, until the IE peoples conquered them).

But no one could read Linear B! It’s not an alphabet, but a syllable-based language.

Then, beginning in the late 30s, a young architect named Michael Ventris started working on the problem. Ventris wasn’t a linguist, but he was phenomenally gifted at languages. He had been fascinated by Linear B since he was 14, when he had met Evans on a school trip. Hearing that the tablets hadn’t been deciphered, he became obsessed with them.

Ventris had worked for years to relate Linear B to Etruscan, a non-IE language spoken on the Italian pennisula. He did not want Linear B to be an IE language—he wanted the Bronze Age culture to have been produced by another culture, to put paid to the notion of European superiority that had crystallized in Nazi Germany.

However, Greek it was. In 1952, Ventris announced on the BBC that he’d cracked Linear B. The Dorian invasions were driving under a group of IE peoples who’d already been there for centuries!
Linear B is now the oldest known European language.

IV. Why is it important to know this? What sort of trends do we observe about languages based on what we read about IE?

A little more help on verbals

I realize that some of the technical points of grammar are pretty tough. The things to keep in mind are:

Participle = Verbal adjective
Gerund = Verbal noun.

A gerund can do anything in a sentence a noun can do. It can be the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, or the object of a preposition.

A participle functions as an adjective. If you think that a word is a participle, ask yourself what noun in the sentence it modifies.

Sometimes it helps to read an explanation that's phrased differently. Here's a worksheet I found on line from the Purdue Writing Center: Verbals

Please remember to come to class with three review questions tomorrow!