Anglo Saxon Poetry Quotes

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry..

Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of glee which God gave him.

...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

El hecho es que la participación de un dragón en la epopeya de Beowulf parece disminuirla a nuestro ojos. Creemos en el león como realidad y como símbolo; creemos en el minotauro como símbolo, ya que no como realidad; pero el dragón se el menos afortunado de los animales fabulosos.

In the Old English translation, Christ’s statement that ‘where your gold-hoard is, there is your heart’ is particularly apt, because in Anglo-Saxon poetry the heart itself is often called a ‘hoard’, the place where the treasures of the spirit are kept. It’s the breosthord, feorhhord or sawelhord, the storehouse of thoughts, life or the soul.

After a pause, he said, “Þing sceal gehegan / frod wiþ frodne. Biþ hyra ferð gelic.” It sounded like German, but from hearing Calla’s whispers about the Gray Man, she knew it was Old English. “A dead language?” she asked, with interest. She seemed to be hearing a lot of them lately. “What’s it mean?” “‘Meetings are held, wise with the wise. Because their spirits are alike.’ Or minds. The word ferð has the sense of mind or spirit or soul. It’s one of the Anglo-Saxon Maxims. Wisdom poetry.

In any case, it is a mistake to equate concreteness with things. An individual object is the unique phenomenon it is because it is caught up in a mesh of relations with other objects. It is this web of relations and interactions, if you like, which is 'concrete', while the object considered in isolation is purely abstract. In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx sees the abstract not as a lofty, esoteric notion, but as a kind of rough sketch of a thing. The notion of money, for example, is abstract because it is no more than a bare, preliminary outline of the actual reality. It is only when we reinsert the idea of money into its complex social context, examining its relations to commodities, exchange, production and the like, that we can construct a 'concrete' concept of it, one which is adequate to its manifold substance. The Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition, by contrast, makes the mistake of supposing that the concrete is simple and the abstract is complex. In a similar way, a poem for Yury Lotman is concrete precisely because it is the product of many interacting systems. Like Imagist poetry, you can suppress a number of these systems (grammar, syntax, metre and so on) to leave the imagery standing proudly alone; but this is actually an abstraction of the imagery from its context, not the concretion it appears to be. In modern poetics, the word 'concrete' has done far more harm than good.

The construction of castle arbours, monastic cloister gardens and Byzantine courtyards with trees and flowers attested to Western interest in the natural world. Paradise remained synonymous with perfect environments. In Anglo-Saxon, 'paradise' translated as 'meadow' or 'pasture'. Notions of a classical Golden Age, local legends, religion and romantic poetry all perpetuated the concept of nature as a refuge from society. For the nobility, nature signified a retreat for aesthetic pleasure and a venue for spiritual uplift. However, for the average medieval peasant, the organic world meant livestock rearing and crop production.

It’s common in Old English to count time by ‘winters’ – to speak, for instance, of someone having lived a certain number of ‘winters in the world’ – and we’ll see that winter is a season which looms large in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Can you name a single one of the great fundamental and original intellectual achievements which have raise man in the scale of civilization that may be credited to the Anglo-Saxon? The art of letters, of poetry, of music, of sculpture, of painting, of the drama, of architecture; the science of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, of logic, of physics, of chemistry, the use of the metals and principles of mechanics, were all invented or discovered by darker and what we now call inferior races and nations.

Simle þreora sum þinga gehwylce, ær his tid aga, to tweon weorþeð; adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete fægum fromweardum feorh oðþringeð.” He sighed, which told Maura more about his mental state than his untranslated Anglo-Saxon poetry did. “It was easier to tell hero from villain when the stakes were only life and death. Everything in between gets harder.

My heart's longings always urge me to undertake a journey, to visit the country of a foreign people far across the sea.

In its opening image of the cross towering as tall as the heavens, worshipped by all beings in the world, The Dream of the Rood shows us this great tree as the steady axis around which the universe revolves, the world-tree. As such images found their way into Old English poetry, they must have resonated with older beliefs, since there’s evidence for the veneration of sacred trees in pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture as well as in the Christian tradition.

Though we’ll get to the poetry of fallen leaves in the next chapter, there’s really no word in Old English corresponding to what English-speakers today would call ‘autumn’ or ‘fall’. To the Anglo-Saxons the fourth season of the year was hærfest, ‘harvest’, and that continued to be its usual name throughout the medieval period. In the four--season pattern of the year, hærfest was used as the equivalent of Latin autumnus, and theoretically ran from 7 August until 6 November. However, in general use hærfest referred more loosely to the period when harvesting was actually being done, from late July to September. In that sense it’s the latter part of summer, as it would have been in the older two-season cycle – and once it’s over, winter begins.

This divine governance is immeasurably greater than any power to which an earthly hero might aspire; it belongs only, the poet says, to the soð Metod, ‘true Measurer’. Metod is a common epithet for God in Old English poetry, and it seems to mean something like ‘the one who metes out’ life, time or destiny – the one who governs times and seasons and the shape and duration of human lives.

The sea is often called by names like this in Anglo-Saxon poetry: ‘whale’s home’, ‘gannet’s bath’, ‘seal’s track’, ‘swan-road’. All these phrases emphasize that the sea is a space which belongs to wild creatures, not to human beings; they have roads, settlements and homes there, where they form societies and networks hidden from human eyes.

The new Norman elite had their own forms of poetry, in their own language, and they knew or cared little about stories like Beowulf or the poems of the Exeter Book. As the English language changed in the centuries after the conquest, the complex and archaic vocabulary in which most Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed became gradually more and more incomprehensible, and this poetic tradition withered and died. That might have happened even without the conquerors, since the tradition was probably already in retreat some decades before 1066.

Anglo-Saxon England had the richest tradition of written vernacular literature of any country in Europe, including a large body of original poetry and many translations of earlier Latin works.

In a time of ecological crisis, Anglo-Saxon poems which recognize how fundamentally we are connected to the rhythms of nature - how dependent we are on the well-being of the earth, how grateful we should be for its gifts and its beauties - speak truths we still need to hear.

I would have to go back and do some studying to talk properly about the characteristics of Old English poetry—that is, poetry written in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, between the seventh century and a few decades after the Norman Conquest of England, which occurred in 1066. (This date is one that should be remembered especially by writers in English, because it is after this date that the French language was aggressively introduced into the existing languages of England; the Norman Conquest resulted in our having the wonderful doubled vocabulary that we have in English:

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition. Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin. Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called “literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.