Where the wild things are in Old English poetry

Bintley, Mike (2015) Where the wild things are in Old English poetry. In, Bintley, Michael D.J. and Williams, Thomas J.T. (eds.) Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia. (Anglo-Saxon Studies) Boydell & Brewer, pp. 205-228. (doi:10.1017/9781782044925.010).

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the apparent opposition in Old English poetry between those places which are occupied by humans, and those which are the domain of wild beasts. The aim is to demonstrate that there is in fact no clear binary opposition between the two; they cannot, for example, be defined simply by distinguishing the rural from the urban, or civilisation from the ‘natural’ world. To consider landscape in these flexible terms is ultimately Augustinian, in so far as no place is presented as being irredeemably evil; certain places are tarnished through the transgressions of those with rational capacity, but the potential of these landscapes (and their inhabitants) for redemption is often eminently achievable. Bede, drawing on Isaiah in his Historia Ecclesiastica, exhorted missionaries to seek out isolated, inhospitable, and rural places in which to establish hermitages and other ecclesiastical outposts. In these locations, where the ‘dragons’ of pagan ignorance once lay, the green shoots of Christian recovery might then spring forth. These efforts are most obviously reflected in the Guthlac poems, in which the warrior-saint expels a horde of demons from his fenland hermitage, but are equally visible in less obviously didactic Old English poetry, such as Beowulf.It was not only rural places that required redemption. Places that had been built to house human communities could be inhabited by people who were as wild and bestial as Guthlac's demons and Grendel – those who had rejected God. The city of Mermedonia in Andreas, whose description evokes a ruinous Roman city, is presented as a realm of satanic cannibalism until its conversion to Christianity, when a church is constructed at its heart; the glory of Babylon leads Nebuchadnezzar into seven years of bestial madness when he vainly interprets that glory as proof of God's blessing. Elsewhere, this moral interplay between ‘natural’ and consciously manipulated landscapes finds a comfortable point of balance. In the Exeter Book Phoenix, the eponymous avian builds a nest in the forest from twigs that represent the souls of the virtuous. Similarly, in King Alfred's preface to the Old English Soliloquies, timbers are chosen from the forest to build a homestead in ways that have generally been thought to reflect the gathering of Latin wisdom, yet may equally reflect urban regeneration at the end of the ninth century.

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Author: Mike Bintley

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