Old English Saints' Lives

Right: I've been perusing past papers, and Old English saints' lives have come up every year in some guise or other. The questions tend to revolve around how they are particular to OE literature, how they relate to their Latin sources, their use of context and the heroic code. Thus, a post on the subject.

Old English Saints’ Lives – In what framework do they operate? Do they remove all peculiarities of each saint? Discuss their heroic context.

- Elene and Juliana are both poems based in the late Roman period, and come from Latin sources. However, both are in the style of the secular heroic ballad, and both differ in a number of details, as well as in literary respects, from their sources. We see in both the language and preoccupations of Germanic literature, to the extent that Elene begins with the typically heroic ‘Hwaet!’ and casts her, as heroine, in the guise of the war-hero, ‘guthcwen’. Juliana, likewise, is a very physically active heroine, fighting a holy battle against demons – and suffering because of ‘haethens’ here, just as the heroes of Maldon faced the Viking ‘haethens’.
- Elene and Juliana represent ‘a literature more personal and more human in our terms than the Roman literature from which the stories are drawn’ (Olsen). The Latin Helena represented, to an extent, the figure of the church, Ecclesia, via allegory; Elene is herself solely, and the poem is the story of her battle. Throughout, Cynewulf emphasises the personal actions of his heroines: Elene is ‘bald’, a ‘segecwen’. Juliana’s preservation of her virginity is likewise an active and not a passive choice.
- The nature and extent of Elene’s power is stunning. Her physical power lies in her armies: ‘Sio cwen bebead ofer eorlmaegen aras rysan ricene to rade’ (‘The queen commanded her warriors to arise, prepare to move quicly, set forth once again.’) She does not take action personally, but she is seeking knowledge, and does not need to – Nelson has pointed out that her status allows her to demand, rather than request, answers to her questions; thus she can achieve her aim by words only. She issues threats to Judas, promising severe physical consequences - ‘Þe synt tu gearu/swa lif swa deað swa þe leofre bið/to geceosanne’ – but in the end is able to bend him to her will by threat alone.
- At certain points – ie, where Elene is depicted sailing over the sea with her armies – Cynewulf seems almost to have forgotten that he is writing about a woman, so absolutely has he cast her in the mould of the Germanic hero. This potency of her speech, however, is absolutely in accord with the Germanic tendency by which ‘women normally use speech rather than action to achieve their purposes, but they resort to action when speech fails’ (Olsen). In Elene (and not in the Latin narrative) occurs the following comment: ‘haefde Ciriacus/eall gefylled swa him seo aeðele bebead/wifes willan.’(‘Cyriacus had completely done what the noble woman bade him do, the will of the woman.’) As Olsen points out, ‘By adding this passage to his source, Cynewulf emphasises that his Elene is the person who controls the situation.’ After Elene has found the True Cross, she is able to order her ‘forthsnotterne’ to help her in her self-appointed task of finding the ‘naeglum’ that crucified Christ. This task is from her own ‘frywet’, rather than at her son’s instigation, demonstrating that she has a degree of autonomy, despite the fact that her previous power, although very real, had all derived from the position of her son.
- To an extent, then, Elene, as envoy, is retainer to Constantine: she has the power of an ‘appendage’ (Fraser) more because she is a delegate than because she is a woman, doing what ‘weorada helm…beboden haefde’ (the guardian of the people had commanded). Juliana, conversely, is delegated her power by nobody but God. She conforms to the warrior-martyr type as used in Guthlac, ‘drythnes cempa’, displaying the boldness in battle and resoluteness of mind typical of the warrior figure. Cynewulf employs much formulaic diction of the heroic school in this poem, suggesting strongly an intent to depict Juliana against such a contextual background. Cynewulf does not simply translate the words of his Latin text; he also translates the cultural setting to one which his own audience could better understand.
- Juliana is not withdrawing, but launching a spiritual attack, opposing her father, her husband to be, and the devil who comes to her in prison – again, primarily using words. It is she who is in control of her own situation, issuing the ultimatum to Helesius:

‘Naefre þu þaes swiðlic sar gegearwast
þur haestne nið heardra wita,
þaet þu mec onwende worda þissa.’

(‘Threaten as you will, no torture, no punishment, no act of violence can make me break my solemn promise.’)

- In confrontation with the devil who comes to her in prison, Juliana is fearless: ‘seo the forht ne waes.’ She is able to manipulate him through the aid of the Holy Spirit: ‘him seo halge oncwaeð þurh gaestes giefe.’ She addresses the ‘aglaeca agleaf’ in forceful imperatives: ‘Þu scealt furthor gen, feond moncynnes, sithfaet secgan, hwa thec sende to me,’ and, in fact, unlike Elene, goes so far as to physically attack the devil: ‘heo þaet deofol genom’- conforming, then, to the Germanic concept of women ‘resorting to action when speech fails’ (Olsen). According to Nelson, the Old English Juliana is stronger than her Latin counterpart in a more obvious way, forcing Helesius to martyr her, and showing her both wilful and ready for death.
- These women are not mere symbols. Cynewulf’s choice of words alone is sufficient to indicate that he intended to represent the type of heroic women his audience could understand, moulding them to Germanic convention where possible and appropriate. His deviations from the Latin sources show this: to his mind, Elene could make more impact as a warrior queen, miles christi, than as an allegory, and an emphasis on the strength of Juliana’s words would make her more appealing.
- Guthlac A and B make similar use of the miles christi idea – certainly not singular to Old English and heroic literature – but again, manipulate the topoi and diction of the heroic genre in a way that personalises the poems. Of course, in the first instance, Guthlac is an English saint, but it is still the case that his OE poet is working from a Latin source. In Guthlac A, the Germanic debt is less clear: Guthlac criticises the sword as ‘worulde waepne’, aligning it with the corruption of earthly things and with the devils who tempt him, opposing him rather to the secular military heroism of the OE battle poetry. This is similar to the image used in the Phoenix of death approaching as an armed warrior – again, negative manipulation of the heroic code. Nevertheless, in the Phoenix and Guthlac A both, the courage of the warrior is emphasised as being both commendable and necessary for passage from one phase of life to the next:

Swa sceal oretta a in his mode
Gode compian, ond his gaest beran
Oft on ondan tham the eahtan wile
Sawla gehwylcre thaer he gesaelan maeg.’

(Thus shall a warrior ever fight for God in his heart and often hold his spirit in fear of him who is eager to persecute every soul, when he may bind it.)

- Guthlac B is less emphatic regarding the necessity of distancing oneself from all earthly things. Thus, we find an emphasis on kinship, and Guthlac maintains ties in his old age with his attendant (Beccel, a retainer-like figure) and his sister, Pega. Guthlac is, like the Phoenix, ‘dryhtnes cempa’, fighting ‘hella thegna’. Guthlac B has been described as being a poem on the death of Guthlac, and certainly it presents his death in an extensive and moving way, in the manner of the ‘Hero on the Beach’ topos found in Beowulf and elsewhere. A lot of the focus of this poem is on Guthlac’s ‘ar’, or servant; but he, like the sister, is here nameless, their anonymity thrusting the focus onto Guthlac alone. The poem is incomplete, but it ends with a lament by the grieving servant that is strongly redolent of The Wanderer, the retainer of OE elegiac tradition. It reconciles an OE belief in transience and a Christian belief in heaven, to whose ‘longan gefean’ angels have just taken Guthlac.
- David F Crowne identified the death of Guthlac as a typical example of the Hero on the Beach formulaic theme. Guthlac does not die on a beach, but in ‘ilgam halge hofe’, but he has his retainer, and Alan Renoir has posited that a ‘symbolic’ beach fits the topos equally well – anything that represents an area between two worlds, a hinterland; in Guthlac we have as a symbol of this the wall against which he leans to die, separating the finite inside from the infinite outside of his hut (Olsen). From an affective point of view, incidentally, the substitution of a wall for a beach seems especially appropriate since the Old-Englishweall also means a sea-cliff, as it does in the famous Hero-on-the-Beach passage in which Beowulf describes his swimming match with Breca. (Olsen)
- When it appears in straightforward battle poetry, the Hero on the Beach image predicts sorrow, strife or death. The effective merging of the Christian and the Germanic is made evident here in the fact that, in Guthlac, death is predicted but without sorrow, at least for Guthlac, who will be achieving heavenly bliss. The servant, on the other hand, is distressed because he has failed to understand; he has trapped himself in the Germanic topos of the Hero on the Beach by not moving away from the Germanic belief in transience. He is living still in the shadow of the Fall, while Guthlac himself is, like the Phoenix, living the Redemption: the use of the Germanic traditional format thus conveys the idea that it is possible to escape the pain of one whose only belief is in transience, the sorrow of the Wanderer, by embracing, like Guthlac, a Christianity that seeks its joys in heaven, rather than in hall.

*****

A2 makes me want to cry. I felt like I knew stuff until I went and looked at the papers. What's with all the weird generic-y questions that don't seem to apply to anything?