A new series, sharing Anglo-Saxon poetry with the hope of revealing the untold lives and tales within them: the shared experiences we have with their emotions as they journeyed through lives over a thousand years ago.
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Welcome!
This week’s poetry post looks at an Anglo-Saxon poem entitled The Ruin. I’m not sure when it came to have this name: I haven’t delved into its manuscript history, but I have often wondered when texts were given titles. Did the poet intend his work to be known in this way, or was it the addition of later scribes who felt it aptly summarised the contents of the poem? This is a question I have often been intrigued by. Titles imprint themselves on our memories and deeply affect how we think about things, yet they might not even be the work of the original author when we’re dealing with early medieval texts.
A few opening thoughts
The following themes jumped out to me as I re-read the poem (quoted in full below) for this post:
The inevitability of destruction suggested by the word ‘fate’. It seems to march through this once-glorious city with little care for the trail of devastation it leaves behind.
The strength and vibrancy of the city in its heyday. It’s hard to imagine our country punctuated by architecture of the type still standing in places like Bath and across Italy, especially as its inhabitants really did return to living in mudhuts for centuries (for the most part). Real people such as Bertha of Kent, the protagonist of my serialised novel, as well as those featured in our biographies, lived textured lives in these places!
The agency given to the natural world and to death: the earth seems to imprison those who have been snatched away by death, in a way that reminds me of Anglo-Saxon descriptions of winter’s impact upon the earth (read about early medieval seasonal language here and be challenged by our modern tendency to be disconnected from the natural world).
The poem in full
Enjoy a slow read, drinking in the evocative imagery and hearing the poet’s voice ring clearly through the centuries.
The Ruin
Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate;
the city-buildings crumble, the works of the giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
barred gates are gaping, tottering and fallen,
undermined by age. The earth's embrace,
its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
they are perished and gone. A hundred generations
have passed away since then. This wall, grey with lichen
and red of hue, outlives kingdom after kingdom,
withstands tempests; its tall gate succumbed.
The city still moulders, gashed by storms ...
...
A man's mind quickened with a plan;
subtle and strong-willed, he bound
the foundation with metal rods - a marvel.
Bright were the city halls, many the bath-houses,
lofty all the gables, great the martial clamour,
many a mead-hall was full of delights
until fate the mighty altered it. Slaughtered men
fell far and wide, the plague-days came,
death removed every brave man.
Their ramparts became abandoned places,
the city decayed; warriors and builders
fell to the earth. Thus these courts crumble,
and this redstone arch sheds tiles.
The place falls to ruin, shattered
into mounds of stone, where once many a man,
joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour,
proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour;
he gazed on his treasure - silver, precious stones,
jewellery and wealth, all that he owned -
and on this bright city in the broad kingdom.
Stone houses stood here; a hot spring
gushed in a wide stream; a stone wall
enclosed the bright interior; the baths
were there, the heated water; that was convenient.
They allowed the scalding water to pour
over the grey stone into the circular pool. Hot ...
... where the baths were
... that is a noble thing,
how the ... the city.
Tr. Kevin Crossley-Holland (2015: 59-60)The period after the end of Roman rule in Britain (c. A.D. 410 is the oft-quoted date) and the coming of the Anglo-Saxons (a hopelessly inadequate description of the complex networks of people-groups who migrated to these shores) is essentially ‘dark’. With almost no surviving insular written records until the arrival of a Christian mission in A.D. 597, post-Roman Britain plunged into something of a second prehistory. The archaeological evidence suggests the almost complete abandonment of Roman cities (with some exceptions on varying scales), although it seems that people at this time settled near to these sites. It might be easy to forget, amidst visions of mud huts and sunken-featured buildings1, that these people lived and worked amongst the decaying ruins of the type described by today’s poet.
A glorious past giving way to a lamentable present
I particularly love Crossley-Holland’s translation of the end of the poem, in which the poet describes the glory-days of Roman architecture. You can almost hear the sarcasm and satire dripping from the words. Just the phrase ‘that was convenient’ sounds remarkably contemporary, a medieval nod towards the typically-British dry sense of humour. ‘Can you believe it, they had heated water. Heated water! In their buildings! And we have to dunk ourselves in the ice-cold stream if we want a wash. They didn’t even have to go outside!’
These buildings are not, however, ultimately secure, and had succumbed by the poet’s time to the destructive power of people, the natural world, and the passage of time.
The barred gate has been borne away as plunder, Frost cracks the plaster, all the ceilings gape, Collapsed and pierced with holes, consumed by age. tr. Hamer (2015: 5, my emphasis)
It’s almost certainly a fictional, idealised portrait, but I find the way the poet describes those who inhabited these buildings before they crumbled away deeply interesting. For sure, the poet had political aims when writing: there was a trend at this time for making thinly-veiled criticism on the state of the present through a glorification of a bygone era. He also foreshadowed the eventual destruction of all in this earthly realm, when Christ returns to complete his work and gather his people for the New Creation.2 But note how the author describes those he imagined to have lived in the city during its heyday:
Once many a man, joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour, proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour; he gazed on his treasure - silver, precious stones, jewellery and wealth, all that he owned - and on this bright city in the broad kingdom. tr. Crossley-Holland (1982: 60).
This may be another example of the somewhat satirical, dry humour noted above: ‘they were able to live and dress gloriously while living in buildings you can’t even dream of being able to construct; and they were just regular city-dwellers. Who are you to think you’re worthy of leading us?’ For someone writing in the chaos of the mid- or even late-Anglo-Saxon period, however, it was perhaps comforting to imagine a warrior hero deep in the mists of time whose dwelling was ‘the work of giants’. One might place the famous Beowulf in this category, with its connections to the East Anglian royal dynasty of the pre-Conversion period (perhaps a story for another time).
This, too, collapses
The Ruin is preserved in a collection known as the Exeter Book which, unfortunately, sustained damage such that the poem cannot be known in its entirety. The missing sections are indicated in the translation with dotted lines. I often think that there is an irony to this: that a poem dealing with themes of ruin, destruction, and crumbling over time came itself to be ruined, destroyed, and crumbled. A fitting fate for such writing.
J.R.R. Tolkein famously took inspiration for his writing from the Anglo-Saxons that he studied. Although recent scholarship has queried much of the material that he (and others at the time) used, his description of hobbits living in holes under the ground is a direct reference to an unusaul feature of Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology. ‘Sunken-featured buildings’ (or SFBs) are known as such because they appear in excavations as depressions in the ground, sometimes with post-holes, and are characteristic of early Anglo-Saxon sites.
See Amy Jeffs (2022) Wild. River Run: London, p.135.
@mad mayday thanks for the restack!
@David Pilling's History Stuff thanks for the restacks! 🤩