31 THE ANGLO-SAXONS. THE history and literature of England are involved in the transactions of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there a people first assumed the name of Franks or Free-men. Our language, and our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people everywhere left the impression of a strong hand. The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen; the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long neglected—in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems often to have been to them " the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation, were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by strange characters, and ob scured by perplexing forms of diction. The language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written. 66 But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, Who was the first to attempt their restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this king's secretary, Asser, printed in the Saxon character; we are told, as an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an acquaintance with the handwriting of their ancestors."* "The invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archæologist, was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to the study; and his " Glossary" is too humble a title for that treasure of law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the learned world at home and abroad — while the unsold copies during the life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted lore. HICKES, in his - * Bp. Nicholson's Eng. Lib. 66 elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read. These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary Rowe Mores expresses it, unsightly to politer eyes." A lady- and she is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient language of our country - Mrs. ELSTOв, the niece of Hickes, patronised by a celebrated Dutchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly to disappear from our literature. None of our historians from MILTON to HUME ever referred to an original Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record the polity which had once constituted their lost independence. The annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England. MILTON, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the AngloSaxon heptarchy, or octarchy, would be as worthless "to chronicle as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air." Thus a poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that knowledge which he contemnns before he has acquired this was less pardonable in a philosopher; and when HUME observed, perhaps with the eyes of Milton, that " he would hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon Annals," however cheering to his reader was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly unconscious that these "obscure and uninteresting annals of the Anglo-Saxons" formed for themselves a complete history, offering new results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we track BURKE in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our elegant antiquary, Bishop PERCY, lamenting the scanty and defective annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and conjecture. We find ELLIS and RITSON still erring in the trackless paths. All this national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was given to the country. It was our studious explorer, SHARON TURNER, who first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.* Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be too * It is pleasing to record a noble instance of the enthusiasm of learned research. "The leisure-hours of sixteen years" furnished a comprehensive history of which "two thirds had not yet appeared."—Mr. Turner's Preface. literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambigu Different anglicisers offer more than one construc ous. tion.* It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a most corrupt state. This fatality was occasioned by the inattention or the unskilfulness of the calligrapher, whose task must have required a learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a peurile system of alliteration, and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the strokes or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns." These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The torturous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous met * A sufferer, moreover, fully assures us that some remain, which "must baffle all conjecture;" and another critic has judicially decreed that, in every translation from the Anglo-Saxon that has fallen under his notice, "there are blunders enough to satisfy the most unfriendly critic." -"The Song of the Traveller," in "The Exeter Book," was translated by CONYBEARE; a more accurate transcript was given by Mr. KEMBLE in his edition of Beowolf; and now Mr. GUEST has furnished a third, varying from both. We cannot be certain that a fourth may not correct the three. "Without exception!" is the energetic cry of the translator of Beowulf. The first line contains two words commencing with the same letter, and the second line has its first word also beginning with that letter. This difficulty seems insurmountable to a modern reader, for our authority confesses that, "In the Saxon poetry, as it is preserved in manuscripts, the first line often contains but one alliterating word, and, from the negligence of the scribes, the alliteration is in many instances entirely lost."- Dissertation on Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Fraser's Mag. xii., 81. |