Title Old English Then and Now Description This final lecture looks briefly at how Old English has been reused by modern writers, but specifically at how the Anglo-Saxons have been portrayed on film, and what film studies can do to help us enjoy Old English poetry. Presenter(s) Stuart Lee Recording http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish/lee05-medium-audio.mp3 Keywords old english, runes, middle earth, medieval, anglo-saxon, film, genre, Q321, Q310, 1 Part of series An Introduction to Old English

Contributor Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to this final lecture in Old English and this, there isn’t a hand out by the way so don’t worry about looking for one. This is kind of the relaxing lecture; it’s a bit like that last week in school used to be when you could bring your games in. It’s taking on a light motif I suppose. Really what I am trying to do here is look at Old English and the Anglo Saxons but particularly Old English, what happens to it after the period and try and make a few points about its cultural relevance. So the objective here really is to make some preliminary remarks about history, I’m not going to define history as a subject, I just want to make a couple of remarks about it because it ties into what you are going to see and read. I then want to look at how Old English and how the Anglo Saxons have been picked up and used or misused throughout the ages and particularly ending with modern day perceptions of the Anglo Saxons and as you will see towards the end of the lecture, really looking at film studies and trying to bring the two together with the aim of showing its relevance. But if we want to be particularly spot on what I am trying to do is demonstrate the inaccuracy of the following statement. This is an article which cites a commentator who is discussing Old English and the commentator said that Old English was educationally, linguistically, historically a cul de sac, a wearisome, philological diversion from the broad current of English literature rather than a central part of it. In this commentator’s argument the language has no essential kinship with our own, the themes and concerns in literature have left no trace on ours and the very term Old English implying that such a connection exists is spurious. And it may surprise you that that came from a member of this English faculty. Or to put it more bluntly as Kinsley Amis once described Old English as Ape’s Bum Fodder and what I am trying to do here is dismiss these. I’m not sure about the anatomy of an ape but I will certainly try and take that first point on. What follows on really I suppose based on this thing that when people view history, when they are writing about history or they are interpreting history, they are doing it through their present circumstances and if we consider going way back you remember I may have mentioned Tacitus who wrote ‘The Germania’ we could take him as a good example. What he is trying to describe http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 1 Old English Then and Now

and define from a Roman perspective the people who lived the other side of the Rhine, these Germanic barbarians. But he is doing it from a particular angle. Firstly he is trying to capture what they do, their cultural beliefs etc. but more importantly what he is trying to do is say “Here are a bunch of noble savages and what’s happening to the Roman Empire, it’s going down the pan and we should probably be learning from these, even these savages can do this.” Of course it’s all made up, he didn’t go there, he didn’t visit these places so it’s entirely fictitious but it has very much influenced what we know about today or what people perceive of the Anglo Saxons and Germanic tribes. If we move a bit later, St. Gildas a British monk, he writes a history of Britain around mid 6th century, around that and he is writing it from the perspective of the indigenous people who are facing invasions from these pagan Anglo Saxons. So again he is writing the story and in his particular story again he is saying “Look we’ve created all these sins, we’ve done all these things, our morals have slipped and that’s why we are having these pagan, nasty Anglo Saxons visit upon us.” But again he is rewriting history, interpreting history for his present circumstances and even the venerable Bede was doing just that. So when he writes in the early 8th century, his history of the English people, what he is talking about there is trying to unify, or present unified England to the people, unified under one religious belief. So again he is writing history from his perspective with his political motives. And that is pretty much what we are going to see as we go through. So let’s take a more modern day example of where we can see people applying what they think about modern day perceptions to the past. It goes on, I actually heard people quoting that so good on you. So a very good example of taking medieval society, how it’s structured and trying to apply modern day beliefs back to it in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as I am sure you know. And really what we are going to do now is take a journey through this medieval land and I think what you learn or what I learnt from looking at these, these later day depictions of people is that the place, whatever you want to define this, exists in the present, it doesn’t exist in the past. And that changing perceptions, the way the Anglo Saxons and Old English is viewed throughout the centuries following on from their departure or removal of their power is based on what the perceptions of the modern day cultural needs are and that’s what people apply. And anachronisms are accepted and even perpetuated. So what we are going to see is a series of rewrites of the Anglo Saxon history. That picture by the way if you don’t know is a theme park ride in Blackpool pleasure beach called Valhalla and you go, it’s like a roller coaster in the dark and you get very wet. So don’t do it in February as I did because it’s freezing. So the first rewrite actually happens quite soon after the Anglo Saxon period as we would define it. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this but it is the Bayeux Tapestry as you all know, this is the scene of Harold possibly getting one in the eye, very dubious to say the least is that Harold, that’s his name there. But the point about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it does depict the Norman Conquest of course and it was probably commissioned by the Normans but it was probably made and sewn or whatever, embroidered by the Anglo Saxons, so hidden throughout that there is an attempt to present two angles on this particular story. Very soon after the Norman Conquest we get these people but they are followed up by other writers, William Jumiere, William Lamans, Geoffrey of Monmouth who are presenting the story of the victors who are right and back and looking at this and looking particularly at Harold and what they thought of him and then perhaps saying “Well previous Anglo Saxon Kings were fine but Harold wasn’t” etc. etc. So you get this regurgitation, rewriting of the history from different angles. Now just before we move on from that everyone often says Harold II was the last Anglo Saxon King of England, this is not true, possibly Edgar Atherling did reign for a couple of months

2 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml Stuart Lee

between the Norman conquest in October, the Battle of Hastings October 14th and William’s coronation in December but nevertheless his niece Matilda comes back onto the throne, she is the wife of Henry I so their descendants are Anglo Saxons. And of course we have the House of Wettin, currently on the throne, you may not know they were called that, probably you’ve heard of Saxe Coburg and Gotha or House of Windsor as they changed their name during the first World War quite wisely. They are of course Saxons from Saxony so the Anglo Saxons are back. The second rewrite is another curious period in English history. You remember in the prose lecture I mentioned that Alfred has instigated this idea that text should be written in English because that is what the English understand. So he merrily initiated translations of many key texts and from that we get the translations of the Bible into Old English, so should I say was not heretical. So it is surprising of course that Whitcliff and Tindall are considered heretical but nevertheless that wasn’t the case in the 10th century and 11th century. While we are on the theme of religious beliefs etc. the Anglo Saxons and Anglo Saxon literature again picked up and this is possibly what restarts the subject as a discipline as a political football if you like between the Protestants and the Catholics. This gentleman here, Archbishop Matthew Parker, he really leads the charge on this after the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII, all of these manuscripts are dispersed to the four winds. Parker begins to collect them but he is collecting them not just for historical reasons but also because he thinks if he can analyse what the Anglo Saxons said about certain religious beliefs he can use that to defend Protestantism and some of their beliefs. In particular he uses Alfrich but he points to the fact that Alfrich writes about the fact that priests could be married in Anglo Saxon England and doesn’t say they should be forced to marry and Parker is a married priest and he is of course using that to say “Well look, if for five, six hundred years of the Roman Catholic Church, whatever you want to define that in England it was fine for priests to be married, why isn’t it now?” And more importantly he commissions the first printing of an Anglo Saxon text, a homily by Alfrich which he uses to attempt to prove that the Anglo Saxons didn’t believe in transubstantia- tion, if you don’t know what transubstantiation is, it’s basically in the mass ceremony, the Roman Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit actually appears, he is summoned, possibly the wrong word. Protestants don’t believe that. Parker was saying that if you read Alfrich the Anglo Saxons didn’t believe that so for 500 years they were pretty much Protestants. Actually if you read Alfrich he is not saying that, he is actually saying the opposite but that is because parker didn’t quite understand what was being said, but there you are. However what we do get from Parker is as I said the printing and testimony of antiquity in 1566 and he deposits all his manuscripts that he’s collected which now form the very important collection at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. From Parker this led then to an interest in understanding Old English and I think I had this up last week; it’s the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. What I was saying here, apart from the fact that it’s interesting because this is the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, is this underlining here of words that you can see, they are generally place names, so Gloucester, Winchester, Oxford I think I said. This is probably someone just taking a first glance at this thinking “What on earth is this stuff?” and once they’ve worked out how to read the characters they are then looking for words which look vaguely familiar and place names are of course familiar because they survive. So they can see Oxenaforda, well that must be Oxford. Okay so why is it Oxenaforda? What’s happening here with these As and then they start to work out the rules of the language. And pretty much in the 17th century, following Parker’s initiation of this we start to get quite a few scholars who start to learn Old English and form the rules and really bring these things together. http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 3 Old English Then and Now

These are just a few of the names including Elizabeth Elstob into the 18th century and that leads to the formation of things like The Society of Antiquaries which again perpetuates this idea of bringing Old English and Medieval literature to the masses. The third rewrite moves away from religious beliefs to political beliefs and it is odd but when you understand it it’s not unsurprising. So for example when the Whigs managed to get George I on the throne in 1714 as part of the defence of getting him on there, Hanoverian who couldn’t speak English of course, what they tried to reinforce the idea is that the English are actually Germans and that the English constitution whatever that might be although isn’t defined is pretty much a Germanic constitution. And that it is right for wise people in this case Whigs politicians to select kings to lead us because that’s how the Anglo Saxons did it. The theory is they used to have this Witten, this gathering of wise people and they would select who would lead them. And this embodies or sets in stone this idea that if we go back to those early periods, the Anglo Saxons, they really pretty much had it, they were getting there with ideas of democracy and parliamentary ideas and that all got ditched when the Normans came and imposed the feudal system and it’s the type of thing you might have heard of the Norman Yoke which really was put down properly by McCauley in 1848. That transfers itself to the colonies if you want to call them that, they didn’t think they were but anyway. So 1776, the American Revolution, the American founding fathers start to look when they are forming their constitution again at some of these ideas and they start to go back and picking up the ideas from the Anglo Saxon period. They talk about the Witan which they liken to the New England town house where I guess all the little people from that town would go and someone would make a speech and they would all shout and shout them down or agree etc. And they are really beginning to form this and it gets quite bizarre at times. Jefferson, famous politicians from the US and certainly from that period. Americans he likened to the children of Israel in the wilderness led by cloud by day and a pillow by night and on the other side Hengist and Horsa the Saxon chief from whom he claimed the honour of being descended and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed and he even advocated that US coinage at that period should have Hengist and Horsa on them. He founded the University of Virginia which of course is one of the bastions of Anglo Saxon studies and I have never seen it written down but I have heard, whether he was just doing this as a joke, that he suggested the official language of the United States should be Old English which would be great wouldn’t it? Because basically because you’ve got English descendents there but you also have German descendents there and he said “Why not go for the middle, for a highly structured language?” Anyway, so what he was pretty much saying though, he was likening Anglo Saxon England to Norman England so the United States is like it would be likened to George III England, a free place with a good constitution. And again these are perpetuated so if you look at Scott’s Ivanhoe, it is all based on this idea that there is the Norman Yoke, there is the free spirit of the Saxon constitution and this finds its way into quite serious political thought. Jefferson is of course a serious political thinker but we get it in Carlyle Past and Present and things like that. It is perpetuating this idea that we’ve lost something for 900 years which now we are going to gain. Similarly in architecture, literature we get the gothic revival. Gothic doesn’t mean kids dressed in black with piercings, it means anything to do with medieval and they were again harking back to this idea that they lost things, these great thinkers from the 19th century, Pugin, Ruskin the artists the pre Raphaelites etc. The famous person you have probably heard of William Morris

4 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml Stuart Lee

who writes a series of novels “The House of the Wolfings”, “Sigurd the Volsing”, “The Tale of Beowulf”, “Sometime King of the Folk of the Wedder”, to try and again bring back this idea to the people. He actually went completely bananas in some ways and starts to try and reintroduce Old English words so he didn’t much like the idea of a word omnibus, he wanted folkwain and a place that carried the people around. Which you may laugh but it is pretty much Volkswagen in German. And the reason I’m putting that is of course that is one of the greatest examples of Gothic architecture. If you look at it, if you really, really look at it that’s pretty much an idealised Dysneyfied version of medieval period, the Houses of Parliament. And there is plenty of other examples around from that period. Now literature didn’t escape its influences you will be pleased to know. The Alfrich society gets formed quite early on. There is a fixation in the early part of picking this up as a serious study on people, they could actually identify Alfrich, Alfred etc. so poetry was a bit of a pauper at the feast early on. We have the formation of the Early English Text Society, go in the English faculty library you will see rows and rows of these brown books, that’s the early English text society. Now there is two reasons, apart from the fact that it was collecting and editing all these texts which many people didn’t have access to. One is this was pre-empting or getting ready for the new dictionary they were planning. So by collecting these texts you could start building up the Oxford English Dictionary. The other thing is that on the continent, after the formation of Germany there was a move amongst German scholars to try and hoover up all this material and say “It’s German” and they are showing their roots. So there are many, many books published in Germany around that period of Anglo Saxon texts which they describe as Angle Saxition and not Old English, they wouldn’t want to refer to that. But it finds its way into all kinds of scholars and writers, Tennyson writing the Battle of Brunanburh, he wrote a drama on Hastings. Oxford’s first chair in English was in Anglo Saxon in 1795. The faculty itself you are in wasn’t founded for another 100 years but they managed to slip that one in because the classicists liked it because Anglo Saxon is kind of a serious subject because it must be because it is to do with language whereas literature is just nonsense, anyone can do that. Gerard Manly Hopkins, he is heavily influenced by Old English, look at “Spring and Fall”, he starts to use compound words, we see it running throughout his poetry and then moving rapidly on Esra Pound’s the Seafarer, if you haven’t read that. Auden who I said was educated here, wrote the verse “Paid on both sides” which is pretty much line 1305 of the Beowulf. David Jones, there’s a poster still outside about him “In Parenthis” 1937 etc. etc. moving up to the present day Jeffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney. So running through English literature there is a lot of influence from Anglo Saxon and this is my favourite quote just because I like Graves. “Beowulf and Judith seem good poems to me, Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among a platoon of his drunken thanes in the gothlin billet. Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’ staff tent and Brunanburh with his bayonet and cosh fighting. All this was closer to us at the time than the drawing room and Deer Park atmosphere of the 18th century.” I couldn’t agree more. So rewriting history is not new, Old English Anglo Saxons have been users of defence for all kinds of things throughout the ages, religious beliefs, royalty, political structures, processes, national ideals and so on. So pretty much you could say I could stop the lecture here and you can all go which I won’t do but anyway I could because I’ve made the case quite strongly that Anglo Saxon and Old English has had cultural references going right through the decades for all kinds of reasons. So, so far so good. But that image there does ring a bell and cause some alarms. Why http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 5 Old English Then and Now

is it in our major, primary, oldest, theme park in Blackpool we make a ride about the Vikings and not the Anglo Saxons? Referring back to that question I started these lectures off what does the term Anglo Saxon mean today? You all came up with a very, very sensible answers of course you were talking about tribes who had come over, but I think really if you went to anyone in the street and said “What does Anglo Saxon mean, what were the Anglo Saxons or even describe an Anglo Saxon” they would look blankly at you, they wouldn’t know. Whereas this lot they could do. This was just when I was running around, I just found this, there is a game out called “Viking” apparently where you get to dismember enemies with flesh cleaving combat moves which clearly is an appealing thing on some of them. But Vikings, you can look, Vikings everywhere. If you went to someone and said “Describe me a Viking” they would go ”Horned helmet, long hair, axe, gets off a boat and hits people” whatever, but they would have an idea about Vikings and Vikings are everywhere, everywhere. There are images of them, it is in our culture and people die, they are desperate to be Viking when they do DNA tests. Why? They lost. But anyway that’s by the by. In fact I did a Google search of Google images, ten to one ratio Viking images compared with Anglo Saxon and the Viking images are of Vikings, even if it is this little Lego man but they are of a Viking or something. The Anglo Saxons are old bits of jewellery and things like that. You have no mental image of what an Anglo Saxon is or what it looks like. How could we do this? Five hundred years of English history gone away and I find it quite extraordinary. And if we consider films as we move into that genre, let’s consider films. If you go into the IMDB and type in Viking you get a range of films that have been made going way back to 1908, “Viking Queen” the “Oath of the Viking”, “The Viking”, “The Viking” etc. “Tales of the Vikings”, “The Viking”, “Saga of the Viking Rumour”, “Return of the Vikings”, they are everywhere. And there is more, “Eric the Viking”, well why not. “Viking Massacre”, “Vicious Viking”, “The Viking Queen”, “Tarquin Viking”, “The Norsemen”, “Vikings Go Pumping” I don’t think you should watch, “Eric the Viking”, “Sigurd . . . “and there’s more, “Lost in the Barrens”, “The Curse of the Viking Grave”, “The Lost Vikings”, “Lost Vikings”, “Vicky the Viking”, “The Viking Saga”, “Vegi Tales”, there is even a vegetarian Viking. “The Thirteenth Warrior” which is about Vikings and even if you do that you get “Medieval Total War, Viking Invasion” and things like that. Anglo Saxons, that’s your lot. “Last of the Saxons 1910”, “Harold, the Last of the Saxons”, “The Saxon Charm”, “Lady Godiva”, she was an Anglo Saxon, Coventry. I don’t think [[?? 0:21:12]] is anything to do with them, “Arthur of the Britons” possibly because of he was fighting Anglo Saxons, “Anglo Saxon Axes” is about an archaeological dig, “Milk and Cookies” I don’t believe is Saxon, “River End” and you get Beowulf. It’s extraordinary. I did find this though, I like this, this was “Harold the Last”, I would like to see that, that does look like Terry Jones though in the middle and this was a series of films and I have to say when you read about the early films, although they are named after the Viking they do occasionally have Anglo Saxons. This was Florence Rawson I think she was who was in the “Viking Daughter”, but it’s actually about the Saxons coming and rescuing her from the nasty Vikings. She was a major, major film star; no-one’s ever heard of her now. Killed herself by eating ant poison, horrible way to go. But even when they do appear the Anglo Saxons in film you get this nonsense. That’s a serious, it’s jokey but it’s a serious point, this is how the Anglo Saxons are portrayed. Now I could take some consolation from this, a good article by Linley saying that most importantly unlike Scorsese, medieval films are not working from the assumption that past was an inherent interest or historically connected to the present, they just do whatever they want.

6 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml Stuart Lee

You can do that but I don’t think that’s the point because films in this age are our fourth rewriting of history, our period of medieval land and if you look at those films, Vikings are masculine, fierce, brave adventurous, victorious. Anglo Saxons are weak, effeminate, ineffective losers basically which is historically not true. The question I have is are they creating this image or are they simply reflecting it, bearing in mind that quote I gave to you right in that first slide from a member of this faculty about it being a cultural backwater. So let’s begin the fight back. Film studies, because I like film studies but I think you can use films to actually bring Old English back up to relevance and show how it is strongly or very culturally relevant. So I am going to have a look at two very simple things, plots and type scenes which are common in Old English which I would suggest are common in modern day films and by doing that hopefully suggest how films, how Old English is relevant and depicted by films. And then also slightly more tricky, how Old English poets are basically film directors. So if we take an old English text called The Fight at Finsburgh which is a small fragment, it’s quite an interesting one. Basically there are some Danish warriors trapped in a hall, they start off saying “What’s out there? There’s something coming outside the hall” and then they get attacked, there are some people outside and they try and get in the doors. They bar the doors, there is a discussion come to be called flighting and then the Friesians who are outside break in there and there is fierce fighting. It is basically a battle of people holding out against superior forces as long as they can. So it’s what you might call the siege, so let’s show you a siege from a film. Let’s stop it there shall we? You can go away and watch it. Anyway the point I am trying to make is that if you look through Old English literature, one of the things, one of the obvious plot lines, the stories they quite enjoyed was this idea of small forces holding out against larger forces, a siege and it comes up again and again. They would have found that fascinating, they found it entertaining and what I am just trying to say is here if you look at that film, although it’s Tolkien but whatever, that is something which we too also like and there is a series of films. Some of them you may know, some of them you may not but pretty much they are all based on the same premise, a small group of people holding out against superior forces and these are famous films going throughout the period. Don’t watch the remake of “Assault on Precinct 13”, the original is far, far better. So a plot there. Now a type scene I mentioned before, these are the sort of things they might appear very briefly in the poetry but it would trigger something in the audience, they know something is going to happen. So for example one of the famous type scenes is the arming f the warrior, the warrior picks up the arms and gets ready, so in Beowulf he readies himself against the battle against Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon, you should go and consider what weapons he takes into each of those battles. Judith readies herself against the battle against Holo Fernes which is actually a seduction. Christ readies himself for the struggle on the cross in “The Dream of Rood”, he is a warrior arming himself. And pretty much what I am saying is when it gets to those key things and a bit like “The Beast of the Battle”, the audience would have gone “Right there is a fight coming up, the warrior is getting ready” although in “The Dream of the Rood” it is completely introverted, would have triggered in their mind that something is happening and do you like the way I did the animation there? This is very similar to the idea in the Bond films, I don’t think in the current ones but in the previous ones if you remember there is always that scene where he goes to the boffin and he gives him this little gadget and you know Bond is going to use that to get out of the fight at the end, he is going to escape by his magic watch or whatever. http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 7 Old English Then and Now

Again you trigger in you, you expect it after 15 films, you know there is going to be that scene, you know there is going to be a casino and a car chase but you know Bond would get out of whatever gadget he was given at the beginning. It’s that idea, that’s what you’ve got to try and get into your head; this is how the Anglo Saxon viewed things. Old English literature as film is perhaps a slightly more difficult concept but an article if you ever want to go away and read it a very good article, “Point of View and Aggression for Terror in Beowulf and Judith limits and poetry” by Renoir. Renoir I think he was the son of Jean Renoir the French film director. So it is not surprising that what he is trying to do here is make links between Old English literature and film. Basically the idea is this, if you were a poet and you went into a mead hall and you recited your poems, you have to do a single performance which is linear. You have to keep the audience with you so you have to use all these devices to make sure that they follow the plot, they don’t get mixed up, what’s happening, and you have to keep them entertained throughout and it is pretty much like a film, you can’t sit in a film in a cinema at least and say “Could you rewind that bit, I don’t remember who he is or she is or whatever they’ve said.” So the film director has to know that they are taking you on a linear path and they have to use all kinds of devices, and that’s what the Anglo Saxon poet was doing. So the poet has to hold the attention of his audience while recounting a tale and he must make them visualise the action as fast as they hear it, the words describe it. What you see in our Old English poetry, I haven’t explored this but I am going to, is that they are using quite clever devices to make you visualise the action, the images etc. what are going on there because that’s they can’t present them on a screen or anything like that. So for example when Grendel attacks Herot we have a common device in films called point of view shifting, so what happens is Grendel’s coming to, he has been described as approaching Herot, it is getting nasty. We then cut back inside the hall, what’s happening in the hall. We then cut back outside, Grendel is getting a bit nearer. We then cut back inside the hall and gradually bang until Grendel gets to the hall. And that is you keeping you flitting back and forth imagining the action. It even works in prose Cynewulf and Cyneheard, a short story in Anglo Saxon Chronicle but again it’s describing people outside, describing people inside, outside, inside until the action gets and if you were to script that or put it on a story board you could even imagine exterior shots, interior shots, exterior shots, interior shots. So cut back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, it was a very, very common device from Anglo Saxon poets. So I will show you one example of this. It’s a good song at least, it goes a bit funny in the middle but anyway. No they’re not. So a common device which you will see in films again and again and again was used in Old English poetry to try and portray action. Okay another thing is how do you engage the audience? Not only have they got to understand very complicated things which are going on but you’ve also got to give them emotional engagement in the characters you are trying to portray and the “Battle of Maldon” you may not think this, is a very, very good example. Because what the poet here is trying to do is describe armies moving back and forth while at the same time not just saying army b moves over the army a, they had a big fight, the English lost, the end. Trying to get you to imagine that you were there and that you had sympathy for the Anglo Saxon warriors who were about to get butchered. And the way he does this is very, very common, it’s common in most films so he starts with a scene, Byrhtnoth bringing his troops together then we get a minutiae detail of a single bird flying to the woods. Then Byrhtnoth riders and warriors. Then the close in on a Viking messenger talking,

8 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml Stuart Lee

close in Byrhtnoth bit of dialogue. Then you are almost sweeping back, we see the armies moving then we see a little fight on the causeway, Byrhtnoth speaking and armies move etc. individual combats and so on and so forth. It’s a very, very clever way of writing about a battle, a very, very interesting way and one which people pick up if they knew the “Battle of Maldon” but they have certainly used again and again and again. So I am going to show you a clip of film if it is quite violent so turn away if you don’t like it, or plug your ears, but we won’t leave it running too long. But it is probably the most famous war film or best war film ever made. And so on. Now, sorry about that. It is probably the most realistic depiction of warfare but what Spielberg is doing there to get the effects and everything like that is pretty much what people were doing on things like ”All Quiet on the Western Front” in the 30’s. He takes shots which you couldn’t film because you would have been shot as you were doing it, so he is doing unrealistic shots but he also focuses in on individuals, then he shifts his point of view to give you a complete 360 degree view of the battle. What happens next is he focuses on the Tom Hanks character and then you see what Hanks is seeing as what is going on around him. And that is exactly what the poet of the “Battle of Maldon” was doing, it isn’t just a boring trot through army a, army b, army c. It’s a very, very clever way of making you visualise the action. You maybe think it doesn’t work, that’s up to you but that’s what he is trying to do that poet. Finally, the final thing I want to mention is this. You remember when I talked about Sever’s five types and I said all the half lines in Old English can be put down into these codes, a, b, c, d, e. And that is pretty much where I left it, it’s the stress pattern, stress, un-stress, stress, un-stress. Now there is another thing to be said about this As, Bs, and Cs are quite short half lines, they are stress, un-stress, stress, un-stress, they move quite quickly whereas Ds and Es are slightly longer they have this half stress in there and they slow the action down. So the poet on top of all those things I said with it will use these shorter stress patterns to speed up action or slow down action. This is the bit from Beowulf and Grendel’s mother is attacked and she’s run off with one of the warriors, not in a romantic way, in a nasty way and Beowulf and his men are off to try and find out what happens and they are walking though this almost apocalyptic world and it’s quite slow,. There are As and Bs but there is a predominance I can show you in the previous lines of Ds, Cs and Es here. It slows the action down, slows the action down and then there is a part here of that and then it’s not absolutely certain but you do get more As and Ds so it speeds up, something turns it and then it speeds up and you don’t actually know what they found. He drags out the tension, drags out the tension until the last half line they found a head and that’s what the suspense is. So you can imagine sitting there listening to that in that dark room, it’s horrible outside and you are going “What have they found? What have they found?” He’s dragging it out, dragging it out, then you get the head. Exactly as people do in any, well any half decent director would do in a horror film or a suspense film. So if you think of the example you are in a haunted house, whoever, you are wandering along the corridor, there is a door at the end, you as the audience know there is something horrible and nasty in there, any director worth his salt would not have you just saunter up, chink and out comes the nasty thing and kills you. They will drag it out infinitely and you will be going “Oooh” and then when they open the door then all hell breaks loose and that’s exactly what the poet is doing there, but using stress patterns to speed and slow down action. So let’s show you one last clip. It’s in black and white so it can’t be gory. http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 9 Old English Then and Now

And you will see Hitchcock employing exactly those techniques. It was a good special effect at the time, don’t laugh at it. But you can see the point okay, dragging things out. When you read the Old English poetry, that is what’s happening because they are trying to entertain, they are trying to capture an audience. So what I am trying to say there is it’s relevant. Okay so history of the Anglo Saxons and Old English have been through a lot of things, been rewritten over the years and has been used for all manner of issues to defend them and in the modern day I would say Anglo Saxon, image of them is at best vague. Even just using an example of films, hopefully I have tried to show you the links and how it has a lot to offer and if you look imaginatively at the things and what interests the Anglo Saxons you can start applying it to all kinds of things. So that in my view is just unadulterated nonsense. Well I just disagree with practically everything there that is said apart from the ‘and’ and you can think back over these five lectures. I don’t know, do you think this is some of the things we’ve covered? Runes, the formation of England, why English is a Germanic language, the firth of the English Legal system, Birth of England, Place names, manuscripts. We’ve looked at modern literary aspects like authorship, performance, audience studies. Birth of poetry, how poetry works, metrics, stylistic devices, prose, English as a national language. We’ve even looked at why days of the week are called, months, Hallowe’en, pagan beliefs, old Norse. We’ve had some Nazis in there, we’ve had Auden we’ve even has Austen but we won’t mention that, we had Eminem, Hitchcock, Monty Python, Tolkien, we’ve had all that. So if that’s culturally irrelevant I don’t know why. So it only remains for me to say thank you very much for coming to these lectures. I do wish you all the best in your future studies. I hope you choose to do Old English, if you don’t fair enough. Whatever way I hope what these lectures have done is just given you an idea of why I am fascinated with this subject, why I have studied it for twenty years and I’m not going to say that the Anglo Saxons were the Greeks, the Romans, great philosophical thinkers but they did give the world a language and they did give England a lot and English history a lot and occasionally they deserve their little place in the sun, so don’t diss them. Westou hau means be good to you health or be health to you, anyway it’s a nice thing to say and it was actually bastardised, truncated whatever you want to call it into this, Wassail which you will be saying in a few weeks. Merry Christmas. Thank you very much.

c 2010 University of Oxford, Stuart Lee This transcript is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial- Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. It can be reused and redistributed globally provided that it is used in a non-commercial way and the work is attributed to the licensors. If a person creates a new work based on the transcript, the new work must be distributed under the same licence. Before reusing, adapting or redistributing, please read and comply with the full licence available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

10 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml