History of the English Literature
3rd Day of the Eleventh Month of our Lord's Year 2010
7.King Alfred the Great (reigned 871-899) and his influence on the political and cultural identity
and independence of the Kingdom of Wessex
a. The upbringing in the spirit of the Northumbrian renaissance (8th c. Northumbria) and Carolingian
renaissance (9th c. Frankish empire)
b. His visits to Rome as a child  his perception as an heir to Imperium Romanum in Wessex and in
Britain
c. Viking attacks and settlements in Britain. Alfred's wars with Vikings.
d. Initial defeats and later military successes of Alfred  the rise of Wessex, later transformed into
the kingdom of England (king Athelsan's battle of Brunanburh)
8. Alfred and English literature:
a. Legends of the king who loved literature since childhood  Asser's (his biographer's) story of the
king's exceptional memory and his Handboc (handbook of poetry).
b. The vision of a kingdom in Alfred inspired Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (containing  The Battle of
Brunanburh )
c. Alfred's tranlations
-Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis (Pastoral care). Alfred proposes in its opening a programme
of education and translation to recover the people's lost wealth and wisdom
-Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae (consolation of Philosophy)  Alfred's additions and
modifications (such as a ruler's responsibilities to his subjects, and increased Christian element).
-St. Augustine of Hippo, Soliloquies (Sprostowania)
-First fifty biblical psalms.
d. Additional texts important for Alfred's programme (noticeable slant towards history)
-Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos (Histories Against Pagans), a history of the world with
Anglo-Saxon additions (Curiously mentioning the present day Polish coast in the added report by
Ohthere)
-the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A vision of the kingdom as arising from earlier kingdoms in the
Chronicle (containing the The Battle of Brunanburh)
e. Alfred's exceptional understating of the role of education and his idea of books that every free
man in the kingdom should know (including the translation of Bede).
f. The propagandist use of King Alfred in later times (after the 16th c. reformation)
g. Possible influences of Alfredian translation on Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry  the idea of wisdom
drawn from suffering in  The Wanderer and  The Seafarer (enclosed in 10th c. Exeter Book)
Old English wisdom poetry
elegies, gnomic verse, poetic riddles and charms
Reading the map: Anglo-Saxon or Cottonian world map, ca. 1040 A.D.:
The Holy Land in the centre, England ad Ireland in the lower left hand corner
1. Cornerstones of medieval philosophy and the medieval Christian Weltanschauung (world-view)
Logocentrism  in medieval understanding, the focus on the Holy Logos (the Scripture) and on the
power of words as an emanation of reality
Pansemiotism  the meaningfulness of everything (the idea of the divine plan and divine purpose of
everything that happens).
Polysemy  multiplicity of the layers of meaning. The example of the Bible (the Holy Scripture):
sensus historicus (literal sense); sensus allegoricus (symbolic meaning); sensus tropologicus/moralis
(moral meaning); sensus anagogicus (the secret, gnomic meaning of the text)
Universals  knowledge derived from the universal, not particular ideas. But how to distinguish one
from the other?
4. Old English wisdom poetry (gnomic verse)  the homiletic effect:
Old English word giedd  multiple meaning :  song, lay, poem, speech, tale, sermon, proverb,
riddle, maxim, sentence, word. 
Elegies (including love elegies): The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor's Lament ( intresting, as it refers
to Germanic past and legend), Wulf and Eadwacer, Wife's Lament
Gnomic texts  Maxims, The Order of the World, The Fortunes of Men
Poetic riddles and dialogues  the Exeter Book riddles, Dialogue between King Solomon and Saturn
Charms  remnants of old verbal magic, mixture of pagan and Christian beliefs and rituals
Wisdom elements old present in other types of poems )e.g. maxims and instructions in heroic
poetry, gnomic elements in religious verse).
5. Old English elegiac poetry  lamentation and existentialism
a. Most of it preserved in the so-called Exeter Book (10th/11th Century);
b. frequent motifs of Old English elegies  imagery:
- rough sea and the hostile nature (wintry landscapes, wind ice, frost, hail, rain);
-the image of the sea as the mare vitae -  the sea of life
c. the common motifs of Old English elegies  ideas:
-loneliness; separation, death of friends, families, the hopelessness of earthly existence;
-the voyage  life as a journey
-exile  understood both literally and as earthly exile
(& )
6.The roots of Anglo-Saxon existentialism in the times of uncertainty:
a. the question of how to make sense in the world of instability;
b.wyrd  Old English fate, sense of fatalism and uncertainty of human existence, of the
impossibility of changing what cannot be changed and is beyond human control  possible
Germanic and Nordic influences (cf.Urdr, on of the Nordic Norns, women who rule the fate);
c.Transitoriness, evanesnce
(& )
7. Christian elegies  The Wanderer and the Seafarer
a. The Wanderer
-a lamentation of a man deprived of his past happiness and security beside his lord and friends, now
searching for a new patron  also metaphorically
-The Wanderer and the idea of suffering as a blessing, a divine gift.
-The narrator of the poem as a man haunted by the memories of his happy past and who cannot set
himself free from them
b. The Seafarer:
-the conscious choice of the life of hardship on the sea  the desire to live life fully, to live it to its
extremes  also as a metaphor of choosing the difficult life on the sea and close to God,