EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE That I may this magic spell, by the favour of the Lord, through a thought firm-grasped ; for our worldly need; Waken up the swelling crops Prank the turfed plain with fairness, CHAP. as the Prophet quothwhoso had praiseworthily, given out his alms.1 And now they were met to fulfil the charm. And the owner of the land stood and turned himself round three sun-courses, and stretched himself out longways and said many litanies and Christian hymns and prayers; but the last song he sang was to Mother Earth, for himself and for all who were under him. Then he brought unknown seed which he had got from beggarmen, and for which he had given them twice as much as he had taken, and gathered all his plough-tackle together. And he bored a hole in the plough-beam and put into it (stor-) styrax, and fennel, and soap, and salt which had been hallowed, but the seed he set upon the body of the plough. Then Cynewulf listened to the ancient lay Mother of Earth! [or, O Earth, our Mother] Ever-Lord grant thee Erce, Erce, Erce- the blossoms, ears waxing, the harvest! Let be guarded the grain That are sown o'er the land against all the ills by the sorcery-men, Nor let cunning woman change it 1 This is the least heathen of all the poetic fragments in this charm; but I have italicised, in the translation, the verses which seem to have formed part of the ancient Earth and Heaven worship. 2 A very long note on this will be found in Wülker. 8 These last three lines have been shortened. Cunning woman might be better translated "talkative woman," and crafty is of course "powerful." This is nearly altogether a very old heathen invocation, used, I daresay, from century to century, and from far prehistoric times, by all the Teutonic farmers. Who Erce is remains obscure. But the Mother of Earth seems to be here meant, and she is a person who greatly kindles our curiosity. To touch her is like touching empty space, so far away is she. At any rate some godhead or other seems here set forth under her proper name. In the Northern Cosmogony, Night is the mother of Earth. Erce be a proper name) bound up in this song with agriculture. Grimm suggests Eorce, connected with the Old High German erchan = But Erce cannot be Night. She is (if also makes a bold guess that she may be the same as a divine dame in Low Saxon districts called Herke or Harke, who dispenses earthly goods in abundance, and acts in the same way as Berhta and Holda simplex.' He the Lady of the plougher and sower and reaper. In the Mark she is called frau Harke. Montanus draws attention to the appearance of this Charm in a -an earth-goddess then, 66 And when he had thus sung he pushed on the plough and cut the first furrow; and then he stayed himself and, looking on the upturned earth, he sang again a very ancient verse — Then the farmer took of each kind of meal and let knead a broad loaf with milk, and laid it under the first furrow and sang again Blossoming brightly, blessed become ! grant us gift of growing, And the God who wrought the ground And when he had so sung, the work was done, and he drove the plough on through his acre. But Cynewulf walked on, nor was he fated to leave the place till he had heard something more heathen still. For now a little way in the wood he came to a hill whence the trees had been cleared, and he saw a man crouching doubled up upon the ground in sudden pain of a stitch caused by witchcraft; and another, who stood by, held a shining linden shield over him as if to guard him from weapons shot at him, and was anointing him with a salve made of fever-few and the red-nettle, which had grown through convent at Corvei, in which this line begins "Eostar, Eostar, eordhan modor." Nothing seems to follow from this clerical error. The name remains mysterious, and I am glad of it. As to the rest of the song, it breathes the pleasure and worship of ancient tillers of the soil in the labours of the earth and in the goods the Mother gave. It has grown, it seems, out of the breast of Earth herself. Nor are the next four lines less remarkable and less heathen. Earth is here the mother of men. The surface of Earth is the lap of the goddess; in her womb let all growth be plentiful. Food is in her for the needs of men. "Hale be thou, Earth!" I daresay this hymn was sung, ten thousand years ago, by the early Aryans on the Baltic coasts. The next four lines-Acre full-fed-are partly heathen, partly Christian. On the whole, we are placed in these songs in that early time, after settled agriculture had begun, when the "Cornfield," as Professor Rhys says, "is the chosen battlefield where the powers favourable to man make war on those other powers that would blast the fruits of his labour." And if we wish to bind up this ancient English Earth Religion with Northern names of gods, we may think of Frigg, Woden's wife, who is the Earth goddess, and of Thor her son, the god of husbandry," the farmer's friend," whose bolt cleaves the stormclouds that threaten the grain and disperses the blighting mists, who marries Sif, the yellow-haired goddess of the cornfield. Beyond this there is a literary quality in this old song, and in the Stitch-Charm that follows it, which, from its delightful naturalness, from its close clinging to the subject, and from its contrast to the conventional Christian poetry, pleases the ear and the imagination. a fence, and waybroad (plantago), which it was his habit, for he was a witch-doctor, to keep by him, having first boiled it in butter, that he might heal those whom the fierce elves shot with their spears. So Cynewulf drew near to listen, hiding in the fringe of the wood, and he heard the man singing this pagan song, which told of fierce witch-wives riding over the hill and flinging spears." 1 Through a sieve. The Romans had this custom. They laid a sieve in the road, and used the stalks of grass that grew through it for medical purposes. - Grimm, Chapter on Herbs. 2 Elf-shooting, etc., is a common superstition in England. Indeed, it ranges from Shetland to Cornwall. Here is a Scandinavian instance: "That same autumn Hermund gathered a party and went on his way to Borg, intending to burn down the house with Egil in it. Now as they came out under Valfell, they heard the chime of a bowstring up in the fell, and at the moment Hermund felt ill, and a sharp pain under his arms, and the sickness gained on him." out nettle. - Nettle in, dock out."- Troilus and Cressida. In Sussex a poor woman is cured of a scald on a Sunday evening by an old wife who bows her head over the wound, crosses two of her fingers over it and breathes upon it, repeating these words 8" In dock - There came two angels from the north, Out Fire, in Frost, In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Folk-Lore: Northern Counties (Henderson), p. 171. Flee, witch, to the wild hilltop But thou be thou hale, and help thee the Lord! 1 Then the strange chant ended, the witch-doctor bid the man take the seax and dip it into water; but Cynewulf had heard enough, and we bid him farewell as he entered the forest paths. 1 I have taken Sweet's reading. CHAPTER X THE SEA THE English, at least in the north of England, were close observers not only of the natural aspect of the Earth, but also of the Sky and the Sea; and the proof of this lies in the number of words they invented to express the different appearances of these two great creatures. The changes of the Dawn from the first gray tinge of the heaven to the upward leap of the Sun; the changes of the Evening from the light left by the setting sun to the last glimmer of it before dead night, have each their own specialised words. The fiercer phases of natural phenomena were also watched and described with minuteness by the poets. Cynewulf dedicates eighty lines to the story, hour by hour, of the birth, the growth, and dying of the Tempest. But no natural object engaged them so much as the Sea, and for no object have they so many names. Their treatment of it in verse deserves a chapter in a history of English poetry. Such a chapter will bring together a number of descriptive passages, so varied in form and in imaginative sentiment that we shall be able to estimate the range of the natural description of the Angles, its limits and its excellence. No critical analysis of mine could make this estimate or give this insight into the way in which the English saw nature, half as well as the series of examples which I shall translate, and which describe the doings of the great Being who of all the living things of the world awakened in them the most profound emotion. A shoal of simple terms express in Beowulf the earliest seathoughts of the English. But, still uncontent, the singers compounded these simple terms with other words, in order more fully to image forth the manifold impressions they had received of the doing of the great waters. Double, sometimes treble words were used to picture, if possible, the waves in storm and the ships that rushed through them. Many more than those in Beowulf were invented by Cynewulf, whose |