Anglo-Saxon Literature
THE ANGLO-SAXON INVADERS,
who came
to Britain in the latter part of the fifth century A.D. and eventually
established their kingdoms there, were the founders of what we can properly
call English cul-ture and English literature. They gave England its name, its
lan-guage, and its-links with "Germania," that great body of Teutonic
- peoples whose migrations disrupted the Roman Empire and utterly changed the
face of Europe. Some four hundred years before they arrived in Britain, the
Roman historian Tacitus had given his account of the Germanic peoples and how
they looked to his civilized Roman eyes; and though we can see that Tacitus'
Germania idealizes the barbarians in order to hold up the noble savage as an
example to de-cadent Rome, we can nevertheless trace in his account something
of the qualities of these people as they emerge out of the mists of his-tory
and legend at a later period. To th,e Romans, whose world they threatened and
finally overcame, they were "barbarians;" appearing out of nowhere to
endanger, with their primitive vigor and alien ways of thought, both the
political structure of the ~mpire and the ideological structure of Greco-Roman thought. After
the Roman Em-pire had become Christianized, the contrast between barbarian and
Roman was even more striking, for the former were heathen and their life and
their SOCiety reflected heroic ideals far removed from Roman Christian theory
or practice. Yet the history of much of Eu-rope in the so-called "Dark
Ages" is the story of the gradual fusion of these two ways of life and
thought, the growing together of bar-barian and Chris";an and the
grounding of both in an appropriately modified phase of the Greco-Roman
tradition. Precisely who the invaders were whom we have for so long called
"Anglo-Saxon" is not of primary importance to the student of
litera-ture. That they belonged to the group of Teutonic peoples to which we
can appropriately give Tacitus' name of Germania is clear. Ac-cording to Bede,
writing his ecclesiastical history of England two hun-S
4 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE dred years and more after their arrival, they came
"from three very powerful nations of the Germans: that is, from the Saxones, Angli, and the Iulae." We know something about the Saxons, who appear to have
come from the low country south of Denmark and east of Holland, the modem
Holstein. The Angles app'far to have lived in modem Jutland and the neighboring
islands before they appeared in Britain, while the Jutes, whose origin is the
most obscure of the three, perhaps came from the country east of the lower
Rhine and perhaps, though less probably (the apparent similarity of names not
being the cogent argument it might appear to the modem ear), from Jutland. In
Anglo-Saxon England there were Saxon kingdoms (in the south and southwest),
Anglian kingdoms (in the east, north, and midlands), and the lutish kingdom of
Kent in the southeast. The cultural differences between the three groups are of
comparatively little moment: their language was essentially the same, though
with important dialectical differences; and they all considered themselves part
of "Germania," that loosely associated group of peoples who in-cluded
Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and others, and who had a common set of heroes
who might belong to any' one of these. Of the Romanized Britons whom the
invading Anglo-Saxons pushed into western corners of England the historian of
English lit-erature has little to say.
