The Anglo-Saxons left behind only a small body of poetry, but it can tell us a lot about these people.
Earlier this week, I happened across a book of early English poems, translated by Michael Alexander. Of these poems, one in particular struck my fancy. It is entitled “The Ruin,” and is the reflection of the Saxon poet on a destroyed and abandoned Roman city. Here’s a quick excerpt.
“Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.” 1
Apart from the beauty of the words, what really interested me was the thought process behind the work. Written a few hundred years after the Saxon conquest of England, it helps to demonstrate why that age is known as the Dark Age. Not only does this poet have no idea how man could construct such a city, he seems to barely believe such a thing is possible. With no concept of engineering, he can understand construction only in terms of brute strength, and therefore assigns the creation of such as city to the work of giants.
And yet the fact that the poet was capable of such ruminations, and able to form his thoughts into verse, shows that the Saxons were more than mindless barbarians, even if they lacked many of the skills of the people they replaced.
1) The Earliest English Poems, trans. Michael Alexander, Penguin Books, 3rd edition, 1991
