Introduction

The study of the natural world in Old English literature is by no means new. Old Germanic philology came into its own against a background of national historicism and Romantic culture. This intellectual environment also gave rise to a political brand of environmental determinism asserting that ‘national character’ was shaped by the geographical features accommodating a society. Given this background and the continued interest in nation state and geography in the early-twentieth century, it should come as no surprise not only that literary scholars of this period were interested in the natural world, but also that some continued to bring an ideological burden to bear on Anglo-Saxon depictions of weather and landscape. Frederic Moorman worked within this school of thought when he juxtaposed Homer and the Beowulf poet as ‘the classic and the romantic’, grouping the Anglo-Saxon poet with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Shelley, poets who ‘lived nearest to Nature’. Scholars in this tradition held that Old English poets were fascinated with the rougher manifestations of nature so prominent in northern Europe, but indifferent to its gentler side. In his study of ‘the Teuton’ through Old English literature, Edmund Dale observed in 1907 that ‘it is always the hardship of the life upon which he dwells, because he has mastered it, fighting his battle alone in the solitude of the sea’. Although scholars today may cringe at this type of discourse and its ideas regarding ‘primitive poetry’, ‘the Teutonic mind’, and ‘feeling for nature’, the paucity of summer landscapes in Old English poetry, though not absolute, remains a remarkable fact contrasting with a considerable body of barren landscapes and winter scenes. This disparity continues to be observed by scholars today, though often in passing.

While scholarship of the mid-twentieth century likewise took an interest in medieval nature imagery, it employed a different paradigm, based on the understanding that landscape descriptions in much of Western literature are highly conventional. At times, this approach was given so absolute a form that landscape was now understood as a self-contained tradition with little bearing on the world inhabited by the culture that described it. Instead, the emphasis came to rest on classical motifs, resulting in a series of studies tracing the depiction of such motifs from the classical to the medieval tradition.