Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
3 - Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
from PART I - THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
AS IN GERMANY so in England the national poetic heritage was withered at the blighting touch of Christianity. That is how Jacob Grimm saw it:
After the introduction of Christianity the art of poetry took a religious turn, to which we owe many remarkable poems. But the freedom of the poetry and its roots in the people had perished.
Scholars from the first half of the nineteenth century to the present day have followed, in varying degrees of ferocity, Grimm's relatively mild disparagement of the Christian element in the extant Germanic poetry. Throughout, the assumption is made, explicitly or implicitly, that whatever was not touched by Christianity, whatever remained purely Germanic, purely pagan, was more original and more glorious. The quotations that follow show that this fundamental attitude to the literature of the Germanic peoples after their conversion (for no literature survives from before the conversion) has had, and still has, an abiding place in Anglo-Saxon scholarship.
Thomas Wright (1846):
The Saxon bards seem to have possessed most of inspiration while their countrymen retained their paganism. We trace distinctly two periods of their poetry – a period when it was full of freedom, and originality, and genius, and a later time, when the poets were imitators, who made their verse by freely using the thoughts and expressions of those who had gone before them. The religious poetry of the Christian Saxons abounds in passages taken from Beowulf; and probably a large part of what is not imitated from that poem is taken from others of the early Saxon cycles.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 10 - 13Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000