English 101: English Literature

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We'll go over some quick medieval history to situate some of the major literary works of the time period. We're going from Caedmon and Beowulf, writing in Old English, all the way up to Sir Thomas Malory's collections of the Arthur myths in late Middle English.

Welcome to the wild and crazy world of medieval literature! We've got dragons, we've got King Arthur, we've got knights, we've got some more dragons. It's pretty awesome. I don't know about you, but I played with the Lego castle constantly when I was a kid. I designed booby traps that were dumping stuff on people coming through the portcullis; I was obsessed. And you should be too. Think about all that stuff and get yourself really excited. That should help you through the sometimes frustrating, but also rewarding, study of medieval literature.

Early and High Middle Ages

We're going to start, naturally, with the Early Middle Ages, which basically starts when the Romans clear out in about 400 A.D. The Romans had been hanging out since around 50 A.D. or so. There's a lot of Roman stuff in Britain. There's this town called Bath that's named after a Roman bath that was there and actually still is there. You can go look at it; it's kind of cool. So that's the Romans. They clear out around 400 A.D., and there's a period of chaos and figuring out who should be in charge of stuff. Then the Normans come in and invade from France. William the Conqueror is the guy associated with them, and he comes in and conquers. You can remember his name because he conquers things.

This scoots us along into what's known as the High Middle Ages. No, it's not that kind of 'high.' They're high because they're the big ones, the late ones. That's when all the stuff you might have seen in Robin Hood takes place - King John, Richard the Lionheart's off at the Crusades; they weren't animals, they were real - so that's around 1150-1215. Then we head into the Black Plague, or Black Death, around 1350. You've probably heard of that. Tons of people died, and stuff got crazy. There were these doctors that would go around with beaks on their noses to keep out the vapors; it was weird. Around that time, they're fighting the Hundred Years' War in France, and that lasts for about a hundred years, from 1337 to 1453. Then we're kind of moving out of the Middle Ages in 1485, when the Tudors take the throne, and we're on our way into the Renaissance. (Side note: I don't know if I should be advocating this, but you should watch The Tudors. Don't believe it, but watch it.)

That was a lot of stuff we covered from a long period of time, but we kind of laid out the general sweep of things. Now it's time to figure out Who was writing? and What were they writing? Per capita, there actually weren't a lot of people writing because not a lot of people were literate. People associated with the church could read, and people who were highborn could probably read. A lot of the oral traditions couldn't survive unless someone who was literate wrote them down. That was the case for the first piece of medieval lit we're going to talk about, which is called Caedmon's Hymn.

Caedmon's Hymn

Caedmon's Hymn is the earliest recorded poem in Old English. Old English has the word 'English' in it, but you won't be able to read it if you try. It's super old (obviously) and pretty far removed from modern English - it's basically a foreign language to us. Caedmon himself was illiterate, so this was composed orally. It was written down by a guy named the Venerable Bede around the seventh century A.D. He wrote it in Latin, and that's the reason we have it, because this literate guy wrote it down.

A few things about it, it's composed in something called alliterative verse, which is kind of interesting. Instead of rhyming, in order to structure the poetry, what they do is have a bunch of words in the same line start with the same letter. You've probably heard of alliteration like 'The angry alligator ate Andy.' It's basically that but in poetry, and instead of a rhyme structure they had an alliterative structure. Each line in this hymn also had a caesura, which is basically just a break, or pause, in the middle of each line. And, like modern hymns, it was about praising God. So that's Caedmon's Hymn.

Beowulf

Moving right along, next we've got Beowulf (which we'll have a whole lesson on, but I'll give a brief overview). Caedmon's Hymn, we know that a guy named Caedmon wrote it because that's what we call it, but Beowulf, we don't know who wrote it. It's anonymous; we don't know the dude who wrote Beowulf. It's quite similar in some ways to Caedmon's Hymn - a lot of Old English poetry does that alliterative verse and caesura thing. But it's also really, really long, so it's quite different in that respect. It's actually called an epic; that's its classification. It's about a guy named Beowulf who helps out this guy named Hrothgar who's king of the Danes (that's Denmark a long time ago). Beowulf comes and kills Grendel, who's been terrorizing their mead hall - Oh no, not the mead hall! That's where they'd hang out and drink! - then Grendel's mom comes and takes revenge and Beowulf goes and kills her. Then he goes home and becomes king of his people, ends up fighting a dragon and dies a noble hero's death.

That's the very brief summary of Beowulf, but the interesting thing about it is there's a lot of debate about whether it was passed down in the oral tradition for awhile and then written down or whether it was written down around when it was composed. We don't really know. It was written down around 1000 A.D. and could have been composed as early as the eighth century. It's the kind of thing scholars like to fight about, which is not as exciting as it sounds.

More Old English

Is there anything else in Old English? Yeah, there's a ton of stuff, all pretty small. We won't talk about anything individually. There are poems called elegiac poems that are about life and wisdom; they're not as long as epics. Old English people were also really into writing riddles. Kind of like 'What is black and white and red all over?' but more interesting and cool and ancient. And they also wrote a lot about saints because they were religious folk. There's a genre called Saints' Lives that got a lot of play back then.

Middle English Works

Now we're going to move on to Middle English, which as I said roughly corresponds with the High Middle Ages that were ushered in with William the Conqueror coming in and conquering stuff. He brought in sort of a Norman, 'Frenchy' influence that really started to get into the language and we get Middle English. This is much closer to modern English, and you can actually understand it if you squint really hard at it. As an example, 'This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart.' Take a close look at it: 'This Nicholas let fly a fart.' Congrats, you can read Middle English. That line was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, who's one of the most famous Middle English writers. We have a whole mess of videos on him, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. He was writing in the 1300s and is most famous for a little thing called The Canterbury Tales. It's actually kind of a big thing. There's sex in it and violence and farting obviously, so it's pretty cool.

Who else wrote in Middle English? There's an anonymous guy who we call the Pearl Poet because he wrote something called The Pearl, but he also wrote something called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sir Gawain was a knight of Arthur's Round Table, which is really exciting. Arthur wasn't in our history; he didn't come up. That's because he doesn't really exist, but he does exist all over literature, which is cool. We'll get to more of him later. So the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain is our first introduction to that. Then we have a guy whose name we do know (the Pearl Poet was anonymous, which is why we call him by his work), William Langland. He was also writing in the 1300s and wrote an allegorical poem called Piers Plowman. Allegorical just means that the story is a big metaphor for something else. In this case, the main dude in Piers Plowman falls asleep and has a vision that's an allegory for heaven, hell and the people on earth. Then we've got John Gower. He's another poet writing in 1300s - there were a bunch of them - and he was actually really good friends with Chaucer. He wrote in lots of languages but is most famous for a work called the Confessio Amantis, which doesn't sound like it would be in English but it is. The title isn't; it just means The Lover's Confession.

Those are the major dudes writing in Middle English. Some women wrote in Middle English, so we're just going to knock them out. We've got Margery Kempe who wrote or, rather, dictated The Book of Margery Kempe. She was basically writing about what it was like to be a woman in the Middle Ages, which does not sound fun. She had 14 children, which is insane, and lived to tell the tale obviously. There's another woman named Julian of Norwich. She was a very religious woman, kind of a hermit; the technical term is anchoress. She didn't go out much, she just wrote about God a lot. She wrote Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. There's a famous line in it, which is 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' This actually ends up being quoted in a much later 20th-century poem by T.S. Eliot, which is how it gets into the tradition in a neat way.

We're almost done. There's one more dude I want to talk about, who's almost not in the Middle Ages. He was in 1485, which if you remember was right when the Tudors were coming in, right at the end. It's still Middle English, but it's much closer to modern English than the other things we've talked about. This guy is Sir Thomas Malory, and he wrote a little thing called Le Morte d'Arthur, which is all about Arthur. (It translates to The Death of Arthur.) It's got all of our favorite Arthurian things in it: Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, that little romance thing, Morgan Le Fay, who's Arthur's weird half sister, and their accidental kid named Mordred. I guess they didn't know that they were half siblings, and he's their kid, which is creepy. What Thomas Malory is doing is really collecting all of the Arthurian legends - and a few totally original ones he wrote himself - and putting them in this book. So it's a real source for a lot of the later stuff that we think of when we think about Arthur; it's his compilation of Arthur legends.

Lesson Summary

We've done a lot. We've gone through the basic Early to Late Middle Ages transition corresponding with the Old to Middle English transition. We've talked about Beowulf, we've talked about Caedmon's Hymn, we've talked about all sorts of Middle English poets like Chaucer, William Langland, the Pearl Poet (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), John Gower (friend of Chaucer), we've talked about the women like Margery Kempe (wrote the autobiography) and Julian of Norwich (super religious) and we've talked about Sir Thomas Malory, who did the Arthurian compilation book that tells us what we know about Arthur today. Those are the greatest hits of medieval lit; I hope you enjoyed them!