LECTURE 01

1.1. Периодизация литературы. конецформыначалоформыВозникновение и распространение христианства, его доминирующая роль в жизни средневекового общества. конецформыначалоформыГимн Кэдмона как образец древнеанглийской поэзии.

1.1.1. English Literature is the literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present. The works of those Irish and Scottish authors who are closely identified with English life and letters are also considered part of English literature. The first period of its development extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman-French conquest of England. The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th century, after the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, language, which is the basis of Modern English. They brought also a specific poetic tradition, the formal character of which remained surprisingly constant until the termination of their rule by the Norman-French invaders six centuries later.

Exactly 1560 years ago, in AD 449, the tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes descended on Britain.

By the end of the sixth century, the new masters of England had become a Christian people. It was chiefly due to the energy of the Christian evangelists from Ireland, who came over to convert them. That is why all the records of the early literature of the Anglo-Saxons belong to a Christian England. It was written by clerks in monasteries, kept stored in monasteries, and came to light only at the time of the Reformation, at the end of the period under discussion. For many centuries that literature was obscure.

Probably, the first memorable piece of Christian literature to appear in the Anglo-Saxon England was Caedmon’s Hymn.

Caedmon (650? – 680) is considered to be the earliest of the Anglo-Saxon Christian poets. The only information concerning Caedmon is in the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (731), by the English theologian Saint Bede the Venerable. According to Bede, Caedmon was an illiterate herdsmаn who had a vision one night and heard a voice commanding him to sing of “the beginning of created things.” Later Caedmon supposedly wrote the poem about the creation known as Caedmon's Hymn, which Bede recorded in prose. Bede further states that Saint Hilda, the abbess of a nearby monastery, recognized Caedmon's poetic ability and invited him to enter the monastery as a lay brother. Caedmon spent the rest of his life at the monastery writing poetry on biblical themes. The only work that can be attributed to Caedmon is “Hymn of Creation,” which Saint Bede quoted. It survives in several manuscripts of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and contains several dialects.

Beowulf is generally considered to be the work of an anonymous 8th-century Anglian poet who fused Scandinavian history and pagan mythology with Christian elements. The poem consists of 3182 lines, each line having four accents marked by alliteration and divided into two parts by a caesura. The structure of the typical Beowulf line comes through in modern translation:

Then from the moorland, by misty crags,

with God's wrath laden, Grendel came.

The monster was minded of mankind now

sundry to seize in the stately house.

Under welkin he walked, till the wine-palace there,

gold-hall of men, he gladly discerned,

flashing with fretwork. Not first time, this,

that he the home of Hrothgar sought, -

yet ne'er in his life-day, late or early,

such hardy heroes, such hall-thanes, found!

To the house the warrior walked apace,

parted from peace; the portal opened,

though with forged bolts fast, when his fists had struck it,

and baleful he burst in his blatant rage,

the house's mouth. All hastily, then,

o'er fair-paved floor the fiend trod on,

ireful he strode; there streamed from his eyes

fearful flashes, like flame to see.

The somber story is told in vigorous, picturesque language, with heavy use of metaphor. In fact, much of the violence of Beowulf derives from the nature of Old English itself.

1.3. “Битва при Мэлдоне” – первая подлинно англосаксонская эпическая поэма. Понятие об аллитерационном стихе древнеанглийской поэзии.

1.3.1. A later but already genuinely Anglo-Saxon example of that 'violent' language is the poem entitled Battle of Maldon. It is one thousand years old. The poem has been called the greatest battle poem in English. Written by an unknown poet, it describes a battle between the English and Viking warriors from Denmark in AD 991 at Maldon in Essex on the River Blackwater, called the River Pantan in those times. The Danish invaders are on an island at the mouth of the river waiting for the tide to go out. Byrhtnoth, the earl of Essex, is at the head of the English warriors on the mainland. A messenger from the Danes offers peace, if they pay a sum of money. Byrhtnoth rejects the offer. He is far too confident and is tricked into letting the enemy cross to the mainland. And the battle begins, in which the earl perishes, and many of his men run away. But a brave few continue to fight...

1.3.2. What do we understand about the nature of Old English poetry? No doubt, it was essentially an oral phenomenon, to be accompanied by harp music. Each line is divided into two halves, and each half has two heavy stresses. And the so-called head-rhyme is used. Head-rhyme means making words begin with the same sound (i.e. it is not exactly what alliteration – beginning with the same letter – seems to be). It appears to be quite congenial with the nature of the language. Though later poetry has been traditionally using end-rhyme, this old head-rhyme has always had some influence on English writing. It can be easily traced in everyday speech in expressions from the good old days like 'a pig in a poke' or 'fit as a fiddle'. In this light, the Russian translation of Battle of Maldon does convey the spirit of the language.

In the Old English tradition, using head-rhymes was a device that needed a lot of imagination on the part of the poet. Those people often had to call common things by uncommon names just inventing a head-rhyme for an immediate purpose. Thus, the sea becomes the swan's way or the whale's road or the sail-path.

2.1. конецформыначалоформыДжефри Чосер как основоположник реализма и литературного английского языка. Микрокосм средневековья в «Кентерберийских рассказах». Влияние Чосера на развитие английской литературы.

2.1.1. In the Middle Ages English literature experienced a great breakthrough which is associated with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?-1400). He is one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on the development of English literature. His life is known primarily through records pertaining to his career as a courtier and civil servant under the English kings Edward III and Richard II.

The son of a prosperous London wine merchant, Chaucer may have attended the Latin grammar school of Saint Paul's Cathedral and may have studied law at the Inns of Court. Early in his teens, he was page to the countess of Ulster, Elizabeth; there, he would have learned the ways of the court and the use of arms. He married a lady-in-waiting to the queen and afterward served as controller of customs for London. He traveled on several diplomatic missions to France, to Spain and to Italy. In the last year of his life, Chaucer leased a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. After his death, he was buried in the Abbey (an honor for a commoner), in what has since become Poets' Corner.

Chaucer wrote for and may have read his works aloud to a select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. Chaucer also translated and adapted religious, historical, and philosophical works.

Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex that the work has also been called the first modern novel.

By 1387 Chaucer was engaged on his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. It is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Saint Thomas а Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of English society of the time. Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time; each of the 30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to tell four tales on the round round trip. Chaucer completed less than a quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of separate blocks of one or more tales with links introducing and joining stories within a block.

The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at its best. The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story.

After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor); the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers. The prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are high points of Chaucer's art. The Wife, an outspoken champion of her gender against the traditional antifeminism of the church, initiates a series of tales about sex, marriage, and nobility (“gentilesse”).

Although Chaucer satirizes the abuses of the church, he also includes a number of didactic and religious tales. Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and meters. He was the first English poet to use the seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter known as rhyme royal and the couplet later called heroic. Chaucer dominated the works of his 15th-century English followers. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer. Edmund Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the plays of William Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the father of English poetry.

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