Wednesday 26 December 2018

'Mary hath borne alone'

Virgin and Child, from a 15th-century Book of Hours (BL Add. 50001, f. 119v)

Mary hath borne alone
The Son of God in throne.

That maiden mild her child did keep
As mothers doth echone, [as all mothers do]
But her dear son full sore did weep
For sinful man alone.

She rocked him and sung 'Lullay',
But ever he made great moan.
'Dear son,' she said, 'tell, I thee pray,
Why dost thy weep alone?'

'Mother,' he said, 'I shall be slain,
Who sin did never none,
And suffer death with woeful pain;
Therefore I weep alone.'

'Lullay,' she said, 'sleep and be still,
And let be all thy moan,
For all thing is at thine own will
In heaven and earth alone.'

'Mother,' he said, 'how should I sleep?
How should I leave my moan?
I have more cause to sob and weep,
Since I shall die alone.'

'Dear son,' she said, 'the king of bliss,
That is so high in throne,
Knoweth that thou didst never amiss,
Why shouldest thou die alone?'

'Mother,' he said, 'only of thee
I took both flesh and bone,
To save mankind and make it free
With my heart blood alone.'

'Dear son,' she said, 'thou art equal
To God, that is in throne,
For man therefore, that is so thrall,
Why shouldest thou die alone?'

'Mother,' he said, 'my father's will
And mine, they be but one;
Therefore by skill I must fulfill [for this reason I must fulfill]
My father's will alone.'

'Dear son,' she said, 'since thou hast take
Of me both flesh and bone,
If it may be, me not forsake
In care and woe alone.'

'For man I must the ransom pay,
The which to hell is gone,
Mother,' he said, 'on Good Friday,
For he may not alone.' [man cannot do this by himself]

'Dear son,' she said unto him tho [then]
'When thou from me art gone,
Then shall I live in care and woe
Without comfort alone.'

'Mother,' he said, 'take thou no thought,
For me make thou no moan;
When I have bought that I have wrought, [when I have redeemed what I created]
Thou shalt not be alone.'

'On the third day, I thee behight, [promise]
After that I am gone,
I will arise by my great might
And comfort thee alone.'

Baby Jesus (BL Add. 50001, f. 95v)

This is a poem from a manuscript of carols which was compiled by the Canterbury friar James Ryman at the end of the fifteenth century. Ryman's manuscript (now CUL MS. Ee 1.12) contains more than 150 carols on a range of topics and in varying moods, from a cheery farewell to Advent fasting to stately songs in praise of the Virgin Mary and sombre songs like this one. In this week's Catholic Herald I've written a short piece about medieval Christmas celebrations, with an emphasis on festivity and fun and all the things people in the Middle Ages did to celebrate the season, and medieval carols give us some lively pictures of that merriment. But amid the jollity there is another strain, which seeks to explore something more serious, sad, and strange. Medieval carols can speak of joy, comfort, liberation - but they can also imagine a tiny baby telling his mother 'I shall die alone.'

At this time of year medieval images of the Nativity are to be found everywhere, and they usually look serene and beautiful - gazing mother, quiet baby, angels adoring. Some medieval Nativity carols are like this too, but others - a surprisingly large number - offer Nativity scenes which are not peaceful but deeply painful and poignant: the baby Jesus shivering in the cold, or crying and screeching, while Mary and Joseph lament their poverty. I wrote about one particularly powerful example in detail here, but I think this one, gentle and dignified and sad, is my favourite example of the theme:

Child, it is a wepyng dale that thou art comen in;
Thy poure cloutes it proven wel, thy bed made in the bynne;
Cold and hunger thou most thoeln, as thou were geten in synne,
And after deyen on the tree for love of all mankynne.
Lullay, lullay, litel child, no wonder thogh thou care,
Thou art comen amonges hem that thy deeth shullen yare.

The central idea in all these poems is that we live in a 'weeping world', a place of many sorrows; this baby faces pain and death in his future because he has come to share that sorrow, to feel the grief that all human beings feel, and to suffer for our sake.

In James Ryman's poem the keyword, repeated again and again, is that poignant alone. The carol plays delicately with the different shades of meaning this word had in Middle English, so it doesn't quite mean the same thing every time it is used here: sometimes it means 'solitary', but it also means 'only', conveying the sense that this child alone, by his death, can save mankind. In response to Mary's confusion about why her child should suffer by his Father's will, alone also emphasises the unity of will between the Father and the Son (they are 'all one'). No wonder poor Mary struggles to understand, and the carol follows several stages of her confusion and her attempts at comfort: if everything in the universe is at her baby's command, she wonders, what can there be to cry about? She knows her child's power, and his nature - that he is God, equal with his Father - but not what that means, or what it will mean for her. His death alone is also his choice alone; her child is God enough to choose his own death, and yet human enough to weep for it.

It's Mary's reaction which makes this poem particularly moving, especially when she begins to comprehend, and asks him not to leave her: 'If it may be, me not forsake / In care and woe alone.' The force of her grief is reminiscent (perhaps deliberately so) of the powerful dialogues between Mary and Christ on the cross, such as 'Stond wel, moder, under rode', where she clings to her son and cannot let him go, though he begs her to let him die. There she learns, her son tells her, a common sorrow: 'What pain they endure who children bear, / What sorrow they have who children lose.' In her grief she gains kinship with all mothers, just as Christ, becoming a crying baby, shares a pain we all have known.

This genre of medieval poem can be painful reading at Christmastime, but it seems more honest and clear-eyed than the sentimentality which often surrounds a modern Christmas; there is no expectation here that everyone is happy and jolly, living the perfect life which really exists only in Christmas adverts and newspaper supplements. In truth many people at Christmas do feel very much alone; this is a season which, precisely because of its expectation of pleasure, draws painful attention to absences in our lives - whether a specific person or place we are missing, or a more general sense of something we wish to have and don't. These poems offer companionship in that sorrow. Their predominant mood is compassion, in its literal sense: Christ has come into this 'weeping world' to suffer with us. This baby grieves for us, and the idea is that we should be moved by these poems to feel compassion for him and for his mother. It's almost impossible not to, just as it's hard to hear a crying baby and not respond to it. These poems seek to provoke a stirring of what Middle English poets called kynd love - the love which is innate to all creatures, a part of our essential nature, which comes ultimately from God and can be trained to lead us back to him. The love between a mother and her baby is the most kynd instinct in the human heart, Julian of Norwich says; and so she explains why God chose to become a child to his mother that he might be a mother to us all:
Our kynd Mother, our gracious Mother, for he would all wholly become our Mother in all things, he took the ground of his work full low and full mildly in the maiden’s womb... Our high God, the sovereign wisdom of all, in this low place he arrayed him and dyte him [prepared himself] full ready in our poor flesh, himself to do the service and the office of motherhood in all things. The mother’s service is nearest, readiest, and surest. Nearest for it is most of kynd, readiest for it is most of love, and surest for it is most of truth. This office might not nor could never be done to the full but by him alone. We know that all our mothers bear us to pain and to dying. And what is that but our very Mother Jesus? He, all love, beareth us to joy and to endless living...

This fair, lovely word mother, it is so sweet and so kynd of itself that it may not verily be said of none nor to none but of him and to him who is very Mother of life and of all... And in this I saw that all our debts that we owe, by God’s bidding, to fatherhood and motherhood is fulfilled in true loving of God, which blessed love Christ worketh in us; and this was shewed in all, and namely in the high plenteous words where he sayeth, I it am that thou lovest.

Miniature Nativity (BL Add. 50001, f. 100v)

Saturday 22 December 2018

The Anglo-Saxon O Antiphons: O wondrous exchange

Grimbald Gospels, made in Canterbury in the 11th century, BL Add. 34890, f. 115

This is the last section of the Anglo-Saxon poem inspired by the Advent O Antiphons. It follows directly on from the section in my last post (comprising lines 416-439 of the poem), and is based on the antiphon 'O admirabile commercium', which has been set to music by a number of composers.

Eala hwæt, þæt is wræclic wrixl in wera life,
þætte moncynnes milde scyppend
onfeng æt fæmnan flæsc unwemme,
ond sio weres friga wiht ne cuþe,
ne þurh sæd ne cwom sigores agend
monnes ofer moldan; ac þæt wæs ma cræft
þonne hit eorðbuend ealle cuþan
þurh geryne, hu he, rodera þrim,
heofona heahfrea, helpe gefremede
monna cynne þurh his modor hrif.
Ond swa forðgongende folca nergend
his forgifnesse gumum to helpe
dæleð dogra gehwam, dryhten weoroda.
Forþon we hine domhwate dædum ond wordum
hergen holdlice. þæt is healic ræd
monna gehwylcum þe gemynd hafað,
þæt he symle oftost ond inlocast
ond geornlicost god weorþige.
He him þære lisse lean forgildeð,
se gehalgoda hælend sylfa,
efne in þam eðle þær he ær ne cwom,
in lifgendra londes wynne,
þær he gesælig siþþan eardað,
ealne widan feorh wunað butan ende. Amen.

O, that is a wondrous exchange in the life of men!
that mankind's merciful Creator
received from a maiden flesh unmarred,
and she had not known the love of a man,
nor did the Lord of Victory come
by the seed of a human on earth; but that was a more skilful art
than all earth-dwellers could comprehend
in its mystery, how he, glory of the skies,
high lord of the heavens, brought help
to the race of men through his mother's womb.
And coming forth thus, the Saviour of the peoples
deals out his forgiveness every day
to help mankind, Lord of hosts.
And so we, eager for glory, praise him
devotedly in deeds and words. That is high wisdom
in every person who has understanding,
ever to most often and most intently
and most eagerly praise God.
He will grant him the reward of grace,
the holy Saviour himself,
even in that homeland where he never before came,
in the joy of the land of the living,
where he will dwell, blessed, from thenceforth,
live forever without end. Amen.

Virgin and Child (BL Add. 49598, f. 22v)

What strikes me about this section of the poem is its ending, which offers something quite different from anything that has come before - in pronouns, if nothing else! (What could be more Christmassy than a bit of poetic grammar?) When human beings appear in Christ I, it's usually in the plural: either as the plural pronouns 'we' and 'us' or as multitudes of humanity, 'speech-bearers' and 'earth-dwellers'. Mary, exalted in her uniqueness, is an important exception; in the whole 439-line poem only Mary and Joseph (and on one occasion an angel) speak in the first person singular. Otherwise this poem is full of groups and collective voices, of human beings and of angels alike. But here, though we don't get a first-person voice, we get a brief closing image of a single person: someone þe gemynd hafað, 'who has gemynd'. I always find gemynd difficult to translate; it refers to the powers of the mind, particularly memory and recollection, but also intellect and wisdom. Any of those (and probably all of them) are possible connotations of gemynd here. I'm sometimes tempted to translate it with the relatively modern word mindfulness: in the sense people use that word today it suggests a collected power of conscious, intentional reflection, and that's rather what this poet is suggesting. This individual with whom the poem closes is anyone who chooses to gather up the powers of their mind, to reflect upon the mysterious 'exchange' of human flesh and holy spirit, and - here at the end of the poem - to hold in memory all that has come before. By doing so this 'he' (who is any of us) comes to an eternal joy which is expressed, oddly but rather beautifully, in a closing muddle of pronouns:

He him þære lisse lean forgildeð,
se gehalgoda hælend sylfa,
efne in þam eðle þær he ær ne cwom,
in lifgendra londes wynne,
þær he gesælig siþþan eardað,
ealne widan feorh wunað butan ende. 

He will grant him the reward of grace,
the holy Saviour himself,

even in that homeland where he never came before,
in the joy of the land of the living,
where he will dwell, blessed, from thenceforth,
live forever without end.

Who is 'he' here? Sometimes clearly Christ, and sometimes the mindful man, but the last, at least, might well be both. Perhaps they become one in that strange place, a final wonder from a poem full of marvels: a land where humans have never yet been, but which is their true home.

Tuesday 18 December 2018

The Anglo-Saxon O Antiphons: O Beautiful Trinity

The Trinity, with Mary ('Ælfwine's Prayerbook', BL Cotton Titus D XXVII, f.75v)

In the last week before Christmas, I'd like to turn once again to the Anglo-Saxon poem inspired by the 'O Antiphons', texts sung at Vespers in the closing days of Advent. You may have sung or heard a version of these texts without knowing it, because some of them are the basis of the popular hymn 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'; and more than a thousand years ago an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet used them as the basis for a dramatic, beautiful and allusive poem, which today is known as the Advent Lyrics or as Christ I.

This poem is the first text in the precious manuscript called the Exeter Book (currently to be seen sitting alongside three other major manuscripts of Old English poetry - together with many other items which testify to the richness of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture - in the British Library's Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition). It's an intricate poem, which repays close and attentive reading - meditative reading - and over the past few years I've translated and discussed different sections of the poem, one by one. Here are links to those posts, in the order in which they appear in the poem (not the order in which I, illogically, wrote them!):

O rex gentium (lines 1-17)
O clavis David (18-49)
O Jerusalem (50-70)
O virgo virginum (71-103)
O oriens (104-129)
O Emmanuel (130-163)
O Joseph (164-213)
O rex pacifice (214-274)
O mundi domina (275-347)
O caelorum domine (348-377)

Most commonly today seven O Antiphons are used, which are all addressed directly to Christ, but in medieval practice there were other antiphons grouped with these which meditate on other figures in the story of the Incarnation. In the Anglo-Saxon poem several of the sections focus on Mary, including a wonderful sequence I looked at in detail last year, as well as a dialogue between Mary and Joseph. There are also two - the last in the whole sequence - which are more general reflections on Advent themes, and I'll look at those this week.

First, a poem addressed to the Trinity (lines 378-415 of Christ I). It's not entirely clear which antiphon may have inspired this section, but as you read the translation you may spot allusions to some other, much more familiar, liturgical texts.

Eala seo wlitige, weorðmynda full,
heah ond halig, heofoncund þrynes,
brade geblissad geond brytenwongas
þa mid ryhte sculon reordberende,
earme eorðware ealle mægene
hergan healice, nu us hælend god
wærfæst onwrah þæt we hine witan moton.
Forþon hy, dædhwæte, dome geswiðde,
þæt soðfæste seraphinnes cynn,
uppe mid englum a bremende,
unaþreotendum þrymmum singað
ful healice hludan stefne,
fægre feor ond neah. Habbaþ folgoþa
cyst mid cyninge. Him þæt Crist forgeaf,
þæt hy motan his ætwiste eagum brucan
simle singales, swegle gehyrste,
weorðian waldend wide ond side,
ond mid hyra fiþrum frean ælmihtges
onsyne weardiað, ecan dryhtnes,
ond ymb þeodenstol þringað georne
hwylc hyra nehst mæge ussum nergende
flihte lacan friðgeardum in.
Lofiað leoflicne ond in leohte him
þa word cweþað, ond wuldriað
æþelne ordfruman ealra gesceafta:
Halig eart þu, halig, heahengla brego,
soð sigores frea, simle þu bist halig,
dryhtna dryhten! A þin dom wunað
eorðlic mid ældum in ælce tid
wide geweorþad. Þu eart weoroda god,
forþon þu gefyldest foldan ond rodoras,
wigendra hleo, wuldres þines,
helm alwihta. Sie þe in heannessum
ece hælo, ond in eorþan lof,
beorht mid beornum. Þu gebletsad leofa,
þe in dryhtnes noman dugeþum cwome
heanum to hroþre. Þe in heahþum sie
a butan ende ece herenis.

O beautiful, plenteous in honours,
high and holy, heavenly Trinity
blessed far abroad across the spacious plains,
who by right speech-bearers,
wretched earth-dwellers, should supremely praise
with all their power, now God, true to his pledge,
has revealed a Saviour to us, that we may know him.
And so the ones swift in action, endowed with glory,
that truth-fast race of seraphim
and the angels above, ever praising,
sing with untiring strength
on high with resounding voices,
most beautifully far and near. They have
a special office with the King: to them Christ granted
that they might enjoy his presence with their eyes,
forever without end, radiantly adorned,
worship the Ruler afar and wide,
and with their wings guard the face
of the Lord almighty, eternal God,
and eagerly throng around the prince's throne,
whichever of them can swoop in flight
nearest to our Saviour in those courts of peace.
They adore the Beloved One, and within the light
speak these words to him, and worship
the noble originator of all created things:
'Holy are you, holy, Prince of the high angels,
true Lord of Victories, forever are you holy,
Lord of Lords! Your glory will remain eternally
on earth among mortals in every age,
honoured far and wide. You are the God of hosts,
for you have filled earth and heaven
with your glory, Shelter of warriors,
Helm of all creatures. Eternal salvation
be to you on high, and on earth praise,
bright among men. Dearly blessed are you,
who come in the name of the Lord to the multitudes,
to be a comfort to the lowly. To you be eternal praise
in the heights, forever without end.'

The Trinity, surrounded by angels with multi-coloured wings
(from the Grimbald Gospels, made in Canterbury in the 11th century, BL Add. 34890, f. 114v)

This is a poem peopled by many beings: the Trinity, multitudes of angels, and all of us creatures here on earth. It opens with the Trinity - the Old English word for that is simply þrynes, 'threeness' - and a triplet of alliterating adjectives, a little trinity of words: heah, halig, heofoncund 'high, holy, heavenly'. The first seven lines reflect on this threeness and its relationship to us, the eorðware, 'earth-dwellers'. There's another beautiful triplet in the sixth line, which packs together all in one half-line us hælend god, 'us, Saviour, God' (i.e. '[to] us a Saviour God [has revealed]'). The syntax underlines the idea that the Saviour (hælend means 'healer, saviour' but is also the usual name for 'Jesus' in Old English) unites us and God - a meaningful bit of grammar it's difficult to reproduce in translation.

As often in Old English religious verse, human beings - you and me - are here called 'speech-bearers', reordberende. This is a word which might perhaps be familiar from The Dream of the Rood, and it's a kenning which defines human beings by their ability to speak; but Anglo-Saxon poets were interested too in all the other creatures who might also have, or be imagined to have, voices of their own. In The Dream of the Rood it's when human 'speech-bearers' are asleep that a solitary wakeful listener is able to hear the voice of Christ's cross, a tree speaking to him out of the silence and the darkness. And in this poem, the loudest voices are those of the angels - not us earth-dwelling reordberende. They are 'ever praising', singing unaþreotendum þrymmum 'with untiring strength', beautifully and with voices which resound through the universe.

Christ and angels (BL Harley 603, f. 69v)

The angels here are a busy flock of flying creatures, 'eagerly' pressing close to the throne of God:

hwylc hyra nehst mæge ussum nergende
flihte lacan friðgeardum in.

whichever of them can swoop in flight
nearest to our Saviour in those courts of peace.

This is a lovely moment: lacan is a verb which means (as one dictionary defines it) 'to swing, wave about, move as a ship does on the waves, as a bird does in its flight, as flames do'. It's a free and unfettered movement, full of life and energy. The angels are like a flock of birds in flight, a murmuration swooping with one intent and calling with one voice: halig, halig, halig. This is an unearthly sight, but in those heavenly courts the king they serve is not a stranger: he's called ussum nergende, 'our Saviour', and he belongs to the earthbound as well as to the angels.

Within the light of heaven, they sing the words which human voices can join - and do join every time the Mass is celebrated, cum angelis et archangelis. Here the poem is drawing on a number of Biblical and liturgical texts which allude to the angels, but especially on the Sanctus and Benedictus:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

The Old English poet is directly using this liturgical source (which he presumably knew in Latin) and yet in the middle of the passage translating the Sanctus, there are also two epithets which seem to belong to another world - non angeli, sed angli! God is called wigendra hleo, 'shelter of warriors', a phrase used in Anglo-Saxon poetry of kings and heroes; exactly the same phrase is used in Beowulf of Hrothgar, of the hero Sigemund, and of Beowulf himself. The word hleo means 'shelter' or 'refuge' (it survives in the word 'lee', as in 'leeward' or the lee of a hill - the side sheltered from the wind). It's paired here with the phrase helm alwihta, 'helm of all creatures', another kingly epithet. This too is a form of protection - a helm is a covering, a literal covering like a helmet or a metaphorical one like the 'helm' of night above the earth. So God is imagined as the lord and guardian and beloved leader of a heavenly troop, those flocks of angels, and of an earthly one too - the multitudes of the lowly, to whom comfort is coming.

 Christ with angels (BL Harley 603, f. 71)

Saturday 1 December 2018

'If in day of Doom one deathless stands'

Readers of this blog may be interested in watching this series of talks given recently in Oxford (in connection with the Bodleian Library's exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth) on the subject of the medieval languages which interested and influenced Tolkien. There were lectures on Old and Middle English, Medieval Welsh, Gothic and Old Norse (my contribution). If you're interested in Tolkien, the whole archive is worth exploring - the Bodleian have made available talks dating back to 2008, on a range of topics relating to Tolkien and his works.



In my lecture I talked about Tolkien's interest in Old Norse and especially in the legend of the Völsungs, which he explored in his long poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. This text interests me because it's such an individual take on the story; though it arises from a deep engagement with the medieval sources, it's far from a straightforward retelling of the legend. There are several ways in which this is true, but in the lecture I focused on the element of Tolkien's retelling which interests me the most: his Christian-inflected retelling of the story of Ragnarök. This too is highly individual, and while some lovers of Norse mythology might feel it detracts from the powerful bleakness of the Ragnarök myth, Tolkien's version has a poignant beauty of its own. His Sigurd, dragon-slayer, is not just a great hero but a Christ-like figure, the Chosen One (that's Tolkien's proposed interpretation of Völsung): the promised Saviour, the fulfilment of prophecies, whose return at the end of time will be the salvation of the world.

A seer long silent
her song upraised –
the halls hearkened –
on high she stood.
Of doom and death
dark words she spake,
of the last battle
of the leaguered Gods.

'The horn of Heimdal
I hear ringing;
the Blazing Bridge
bends neath horsemen;
the Ash is groaning,
his arms trembling,
the Wolf waking,
warriors riding.

The sword of Surt
smoketh redly;
the slumbering Serpent
in the sea moveth;
a shadowy ship
from shores of Hell
legions bringeth
to the last battle.

The wolf Fenrir
waits for Ódin,
for Frey the fair
the flames of Surt;
the deep Dragon
shall be doom of Thór –
shall all be ended,
shall Earth perish?

If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Ódin,
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head shall be helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
The Serpent shall shiver
and Surt waver,
the Wolf be vanquished
and the world rescued.'

(Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (2009), pp. 62-3)

Some of this is drawing on (in places directly translating) the description of Ragnarök in Völuspá, the first poem in the Poetic Edda, but its context and function are very different in Tolkien's poem. The fulfilment of this prophecy, as Odin ensures, is to be Sigurd: he who shall come, 'who death hath tasted / and dies no more.' Tolkien's reworking of Sigurd as a Christ-like figure is done with a light touch - a bit of subtle source-reshaping here, a resonant turn of phrase there - and it takes away nothing from the original story, but invites us to read it in a new light, with new eyes.

All this seems particularly appropriate to think about here at the beginning of Advent, the season which by ancient tradition is not just a preparation for Christmas but an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between prophecies and their fulfilment, between the Old Testament and the New, between the first Advent and the Second Coming at 'the day of Doom'. Tolkien's interpretation of the story of Sigurd is a kind of typological reading of the myth, somewhat like the way medieval readers interpreted the different 'types' for Christ they found in the figures of the Old Testament: Isaac, Moses, Jonah, and more. Those figures and their stories were understood simultaneously to be real historical episodes and to be signs foreshadowing the story of Christ's birth, death and resurrection; neither reading takes anything away from the other, but offers an additional layer of meaning in the divinely-composed narrative of human history.

The idea of a parallel between Sigurd and Christ is something I wrote about a few years ago in this Advent post; there I was discussing the history of the word arkenstone (Old English earcnanstan, Old Norse jarknasteinn), which - as Tolkien must have known - one Old English poem applies to Christ, and one Old Norse poem to Sigurd. The Old English instance occurs in a prophecy, embedded within an account of Christ's second coming at Doomsday:

...æt ærestan
foreþoncle men from fruman worulde
þurh wis gewit, witgan dryhtnes,
halge higegleawe, hæleþum sægdon,
oft, nales æne, ymb þæt æþele bearn,
ðæt se earcnanstan eallum sceolde
to hleo ond to hroþer hæleþa cynne
weorðan in worulde, wuldres agend,
eades ordfruma, þurh þa æþelan cwenn.

...from the beginning,
from the origin of the world, foreknowing men
with their wise wits, prophets of the Lord,
holy ones sage in spirit, spoke to men
often, not once only, of that noble child:
how the precious stone should
come into the world as refuge and comfort
to all the race of men, the ruler of glory,
beginner of bliss, through the noble woman.

This poem is known today as Christ III and as it comes down to us in the Exeter Book (though probably not as originally composed), it stands last in a sequence of three poems which moves from Advent to Apocalypse, from creation to destruction and rebirth - as Völuspá does too, in its different way.

As I've said before, the medieval understanding of Advent was as a season which encourages new and exciting kinds of reading - a season rich in imaginative possibility for those who are prepared to read with the right eyes. Advent is the time when the church reflects on the many different kinds of meaning which Scripture, and the world around us, can reveal: the season for interpreting 'the signs of the times' written in the book of the world, and for reading a Christian interpretation into the prophecies and poetry of the Old Testament (the same kind of light-touch typological reading Tolkien offers in his version of the Sigurd story). The ancient liturgy of Advent is crafted to appeal to all the faculties of the mind and heart which we call upon when we read poetry, or take in stories in any form: it offers metaphor, allegory, foreshadowing, wordplay, expressions of urgent desire, and (especially in the link between Advent and Apocalypse) creative thought experiments with narrative time. Medieval liturgists were some of the greatest literary critics who ever lived - sensitive and imaginative readers of Scripture, who wove together connections between texts, between characters and words and ideas, and between moments in time, and hallowed the very act of reading as a way of trying to understand the mind of God.

There's an imaginative fertility and a reaching ambition about the medieval view of Advent which offers something much richer than just a cheery countdown to Christmas. For many people the basic details of the Christmas story are so familiar that its strangeness and power and meaning have been sucked dry, and it doesn't have the imaginative appeal that other kinds of less well-known mythic story do - the story of Ragnarök, for instance, or the fierce beauty of the Poetic Edda. But Advent can be a yearly exercise in 'making strange' - reading old stories with new eyes.