Hwæt! Anglo-Saxon in 1973

Probably the biggest shock to the system back in 1973 was the requirement to study Anglo-Saxon. Most of us had encountered Chaucer, since the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales plus one of the tales was a common package set at A level. I’d read the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale. So we had some idea of an English that was older than Shakespeare’s, but Anglo-Saxon was challenging. The Anglo-Saxon strand of the degree in the first year consisted of a lecture, in which we learned about the history as well as the literature, and a seminar where we would tackle the set texts, translating passages and learning the grammar. In the first term, the lecture concentrated on the history, and the seminar on grammar and vocabulary. In the second term, we explored the literature in more depth. Our texts were Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Anglo-Saxon Reader, together with three long poems: The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. It was tough, but enjoyable, and certainly entailed some concentrated study to enable us to grapple with some very unfamiliar material.

My lecture notes for Anglo-Saxon are headed, to my shame, “Auntie Joyce.” This was Dr Joyce Hill, whose lectures were packed with information, and delivered with enthusiasm. We called her “Auntie”, affectionately, because she had a rather old-fashioned look. She was, we imagined, approaching fifty perhaps, a real bluestocking academic. So, imagine my reaction when I tried to trace what happened to her, and discovered that she is still going strong, delivering lectures on YouTube for the Leeds Civic Society, and writing a column for her church, St Aidan’s. Clearly, the lively, vigorous woman in the recent video footage is not that old, so our youthful estimates must have been very awry. Back in 1973, she must have been much younger than we assumed, probably no more than 30. Her career at Leeds was a notable one, and her profile as an emeritus professor shows the extent of her achievements.

Guided by Joyce Hill, and in my seminar by a PhD student whose name was, I think, Pam, we got to grips with this strange and exhilarating language. Unusually, we did get some handouts to illustrate the subject matter, but most of the time we were reliant on the ancient volumes of Henry Sweet, who was, allegedly, the model for Professor Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. His Primer and Reader had been much revised, but the basis of the books was still what Sweet had published at the end of the nineteenth century, when the study of “Old English” was really in its infancy. The handouts were typed, of course, probably by Audrey Stead, the English Department’s secretary. I wonder how she managed the special characters, like the eth and the thorn on a typewriter?

What did we learn? A lot of history, to begin with. We were encouraged to read Peter Hunter Blair’s Anglo – Saxon England, which was a solid introduction. I see my copy cost £1.60, which was expensive, especially as it was old stock, and the price had been overprinted: the original price was 18s or 90p, as it had been originally published in 1970.

Joyce Hill was particularly good on the Benedictine Revival, which I see now was a major research area for her.  We covered the history very thoroughly, right up to the Battle of Hastings. Then we concentrated on the literature, and again, it was thorough, painstaking line-by-line reading. I find I still have many pages of vocabulary and translation from the texts we studied. Here are a couple of examples from The Battle of Maldon.

Reading these texts made me appreciate what academic study was all about. This was very different from school work. Grappling with the unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary, trying to understand that distant and strange world made you feel part of an academic community in a way that school never did. This was the pure pursuit of knowledge, esoteric knowledge at that, and it was very satisfying. The poetic techniques of the Anglo-Saxons, with the strong emphasis on rhythm derived from the oral tradition, were very different from the metrical exactitudes of much of the later poetry which we had learned for A level. The use of alliteration and the dramatic pause in the middle of each line gave it a chant-like quality, and confirmed the directness of its approach.

I loved the scholarly little editions we had. For Maldon and The Wanderer, we had Methuen’s Old English Library, very sturdy paperbacks, with excellent introductions.  For the very mysterious Dream of the Rood, we had a Manchester University Press edition. Manchester, as I discovered much later, had an impressive Anglo-Saxon and Medieval English group of scholars. As had Leeds, of course. The department published a journal, Leeds Studies in English, which is still extant, and looking through issues from the seventies, it’s clear that the scholars of Anglo-Saxon and historical linguistics dominated.

We even had time in the brief post-Easter term to look at Icelandic sagas, which we examined in translation. Laxdæla Saga and Hrafnkel’s Saga were our texts, read in Penguin Classic editions. The lectures were given by an Icelandic expert rather than by Joyce Hill, and seemed rather tacked on to the programme. But again, vistas opened up: this was an introduction to a great national literature, closely connected to our own, of which I knew nothing.

Looking back fifty years on, I feel privileged to have been introduced to this remarkable body of work by someone so obviously engaged and deeply knowledgeable. Thank you, Auntie Joyce.

Hwæt! Anglo-Saxon in 1973 by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.