[128] “A Collection of all the Ecclesiastical Laws, Canons, &c., &c., of the Church of England, from its First Foundation to the Conquest, that have hitherto been published in the Latin and Saxonic Tongues. And of all the Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical, made Since the Conquest and Before the Reformation ... now first translated into English ... by John Johnson, M.A., London, 1720.” A New Edition, by John Baron, of Queen’s College (now Dr. Baron, Rector of Upton Scudamore), Oxford, John Henry Parker, 1850. In two volumes, 8vo. Vol. i., p. 388.
[129] See above, p. [40]. The “Colloquium” is printed in Thorpe’s “Analecta.”
[130] Wulfstan, “Sammlung der ihm zugeschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit: Herausgegeben von Arthur Napier. Erste Abtheilung: Text und Varianten. Berlin 1883.”
CHAPTER XI.
THE SECONDARY POETRY.
How still the legendary lay
O’er poet’s bosom holds its sway.
Marmion.
Between the Primary and the Secondary Poetry we must acknowledge a wide borderland of transition. Some poetical works lying in this interval we have already found occasion to notice, and have given them such space as we could afford. We have spoken of the Cædmon, and of the poetical Psalter; and with these I must group the “Judith,” a noble fragment, which is found in the Cotton Library in the same manuscript volume with the Beowulf. This fragment preserves 350 long lines at the close of a poem which appears—by the numbering of the Cantos—to have been of about four times that length. This remnant contains what would naturally have been the most vigorous and stirring parts of the poem: the riotous drinking of Holofernes, the trenchant act of Judith, her return with her maid to Bethulia, their enthusiastic reception, the muster for battle, the anticipation of carnage by the birds and beasts of prey, the destruction of the invading host.
The poetry which is distinctly Secondary is contained—the best specimens of it—in two famous books, that of Exeter, and that of Vercelli; and in both of these books it is largely connected with the name of a single poet, Cynewulf. Here is at once an indication of the secondary poetry; not merely that we have a poet’s name, for we also entitle poems by Cædmon’s name; but that the poet himself supplies us with his name, and has left it—vailed and enigmatic—for posterity to decipher.
Curiously and fancifully did Cynewulf interweave into the lines of his verse the Runes which spelt his name; and it needed the skill of Kemble to explain it to us. There are three of the extant poems in which he has thus left his mark, namely two in the Exeter book and one in the Vercelli book. In two cases out of the three this ingenious contrivance is at the close of the poem. In the Vercelli book it occurs in the Elene, the last of the poems in the manuscript, and Mr. Kemble remarked that it was “apparently intended as a tail-piece to the whole book.”[131] This naturally suggests the inference, which indeed is generally accepted, that all the poems in the Vercelli book are by Cynewulf.