[Sidenote: The Manuscript.]
While traveling in Italy during the year 1832, Dr. Blume, a German scholar, discovered in the cathedral library at Vercelli an Old English manuscript containing both poetry and prose. The longest and the best of the poems is the Andreas, or Legend of St. Andrew.
How did this manuscript find its way across the Alps into a country where its language was wholly unintelligible? Several theories have been advanced, the most plausible being that advocated by Cook.[1] According to this view it was carried thither by Cardinal Guala, who during the reign of Henry III was prior of St. Andrew's, Chester. On his return to Italy he built the monastery of St. Andrew in Vercelli, strongly English in its architecture. Since the manuscript contained a poem about St. Andrew, it would have been an appropriate gift to St. Andrew's Church in Vercelli. Wülker's theory that it was owned by an Anglo-Saxon hospice at Vercelli rests on very shadowy arguments, since he adduces no satisfactory proof that such a hospice ever existed.
[Footnote 1: Cardinal Guala and the Vercelli Book, Univ. of Cal.
Library Bulletin No. 10. Sacramento, 1888.]
[Sidenote: Authorship and Date.]
On the strength of certain marked similarities of style and diction to the signed poems of Cynewulf, the earlier editors of the Andreas assigned the poem to him, and were followed by Dietrich, Grein, and Ten Brink. But Fritsche (Anglia II), arguing from other equally marked dissimilarities, denies its Cynewulfian authorship, and is sustained in his position by Sievers, though vigorously opposed by Ramhorst. More recently Trautman (Anglia, Beiblatt VI. 17) reasserts the older view, declaring his belief that the Fates of the Apostles, in which Napier has discovered the runic signature of Cynewulf, is but the closing section of the Andreas. There is much to be said in favor of this last theory, which would establish Cynewulf as the author of the entire work; but the whole question is far from being settled. We can at least affirm that the author was a devout churchman and a dweller by the sea, thoroughly acquainted with the poems of Cynewulf.
It is equally impossible to determine with any certainty the date of authorship, since the poem is wholly lacking in contemporary allusions. Nor can we base any argument upon its language, since, in all probability, its present form is but a West Saxon transcript of an older Northumbrian or Mercian version. If Cynewulf flourished in the eighth century, the date of the Andreas is probably not much later. The Vercelli manuscript is assigned to the first half of the eleventh century.
[Sidenote: Sources.]
Fortunately we can speak with more assurance about the sources of the poem. It follows closely, though not slavishly, the Acts of Andrew and Matthew, contained in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.[1] Like the great English poets of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the poet of the Andreas has borrowed his story from a foreign source, and like them he has added and altered until he has made it thoroughly his own and thoroughly English. We can learn from it the tastes and ideals of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers quite as well as from a poem wholly original in its composition. Most clearly do we discover their love of the sea. The action of the story brings in a voyage, which the Greek narrative dismisses with a few words, merely as a piece of necessary machinery. The Old English poem, on the contrary, expands the incident into many lines. A storm is introduced and described with great vigor; we see the circling gull and the darting horn-fish; we hear the creaking of the ropes and the roaring of the waves.[2] Every mention of the sea is dwelt upon with lingering affection, and described with vivid metaphor. It is now the "bosom of the flood," now the "whale-road" or the "fish's bath." Again it is the "welter of the waves," or its more angry mood is personified as the "Terror of the waters." In the first 500 lines alone there are no less than 43 different words and phrases denoting the sea.
[Footnote 1: Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, ed. Tischendorf. Leipzig, 1851, pp. 132-166. (For a translation of part of the Acts of Andrew and Matthew, see Cook's First Book in Old English, Appendix III.)]