| 326. | þe feondes heom forþ ledeþ Boþe lychom and saule. |
| 331-336. | Þe saule seyþ to þe lychome, Accursed wurþe þi nome, Þin heaued and þin heorte. Þu vs hauest iwroht þes schome, And alle þene eche grome Vs schall euer smerte. |
MS. Harl. 2253, fol. 106, vo, l. 7: þe fleysh stont aȝeyn þe gost.
These two fundamental ideas of the transitoriness and hence worthlessness of man’s earthly part, and the cleavage between it and his spiritual part, lie at the root of much of the mediaeval literature, and represent the two not incompatible extremes to which the monastic ideal of life, from its very one-sidedness, was capable of leading: on the one hand a certain morbid materialism, on the other an ascetic mysticism. Nor can it be denied that the mediaeval mind took a certain grim pleasure in dwelling upon the more grotesque aspect of these things. The O.E. poet found the same enjoyment in describing his ‘Ȝifer’—
[29]se wyrm, þe þa ȝeaȝlas beoð
nædle scearpran: se genydeð to
ærest eallra on þam eorðsciæfe,
as the painters of the Dance of Death in the drawing of their skeletons and emblems of mortality, or the Gothic carver in his gargoyles. Perhaps, too, some satisfaction in dwelling upon the hollowness of earthly joys, and the bitter fate of those who took their fill of them, was not lacking to a few of those who had turned their backs upon them.
Erthe upon Erthe is perhaps more especially concerned with the first of the two conceptions mentioned above, man’s mortality, but, as has already been shown, a close connexion exists between it and the Soul and Body poems, and though the idea of the duality in man is not mentioned, it is certainly present. The poem is more popular in form than either the Dance of Death or the various Soul and Body Dialogues, perhaps because of its purely English origin, and seems to represent a later and more popular product of the ideas which gave rise to the other two groups. Its short mono-rimed stanza, its jingling internal rime, and its half-riddling, half-punning character, appear to have especially commended it to popular favour, and it is significant that it became most widely-known in its simpler forms.
[ Editor’s Note.]
In preparing the text of this edition, all the available MSS. have been consulted, the only two not examined being William Billyng’s MS. and the Brighton MS., which were formerly in the possession of private owners, and have eluded all search for them. As exhaustive a search as was possible has been made for other texts of the poem, but it has often escaped cataloguing, and it is probable that other copies of the B version, at least, exist.