3 (page 41)p. 41When it began

In 1969, the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney bought himself a Christmas present: a book called The Bog People by P. V. Glob. It told of the discovery of prehistoric human bodies preserved beneath the peat bogs of Denmark. Heaney had been brought up on a farm and felt a deep bond with the life of the soil; the signature poem in his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), was called ‘Digging’. He became fascinated by the image of bog people: their belonging in the land, their simultaneous mortality (the bodies bore the marks of violent death) and immortality (their retention of human form over thousands of years). He wrote a group of poems inspired by them. In ‘Punishment’, he drew an analogy between the corpse of a ritually sacrificed bog woman and the treatment of Roman Catholic girls in Belfast who in the ‘Troubles’ during which he was writing were ritually tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. The analogy gained force not least from the longstanding English insult whereby the Irish were called ‘bogtrotters’.

As an Irish poet writing in the English language, Heaney was acutely conscious that his spoken tongue and the literary tradition into which he was entering belonged to the people who had conquered the Irish land and oppressed the Irish people. Edmund (page 42)p. 42Spenser, the ‘national’ poet in the age of Elizabeth I, served as a government official in Ireland and wrote a political dialogue called A View of the Present State of Ireland in which the dominant voice advocates the violent suppression of the rebellious Irish (though the story is more complicated than this – Spenser's animus was directed less against the indigenous Gaelic Irish than the ‘old English’ who had been in Ireland since the 12th century, an early glimmer of the perennial imperial fear of the colonial settlers going native). Another Heaney poem, ‘Act of Union’, wittily elides the formal annexation of Ireland with the sexual conquest of an Irish servant girl by another Elizabethan proto‐imperial poet, Sir Walter Ralegh.

In ‘The Tollund Man’, Heaney drives through the country of the bog people:

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland

In the old man‐killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

(Wintering Out, 1972)

He is in Jutland, where the Anglo‐Saxons had come from: the original home of the race that would drive out the Celts, his own people. He is ‘lost’ but also ‘at home’. This may be the perpetual condition of the poet, but in 1969 a dual sense of belonging and not belonging was particularly acute for a thoughtful Northern Irish Catholic. Heaney is a man of words, fascinated by the sounds of the names that have been given to the bog people, as he is by the old Irish names of his own place. But he does not write in Gaelic. The ‘pointing hands’ thus become those of his own ‘country people’, admonishing him for not knowing his native tongue. A few years (page 43)p. 43later, Heaney's friend Brian Friel wrote an immensely powerful play about the remapping of Irish places with new British names (Translations, 1980). In the poems collected in North (1975), we witness Heaney progging at his own anxiety that by writing in English he may have participated in a betrayal.

At some level, he is wondering whether one of the bog men could have been a poet, a guardian of the land and language, a vessel for the preservation of the stories of a tribe. For that was the original role of poets, as Spenser himself recognized, with a touch of envy, in A View of the Present State of Ireland:

There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called Bards, which are to them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rhymes, the which are had in so high regard and estimation amongst them, that none dare displease them.

There is an ancient history behind all this, a fact that is scandalous to the Anglocentric version of literary history: before the English there were the Celts. The poems of the Celts, not those of the late‐coming Anglo‐Saxon invaders, were the native equivalent of the Homeric corpus on which ancient Greek culture was built. A mythologized version of the Celtic bard is a key figure in the history of literature in these islands. The harp that accompanied the song of the bard has been a potent and enduring symbol, especially in Wales and Ireland. But since Celtic culture was oral, the poems of the bards were not written down for many centuries.

‘“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth”’ (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902). Ironically, in so far as Britain would one day become an empire that modelled itself on ancient Rome, the earliest written text (page 44)p. 44regarding Britannia was written not by a native but by the leader of a colonial expeditionary force. Julius Caesar, in the fifth book of his Gallic Wars, created an enduring image of the inhabitants of the triangular island off the north coast of Gaul: ‘All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with wood, which occasions a bluish colour, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight. They wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip.’ Caesar failed to establish a colony in Britannia, though he did extract an agreement that tribute money would be paid to Rome. Aulus Plautius, leading an invasion force nearly a century later, in AD 43, was more successful. Roads, villas, baths, a wall to keep out the Picts of the north, and eventually Christianity would arrive in his wake. British resistance to the Roman invader would become part of the national myth in later centuries. During the reign of King James I of England, who was also King James VI of Scotland and who had hopes of uniting his two kingdoms to create a new ‘Britain’, Celtic resistance to Roman imperialism provided Shakespeare with the plot of his Cymbeline (c. 1610) and John Fletcher with his Bonduca (c. 1613, an alternative spelling of Boudicca or Boadicea).

Crucially, though, the Romans never invaded Ireland. This meant that the bardic tradition of the Celts was still alive when St Patrick converted Ireland to Christianity in the 5th century. Literate monks began to write down and preserve the stories of the native culture – sequences of epic poetry such as the ‘Ulster’ cycle, narrating the exploits of Cú Chulainn, and the ‘Finn’ or ‘Fenian’ cycle, telling of Finn or Fionn, foremost among the elite warriors of the Irish High King.

Neither the Romans, nor the next wave of invaders, the Anglo‐Saxons, penetrated into Scotland or the depths of Wales. Celtic stories accordingly survived in these lands too. Again, though, they were not written down for hundreds of years. The Welsh Mabinogion, meaning ‘instructions for young bards’, tells of Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and Branwen, daughter of Llyr. The collection (page 45)p. 45appears in a manuscript known as the ‘Red Book of Hergest’, which belongs to the late 14th century. In Scotland, stories were handed down regarding the exploits of Oisin, legendary 3rd‐century warrior and bard, son of Finn (Fingal).

The translation – or, more often, the free adaptation and reinvention – of these foundational epics into the English language has been an important feature of various Celtic revivals. In 1760, after the failure of the Jacobite political enterprise to return the Stuart kings to the throne, a Scotsman called James Macpherson tried launching a cultural revolution instead. He published Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language. Spurred by the success of this enterprise, he followed it up two years later with Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, and the year after that with an eight‐book epic called Temora, purportedly the work of Ossian (Oisin) himself:

Is the wind on the shield of Fingal? Or is the voice of past times in my hall?…Four times has autumn returned with its winds, and raised the seas of Togorma, since thou hast been in the roar of battles, and Bragéla distant far!

(‘The Death of Cuthullin’)

Could Macpherson have recovered the British equivalent of Homer? Many people thought so, but others were suspicious – notably, Dr Samuel Johnson, an Englishman with a low opinion of Scottish culture. ‘But Doctor Johnson,’ he was asked, ‘do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘Many men. Many women. And many children.’ Macpherson was called upon to produce his originals and was obliged to fabricate them. In very British fashion, a committee of inquiry was established. It concluded, and modern scholarship has largely endorsed its findings, that Macpherson had (very) liberally edited a body of traditional Gaelic ballads and inserted swathes of his own writing. Though the Ossian affair hardly served the (page 46)p. 46Jacobite cause, the romantic sublimity of the poems' language helped to shift English poetry away from the neoclassical mode that had dominated for much of the 18th century. William Blake attempted to create an entirely new kind of ‘radical British’ epic in Milton and Jerusalem by rejecting Greco‐Latin models and seeking to combine the style of Ossian with that of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible.

A century later, the Celtic revival in Ireland played a major part in the emergence of a cultural nationalism forged in resistance to British rule. Leading figures in this movement included members of the old Anglo‐Irish protestant ascendancy such as Lady Gregory, who translated and adapted many stories about the legendary hero Cuchulain, and William Butler Yeats, who published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), and The Celtic Twilight (1893). In 1899, his The Countess Cathleen was acted at the Irish Literary Theatre, which he and Lady Gregory had founded. In December 1904, the ‘national’ Abbey Theatre opened its doors in Dublin with a triple bill of Yeats's On Baile's Strand (a play about Cuchulain) and Cathleen Ní Houlihan, together with Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, a comedy that satirized the English ruling class via the character of a pompous Magistrate. On the second night, one of the Yeats plays was replaced by In the Shadow of the Glen by J. M. Synge, another dramatist from a well‐to‐do protestant background who converted to Irish cultural nationalism and made his work out of the stories of the folk – in his case, those of the Aran Islands.

In a poem in memory of Major Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son, Yeats wrote that Synge had found his inspiration ‘In a most desolate stony place’, that he came ‘Towards nightfall upon a race / Passionate and simple like his heart’. The Celtic revivals were bound up not only with politics and nationalism, but also with a poetic desire to return to peasant simplicity and strong feeling while grounding the religious sense in locality and landscape.

When the Anglo‐Saxons arrived in wave upon wave from Jutland, Angeln, Saxony, and Frisia, they brought their own tales of legendary heroes. Again, these were only written down much later. The most famous of their stories is Beowulf. There is a lively scholarly debate about the date of its composition (8th century or much later?). The only surviving manuscript belongs to the late 10th or 11th century; it was recovered in the 16th. Beowulf embodies the poetry of Old English at its most forceful, but since it was unknown for so long and was set in Scandinavia, it exercised no influence on English literature until the 19th century, when it was translated into modern English. In more recent times, it has been studied in universities and translated many times, not least by Heaney, for whom it provided an opportunity to make peace with his Anglo‐Saxon masters after the reconciliation of the 1999 Good Friday agreement. He was drawn especially to the poem's earthbound language and its alliterative energy (‘Sinews split / and the bone‐lappings burst’).

‘Ossian’ was in large measure fabricated and the author of Beowulf is unknown. Who, then, was the first English poet who can be named, as Homer can be named as the founding father who began the journey from the unknown singers of oral tradition to the revered authors of ‘literature’?

In Anglo‐Saxon England, writing was predominantly the preserve of monks. Literacy belonged to the clerks, which is to say the clerics. The most potent narrative of the origin of English Literature is accordingly to be found in a clerical text. Written in Latin, it was the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, believed to have been completed in AD 731), a nascent national history in which the main focus is on the conflict between Roman and Celtic Christianity.

(page 48)p. 48According to Bede, some time in the late 7th century, when St Hild was abbot of Streanæshalch (Whitby) on the north‐east coast of England, there lived a man called Cædmon who composed ‘godly and religious songs’. He studied the Scriptures and their interpreters, turning passages of the Testaments ‘into extremely delightful and moving poetry, in English, which was his own tongue’. All that survives of his creations is a single fragment. A visitor came to Cædmon in a dream and told him that he must sing in praise of God the Creator. This is what he sang:

From its very beginning in these lines, English poetry has resonated with the language of praise and of wonder; writers have taken it upon themselves to be the guardians of ‘middangeard’, ‘middle earth’. The poet's creative spark emulates God's: there is a golden thread linking Cædmon to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's definition, (page 49)p. 49over a thousand years later, of the poetic imagination as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I am’.

In Cædmon's time, England was still divided into several kingdoms. The invention of English poetry preceded the formation of the English nation. So when did a national literature emerge?

Alfred, King of Wessex from 871 to 899, had a new conception of his royal role. He aspired to excellence ‘both in warfare and in wisdom’. He considered it his duty not only to preserve his kingdom from the Viking hordes, but also to establish his court as a cultural centre and to oversee the creation of a vernacular literary culture. He wrote, or perhaps commissioned, translations from the Bible (a prose version of the first fifty Psalms), from Christian theological and pragmatic texts (Augustine's Soliloquies and Gregory's Pastoral Care), and from Roman neo‐Stoic philosophy (Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which would be translated again by Chaucer many centuries later). ‘King Alfred was the translator of this book’, began the preface to his Boethius, ‘he turned it from Latin into English, as it now stands before you. Sometimes he translated word for word, sometimes sense for sense, so as to render it as clearly and intelligibly as he could, given the various and multifarious worldly distractions which frequently occupied him either in mind or in body.’ In the following millennium, Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI/I would follow in Alfred's footsteps as monarchs who found time for reading, writing, and translation. Translation – which in the 17th century the poet John Dryden would divide into literal ‘metaphrase’, freer ‘paraphrase’, and creative ‘imitation’ – has been a perennial project of English Literature.

Though Alfred was perhaps the first to create a repertoire of literature in the English language, he was not king of all the land. According to a poem in The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, it was in the year 937 that

Athelstan King,

Lord among Earls,(page 50)p. 50

Bracelet‐bestower and

Baron of Barons,

He with his Brother,

Edmund Atheling,

Gaining a lifelong

Glory in battle,

Slew with the sword‐edge

There by Brunanburh,

Brake the shield‐wall,

Hew'd the linden‐wood,

Hack'd the battle‐shield,

Sons of Edward with hammer'd brands.

(‘The Battle of Brunanburh’, translated by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1876)

In this battle, which took place at a location that is still debated (the leading contender is Bromborough on the Wirral), a Saxon army defeated an alliance of Vikings, Scots, and Irish. Thereafter Athelstan, Alfred's grandson, was the first king of all England. But the cultural identity of his land remained hybrid. Though the Anglo‐Saxons were dominant, they jostled with the legacies of native Celts, Norse invaders, and Christian missionaries. When the Normans came in 1066, the picture was complicated further.

Nowhere is the intersection of different ethnic and linguistic traditions more apparent than in the stories of Britain's mythical founder, Brutus, and its exemplary king, Arthur. Ancient Rome had trumped Greece by proclaiming its mythic origins in the escape of Aeneas from Troy. After the fall of the Roman empire, British chroniclers deployed the same tactic as a means of asserting their own venerable pedigree. The story is first encountered in the 9th‐century Historia Brittonum of Nennius; it was told most influentially in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th‐century Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’). A Welshman (page 51)p. 51in Oxford at a time when England was ruled by the Normans, Geoffrey sought to trump the Saxons by proclaiming the superior antiquity of the Celts.

In this narrative, the British are given the same origin as the Romans. Brutus, the great‐grandson of Aeneas, accidentally kills his father and goes into exile. He meets up with the last remnants of the Trojan race, frees them from the Greeks, and leads them on a voyage to the distant northern island of Albion, which was then uninhabited save for the last few of an old race of giants. They land at Totnes in the West Country and Brutus renames the island after himself. His followers become Britons. Geoffrey then outlines two thousand years of mythic British history. The line of kings inaugurated by Brutus includes many who would be featured in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, such as Locrine, Gorboduc, Ferrex and Porrex, Lear, and Cymbeline. The Historia ends with the death of Arthur, the greatest of these kings, and the prophecy that his line would one day be revived. Cue the Tudor propagandists four centuries later: they pointed to Henry VII's Welsh ancestry as evidence that this new dynasty was made of true Arthurian, and ultimately Brutish/Trojan, stock.

The line of Brutus was a myth, but Geoffrey's narrative drew at various points on true history. Before the Romans renamed it Londinium, Britain's first city took its name from a powerful local tribe, the Trinovantes. Trinovantium could thus be reinterpreted as Troynovantum, new Troy. So Edmund Spenser in the third book of the Elizabethan Faerie Queene: ‘For noble Britons sprong from Troians bold, / And Troynouant was built of old Troyes ashes cold’.

Geoffrey's history was written in Latin prose. It was turned into French verse by Wace, who presented his Roman de Brut to Queen Eleanor (wife of Henry II) in 1155. Then around 1215, it was translated into early Middle English by a man called Laȝamon (‘lawman’), who wrote in a West Midland dialect that still has the (page 52)p. 52feel of Old English. Laȝamon retained strong elements of the old alliterative verse style and used a surprisingly small number of words of French origin, even when his translation was comparatively literal. He also expanded and improvised upon his material, as when he introduced a prophecy of return after the passing of Arthur:

Aefne than worden ther com of se wenden

That was an sceort bat lithen, sceoven mid üthen;

And two wimmen therinne, wunderliche i‐dihte;

And heo nomen Arthur anan and a‐neouste hine vereden

And softe him a‐dun leiden, and forth gunnen hine lithen.

Tha wes hit i‐wurthen that Merlin seide whilen,

That weore unimete care of Arthures forthfare.

Brüttes i‐leveth yete that he bön on live

And wunnien in Avalun mid fairest alre alven,

And lokieth ever Brüttes yete whan Arthur cumen lithe.

Nis naver the mon i‐boren of naver nane bürde i‐coren

The cunne of than soothe of Arthure sügen mare.

But while wes an witeghe, Merlin i‐hate;

He bodede mid worde – his quithes weoren soothe –

That an Arthur sculde yete cum Anglen to fülste.

Even at these words, there came travelling from the sea a short boat, moving, driven by the waves, and two women in it, wondrously clad; and they took Arthur into it and went in beside him and laid him down gently, and they journeyed away.

Then was fulfilled what Merlin had previously said, that there would be unbounded sorrow at the departure of Arthur. The Britons still believe that he is alive and dwells in Avalon with the fairest of all elves, and the Britons ever look for the time, even yet, when Arthur will come back. Never has the man been born of any chosen woman that can tell more of the truth concerning Arthur. But once there was a wizard called Merlin; he announced by word – his sayings were true – that an Arthur was still to come as an aid to the English.

(page 53)p. 53Whereas Cædmon's hymn sounds like a foreign language, the usage of phrases such as ‘two wimmen therinne’ in Laȝamon's Brut begins to sound like modern English. And in that slide from the British (‘Brüttes’) to the English (‘Anglen’), Laȝamon anticipates one of the prevailing tensions of the national story.

King Arthur would indeed return, but by a circuitous route. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the tales of his knights of the Round Table were developed in the French romance tradition, most notably by Chrétien de Troyes. They were then central to a revival of English alliterative poetry in the 14th century, before receiving their most influential recension in Thomas Malory's 15th‐century prose narrative Morte Darthur, which brought together French and English sources, along with developments that were Malory's invention. William Caxton's printed text of 1485 assured wider circulation than was achievable within manuscript culture.

In every subsequent century, poets have returned to the matter of Arthur, among them William Warner (Albion's England) and Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene) in the 16th; John Milton in the 17th (he planned an Arthurian epic before settling on the biblical matter of Paradise Lost); Lord Tennyson in the 19th (Idylls of the King); and Simon Armitage in the 21st (translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Alliterative Morte Arthure). For Armitage, a Yorkshire poet in the mould of Ted Hughes and Tony Harrison, the story of Gawain's perilous journey far away from Camelot to the chapel of the Green Knight exemplifies an anti‐metropolitan, grounded, northern English dialect:

Ouer at Þe Holy Hede, til he hade eft bonk

In Þe wyldrenesse of Wyrale; wonde Þer bot lyte

Þat auÞer God oÞer gome wyth goud hert louied.…

Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolues als,

Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, Þat woned in Þe knarrez,

BoÞe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oÞerquyle.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, fitt 2)(page 54)p. 54

Crossing at Holy Head and coming ashore

in the wilds of the Wirral, whose wayward people

both God and good men have quite given up on.…

Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves,

here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags

or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar.

(translated by Simon Armitage, 2007)

Roman versus Briton, Saxon versus Celt, Norman versus Saxon, writing in Latin or French versus writing in English, court versus country, south versus north, received pronunciation versus regional dialect, London versus the provinces: English Literature has been built upon the contest between conqueror and dispossessed, centre and margin, authority and rebellion. Several of these tensions are vividly apparent in the diverging legacies of the two great poets of the late 14th century.

The son of a vintner, Geoffrey Chaucer was born a Londoner. As a young man, he had a period of military service in France, during which he was captured and ransomed. He then gained the patronage of the hugely powerful John of Gaunt; his most notable early poem, The Boke of the Duchesse (c. 1368), was dedicated to the memory of Blanche of Lancaster, Gaunt's first wife. Chaucer's wife Philippa was sister to the duke's mistress. With connections such as this, it was easy for Chaucer to gain some rewarding positions at court. A mission to Genoa and Florence on the king's service in the early 1370s was especially important for his poetic development because it gave him the opportunity to discover the riches of Italian literature. It has been suggested – though most scholars discount the possibility – that he may even have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, the pre‐eminent authors of the Italian Renaissance. Back in London, he obtained the posts of comptroller of customs and then clerk of the king's works.

(page 55)p. 55For Chaucer, poetry was an accomplishment and a vehicle for self‐display, a means to advancement at court rather than a profession. His poetry benefited his career and vice‐versa: his earlier works, coinciding with his French connections, were influenced by French poetry (notably the allegorical love vision of the Roman de la Rose), while his middle period, inspired by the Italian journey, was dominated by his version of the Troilus and Cressida story, written in imitation of Boccaccio's treatment of the same subject.

(page 56)p. 56Courtly, cosmopolitan, and multi‐lingual, Chaucer was a self‐consciously modern and, above all, a European poet. His poetry and translations were celebrated among the elite. Even when he turned, late in life, to the Canterbury Tales, with their satirical anatomizing of English character types, each representing a different role or ‘estate’ within the polity, he continued to domesticate continental models and update inherited ones. The idea of multiple narrations within a single overarching structure is derived from Boccaccio's Decameron; the Knight's Tale is adapted from another work by Boccaccio; the bawdy Miller's Tale is in the style of French fabliau; the Monk's Tale is shaped by the classical notion of tragedy as the fall of great men; the Nun's Priest's Tale is a beast fable in a tradition going back to Aesop; the Wife of Bath is a larger‐than‐life English comic character, but her prologue and tale participate in a serious debate about the roles and proper behaviour of women that draws on such learned sources as St Jerome's Latin treatise Adversus Jovinianum.

Richard II (like Richard III) is one of those medieval kings who has suffered from the negative spin of the Tudor chroniclers. The popular image of him is derived from Shakespeare: a self‐absorbed weakling who surrounded himself with flatterers, let the country go to rack and ruin, and had to be replaced in a coup d'état by strong‐man Henry Bolingbroke, father of Henry V of glorious memory. In reality, Richard II presided over a court culture of great sophistication, in which Chaucer and his friend John Gower created a place for poetry.

Beyond the court, the nation was beginning to find its political voice, as witnessed by the Peasants' Revolt or ‘Great Rising’ of 1381 and the ‘Lollard’ project to modernize and democratize religion. The poem that was perceived to embody these developments was William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman (c. 1370–90). The fact that this long poem exists in several different versions and dozens of different manuscripts attests to its popularity and to the fact that Langland – about whom we know almost nothing – never (page 57)p. 57stopped revising it (for instance by removing some of the more politically inflammatory passages after 1381).

The narrator of the poem falls asleep on the Malvern hills in the far west of England. He has a vision of a ‘fair field full of folk’: the people of England, for whom he writes of the quest for the saintly life, the corruption of the rich and powerful, and Jesus Christ's championing of the poor and the dispossessed. English rather than European, provincial as opposed to metropolitan in both dialect and outlook, pious rather than bawdy, Langland came to be perceived as Chaucer's great opposite. For John Ball in the Peasants' Revolt and again for the radical protestant ‘commonwealth’ men of the mid‐16th century, the name of Piers Plowman became synonymous with sturdy English resistance to the tyranny, both monarchical and ecclesiastical, that came from the centres of power.

So when did English Literature begin? With the Celtic bards, with Julius Caesar, with Cædmon, with Alfred, with the poem that celebrated the battle of Brunanburh and Athelstan's unification of the kingdom? Or only with the evolution of the south‐east dialect of Middle English embodied by Chaucer, which, though modified by the great vowel shift of the 16th century, became the basis of the received pronunciation of modern English – the so‐called king's or queen's English? For the Elizabethans, it was Chaucer who was the father of English poetry, despite his own determined Europeanness.

Another way of answering the question is to say: in the beginning was the Word. English Literature came into being when the Word was made flesh in the English language. That is to say, when the most important book in the history of the world was translated into the vernacular.

(page 58)p. 58Cædmon was the father of Old English biblical paraphrase. We may securely say that English Literature begins not with Homeric‐style epic – praise of ancestors and demi‐gods, heroes and warriors – but with Christian faith, with the praise of God. The Venerable Bede translated portions of the Bible. Aldhelm rendered the poetry of the Psalms into Old English in the late 7th century. In the 11th century, Ælfric took on great swathes of the Old Testament. In the 12th, a monk called Orm produced a mixture of selected translation and commentary. Then, crucially, came John Wyclif's 14th‐century enterprise: the translation of the entire Bible from the Latin Vulgate into the vernacular. ‘It helpeth Christian men’, wrote Wyclif, to the consternation of the Church authorities, ‘to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ's sentence’.

The Bible tells of how the Word was made flesh when Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary. For women in the Middle Ages, the devotional example of Mary mother of God, of the women such as Mary Magdalene who loved Jesus, and of the female saints who were martyred in his name, were the inspiration to take up writing: literature by women in these islands has its origin in prayers and meditations, confessions of faith, songs of praise, and manuals of the contemplative life, such as the Ancrene Wisse (monastic rule for anchoresses, early 13th century), Revelations of Divine Love (mystical devotions of Julian of Norwich, late 14th century), and The Book of Margery Kempe (spiritual autobiography, early 15th century).

In the 16th century, English Protestants called themselves the ‘people of the book’. The book they meant was the Bible. People of the book are perforce literary people. What is literature for? It is an attempt to give meaning to human life. That is also what the Bible is for. The ordering of our lives through narrative, through a structure of beginning, middle, and ending; the sense that individual details and events may be gathered into a pattern that forms a whole: in these conceptions, the Bible is literary and (page 59)p. 59literature is biblical. ‘The Old and New Testaments’, wrote William Blake, ‘are the Great Code of Art’.

Our primary tool for reading literature – hermeneutics, the art of interpretation – was originally devised as a way of reading the Bible. The Church Fathers taught the art of fourfold figural interpretation, in which the reader traces different strands of meaning: literal (historical), allegorical (higher, spiritual significance), tropological (the moral lesson), anagogical (to think of future and last things). The flexibility of this interpretative art has made it possible to read religious texts in secular ways and vice‐versa. It has allowed pagan stories to be read allegorically in Christian terms, as in the medieval tradition of ‘moralizing’ the erotic tales of Ovid's Metamorphoses, thus resolving the dialectic of Hebrao‐Christian and Greco‐Roman traditions that has been one of the creative tensions energizing English Literature.

The Bible is also foundational of English Literature by virtue of its generic impurity. Its mix of mythology, history, and allegory, its parables, epistles, prophecies, poetry of praise (and even, in the Song of Solomon, of erotic love), are precedents for the stylistic variety of The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's collected plays, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, James Joyce's Ulysses, and a thousand other hybrid creations.

Translation has always been central to English Literature not only because of the multiple languages of these islands, but also because it is central to the Bible itself. Jesus Christ and his disciples spoke Aramaic, but their Book was written in vernacular Greek, which was translated into Latin by Jerome (the so‐called Vulgate), and has since been translated, and again and again re‐translated, into English. The 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, the exception which proves the rule of the old adage that no great literary work was ever written by a committee, was partly a response to what were perceived as the dangerous innovations of the Geneva translation undertaken by radical protestants a generation before, (page 60)p. 60and of William Tyndale's translation prior to that. One of the demands among the instructions to the King James translators was ‘The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. as the word church not to be translated congregation’. The point here was that in Tyndale's version, ecclesia had been translated not as ‘church’ but as ‘congregation’. Is the Church embodied in the ecclesiastical hierarchy or in the community of faith as a whole? This is at once a theological and a political question, and a matter of linguistic and literary interpretation.

As the Hebrew‐Greek Bible itself consisted of stories from the past intended to be interpreted in the present and applied to human actions in the future, so every translation from Cædmon to the Authorized Version to the most recent updating has interpreted the ancient texts, been influenced by the historical forces of its own moment, and wagered upon its own future. The same may be said of the literary classics: writers respond to – in a broad sense, they ‘translate’ – a received body of works from the past in the light of their own present with the hope of being read in the future. In the case of the 1611 Bible, the wager paid off: no book had more influence on the English language and the English mind during the subsequent three and a half centuries.