Elswyth and the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Voice

Reflections on Anglo-Saxon Elegiac Poetry and GM Baker’s Cuthbert’s People

Often the lonely one longs for honors,
The grace of God, though, grieved in his soul,
Over the waste of the waters far and wide he shall
Row with his hands through the rime-cold sea,
Travel the exile tracks: full fixed is fate!
So the wanderer spake, his woes remembering,
His misfortunes in fighting and the fall of his kinsmen:

These are the opening lines of the Old English elegiac poem “The Wanderer,” which stunningly captures the Anglo-Saxon imagination. A striking wanderlust and aching sense of exile, the creeping melancholy of the brightening dawn, the movement toward speaking, the accents of honor culture and the bonds of kin, and above all the horror and beauty of transience—these elements hang together in wistful harmony throughout “The Wanderer,” and indeed throughout Anglo-Saxon literature.

I love the Anglo-Saxon imagination. That world, at once so similar to and so different from our own, is deeply attuned to the movement of life toward death and the sea toward the shore. It is rich with the dawning of Christianity among the gentile nations, and the sense of the wyrd enchants their love of God.

In his underrated essay “On Stories,” C.S. Lewis writes,

Jack the Giant Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants…The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. That heaviness, that monstrosity, that uncouthness, hangs over the whole thing…I have seen landscapes…which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do.

Only giants will do. I think we have all felt—and this is Lewis’ point throughout the essay—an attraction to certain imaginative landscapes, the same way we may feel drawn to the sea or to the mountains. And a good story within a landscape must be attentive to the elements which make it particularly itself: “The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality,” says Lewis.

I have described some of the qualities of the Anglo-Saxon imagination. And when I crave these qualities in a piece of literature, I agree with Lewis, “nothing else will do.”

The Anglo-Saxon pressing against and into transience (because it is both a pressing in and a pressing against) is the forerunner of later English preoccupations with transience—such as that of John Donne or John Keats, both of whom I also love particularly well—but it is distinct in quality. A sense of time itself and of nature as something wild and untamed pervade the Anglo-Saxon texts, and the soul of the Ango-Saxon poet has a distinctly windswept rootedness.

Perhaps this is why I chose, over the titles on my growing “to read” list, G.M. Baker’s The Wistful and the Good. Baker’s Substack, particularly this article on serious popular fiction, resonated deeply with me, and I was thrilled to see that his body of work included novels set in Anglo-Saxon England and immediately ordered the first of the series, hoping that it would be evocative of the poetic voice I love so well in Anglo-Saxon poetry. I was not disappointed.

From Wistful’s first chapter:

From where she sat, her eyes could follow the great curve of the horizon, the restless boundary between sea and sand below, the roll and swell of the tide, the curve of the sea grass, bent before the wind. These too were a delight, though the same blustering wind tried to tear her embroidery frame from her fingers and whisk away her threads to catch among the bracken and the gorse.

For the hundredth time she glanced upward, and this time, at last, she saw it. A flash of white, far out in the band of haze between sea and sky. A sail. Her frame and her needle fell into her lap as her eyes yearned outward toward a horizon that was empty once again.

Isn’t this an exquisite articulation of that Anglo-Saxon yearning, of that windswept wildness in tension with stark rootedness, yearning that aches against the landscape—both that of earth and that of the imagination?

Indeed, part of what works about Baker’s Anglo-Saxon novels (Cuthbert’s People) is his delicate balance of his own imaginative landscape and that of the Anglo-Saxon literature. In this first book, Elswyth is our point of view character, and she more than almost any other character in the series is the embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon poet.

Another elegiac poem from the Anglo-Saxons, often read alongside “The Wanderer,” is “The Seafarer,” which juxtaposes the voices of an aged sailor and a young sailor.

We—and Elswyth—begin much like the young poetic speaker in “The Seafarer,” enchanted by the sea,

Yet course now desires
Which surge in my heart for the high seas,
That I test the terrors 	of the tossing waves;
My soul constantly kindles in keenest impatience
To fare itself forth and far off hence
To seek the strands of stranger tribes.

But if one part of the Anglo-Saxon soul is identified as this sea-eyed yearning, the other—as we saw in our opening passage from “The Wanderer”—is perhaps best described as “exilic.”

Indeed, these are the two seemingly opposed poles of Christianity, the tension of the Incarnation, and the weaving of the temporal and eternal in the souls of men. The world is full of beauty, and yet we are made for another home.

“The Seafarer’s” aged sailor laments,

To conceive this is hard
For the landsman who lives on the lonely shore—
How, sorrowful and sad on a sea ice-cold,
15 I eked out my exile 	through the awful winter
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   . 	deprived of my kinsmen.

In Elswyth, Baker explores these two Anglo-Saxon personas, and their seemingly paradoxical elements, in tension with each other. She is at once Wistful Elsywth—passionate, beautiful, and with a heart for the sea and adventure—and Melancholy Agnes—silent, grieved, and penitential. She embodies both the aged and the young sailor, and the work of her life over the course of Baker’s books is the work of reconciling these two parts of herself.

And that is, too, the work of our own lives, this integration of life and death, of the Cross and the Resurrection.

Theodimir comments late in The Wanderer and the Way (Book 4),

In this mood it seemed impossible for Theodemir to decide if it was Agnes or Elswyth who was lying beside him in the roadside grass. It was not part of Agnes’s character, at least as he had so far observed it, to giggle so at the follies of another or to rejoice so in the thrill of their evasion. And yet the creature beside him was also not the seductive charmer who had entertained the company in the hall when Alphonso had visited Witteric. Could it be that the rift between Agnes and Elswyth was at last beginning to close and that the enthusiastic, fun-loving creature beside him, more lovely than either Agnes or Elswyth had been in her simplicity and joy, was what would emerge from their union?

The question, as becomes clear, is not whether the aged sailor or the young sailor—Agnes or Elswyth—is the real person. Rather, the question is how to integrate them.

Baker’s narrative emphasizes, through this bifurcation of the character of Elswyth, the havoc wreaked by sin on the human soul. Sin divides. It alienates. It breaks us apart. It casts us into exile.

In the Anglo-Saxon retelling of the Genesis story (“Genesis B”), the “King of Angels” says to Cain,

You have struck down your brother with your own
wrathful hands, the pledge-worthy warrior into his slaughter-bed,
and his blood cries out and calls out to me!
You shall suffer for this murder and turn towards exile,
accursed unto the breadth of life…
You shall go forth sorrowful, without honor from your home,
just as you did to Abel as a soul-slaying. Therefore you
shall travel the far-path of the exile, hateful to your dear kinsmen.

Cain’s punishment is particularly resonant for a culture so preoccupied with the feeling and threat of exile. Exile breaks you off from family and from everything familiar.

And the wrestling with the broken pieces is the essence of the Anglo-Saxon poetic voice.

What is it that heals the wounds, that has the power to put the broken pieces back together? What else but Love Himself?

Healing is found in relationship. Thus, the movement of healing is also a movement toward speaking about our wounds. Elswyth’s healing cannot begin in earnest until she speaks about her wounds, and this, too, is the movement of the Anglo-Saxon elegy. Articulation of pain is integral to processing it.

Baker’s narrative suggests the continuity of personhood inherent in living life. It is an invitation both to repentance and to integration.

Anglo-Saxon poetry—indeed much of the body of literature we now consider the “canon”—was composed with an aim to make profound truths accessible to the common people. Art is how the majority of people receive truth. Indeed, we are built to experience truth in narrative form (Christ did not give His disciples an academic treatise; He spoke to them in parables). Baker’s work to revive “Serious Popular Literature” speaks to this need.

Baker writes in the essay I cited above,

…fiction is not about philosophical reflection on life. Rather, it is about creating the experiences which lead us to reflection. The reason so many books are written about great works of fiction is precisely that thy provoke such reflection. We value these books not because they contain philosophical reflections but because they create the kind of experiences that provoke these reflections.

So this is my reflection. Perhaps it is what the author intended, perhaps not.

I have seen many people in my life don an “Agnes” mask in the wake of sin. I am not here to decry a movement towards penance, but penance ought to be a movement towards healing, not something pursued for its own sake. It should move us more deeply into relationship with the Lord and with those He has given us. It should move us, as Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry does, toward integration of the pieces.

Elswyth struggles to accept mercy and love, and her story is one of reconciliation and healing. It begs us to ask, what does the merciful face of the Father look like, and how are we to respond to it?

Cuthbert’s People provokes these reflections not in spite of being a genuinely fun story to read, but precisely because it is a fun story to read. I eagerly anticipate the next volume (and as a side note: I am willing to copyedit in exchange for an advanced copy of whatever Cuthbert’s People #5 ends up being titled!)

I’ve tried to refrain from specific plot point spoiling as much as possible here, but perhaps I’ll do a more spoiler-heavy treatment at a later date.

Until then, cheers and happy reading!