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...continent: no ruined castles and no primordial basalt. Your inner life remains untroubled within by useless memory and idle strife.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ("Den Vereinigten Staaten")
Among the many under-appreciated charms of the Old English Genesis A, the long poetic paraphrase of the first book of the Pentateuch preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11, is an elegant elaboration of the story of the Tower of Babel. After recasting the Biblical genealogies of Genesis 10 as a story of Cames cneorisse ("Cain's descendants") who became wermaeg[eth]a fela ("a great tribe of people"; 1637-38), among whom the tribe of Eber gave rise to the unrim [thorn]eoda ("countless nation"; 1647) that men now call the Hebrews, the narrator settles into the story of the building of the great tower, a depiction on which he lavishes considerable verbal artistry. This vernacular version of the terse Biblical narrative of Genesis 11.1-9 bears quoting at some length: (1)
Gewiton him [thorn]a eastan aehta laedan, feoh and feorme. Folc waes anmod--rofe rincas sohton rumre land, o[eth][thorn]aet hie becomon cor[eth]rum miclum, folc ferende, [thorn]aer hie faestlice, ae[eth]elinga bearn, eard genamon. Gesetton [thorn]a Sennar sidne and widne leoda raeswan; leofum mannum heora geardagum grene wongas, faegre foldan, him for[eth]wearde on [eth]aere daegtide dugu[eth]e waeron, wilna gehwilces weaxende sped. Da [thorn]aer mon maenig be his maegwine, ae[eth]eling anmod, o[eth]erne baed [thorn]aes hie him to maer[eth]e, aer seo mengeo eft geond foldan bear[m] tofaran sceolde, leoda maeg[eth]e on landsocne, burh geworhte and to beacne torr up araerde to rodortunglum. [THORN]aes [thorn]e hie gesohton Sennera feld, swa [thorn]a foremeahtige folces raeswan, [thorn]a yldestan oft and gelome li[eth]sum gewunedon. Larum sohton weras to weorce and to wrohtscipe, o[eth][thorn]aet for wlence and for wonhygdum cy[eth]don craeft heora, ceastre worhton and to heofnum up hlaedrae raerdon, strengum stepton staenenne weall ofer monna gemet, maer[eth]a georne, haele[eth] mid honda. [THORN]a com halig god wera cneorissa weorc sceawigan, beorna burhfaesten, and [thorn]aet beacen somed, [thorn]e to roderum up raeran ongunnon Adames eaforan, and [thorn]aes unraedes sti[eth]ferh[eth] cyning steore gefremede, [thorn]a he re[eth]emod reorde gesette eor[eth]buendum ungelice, [thorn]aet hie [thorn]aere spaece sped ne ahton. [THORN]a hie gemitton mihtum spedge, teoche aet torre, getalum myclum, weorces wisan, ne [thorn]aer wermaeg[eth]a aenig wiste hwaet o[eth]er cwae[eth]. Ne meahte hie gewur[eth]an weall staenenne up for[eth] timbran, ac hie earmlice heapum tohlodon, hleo[eth]rum gedaelde; waes o[eth]ere aeghwilc worden maegburh fremde, si[eth][eth]an metod tobraed [thorn]urh his mihta sped monna spraece. Toforan [thorn]a on feower wegas ae[eth]elinga beam unge[thorn]eode on landsocne. Him on laste bu sti[eth]lic stantorr and seo steape burh samod samworht on Sennar stod. (1649-1701)
Then they went from the east leading their possessions, cattle and goods. That people was single-minded--the famous warriors sought a more spacious land, until they arrived in great multitudes, a traveling people, at the place where they resolutely established a homeland, those sons of noblemen. The leaders of the people settled in Shinar, far and wide; in their early days the green plains and the fair fields provided for those dear people, in the days when they grew into a greater troop, and gave them everything they could desire. (2) There many a man urged his dear kinsman, one single-minded noble to another, that for their glory, before this multitude would afterwards have to scatter across the surface of the earth in search of land, the people of this tribe, they should build a fortress, and a tower as a sign, raise it up to the stars of heaven. From thence they sought the field of Shinar, where the most mighty and eldest rulers of the people often and frequently dwelt in joy. Men sought teachers for their work and their misdeed, until in pride and ignorance they learned their craft. They built a city and raised a ladder up to heaven, those heroes erected by hand a stone wall in strength beyond human measure, eager for glory. Then Holy God came to inspect the works of the races of men, the fortress of warriors, and also the beacon which the sons of Adam had begun to raise to the heavens, and the strong-minded King put a halt to that foolhardy deed when He, angry, established different languages for earth-dwellers so that they might have no success in their speech when they, successful in might, met in a troop at that tower, in great numbers, to devise that work, nor did any of the tribes of men understand what another said. They could not agree how to build up that stone wall, but wretchedly stacked it up slipshod, severed by language. Each tribe became a stranger to another, after the Creator divided the languages of men, through the success of His might. Then the sons of nobles scattered in four directions, disunited, in search of land. In their track stood both the sturdy stone tower and the high fortress, together, half-built, on the plain of Shinar.
This remarkably expansive re-imagining of the story of Babel appropriates the Biblical narrative into a kind of English Landnamabok; like the genealogy of Grendel in Beowulf, it inscribes a vernacular poetic tradition into Biblical history and finds a place for one story in the heart of another. In this poetic retelling, looking back to a time before the separation of humanity into different and hostile nations, the builders are cast as a restless heroic-age tribe, a folc ferende (1653) seeking fame and glory (maer[eth]e), wandering in landsoc away from the ruins of their half-built city and tower. In this version their tower is not an assault on heaven but a beacen to mark their memory against the future time of their migration; God frustrates their plans by hastening the very division and isolation they are building to prevent. In the end, the tower, intended as a sign of their maer[eth]e, becomes the marker of the limits of their possibilities and a sign of their divinely imposed unge[eth]eode, a word whose use in this context reminds us of the close relationships between OE [eth]eod ("nation"), ge[eth]eodan ("unite"), and ge[eth]eode ("language"). (3) The sign of a ruined tower and the isolation of linguistic diversity are here joined to the story of migration that is, as Nicholas Howe has persuasively argued, part of the infrastructure of Anglo-Saxon cultural identity (Migration). The tower is a sign of pride, certainly--it is built for wlence and for wonhygdum ... ofer monna gemet--but also an emblem of the wreckage of social cohesion and of the sad failure of a people's striving for monumental commemoration. The builders' project is ended by a shattering of language that guarantees not only cultural fragmentation but the failure of memory and the isolation from a shared past. The tower is a beacon, indeed, but a beacon of oblivion.
The retelling of the Babel story in Genesis A is striking not only for its sympathetic evocation of the pre-migration builders (4) but for its delicately proleptic use of another familiar topos in Old English poetry, the image of a ruined building that stands as a reminder of vanished glory. Ruins may seem to litter the landscape of Old English literature as they must also have littered the physical landscape of Anglo-Saxon England, but as Kathryn Hume has pointed out, one must not exaggerate the ubiquity of this "ruin motif' ("The 'Ruin Motif' in Old English Poetry")--it appears explicitly only in the short elegies The Wanderer and The Ruin, in a very brief passage in the Cotton Maxims, (5) and as an informing subtext for some passages of Beowulf dealing with the burial and recovery of the treasure of a dying race (2247-66, 2324-36, and 2444-62). These few resonant occasions, however, have captured the imagination of critics, (6) who have generally read them as an effective evocation of the topos of mutability, the recognition of worldly transience that gives OE poetry much of its characteristic pathos and is virtually the defining feature of OE elegy. (7) Yet the Tower of Babel story in Genesis A points to the motif's imbrication in a far larger and more complex set of concerns, including divine punishment, migration history, and the cultural specificity of language. In this paper I would like to consider the description of ruins in The Wanderer in the shadow, as it were, of the Tower of Babel, as a depiction of the nexus of migration history and language; I will argue that the mutability topos in that poem is an expression of a certain anxiety over the possibility of recovering, recording, and reclaiming the past.
THE BACKGROUND OF THE "RUIN MOTIF"
The ruin motif in vernacular poetry may in fact be a specifically English development, influenced, as P. J. Frankis notes, "by the cultural remoteness of the Anglo-Saxons from the Roman remains in the English landscape (as opposed, for example, to the situation on the continent, where the Franks evidently thought of themselves as the inheritors and continuers of Roman civilization)" (258). (8) The continental immigrants to Britain encountered in their new homeland not just evidence of past settlement but an entirely different built environment; they brought with them a different tradition of architecture, in wood rather than stone, in small enclosures rather than villas and cities, without the roads, bridges, walls, and aqueducts of Roman civil engineering. (9) Instances of the practical understanding of the purpose of Roman ruins and the course of Roman history can be found among the Anglo-Saxons, and there is architectural evidence for the later reuse of Roman buildings for monasteries and churches, (10) but the statement of David Wilson that "in general the Anglo-Saxons avoided these sites [i.e., Roman buildings] and developed their own settlements in rural surroundings" (8) may be taken as generally true. (11) The Anglo-Saxons lived, then, in a landscape punctuated by the remains of a Roman stone world that was falling into ruin; whatever their everyday uses, for the purposes of poetry these Roman buildings were taken as the mysterious work of giants, enta geweorc, and their builders de-historicized from the Romanized Britons whom the Anglo-Saxons had dispossessed into the inhabitants of a generic heroic age. (12)
But even if the poetic depiction of ruins reflected actual experience of the physical world, it did not develop in isolation from the many parallels and analogues to the same motif in Latin poetry, (13) such as Venantius Fortunatus's De excidio Thoringiae, a dramatic monologue placed in the mouth of Queen Radegunde, (14) and Alcuin's De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii, composed on the occasion of the sack of that monastery by the Vikings in 793. (15) Nor can thoughts about ruins be separated from the Biblical exegesis of the first of all ruins, the Tower of Babel. While Latin poetic elegies tend to use fallen cities as warnings of the passing of all earthly glory, patristic and medieval exegesis of the story of Babel was the site of a confluence of discourses on language, history, and pride. (16) The building of the tower was closely connected to the figure of the giant Nimrod, the Tower itself to the great city of Babylon, and the destruction of the tower to the origin of the world's various languages (traditionally put at seventy-two). (17) The equation of Nimrod the giant with the architect of Babel and of Babel with Babylon was a commonplace; it is succinctly put in Alcuin's Interrogationes Sigewulfi nos. 148-49, which AElfric translated into English: "Nembro[eth] se ent se [thorn]e fyrmest waes aet [thorn]aere getimbrunge [thorn]ere mycclan byrig Babilonian on [thorn]aere [thorn]e hi woldan [thorn]one stypel up to heofenum araeran on [thorn]aere wurdon [thorn]a gereord on twa and hund seofantig todaeled" ("Nimrod the giant, who was most prominent at the building of the great city of Babylon in which they tried to raise a steeple up to heaven, when language was then divided into seventy-two parts"; MacLean sec. 57). Alfred's version of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae offers the story as an interpolation to Boethius's discussion (3.12) of the rebellious Titans:
Hi meahton seggan hwylc dysig Nefrod se gigant worhte; se Nefrod waes Chuses sunu; Chus waes Chames sunu, Cham Noes. Se Nefrod het w[yrca]n aenne tor on [eth]aem felda [eth]e [sennar] hatte, & on [eth]aere [thorn]iode [eth]e Deira hatte, swi[eth]e neah [thorn]aere byrig [thorn]e mon nu haet Babilonia. [thorn]aet hi dydon for [thorn]am [eth]ingum [thorn]e hi woldon witan hu heah hit waere to [eth]aem heofone, & hu [eth]icce se hefon waere & hu faest, o[eth][eth]e hwaet [thorn]aer ofer waere. Ac hit gebyrede, swa hit cynn was, [thorn]aet se godcunda wald hi tostencte aer hi hit fullwyrcan mosten, & to[wearp] [eth]one tor, & hiora monigne ofslog, & hiora spraece todaelde on tu & hundseofontig ge[thorn]ioda. Swa gebyre[eth] aelcum [thorn]ara [thorn]e win[eth] wi[eth] [eth]aem godcundan anwalde; ne gewyx[eth] him nan weor[eth]scipe on [eth]aem, ac wyr[eth] se gewanod [thorn]e hi aer haefdon.
They might say how foolishly the giant Nimrod did. Nimrod was the son of Chusa, son of Ham, son of Noah; Nimrod ordered a tower to be built on the plain that is called Sennar, in the land of Deira, very near the city that is now called Babylon. He did this because he wished to learn how far it was to heaven, and how thick and firm heaven was, or what was beyond it. But it turned out, naturally, that divine power destroyed it before they could complete it, and knocked over the tower, and killed many of them, and divided their languages into seventy-two tongues. So it happens to anyone who struggles against divine power; they win no honor in it, but lose that which they had previously. (Sedgefield 99; bk. 35, par. 4)
AElfric's homily De falsis diis connects the dispersion of the builders of Babel and the proliferation of their languages to the rise of idol-worship and pagan practice:
Nu ne raede we on bocum [thorn]aet man araerde ha[thorn]engyld on eallum [thorn]am fyrste aer noes flode, o[eth][thorn]aet [thorn]a entas worhtan [thorn]one wundorlican stypel aefter noes flode, and hym swa feala gereorda god [thorn]ar forgeaf swa [thorn]aera wyrhtena waes. [THORN]a [thorn]a hi toferdon to fyrlenum landum, and mancynn [thorn]a weox, [thorn]a wurdon hi bepaehte [thorn]urh [thorn]one ealdan deofol [thorn]e adam aer beswac, swa [thorn]aet hi worhton wolice him godas, and [thorn]one scyppend forsawon [thorn]e...
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