The Phoenix is an anonymous Old English poem. It is composed of 677 lines and is for the most part a translation and adaptation of the Latin poem De Ave Phoenice attributed to Lactantius. It is found in the Exeter Book.
The composition of The Phoenix dates from the ninth century. Although the text is complete, it has been edited and translated many times. It is a part of the Exeter Book contained within folios 55b-65b, [1] and is a story based on three main sources: Carmen de ave phoenice by Lactantius (early fourth century), the Bible, and Hexaemeron by Ambrose. The first part of the poem is based solely on Lactantius' piece; the second part of the poem is based on scripture, mostly from Job, especially 29:18 (with references to the New Testament, Revelation, and Genesis), and Ambrose's piece. The story of the Phoenix resembles the resurrection of Christ. The first 380 lines paraphrase the Latin version De Carmen de ave phoenice with many of the pagan elements removed from the original Phoenix story. The last 297 lines are an allegorical application of Christianity, and applied to the story of the phoenix. Within the last eleven lines, the poem concludes by combining Old English and Latin. Some possibilities have been suggested, including a passage from the Hexaemeron of Saint Ambrose, and a commentary on the book of Job that had once been attributed to Bede, but has been determined “most certainly” to not have been authored by him. To put the piece in context, in terms of contemporary scholarship, Heffernan labels the time period in which The Phoenix was written, generally “homiletic,” which means the literature during that period was generally written in the style of a sermon. As mentioned previously, the authorship of The Phoenix is up for debate, but may have been the work of Cynewulf, as there are verbal and stylistic similarities between his literary works and The Phoenix.
The beginning of The Phoenix describes the Garden of Eden as a Paradise, meant only for believers, in “eastern lands,” of sweet smells and means of extremes; the weather is mild: it never snows, rains, nor is the sun hot. There are no distinguishing geographical features whatsoever, like mountains, or valleys. However, the “plain,” as the poem refers to the Garden, is resplendent with blooming foliage that never dies. In this environment, there are no extreme emotions at all: no death, sickness, or misery, but on the flip side of that coin, readers get the sense that there are no extreme positive emotions either. Biblical events are occasionally referenced, including the flood, God's creation of the world, and the Judgment at the end of time. There is also a recurrence of certain numbers, particularly the numbers three and twelve, which are also recurrent in Biblical literature. It is not until line 85 that the actual Phoenix bird is introduced, as a resident of “that forest,” and it seems to be primarily employed in watching the eternalness of the Garden. Its other activities include bathing, nest-making, singing, ruling over its fellow fowl as a prince, and perpetually growing old, dying, and then undergoing rebirth from its ashes, a glorious fiery death, which symbolizes giving of the self; and finally the resurrection from the ashes, symbolizing eternal life.
The second part of the poem becomes allegorical, where the bird symbolizes Christ's death and resurrection, his ability to return and raise the dead, and take the living followers on flight to the beautiful home (Paradise) of the phoenix. The phoenix also symbolizes the faithful followers through the baptismal altar where the sinful self dies and the new hope within Christ comes to life. There may be, as well, two more possible symbols of the bird, as Carol Falvo Heffernan discusses, that the phoenix represents the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church. [2]
The lines below show the living followers – as symbolized phoenixes – on flight to the beautiful home of the phoenix (Paradise).
After the death of the Phoenix, it returns to life, which represents Christian doctrine of the resurrection. This is the central theme of the poem. Through examples taken from the natural world the author of the Phoenix is able to relate Christianity to the text. The phoenix desires to be born again.
Old English Christianity seems to have a generally fatalistic outlook on life. Themes of the inevitability of death and unhappy implications of the Final Judgment, for example, pervade other Old English poetry like Beowulf. Such does not seem to be the case with The Phoenix, which devotes passages to describing the beauty of its objects: the Garden of Eden and the Phoenix bird itself.
The Phoenix conceptualizes existence as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, using the analogy of “the nature of corn,” or the harvest. In fact, Bugge considers this reading of The Phoenix, as a symbol Christian soteriology, or the doctrine of resurrection, almost to obvious. However, such an existence is perfected, it does not actually exist in reality, so perhaps the point of expounding on such perfection is to convey a sense of loss, of lamenting what was and can never be again, because of the actions of our own human folly. Thus, in this context, The Phoenix represents a sort of classic fatalist sense of Old English Christianity, but couched and hidden away in terms of the language of beautiful imagery and pleasant descriptions. However, such language really conveys, to readers, negative emotions, which then trigger the true fatalistic nature, the sense of loss, characteristic of Old English Christianity.
The subject mostly approached by scholars when giving critical assessment on The Phoenix is the absence of pagan names and details. J. E. Cross comments on O. F. Emerson's theory about the poet omitting many of the classical allusions to change the original phoenix myth into a Christian poem. [3] Cross disagrees by saying, "The Old English poet cannot do other than omit the names in transferring the ideas to a different poetic idiom, especially such a clearly didactic poem, which assumes an audience less knowledgeable than the author". [3]
In one incident, the poet stops short in using an offensive statement dealing with the rites of the Egyptian sun cult; although the basics are there. A careful reading by a person educated in mythology may detect many adapted myths.
Scholars also identify sexuality, or the lack thereof, as a central theme in "The Phoenix". Bugge states that “elite Christians, who choose a regimen of the strict sexual purity…[somewhat] emulate the apparent sexlessness of the Phoenix” as depicted in the poem.
Lucius Caecilius FirmianussignoLactantius was an early Christian author who became an advisor to Roman emperor Constantine I, guiding his Christian religious policy in its initial stages of emergence, and a tutor to his son Crispus. His most important work is the Institutiones Divinae, an apologetic treatise intended to establish the reasonableness and truth of Christianity to pagan critics.
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
The phoenix is an immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. While it is part of Greek mythology, it has analogs in many cultures such as Egyptian and Persian. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, others that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again. In the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a tool used by folklorists, the phoenix is classified as motif B32.
TheDream of the Rood is one of the Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative verse. Rood is from the Old English word rōd 'pole', or more specifically 'crucifix'. Preserved in the 10th-century Vercelli Book, the poem may be as old as the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross, and is considered one of the oldest works of Old English literature.
Cynewulf is one of twelve Old English poets known by name, and one of four whose work is known to survive today. He presumably flourished in the 9th century, with possible dates extending into the late 8th and early 10th centuries.
The Old English poem Judith describes the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. It is found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, dated ca. 975–1025. The Old English poem is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in the Book of Judith, still present in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian Bibles. The other extant version is by Ælfric of Eynsham, late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer; his version is a homily of the tale.
The Seafarer is an Old English poem giving a first-person account of a man alone on the sea. The poem consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". It is recorded only at folios 81 verso – 83 recto of the tenth-century Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It has most often, though not always, been categorised as an elegy, a poetic genre commonly assigned to a particular group of Old English poems that reflect on spiritual and earthly melancholy.
The Heliand is an epic alliterative verse poem in Old Saxon, written in the first half of the 9th century. The title means healer in Old Saxon, and the poem is a Biblical paraphrase that recounts the life of Jesus in the alliterative verse style of a Germanic epic. Heliand is the largest known work of written Old Saxon.
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Albert Stanburrough Cook was an American philologist, literary critic, and scholar of Old English. He has been called "the single most powerful American Anglo-Saxonist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Christ II, also called The Ascension, is one of Cynewulf's four signed poems that exist in the Old English vernacular. It is a five-section piece that spans lines 440–866 of the Christ triad in the Exeter Book, and is homiletic in its subject matter in contrast to the martyrological nature of Juliana, Elene, and Fates of the Apostles. Christ II draws upon a number of ecclesiastical sources, but it is primarily framed upon Gregory the Great’s Homily XXIX on Ascension Day.
"The Fates of the Apostles" is the shortest of Cynewulf’s known canon at 122 lines long. It is a brief martyrology of the Twelve Apostles written in the standard alliterative verse. The Fates recites the key events that subsequently befell each apostle after the Ascension of Jesus. It is possible that The Fates was composed as a learning aid to the monasteries.
Andreas is an Old English poem, which tells the story of St. Andrew the Apostle, while commenting on the literary role of the "hero". It is believed to be a translation of a Latin work, which is originally derived from the Greek story The Acts of Andrew and Matthew in the City of Anthropophagi, dated around the 4th century. However, the author of Andreas added the aspect of the Germanic hero to the Greek story to create the poem Andreas, where St. Andrew is depicted as an Old English warrior, fighting against evil forces. This allows Andreas to have both poetic and religious significance.
Christ and Satan is an anonymous Old English religious poem consisting of 729 lines of alliterative verse, contained in the Junius Manuscript.
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"The Husband's Message" is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long and found only on folio 123 of the Exeter Book. The poem is cast as the private address of an unknown first-person speaker to a wife, challenging the reader to discover the speaker's identity and the nature of the conversation, the mystery of which is enhanced by a burn-hole at the beginning of the poem.
Daniel is an anonymous Old English poem based loosely on the Biblical Book of Daniel, found in the Junius Manuscript. The author and the date of Daniel are unknown. Critics have argued that Cædmon is the author of the poem, but this theory has been since disproved. Daniel, as it is preserved, is 764 lines long. There have been numerous arguments that there was originally more to this poem than survives today. The majority of scholars, however, dismiss these arguments with the evidence that the text finishes at the bottom of a page, and that there is a simple point, which translators assume indicates the end of a complete sentence. Daniel contains a plethora of lines which Old English scholars refer to as “hypermetric” or long. Daniel is one of the four major Old Testament prophets, along with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The poet even changed the meaning of the story from remaining faithful while you are being persecuted to a story dealing with pride, which is a very common theme in Old English Literature. The Old English Daniel is a warning against pride and there are three warnings in the story. The Israelites were conquered because they lost faith in God, who delivered them from Egypt, and started worshiping idols and this is the first prideful act. The second and third warnings are about internal pride, shown to Nebuchadnezzar through Daniel's dream interpretations.
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The Panther is a 74-line alliterative poem written in the Old English language which uses the image of a panther as an allegory for Christ's death and Resurrection. It is believed to be part of a cycle of three animal-based poems called the Old English Physiologus or Bestiary, a translation-adaptation of the popular Physiologus text found in many European literatures, preserved in the Exeter Book anthology of Old English poetry. Being the first of three poems in the cycle, The Panther is followed by the poems The Whale and The Partridge.
De ave phoenice is a poem attributed to the early Christian apologist writer Lactantius. The poem is not overtly Christian; scholars point to certain aspects of the text to support their view that the author intended a Christian interpretation of the phoenix. They interpret the mythological phoenix motif as symbolic of Christ and resurrection.