Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Classic English Literature Subcast. And if you celebrate, Happy Easter!
If you don’t, let me do a little explainer. Easter is the festival in which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, meant to ensure the salvation of the faithful, and is therefore the most important holy day in the calendar. While there have been recent moves by some evangelical sects to rechristen the feast “Resurrection Sunday,” the old name Easter has persisted. But from where does this come?
Well, do you remember our old buddy the Venerable Bede? First English historian, author of the History of the English Church and People, and all-around swell-guy? He gives us the only known explanation for the curious name in a work called The Reckoning of Time. He indicates an early Germanic dawn goddess named Eostre as the namesake:
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.
I’ve also enjoyed the idea that the “East” is where the sun rises – right, she’s a dawn goddess, so the archetype of new life, renewal, reverdie, and flatulent deer – but you can get a nice pun with “rising sun” with Jesus as “the rising son.” There have been some scandalous rumors that Eostre’s spirit animal was the hare – hence the Easter Bunny – but that seems to have been entirely the invention of Jakob Grimm in the late 18th century. Fake news! I think it rather more likely that a rabbit’s vaunted reproductive abilities are a more likely source. And the eggs, too, yeah – new life.
The ham? Well, that’s just delicious. But don’t go putting that nasty pineapple on top. So cloying.
Anyway, I’ve got a poem here from a Scots poet named William Dunbar from the late 15th to early 16th century. He called himself a “Makar,” a self-consciously artistic court poet. We used to call the group of poets with which Dunbar is often grouped the Scottish Chaucerians because of a rather obvious debt to the Great Man’s style and subject matter. But let’s let them stand on their own – well, Dunbar, anyway. His poem “Done Is a Battell” is an Easter hymn which, as in other medieval texts, including the Dream of the Rood, Piers Plowman, and even the Ancrene Wisse, heroically portrays Jesus’ resurrection as a joust, a fight, with the Devil. Christ is a knight who will ransom the lost souls in his harrowing of Hell.
I’m not going to try to do a Middle Scots accent with this poem – my modern Scots accent is an affront to a great and proud people. So here’s an English version:
Done is the battle on the dragon black,
Our champion Christ has confounded his force;
The gates of hell are broken with a crack,
The triumphal sign of the cross is raised,
The devil trembles with hideous voice,
The souls are released and to bliss can go,
Christ with his blood our ransom pays:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.
Overcome is the deadly dragon Lucifer,
The cruel serpent with [the] death all stings,
The old fierce tiger with his teeth on show
While in wait has lain for us so long,
Thinking to grip us in his claws strong:
The merciful lord would not that it were so,
He made him for to fail of that prize:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.
He for our sake that suffered to be slain
And like a lamb in sacrifice was given,
Is like a lion risen up again,
And as a giant raised himself on high:
Born is Aurora radiant and bright,
On high is gone the glorious Apollo,
The blissful day departed from the night:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.
The great victor again is risen on high
That for our sins to the death was wounded;
The sun that waxed all pale now shines bright,
And, darkness clears, our faith is now reborn:
The bell of mercy from heaven is sounding,
The Christians are delivered from their woe,
The Jews and their error are confounded:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.
The foe is chased, the battle is done,
The prison broken, the jailors fled and banished,
The weariness is gone, confirmed is the peace,
The fetters loosened and the dungeon opened,
The ransom made, the prisoners redeemed,
The field is won, overcome is the foe,
Despoiled of the treasure that he kept:
Surrexit dominus de sepulchro.
I think the translation quite good, but like all translations, we must give up something. We still get a good sense of the poem’s alliterative verse (which remained popular in Scotland for nearly a century after it had passed its English sell-by date) and some of the sound effects (onomatopoeia, for those in the know) are preserved, like those snappy “k” sounds “black” and “crack.” But Dunbar also uses a pretty elaborate rhyme scheme which gets lost in a non-Scots version. He uses an 8 line stanza with pentameter lines with a cool mirroring rhyme: ababbcbc. It’s as if you could fold the stanza between lines 4 and 5 and you’d get this neat symmetry. Here are the rhymes for stanza 1 in the original: blak, force, crak, croce, voce, go, indoce, sepulchro.
And, by the by, that Latin phrase at the end of each stanza means something like the Lord is risen from the grave. A macaronic refrain, if you’d like to impress your friends.
The first stanza establishes the Christ as warrior metaphor. In it, he is the romantic, chivalric hero, slaying the dragon and rescuing all us damsels. Stanza two shifts the focus to the defeated devil with a number of animal analogies: dragon, serpent, tiger. Tiger? I get the first two – and, yeah, tigers are terrifying – but it seems an odd way for Dunbar to fulfill the rule of three.
We switch back to Christ in the third stanza with his own animal analogies: the lamb (a classic, right?) and a lion. In the bestiary, the lion is noble, brave, and fierce and, of course, as the bestiary states: ‘Now leo in Greek is translated to king (rex) in Latin, because he is the ruler of all beasts.’ King of the jungle, baby! Think about Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, a “smack you in the face with a neon tennis racket”- obvious allegory for Jesus. OK, so maybe the earlier tiger is a counterpoint? Bad kitty?
We get some classical allusions, too. Christ is associated with Apollo (so the Son of God to the god of the sun), rising in righteousness (so we get Aurora, goddess of the dawn). A nod to Sampson, the last Israelite judge and strongman is there, too.
Then there’s some rather conventional hymnal sentiments: we are told that Christ’s sacrifice is necessary for our sins. Dunbar allegorizes the darkness that fell during the crucifixion as a pale sun that now shines brightly to dispel the darkness.
But then the poem takes, for us, a dark turn itself. No doubt you noticed the line indicating that “the Jews and their error are confounded.” Why is Jewishness an error but not Greco-Roman classicism? There are traditional, if uncomfortable answers, of course. The classical world became Christendom and Judaism rejected the idea of Jesus as Messiah. This, sadly and tragically, leads to the millenia of anti-semitism at the hands of Christian churches, governments, and individuals. Certainly, the line included here none-too-subtley leagues the Jews with the defeated Devil: Dunbar uses the verb “confounded” in both instances.
An interesting verb, that. Its oldest form meant to pour or to mix, but it comes to mean in the Middle Ages to destroy or to ruin, as well as to curse and condemn. Dunbar exploits all of these meanings here. Unfortunately, it’s in the service of a poem that facilitates an anti-Jewish fantasy. We can fairly question whether Dunbar or anyone in England or Scotland had ever met a Jewish person. Jews were expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290, and while Scotland never had a similar proscription, it’s probably because there was nearly no Jewish population in Scotland rather than Scotland’s medieval religious toleration. So “the Jew” and “Jewishness” for most medieval Christians in the British Isles, were, in some sense, creatures of imagination, characters from stories often repeated. They were tropes, albeit powerful ones, more than flesh-and-blood people. Anti-Jewish policies like expulsion did nothing to alleviate the Jewish threat (as envisioned by Christian monarchs), but rather exaggerated it – making it exclusively a property of fantasy – and this, of course, has led to untold suffering for millions of Jewish people for centuries because an illusion is, by definition, not human. And what is not human does not deserve our moral consideration. This ugly dynamic is not strange to us in the 21st century, as demagogues and populists have revived these very old and terrible tropes.
So, this Easter, we have a poem that in almost every sense embodies some aspect of English medieval culture and literature: alliteration, accentual verse, romance, religiosity, allegory. But it similarly traffics in the fears and prejudices of its time. Easter, and the Jewish celebration of Passover, are at base recognitions of the very human need for freedom and redemption, and a generosity of imagination and spirit that serves us all.
Happy Easter. Chag sameach.
Thanks for listening.