下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Perhaps, the earliest recorded war poetry is thought to be written by Enheduanna, a priestess from Sumer, the ancient land that is now Iraq, where she riled against war in about 2300 BC:
You are blood rushing down a mountain,
Spirit of hate, greed and anger,
dominator of heaven and earth!
As the English people and their national identity were formulated during a long process of constant ethnic hybridization and integration, the English language evolved along a complex tapestry of insistent developments and short, sharp shocks, of isolation and mutual influences,and of borrowings and obsolescence, so is poetry representing wars accompanied with its history as an independent discipline. In Great Britain, war has always been a powerful and enduring cultural force shaping its imaginative literature. As a capacious category, British war poetry has its origins from the diverse literary activity of ancient Greece and Rome, such as Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
(c. 750 BCE), poems of wars as the so-called central text of Greco-Roman literary culture, and Vergil's
Aeneid
(the late 1
st
century BCE) depicting adventures of Aeneas after the Trojan War with illustrious historical background for the Roman Empire.Another important origin is
The Bible
, in which those biblical wars dealing with conflicts soaked in blood has to a greater extent doomed both creeds and deeds in the English poetic tradition, as one scholar has put it:“The presence in the Western world of a Christian tradition as a continuous background, albeit a vaguely defined one without a univocal meaning, is not an element for leveling out conflicts; on the contrary, it is (or has become) a constitutive factor in promoting them, and can exacerbate them.”
The rich varieties of classical antiquity grappling with the problem of how to depict war and its effects characterize those wars in epic, martial poems, lyrics or elegiacs, and historiography, contributes to later war literature for their formal features and thematic concerns memorializing great martial deeds, as Kate McMoughlin's edited
The Cambridge Companion to War Writing
(2009) has such a good summary:“classical war literature's legacy to Britain and America is multifarious, and goes beyond the simple analogizing of modern conflicts to ancient. The military writing of the Greco-Roman world developed formal structures and motifs upon which subsequent writers have often drawn, as well as initiating methodological concerns of ongoing significance. And in the sphere of war literature, as elsewhere, the classical world continues to provide a useful foil for contemporary themes and preoccupations.”
[1]
Despite all those multifarious legacies, the British war poetry has its beginnings in its own historical and linguistic formation. The earliest form of English is called the Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. AD 550—AD 1066), thus the earliest war poetry in English accordingly begins from such a historic process. As the highest achievement of Old English literature, the heroic national epic Beowulf may initiate a good beginning, but its denomination of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, its lack of historical Beowulf, and more importantly its seemingly non-human or supernatural warfare may exclude itself from what is categorized as“war poetry”, so is the Welsh poet Aneirin's The Gododdin preserved in“The Book of Aneirin”manuscript in the Historia Brittonum (written c. 830) for its language (translated from the Welsh by Joseph P.Clancy). Beowulf is believed to have been composed between AD 700 and AD 750 dealing with events of the early 6 th century, and Aneirin is one of five poets renowned among the Welsh in the 6 th century, relating in poetic form that at some time around AD 600, Mynyddawg Mwynfawr, a king of the North British people known as the Gododdin, assembled 300 Celtic warriors and feasted them for a year at his court in Edinburgh, before leading them southward;they encountered the English hosts at Catterick in Yorkshire, and in the ensuing battle all, or all but a handful, were killed.
The pre-historical English language was in the womb before the end of about 500 AD, the Old English was born and growing in the cradle from about AD 500 to about AD 1100, and wars taking place during the transitional period from the Old English to Middle English (c. AD 1100—c. AD 1500)
are“The Battle of Brunanburh”(AD 937) and“The Battle of Maldon”(991 AD), battles before“The Battle of Hastings”(AD 1066) of the Norman Conquest, in which William, Duke of Normandy won his decisive victory and effected profound political,administrative, and social metamorphoses in the British Isles. It is for this good reason that poetry writing the former two battles can be taken as the proper beginning of the English war poetry, but this critical anthology sets
Beowulf
as a beginning only to mediate the British poetic tradition.
[1] Kate McLoughlin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to War Writing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 79.