Redeeming Wastelands, Building Communities in the Old English Guthlac A

Abstract

Although ecocriticism has recently flourished in the scholarship of medieval English literature, the majority of attention has focused on Middle English literature;1 as Alfred K. Siewers notes, “Modern scholarship long believed that descriptions of nature in Anglo-Saxon literature tended to be more alienated and distanced in tone and theme than those in neighboring contemporary Insular literary cultures” (199). However, when we examine the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, ecological concerns appear, even if seemingly on the margins. Such is the case, I argue, for the Old English poem Guthlac A, found in the late tenth-century Exeter Book, which details the religious life of Saint Guthlac. Guthlac, a member of the Mercian royal family born in 673 AD, abandoned a successful military life in order to enter a monastery at the age of twenty-four.2 A few years later, in 701 AD, he withdrew from the secular world even further by removing himself to the wild fens of East Anglia, where he lived for thirteen years, constantly repulsing demonic attacks, as attested by the various accounts of his life. In 740 AD, approximately thirty years after Guthlac’s death, which occurred in 714 AD, a monk of Crowland by the name of Felix composed the first-known hagiography of Guthlac, the Vita Sancti Guthlaci. Vernacular accounts soon appeared in various Old English texts, specifically, the Old English Martyrology, the Vercelli Homily XXIII, and an Old English prose Life.