Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings

The Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, or Ecclesiastical History of the English People, is Saint Bede’s five-book Latin history of Christianity in England.

Take heed not to delay that which you promised to perform; embrace the faith, and keep the precepts of Him who, delivering you from temporal adversity, has raised you to the honor of a temporal kingdom; and if, from this time forward, you shall be obedient to His will, which through me He signifies to you, He will not only deliver you from the everlasting torments of the wicked, but also make you partaker with Him of His eternal kingdom in Heaven.

Take heed not to delay that which you promised to perform; embrace the faith, and keep the precepts of Him who, delivering you from temporal adversity, has raised you to the honor of a temporal kingdom; and if, from this time forward, you shall be obedient to His will, which through me He signifies to you, He will not only deliver you from the everlasting torments of the wicked, but also make you partaker with Him of His eternal kingdom in Heaven.

Take heed not to delay that which you promised to perform; embrace the faith, and keep the precepts of Him who, delivering you from temporal adversity, has raised you to the honor of a temporal kingdom; and if, from this time forward, you shall be obedient to His will, which through me He signifies to you, He will not only deliver you from the everlasting torments of the wicked, but also make you partaker with Him of His eternal kingdom in Heaven.

For none of your people has applied himself more diligently to the worship of our gods than I; and yet there are many who receive greater favors from you, and are more preferred than I, and are more prosperous in all their undertakings.

It remains, therefore, that if upon examination you find those new doctrines, which are now preached to us, better and more efficacious, we immediately receive them without any delay.

Indeed, after him others among the English people tried to compose religious poetry, but no one could equal him because he was not taught the art of song by men or by human agency but received this gift through heavenly grace.

As a matter of fact, he had lived in the secular estate until he was well advanced in age without learning any songs.

This is the general sense but not the exact order of the words that he sang in his sleep; for it is impossible to make a literal translation, no matter how well-written, of poetry into another language without losing some of the beauty and dignity.

He ruled
Lands on all sides: wherever the sea
Would take them his soldiers sailed, returned
With tribute and obedience.

And in that hall he’d divided the spoils
Of their victories, to old and young what they’d earned
In battle, but leaving the common pastures
Untouched, and taking no lives.

The Almighty drove
Those demons out, and their exile was bitter,
Shut away from men; they split
In a thousand forms of evil—spirits
And fiends, goblins, monsters, giants,
A brood forever opposing the Lord’s
Will, and again and again defeated.

I have come so far,
O shelterer of warriors and your people’s loved friend,
That this one favor you should not refuse me—
That I, alone and with the help of my men,
May purge all evil from this hall.

And his heart laughed, he relished the sight,
Intended to tear the life from those bodies
By morning; the monster’s mind was hot
With the thought of food and the feasting his belly
Would soon know.

Grendel snatched at the first Geat
He came to, ripped him apart, cut
His body to bits with powerful jaws,
Drank the blood from his veins and bolted
Him down, hands and feet; death
And Grendel’s great teeth came together,
Snapping life shut.

The infamous killer fought
For his freedom, wanting no flesh but retreat,
Desiring nothing but escape; his claws
Had been caught, he was trapped.

Suddenly
The sounds changed, the Danes started
In new terror, cowering in their beds as the terrible
Screams of the Almighty’s enemy sang
In the darkness

And the Geats’
Lord and leader, angry, lowered
His sword and roared out a battle cry,
A call so loud and clear that it reached through
The hoary rock, hung in the dragon’s
Ear.

The Geats stayed,
Moaning their sorrow, lamenting their lord

Orchards blossom, the towns bloom,
Fields grow lovely as the world springs fresh,
And all these admonish that willing mind
Leaping to journeys, always set
In thoughts traveling on a quickening tide.

And yet my heart wanders away,
My soul roams with the sea, the whales’
Home, wandering to the wildest corners
Of the world, returning ravenous with desire

Thus the joys of God
Are fervent with life, where life itself
Fades quickly into the earth.

A man must conquer pride, not kill it,
Be firm with his fellows, chaste for himself,
Treat all the world as the world deserves,
With love or with hate but never with harm

That man’s kinsmen began to plot
with secret scheming to split us both apart,
so that we two—widely asunder in the world—
lived most wretchedly.

Then I found myself a most husbandly man,
but a man with hard luck, brooding in his heart;
he hid his moods, his murderous thoughts,
yet seemed blithe in his bearing.

All that is whorled backward, changed;
now it’s as if it never had been,
the loving friendship the both of us had.

They forced me to live in a grove of wood
under an oak tree in an earth hovel.

So my loved friend sits
under a stone cliff crusted with frost in the storm—
my lover dreary in spirit.