Cracks at Anglo-Sax

While we fall to see (for reasons we shall discuss below) that OE has much importance at all in the course, even if more rationally studied, we cannot but regret that any subject in a University should become so intellectually useless—so trivial. Yet it is just this triviality, especially in the Honours year that takes up for many students more time than all the other papers put together.

If Anglo-Saxon is to be studied at all it should be done intensively by intending specialists, and not in the perfunctory fashion that is usual with students who learn it because they have to and not because they want to. It should constitute a separate course and not, at least in Stage III and Honours, be compulsory for anyone but linguists, for not only is a little crammed knowledge of A-S texts valueless in itself, but the necessity for it is a positive menace to the student of literature. The Honours student who takes the language options, can if he has the requisite ability and a very grim determination, cover all his course and commit the more important parts to memory in one of two years, but a genuine knowledge of literature, as anyone with a degree in it ought to admit, requires a great deal more reading, and thinking about what has been read, than can be fitted even into the whole four-year course.

What the student of literature resents quite justly is part of an alien and intricate specialisation (the whole of Beowulf with all his works, pomps, textual apparatus and German editors) boring in itself and utterly valueless when studied apart from cognate Scandinavian literature being imposed upon him, with no scrap of justification apart from that implicit in a doctrinaire adherence (as we find in Lewis's article in "Rehabilitations") to the principle of historical completeness. For even if he has picked up a little of the language (and if he has it is probably been by neglecting his other papers) what value is a knowledge of A-S to him as a student of literature? Very little. He has not been given the key to a whole new literature, for Anglo-Saxon is limited both in quantity and in range and when, with a good deal of trouble, he has acquired this proficiency in the language he finds that there are no further texts to read that have any more intrinsic value or interest than those he has become so painfully familiar with already.