Entwork Defeated
As we saw in an earlier post, the Old English poem Andreas features two examples of enta geweorc (‘giant-work’): a stone-paved street, along which the titular saint is dragged by cannibals; and a stone pillar, which the saint commands to unleash a flood that will slay or convert the inhabitants of the city Mermedonia.
What I want to focus on in this post is the way in which those examples of ent work drop out of the poem entirely, rather than remaining as a visible reminder of the city’s entish past.
Such disappearance is unusual. The significance of the enta geweorc in Maxims II - those imposing structures in the landscape that serve as a metaphor for kingly centrality - surely depends upon their longevity and continuity.
In another post considering the eotonisc (‘giantish, trollish’) swords of Beowulf, I made a distinction between the aggression and victory associated with these weapons, as opposed to the passivity and defeat linked to entish work. However, even though entish work in Beowulf is not used to effect victory or change (as it is in Andreas), it is not lost, covered over, or made redundant. To take one example, the blade of the sword Beowulf finds in Grendel’s lair melts: that is, the eotonisc element dissolves. But the ent-work hilt - like almost all other entish survivals - remains as a stubborn, unincorporated jutting into the present.
But in Andreas, alone in Old English literature, we see the entish too ultimately disappear, covered over by the new world which the entish artifacts themselves have helped to create. By enacting a eotonisc triumphal violence against the saint and the devilish inhabitants of Mermedonia, the entish stones - streets and pillar - have effaced themselves.
This cooperation too is strange. Enta geweorc in Old English poetry is emblematic of a former world, long destroyed. The entas themselves (represented, for late Anglo-Saxon writers by figures such as the Biblical Nimrod) made the things of the old, pagan world; nowhere else do we see their works used to create the new, Christian landscape.
To Denis Ferhatovic, “[t]he pillar in Andreas does not move from its place, but its status definitely changes. … Its role as a vessel for the cleansing flood brings up questions of its future use. It continues to live, as does the angel-shaped sculpture from earlier in the narrative.” The pillar’s status may change, but whatever questions we may have about its future use are not entertained in the poem. Its existence is fleeting, more so than the stone angel from earlier in the poem, which steps down from the wall, speaks, and then goes off on its journey to awaken the patriarchs. The pillar, in contrast, is spoken to for a few lines, and then releases the flood – and in the moment of doing so, it breaks: se stan togan (‘the stone came apart’) (l. 1523).1
While Ferhatovic suggests that this pillar may go on to have another life in the walls of the Christian church that is later built above it,2 we never see it after the flood, nor is it referenced again. Ferhatovic acknowledges that Andreas, like other biblical poems, “[does] not envision the exact past or future of these objects,” yet he asserts that “they acknowledge that they were activated before and will be again, somewhere outside the text, as the text itself would be.”3
However, Ferhatovic points out that Andreas is unique with regard to the angel-statue scene. In the poem, unlike the prose versions of the saint’s adventures, Christ does not command the statue to return to its post: “The Anglo-Saxon verse account offers no such closure. We are not even sure whether the statue stays in Mamre or goes back to the temple. Whatever the position of this particular work of art, it is not strictly fixed.”4
The same could be said, in a sense, of the pillar at the end of Andreas: its fate is unknown. But where Ferhatovic sees this uncertainty as implying a continued future for these objects, the Andreas-poet seems rather to be asserting the power of the properly disposed Christian to overcome the awe that is the natural response to such ancient or impressive works and, in so doing, to create a world that outlasts them. In the presence of such entish artefacts, pagan kings like Hrothgar may be stunned into silence or inspired to speak on matters of wisdom that seem only vaguely related to the enta geweorc sword-hilt that he holds; exiles or travellers like those in The Wanderer and The Ruin will contemplate the destroyed works before them, drawn irresistibly to considerations of the past and loss. Only Andrew, when faced with such devastation, sees it as fertile ground for God’s work.
Andrew, in other words, has something to say to - not merely about - the entish artefacts. But his speech is not a guarantee of the pillar’s (worldly) ‘life’, as Ferhatovic might have it. If the pillar is to have a future, fragmentary existence within the walls of the coming church, it will be unsung. Just as the flood is a baptismal death and (potential) rebirth for the Mermedonians, so it is for the pillar itself. In the coming days, the Christianized Mermedonians will not, one assumes, view the pillar as the doomed Egyptian army view the ece stathulas (‘everlasting foundations’) of the Old English poem Exodus l. 474 - as a firm, foundational, discrete element, still retaining its past identity. If it exists at all, it will be invisible, reconstituted, subsumed within the new walls of the church building. Just as Andrew’s suffering under torture has, paradoxically, overcome the entish streets of the city, so his speech overcomes the entish pillar, which tears itself apart as it carries out his command. If the Maxims II poet insists upon the centrality of the entish to earthly authority, perhaps, for the Andreas-poet, the point is precisely that the entish must be excised, erased, in order to make way for an ideal, heavenly-oriented society. In this sense, Andrew ‘defeats’ the entish as surely as Eofor’s sword defeats Ongentheow’s helm - but not before bringing it, briefly, to a eotonisc kind of life.
It is perhaps not surprising that Ferhatovic does not treat extensively of enta geweorc in his Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse. In his work, he focuses on “[t]he resistance of horns, swords, pillars, sculptures, and hoards to submersion in these texts”, stating that “[t]he appeal of such spolia lies in their partially preserved Otherness, which enables them to gesture towards a story or history outside the new context.”5 For the pillar in Andreas, of course, does not “resist submersion”. It submerges Mermedonia, and is itself submerged by the Christianity that it plays an instrumental part in unleashing. No artefacts of the older world remain. Similarly, the enta geweorc hilt of the giantish sword that Beowulf hands to Hrothgar is captured, one might say, in the process of a similar submersion – of becoming less what it had been. Hrothgar holds it loosely while looking upon it, as he (and we) read its past. The hilt, one imagines, will have no future, unlike the other treasures that process through the poem: intact swords passed from loser to victor to son, horses passed from king to thane to king, ancient hoarded gold passed from lair to hero’s tomb.
The sword, like the pillar, is destroyed in the very accomplishment of its work. Despite their different circumstances, the fact that we are witness to their reduction sets these items apart fundamentally from other entish works, which do not perform heroically but whose brokenness reveals the weakness of worldly things, even things of once-great might. These ent-works, sword and pillar, are not presented as already broken, but break in the process of victory. They are thus comparable to those other broken things: the bodies of martyred saints, ruined in obedience, revealing victory amid the appearance of defeat.
Andreas makes this comparison, between the hard stone of the pillar and the bloody stuff of Andrew’s body, strikingly clear. Both are, in their own way, silent expressions of the aspirational words of St. Paul, words as terrible and incomprehensible to us now as they no doubt were to lofgeorn Anglo-Saxon kings and would-be heroes: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me.”
Ferhatovic, Denis. Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse. Manchester University Press, 2019. pg. 9.
Richard North and Michael D.J. Bintley, eds. Andreas: An Edition. Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Ferhatovic, p. 106.
Ferhatovic, p. 10.
Ferhatovic, p. 94.
Ferhatovic, back cover.