St Andrew and the Ents
The apostle in the giant-built city
The Old English Andreas has a history of being undervalued by critics. As a result it is not as widely known as Beowulf or The Wanderer. That is unfortunate, because Andreas, with its striking imagery and dramatic detail, shows a poet working through the difficulties and consequences of a specifically Christian and Anglo-Saxon brand of heroism.1
The poem describes the legendary adventures of Saint Andrew: his journey to the fantastical land of Mermedonia, which is inhabited by cannibals; his rescue of St Matthew, who has been imprisoned and blinded by these pagans, along with many others; Andrew’s subsequent capture, torture, and imprisonment; and his summoning of a flood that drowns the worst of the cannibals and convinces the rest to repent and convert.
Of special interest to this substack, two crucial scenes of the poem involve enta geweorc. (For an introduction to the concept of ‘enta geweorc’, start here.) Andrew’s torture is effected by the cannibals dragging him through the city streets which are described as enta geweorc, and at the poem’s climax Andrew commands the flood to arise from the base of a pillar, another enta geweorc.
Andreas, unlike Beowulf, is certainly based on a prior version of the Andrew legend. In fact, the poem is not unique in treating of this legend in Old English: a vernacular homily deals with Andrew’s adventures; there is also a later Latin and an earlier Greek version. While Andreas corresponds in several details to these other versions of the legend, only in the Old English poem do we encounter the references to enta geweorc, or ‘giantish’ constructions of any kind, during Andrew’s adventure.2
The phrase enta geweorc and variants occur 8 times in Old English poetry: twice in Andreas (l. 1235, the street, and 1495, the pillar); three times in Beowulf (referencing, at l. 1690, the surviving hilt of a giant sword Beowulf has brought out of Grendel’s lair; at l. 2717 the architecture of the dragon’s lair; and at l. 2774 either the lair again or treasures found within it); once in The Ruin (l. 2, the ruined structure); once in The Wanderer (l. 87, a ruined stronghold and palace); and once in Maxims II (l. 2, describing a prominent, kingly construction). Other occurrences of ent in poetry involve the city of Rome, described as burg enta (‘city of giants’) in Elene (l. 31); and the adjective entisc, used once, as we have seen, in Beowulf l. 2979, to describe the helmet worn by the Swedish king Ongentheow.
While the enta geweorc in Andreas are conventional in some ways (they are old and made of stone), the prominence of these artifacts in this narrative - and, in particular, their liveliness - sets them apart.
Compared to the other occurrences, Andrew has by far the most intimate relationship with entish things that we see in any Old English literature. The enta geweorc in or constituting the dragon’s lair in Beowulf are merely observed, as are the enta geweorc in The Ruin and The Wanderer. These structures are essentially passive objects which serve as foci for contemplation. Still, owing to the drama of the moment and the fineness of detail, the invocation of entas at the dragon’s lair is more evocative than that in Elene, and more grounded than that in Maxims II, where the phrase is deployed not to describe but to link ancient with contemporary structures of power.
Like other entish, ruined structures, the giant sword-hilt that Beowulf hauls back from Grendel’s lair serves as a reminder of an ancient past and seems somehow to stimulate Hrothgar’s contemplation of timeless truths. The hilt’s more human scale seems to invite intimacy. As a thing that can be grasped, held in the hand - rather than a crumbling tower to be observed or imagined - it acquires a heft and a history both in and beyond the central narrative of the poem.
Yet its significance remains vague, to the characters as well as to modern readers. Hrothgar looks at it, seems to be affected by what he sees, and then makes a speech that does not directly reference the object of his scrutiny. Unlike other observers of entish work (for example in The Wanderer or The Ruin), Hrothgar is not shown imagining the makers or prior owners of this remarkable object. Similarly, Beowulf himself would note the enta geweorc of the dragon’s lair but not speculate about the barrow’s builders or the owners of its treasure. In short, unlike some other Anglo-Saxon observers of entish work, the characters in Beowulf seem unable to fully recognize or reckon with the significance of these structures and artifacts.
It is only in Andreas that we see enta geweorc doing things. In this poem, entish stones serve as the tools of antagonists – almost they become antagonists in their own right – in the form of the streets down which the saint is dragged. Here in fact is the only example of enta geweorc that injures a character, that imposes itself upon a character’s very flesh. (The giant-sword in Beowulf only becomes enta geweorc after it has melted, at which point it is no longer capable of offering injury.) Andrew’s body is ground up, broken, shorn of hair and clothing, laid bare by this stratum of giant-work that irrupts through the jumbled ruins of the pagan city.
Later, in commanding the pillar, another enta geweorc, to unleash the flood that brings the poem’s climax, Andrew reverses the humiliation and defeat he had suffered not only at the hands of the Mermedonians, but by the entish stone-work itself. The entas as antagonists have their day, but in the end their artefacts are put to work by the saint.
The Andreas-poet has no interest in presenting these pagans as noble or innocently ignorant, like the protagonists of Beowulf. Nor is he content to see enta geweorc as occasion for wistful reconstruction of an inaccessible past, or general contemplation of the passage of time that wears down all mortal activity. In Andreas, we seem to observe a step in a process that places the entas in the camp of the Biblical antagonists that will appear a century later, with Aelfric and other Old English religious writing. The entas of Andreas are not neutral builders of ancient buildings. Their works participate physically in the heroic, saintly struggle.
In fact, the kind of activity accomplished via the enta geweorc in Andreas has much more in common with the deeds performed by heroes in Beowulf employing another kind of giantish work: the three swords that are described with the unique phrase ealdsweord eotonisc ('‘old, trollish sword’). That is, the Andreas-poet uses his entish objects in a eotonisc way.3
Moreover, this innovation – far from being the result of confusion or sloppy borrowing – has a thematic and theological purpose. The poet suggests that the ancient works of ents – which otherwise provide, at best, occasions for contemplation on worldly decay, human misery, and God’s punishment of the proud – can, with the aid of God, be employed in heroic fashion to work deeds even more dramatic than those accomplished by warriors wielding eotonisc weapons.
In Andreas, the struggle between ancient ent-work and heroic Christian sanctity plays out in the saint’s passion as he is chewed to pieces by the grinding work of entas, sees those works effaced by his blood and by the blood-fed blossoming groves of trees, and then, from his prison cell, finally commands the most prominent enta geweorc in the city to submit, to stop being lifeless stone, and to bring forth a flood that will wash the city not only of the sins of men, but of the traces of the defeated entas.
After the flood, neither the streets nor the pillar are mentioned again. But this is not merely a cleansing, a washing away: it is a covering of life over death, and a resultant transformation. The giant-work of the past, dead work of impressive and indeed heroic proportions, yields after its battle to the inevitable processes of the lifigende God (living God).
The entish pillar is gone - but in its place rises a new church.
In future posts, we will examine these episodes more closely, and see how the Andreas-poet’s vision of the entish may signal a shift to a universal – as opposed to strictly Northern – perspective on the entas, opening up new opportunities for future Anglo-Saxon writers and thinkers.
These analogues are discussed and translated (along with Andreas itself) in Boenig’s 1991 The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals.