Severed Head as Signpost: The Journey to Grendel’s Mere in Beowulf as Early Medieval English Overland Travel Experience
[Note: The essay below was given at a conference in 2015. Consequently, it is a more abbreviated version of a longer research paper, available by request.]
The Old English epic poem Beowulf has a particular fixation with physical movement through space. Scenes such as the Geats’ “flota famiheals” (“foamy-necked ship”; 218) approaching the “brimclifu blican” (“sea-cliffs shining”; 222) of Denmark, with its striking landscape imagery, or the march of Beowulf and his men through Heorot the morning after Grendel’s mother kills Æschere, in which one can almost hear how the “healwudu dynede” (“hall-wood resounded”; 1317) under their feet, resonate with the poem’s historical and contemporary audiences and immerse them into Beowulf’s world. Of such active scenes, one in particular has received insufficient critical attention in regards to its depiction of movement and travel: lines 1400b–21, when Hrothgar, Beowulf, and their accompanying men travel to Grendel’s lair in order to confront Grendel’s mother. It is a more conspicuous scene than the two mentioned earlier, for it is one of only a small number of scenes in the entire corpus of Old English literature which depicts large-scale overland travel, as opposed to maritime travel, like the “brimclifu blican” scene, or small-scale movement, such as the “healwudu dynede” moment. Old English travel narratives of any sort are rare, and depictions of overland travel are rarer still (Reynolds and Langlands 411). Despite this compelling characteristic of the scene, however, Beowulf scholars have yet to look at it through the thematic lens of “travel.” [1]
Lines 1400b–21 describe the journey Beowulf and company make shortly after being attacked a second time. Earlier in the poem, Beowulf defeated the monster Grendel; then, Grendel’s mother comes to Heorot, the great hall of the Danes, to avenge her son’s death. She kills and seizes the body of Æschere, Hrothgar’s most beloved warrior. The Danes then travel via treacherous paths to Grendel’s and his mother’s swamp-lair, and along the way, encounter the severed head of Æschere, left behind for them to discover.
This scene is a natural candidate for a travel-based reading, but if we are to read this journey to the mere as a sort of travel narrative, we must have an understanding of the early medieval English “traveling experience.” In recent years, archaeologists and historians have begun to develop just such an understanding. The use of literature, land charters, and various geographic and archaeological methodologies has painted a picture of this experience, a picture that hinges on early medieval English perceptions of the landscape while traveling. Understanding how the early medieval English viewed the landscape in which they were traveling allows us to understand their overall travel experience, and with this understanding, we can finally read lines 1400b–21 of Beowulf as their early medieval English audience would have understood them: as both a reflection and an inversion of the early medieval English peoples’ own overland traveling experiences.
The journey to Grendel’s mere is rife with description of the natural surroundings, and so our travel-based reading must begin with considering early medieval English perceptions of their landscape. How did they understand the environment in which they traveled, and how did this understanding have an impact on their travel experience? Reconstructing this early medieval English perspective, however, is no easy task. Few early medieval English sources concerning their perception of landscape have survived, but those that have form the basis of what we can understand about said perception. An examination of these surviving literary and legal texts, and the geographic and archaeological implications thereof, reveals two critical characteristics of their perspective on the surrounding landscape: one, that, to the early medieval English, the landscape was horizontal, and two, that it was communicative, to borrow the terminology used by Andrew Reynolds and Alexander Langlands in their 2011 article, “Travel as Communication: A Consideration of Overland Journeys in Anglo-Saxon England.”
Let us first consider the early medieval English peoples’ “horizontal” of the landscape. Instead of a “vertical” perspective, the early medieval English would instead have had what Reynolds and Langlands call a “horizontal” one based on their “immediate view-shed” (413). In other words, when early medieval English people traveled, they imagined their route from an eye-level perspective, not an aerial one. In order to best understand this perspective, consider the modern one by considering the topic of maps. Today, maps are paramount to our understanding of landscape. Relief maps show us terrain, road maps depict infrastructure, and political maps, as far as physical geography is concerned, at least depict coastlines. When we envision traveling, we almost certainly envision a route on a map. The overland traveler of early medieval England, however, would not have imagined his or her journey in such a way. It is not as though maps did not exist, but they were likely rare and were the products of a “coastal perspective” rather than a “land-based one” (Reynolds and Langlands 413).
Consider the one early medieval English map to survive to the present day, the Cotton Tiberius mappa mundi (Figure 1). This map, dating to the early-eleventh century, is remarkably detailed in many ways. For all its detail, however, the map “fails to depict . . . any indication of routes, waypoints or notable topographical entities within the landmasses depicted” (413). The Cotton map is thus almost certainly the product of a maritime perspective, a perspective concerned with coastlines and seas. As a result of these limitations, it is not our best resource for determining what the early medieval English traveler’s landscape perspective was. The value of the Cotton map in relation to questions of overland travel, instead, comes in that it tells us what the overland traveler’s perception of landscape was not: chiefly, that it was not vertical in orientation. Early medieval English travelers would not have imagined the landscape they were traversing from an aerial, “top-down” view. While this may seem obvious, the aerial perspective as depicted by maps is so ingrained into the modern imagination that it takes some adjustment to grasp the significance of the early medieval English viewpoint. It is perhaps best illustrated through an examination of several Old English texts which speak in “horizontal” terms.
Consider that iconic scene in Beowulf when Beowulf and the Geats first reach Denmark in their ship:
Went then over the billowy sea, driven by the wind,
the foamy-necked ship, like a bird,
until after a time on the second day,
the curved-prowed ship had advanced
so that the voyagers saw land,
sea-cliffs shining, high hills,
broad headlands; then the water was crossed,
the journey at its end. [2] (217–224a)
The sequence of “land,” “sea-cliffs shining,” “high hills,” and “broad headlands” is an excellent example of horizontal perspective. Stanley B. Greenfield makes the astute observation that this sequence describes the order of sights the Geats would have spotted as they approached the coast. He writes, “the first thing the sailors would see is an amorphous ‘land’; as they got nearer, the landscape would begin to shape itself into the ‘sea-cliffs shining’; and when nearer yet, the steepness of those very harbour cliffs would first become apparent, then their breadth” (88).
One can imagine the sailors, traveling over “billowing waves,” slowly seeing more and more details on the horizon as they drew nearer to Denmark. Although it is a depiction of a voyage rather than overland travel, this scene masterfully demonstrates the horizontal perspective, and it reminds the modern reader that this perspective would have been the norm for the poem’s contemporary early medieval audience. It is telling, of course, that Greenfield even has to make his argument. Modern readers of Beowulf often read the sequence as merely repeating synonymous terms, not fully grasping the significance of their sequential order. The fact that such a reading is often the first instinct of today’s critics demonstrates our difficulty in comprehending the early medieval English traveling perspective.
Another voyage text also serves as a demonstration of horizontal landscape perspective. The Old English edition of the fifth-century priest Paulus Oriosius’s Latin text, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, contains an original insertion. This digression narrates the voyages of a Norwegian, Ohthere, and an Englishman, Wulfstan, as they travel throughout the Baltic Sea and north Atlantic. “The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan,” as the account has come to be called, is brimming with landscape descriptions that are the result of a horizontal perspective. Toward the beginning of Ohthere’s account, as he is sailing around the northern tip of modern-day Norway, the text tells us: “Then he went northward along the land; the entire way, he kept the waste land to the starboard and the open sea on the port-side for three days” (Bateley and Englert 44). This description of land and sea being on either the starboard (right) side or the port (left) side is another example of the horizontal perspective at work, as it must be the result of an “eye-level” way of thinking (“I’m facing the front of the ship, and the sea is on my left, and the land is on my right”). [3]
With the horizontal landscape perspective of the early medieval English established, we can turn to the communicative aspect of their perspective. That is to say, when early medieval English people traveled over land, they traveled through a landscape full of meaning—a landscape that communicated with the travelers and imparted a certain meaning to them. This reality is a direct result of the horizontal perspective established earlier. Without the vertical perspective of maps, the traveler would have understood the land around him or her in the form of a horizontally-oriented “mental map,” and the vistas which make up this mental map “would have been layered with meaning,” as the “authors of landscape [i.e., those who shape the landscape through interaction], through symbolism, monumentalism and place-names with associative meaning can convey a series of messages to those passing through” (Langlands 187). In other words, the early medieval English traveler would have seen communicative landmarks throughout the landscape, and these landmarks were crucial to the traveler’s journey.
While many Old English texts reinforce the importance of landmarks, they are particularly critical in a particular class of legal documents: land charters. Land charters—or, more specifically, their boundary clauses—are a critical source of landscape description in the written Old English corpus. They were used by the early medieval English to “record transfers of land,” and many charters thus contain boundary clauses which give a detailed description of the boundaries of the land in question (Hooke, The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England 10). While the charters themselves are composed in Latin, the boundary clauses are written in Old English, suggesting a shift in the purpose of a charter’s sections, i.e., a shift from using Latin in order to demonstrate legality to the use of the vernacular in order to adequately communicate to a wide audience the practical issues at hand (that is, where exactly does this land begin and end) (Hooke, Worcestershire Anglo-Saxon Charter-Bounds 1). These vernacular boundary clauses, then, were meant to be widely understood, and thus they must reflect common perceptions of the landscape they describe.
The following boundary clause from a Wiltshire charter, dated ca. 987, mentions a number of landmarks:
These are the boundaries at Westwood and at Cissa’s Farm. First in Stone Ford, from Stone Ford along the stream to Island Ford, from Island Ford to the Hedge of the Forest, along the Hedge to the Avon, up by the stream to Lea Meadow, from the Meadow east around the Lea of Cading to the Slope of the Ravens, from the Slope of the Ravens south to the Street toward the Great Shelter, from the Shelter south around the small wood to the Dyke until it comes to the Rood . . . . (Grundy 98–100)
Natural landmarks abound in this clause (e.g., “Lea Meadow,” “Hedge of the Forest”), but of particular interest is the presence of man-made landmarks, specifically, the “street” and the “rood.” A street seems like a natural candidate for a boundary marker, but the mention of the rood is striking. By “rood,” the clause is referring to some sort of monument in the shape of a cross, made out of either wood or stone (Reynolds and Langlands 420). For a cross-monument to appear in a boundary clause such as this one, it must be seen as a significant landmark. [4]
Indeed, archaeological evidence confirms the importance of these cross-monuments in the early medieval English landscape. John Blair observes that “during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries” in southern England, “simple crosses were produced in their hundreds to mark routes, especially those leading to churches” (479). Reynolds and Langlands concur with this church-guiding role and also note that cross-monuments, such as the Beornwyne stane (“Beornwin’s Stone”) and Copelan stan (“Rocking Stone,” which lends its name to the modern village of Copplestone in Devon) referred to in charters, lay at major intersections of roadways, reflecting their importance (420).
Crucially, however, Reynolds and Langlands also observe that, based on charter evidence specifically from the Bradford-on-Avon region, that “the placement of roods . . . is less concerned with crossroads, but rather more with points of high visibility along routes” (421). Cross-monuments, as well as other communicative landmarks, were placed at any point that could easily be seen, whether a crossroads, or a roadside, or a nearby hill. With this piece of information, we can begin to see how the horizontal and communicative natures of the early medieval English perspective overlap. Reynolds and Langlands provide the perfect example of an early medieval English traveling perception of landscape when they observe how a series of cross-monuments in Bradford-on-Avon, with their high-elevation and thus highly visible placement, “give the impression of guiding travellers towards the crossing point over the River Avon and the sanctuary of the religious house located there. In the ‘horizontal’ perspective, each rood marks a target point in a panorama” (422). In this example, we see the “horizontal” nature of the early medieval English traveler’s perspective via the panoramic placement of monuments and we see the communicative nature, with the monuments acting as a sort of guide toward a religious site. We can now say that we have some semblance of just what the early medieval English overland traveler perceived on his or her journeys.
With this “traveling perception” in mind, we can now return to Beowulf and the journey to Grendel’s mere in lines 1400b–21. As mentioned earlier, few sequences depicting overland travel exist in the corpus of Old English literature, and of these few, this particular scene is one of the longest, and thus deserves special consideration as a sort of travel narrative. Armed with a new understanding of early medieval English travel perspectives, a modern reader can now read lines 1400b–21 of Beowulf with an eye for the horizontal and communicative aspects of the scene’s landscape descriptions, aspects which reflect (and, in a particularly striking instance, invert) the original early medieval audience’s understanding of overland travel.
To begin, let us consider the scene with an eye for the horizontal perspective of landscape. With such an approach, the following lines immediately stand out:
[Hrothgar] went before with a few other
wise men in order to see the land,
until he suddenly found mountain-trees
leaning over gray stone,
a joyless wood . . . (Beowulf 1412–16a)
Hrothgar’s going “before” in order to “see the land” calls to mind a classic example of the horizontal viewpoint in action: the scout running ahead of the traveling group in order to ascertain the landscape in front of them. And then, “suddenly,” he sees the forest—all of this action betrays an eye-level perspective of the landscape, and an early medieval audience-member listening to the poem being performed would have intuitively recognized this scene as reflecting his or her own experiences traveling.
The scene also plays with early medieval perceptions of traveling by incorporating its own communicative, constructed landmark. This landmark, however, is a far cry from the guiding cross-monuments of Reynolds and Langlands’s panorama:
It was to all the Danes,
retainers of the Scyldings, many a thane,
a sore pain at heart to suffer,
a grief to each earl, when Æschere’s head
they found on the sea-cliff. (Beowulf 1417b–1421)
The Danes are rightfully horrified by the severed head of Æschere, and it is perhaps an understatement to speak of his head as a “communicative” landmark, yet that is exactly what an early medieval English traveler would have understood it to be. The head is found, according to the text, on a “holmclife.” This word is a straight-forward compound, glossed by Klaeber’s Beowulf as “sea-cliff, cliff by the waterside.” It takes on a new meaning, however, when paired with an understanding of the placement of monuments such as roods in the early medieval English landscape. Cross-monuments were often placed on points of “high visibility” in order to communicate with travelers, and Æschere’s head is found on a sea-cliff—a point of high visibility if there ever were one.
It is not just its geographic placement that recalls cross-monuments. As observed earlier, cross-monuments were often used by the the early medieval English to guide travelers somewhere, often to religious locations, such as churches. Is Æschere’s head functioning in a similar way? It is certainly not guiding Beowulf and company to a church. It is, however, guiding them to another kind of spiritual site: hell itself, at least, something like it. Consider the description of the landscape surrounding the mere, which is described as “steep headlands, the home of many sea-monsters,” complemented by “mountain-trees, / leaning over gray stone, / a joyless wood,” while “the water underneath stood / dreary and turbid” (1408–17a). This description is similar to the landscape described in the sixteenth Blickling homily, which reads: “. . . there he saw, over the water, a certain gray stone . . . [and] under the stone was the domain of sea-monsters . . . [and] the water was black underneath the cliff . . .” (Fulk, Bjork, and Niles 294). Both texts speak of gray stone, homes of sea-monsters, and black or dreary water under cliffs. This moment in the Blickling homily is itself derived from a Latin text, The Vision of St. Paul, in which Paul witnesses the Christian hell and the torment of damned souls, meaning that the Beowulf poet is likely to be invoking the same sense in his description. Æschere’s head, therefore, shares another characteristic with the early medieval English traveler’s cross-monuments: proximity to a religious site.
Æschere’s head, however, does more than parallel communicative cross-monuments; it also acts as an inversion of those monuments. Pointing the way to hell instead of a church is one such inversion, but the way in which the characters encounter the head also overturns the audience’s expectations. Recall that Beowulf, Hrothgar, and their retainers encounter this setting “færinga,” “suddenly” (1414). Unlike a cross-monument placed on a hill along a road, which would be seen from a distance, the sighting of Æschere’s head comes as a sudden surprise. The very fact that Beowulf and company are on top of the cliff instead of at its base reinforces this inversion. Furthermore, the poem gives no indication that the head is mounted in any way, and so we ought to assume that the men are looking down at it, as opposed to upward, like they would at a typical monument. Instead of travelers looking up at a cross-monument slowly coming into view, guiding them to a church, Beowulf presents us with travelers suddenly finding themselves looking down at a severed head, urging them to continue their downward stare to hell itself.
Here, then, is the travel-based lens’ most significant contribution to our understanding of this scene and its impact on its original audience. Instead of finding comforting crucifixes guiding travelers to churches or safety, the early medieval English audience of the poem would have been confronted with a grotesque inversion. By using horizontal and communicative perspectives in his narration of overland travel, the Beowulf poet both conforms to his audience’s implicit understanding of travel and then subsequently subverts it, leaving them disturbed at Æschere’s head, but also leaving them with an understanding of just what that head means. As a result, the scene becomes a powerful example of an Old English travel narrative.
Bibliography
Attenborough, F. L., ed. The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922. Print.
Bately, Janet, and Anton Englert. Ohthere’s Voyages: A Late 9th-century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and Its Cultural Context. Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum, 2007. Print.
Blair, John. The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Cole, Ann. “Place-Names as Travellers’ Landmarks.” Place-Names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape. Ed. Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan. Woodbridge: Boydell P, 2011. 52–67. Print.
Fowler, Peter. “Moving through the Landscape.” The Archaeology of Landscape: Studies Presented to Christopher Taylor. Ed. Paul Everson and Tom Williamson. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. 25–41. Print.
Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print.
Gelling, Margaret. “The Landscape of Beowulf.” Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002): 7–11. Print.
Greenfield, Stanley B. “‘Beowulf’ 207b–228: Narrative and Descriptive Art.” Notes and Queries 13.3 (1966): 86–90. Print.
Griffiths, Bill. Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic. Hockwold cum Wilton: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996. Print.
Grundy, G. B. “The Saxon Land Charters of Wiltshire.” Archaeological Journal 27 (1920): 8–126. Print.
Hooke, Della. The Anglo-Saxon Landscape: The Kingdom of the Hwicce. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985. Print.
---. The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Leicester UP, 1998. Print.
---. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape. Woodbridge: Boydell P, 2010. Print.
---. Worcestershire Anglo-Saxon Charter-Bounds. Woodbridge: Boydell P, 1990. Print.
Howe, Nicholas. Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. Print.
Langlands, Alexander. “Travel and Communication in the Landscape of Early Medieval Wessex.” Diss. University of Winchester, 2013. Print.
Leighton, Albert C. Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe AD500–1100. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972. Print.
Malone, Kemp. “Grendel and His Abode.” Studia Philologica et Litteraria in Honorem L. Spitzer. Ed. A. G. Hatcher and K. L. Selig. Bern: A. Francke Verlag, 1958. Print.
Ohler, Norbert. The Medieval Traveller. Trans. Caroline Hillier. Woodbridge: Boydell P, 1989. Print.
Osborn, Marijane. “‘Verbal Sea Charts’ and Beowulf’s Approach to Denmark.” De Gustibus: Essays for Alan Renoir. Ed. John Miles Foley. New York: Garland, 1992. 441–55. Print.
Overing, Gillian R., and Marijane Osborn. Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Print.
Pelteret, David A. E. “The Roads of Anglo-Saxon England.” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 79 (1985): 155–63. Print.
Pocock, Douglas C. D., ed. Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place. London: Croom Helm, 1981. Print.
Reynolds, Andrew. “Meaningful Landscapes: An Early Medieval Perspective.” Reflections: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, 1957–2007. Ed. Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds. Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2009. 409–34. Print.
---, and Alexander Langlands. “Travel as Communication: A Consideration of Overland Journeys in Anglo-Saxon England.” The Archaeology of Travel and Communication 43.3 (2011): 410–27. Print.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977. Print.
Turner, Sam. “The Christian Landscape: Churches, Chapels and Crosses.” Medieval Devon and Cornwall: Shaping an Ancient Countryside. Ed. Sam Turner. Macclesfield: Windgather P, 2006. 24–43. Print.
---. Making a Christian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2006. Print.
---. “Making a Christian Landscape: Early Medieval Cornwall.” The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300. Woodbridge: York Medieval P, 2003. 171–94. Print.
Wright, Charles D. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.
[1] The fourth edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf is the source of all Beowulf lines cited. All modern English translations in this paper, whether of Beowulf or other Old English texts, are the author’s.
[2] For the original Old English text for this quotation and all following quotations from early medieval texts, see appendix below.
[3] A modern traveler might rightly observe that even we would envision the coast of Norway as being on the “right” if we were sailing north, as our maps depict it on the right-hand side; however, given the medieval penchant for “orient”ing maps with “east” on top, it cannot be said that they saw such a correspondence.
[4] It should be noted here that such cross-monuments were not likely erected with the intent to serve as boundary markers. John Blair notes that if they were, there would be more references to them in boundary clauses than there currently are, as they would have provided a useful and relatively easy way to mark borders (479).
Appendix
Beowulf 1400b–21: The Severed Head
[W]isa fengel
geatolic gende; gumfeþa stop
lindhæbbendra. Lastas wæron
æfter waldswaþum wide gesyne,
gang ofer grundas, [þær] gegnum for
ofer myrcan mor, magoþegna bær
þone selestan sawolleasne
þara þe mid Hroðgare ham eahtode.
Ofereode þa æþelinga bearn
steap stanhliðo, stige nearwe,
enge anpaðas, uncuð gelad,
neowle næssas, nicorhusa fela;
he feara sum beforan gengde
wisra monna wong sceawian,
oþ þæt he færinga fyrgenbeamas
ofer harne stan hleonian funde,
wynleasne wudu; wæter under stod
dreorig ond gedrefed. Denum eallum wæs,
winum Scyldinga, weorce on mode
to geþolianne, ðegne monegum,
oncyð eorla gehwæm, syðþan Æscheres
on þam holmclife hafelan metton.
[T]he wise king
rode, richly equipped; the band marched,
shield-bearers. Tracks were
widely seen along the forest-path,
the track over the plains there went straight
over the dark moor, she bore away,
lifeless, the greatest of retainers of those
who, with Hrothgar, watched over their home.
Then the son of nobles traversed
steep rocky slopes, narrow paths,
single-file ways, unknown passage over water,
steep headlands, the home of many sea-monsters;
he went before with a few other
wise men in order to see the land,
until he suddenly found mountain-trees
leaning over gray stone,
a joyless wood; the water underneath stood
dreary and turbid. It was to all the Danes,
retainers of the Scyldings, many a thane,
a sore pain at heart to suffer,
a grief to each earl, when Æschere’s head
they found on the sea-cliff.
OTHER SOURCES
Beowulf 217–224a
Gewat þa ofer wægholm winde gefysed
flota famiheals fugle gelicost,
oð þæt ymb antid oþres dogores
wundenstefna gewaden hæfde,
þæt ða liðende land gesawon,
brimclifu blican, beorgas steape,
side sænæssas; þa wæs sund liden,
eoletes æt ende.
Went then over the billowy sea, driven by the wind,
the foamy-necked ship, like a bird,
until after a time on the second day,
the curved-prowed ship had advanced
so that the voyagers saw land,
sea-cliffs shining, high hills,
broad headlands; then the water was crossed,
the journey at its end.
“The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan”
Þa for he norþryhte be þæm lande; let him ealne weg þæt weste land on ðæt steorbord [ond] þa widsæ on ðæt bæcbord þrie dagas…
Then he went northward along the land; the entire way, he kept the wasteland to the starboard and the open sea on the port-side for three days…
Wiltshire Charter Boundary Clause, ca. 987
This syndon tha landgemaero to Westwuda and to Cissan-hammae. Aerest on Stanford, of Stanforda andlang streamaes on Igford, of Igford on Baerae Haehge, andlang Haegaes on Afonae, up bae straeamae on Windaerlaeh Maed, of thaerae Maed east onbutan Cading Laegae on Hramaes Hangran, of Hramaes Hangran suth to thaere Straet on tha Greatan Hlywan, of Hlywan suth onbutan Faers Scagan on tha Dic thaet hit cymth to thaere Rodae . . . .
These are the boundaries at Westwood and at Cissa’s Farm. First in Stone Ford, from Stone Ford along the stream to Island Ford, from Island Ford to the Hedge of the Forest, along the Hedge to the Avon, up by the stream to Lea Meadow, from the Meadow east around the Lea of Cading to the Slope of the Ravens, from the Slope of the Ravens south to the Street toward the Great Shelter, from the Shelter south around the small wood to the Dyke until it comes to the Rood…
Blickling Homily XVI
. . . he þær geseah ofer ðæm wætere sumne harne stan . . . [ond] under þæm stane wæs niccra eardung . . . [ond] þæt wæter wæs sweart under þæm clife neoðan . . .
…there he saw, over the water, a certain gray stone . . . [and] under the stone was the domain of sea-monsters . . . [and] the water was black underneath the cliff…
Below: Figure 1. Cotton MS Tiberius B.V. f 57r. from “Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi, 1025-1050”; British Library; The British Library Board, n.d. Web. 1 May 2015.
