Abstract
The Old English poem depicts the speaker’s encounter with an ancient world in the form of a ruined city. His encounter is both awe-inspiring and haunting—awe-inspiring in that the city’s buildings are so finely crafted and have lasted for many generations and haunting because the excellence of its construction only underscores the absence of its builders, a people clearly technologically superior to the speaker’s own generation. The discovery of the work of ancient builders expands the speaker’s historical horizons, forcing him to recognize that his land was once inhabited by a people whom he imagines both as other—i.e., entas (giants)—and as familiar but idealized Anglo-Saxons. The speaker’s encounter with this ancient world serves also to enlarge the reader’s horizons, leading the reader to recognize that because we exist in a world inhabited by people whose works outlast them, ours is a world shaped largely by people of the past. Contrary to many twentieth-century critics, The Ruin insists not so much on the mutability of the earthly world as on the fleetingness of human beings in contrast to the lastingness of their works.
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All translations from the poem are mine, based upon the text in Krapp and Dobbie (1936, pp. 227–229).
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Beaston, L. The Ruin and the Brevity of Human Life. Neophilologus 95, 477–489 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9240-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9240-x