Free Albion by Peter Ackroyd Page B

pattern, beginning with a miraculous birth and ending with a calm or visionary death. It has been estimated that, before 900, some six hundred different lives were being read throughout the country.
    The popularity of English biography can be dated quite accurately, therefore, particularly in the lives of saints associated with a specific locality or region. St. Cuthbert dwelled upon Farne Island, a desolate spot close to Lindisfarne, while St. Guthlac withdrew to Crowland in the Lincolnshire fens; here by prayer and miracle they were able to control their environment, as if their attachment to a certain area lent them special powers. It was another way of asserting the spirit of place.
    These first English lives borrow themes and techniques from the secular poetry of their period, suggesting once more that the concept of form is a fluid one. Biography is as much an aspect of literature as epic verse. The landscape of the Guthlac biographies (there are two separate texts) is that of a “wide wilderness” populated by fantastic demons and is not dissimilar to that of
Beowulf
; Guthlac himself is “steadfast in truth” just like the hero of the epic poem, and is deemed to be a warrior for Christ of the same heroic temper as those who fight in secular verse. This mingling of biography and fiction seems to spring naturally from English writing; a survey of sixteenth-century literature, for example, has recently concluded that a “notable feature of later English experiments with form” is “the blurring of the boundaries between legend and history.” 1
    Once more we may see the hand of Bede behind a formative development in English letters. He composed a life of St. Cuthbert in Latin hexameter verse before he completed one in prose, once more emphasising that there is no necessary disparity between the two genres. He was the first English writer to give historical substantiality to the accounts of the martyrs of the early Church, and began the tradition of what might be called secular as opposed to saintly biography with his
Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow
. These lives are as short as those written by Johnson or Strachey, and they manifest what has become the customary English interest in character and circumstance; they dwell upon the practical details of living, too, albeit succinctly described.
    Another
life might
be ventured in this context, since it is the first example of “travel literature” in English and as such represents one of the true origins of the English imagination.
The Voyage of St. Brendan
has been described as one of the great mythological narratives of the Christian West, but it has also been interpreted as an actual account of a sea journey to Newfoundland or Iceland; the Elizabethan magus John Dee included the text in his argument that England held original dominion over America itself. It has also been described as “one of the most famous and enduring stories of Western Christendom.” 2
    Brendan and fourteen brethren set out to sea in a coracle of wood and tanned oxhide; after forty days they land upon a rocky island where a great hall and miraculous feast appear to comfort them; yet here the devil, in the shape of “a little Ethiopian boy holding out a silver necklace and juggling with it,” 3 comes to tempt them. On another island they discover herds of giant sheep, and afterwards build their camp upon the back of a great whale; in another place they encounter flocks of speaking birds who explain to Brendan that they are fallen angels. At the time of Vespers, the birds sing a hymn in praise of God and beat their wings against their sides “as sweet and moving as a plaintive song of lament.” 4 On a yet more distant island they visit an enchanted monastery and on another they converse with a man, crouching upon a rock, who announces himself as Judas Iscariot. It is a delightful story, which can be seen as the harbinger of
Utopia, Robinson Crusoe
and
Gulliver’s
Travels
; it