Invisibility is often seen to characterise childhood in the Middle Ages, but the historical experience and literary treatment of adulthood is perhaps even more seriously plagued by the problem of invisibility. Its invisibility is different in kind. The problem with studying medieval children, understood as a ‘mute group’, stems from the sources and voices missing from the historical record.¹ Efforts to study and historicise adulthood, meanwhile, suffer from an excess of representation: history (and, indeed, literature) tends to be written both by and about adult men. In one sense, this makes adulthood the most visible part of the life course, but in early medieval texts themselves and in the attendant scholarly discourse, the ideas attached to ‘adulthood’ are in fact so deeply naturalised that their outlines are difficult to see.

In medieval studies, adulthood is only occasionally discussed as a socially constructed or historically contingent subject position.² As has long been said of masculinity, we might argue that adulthood enjoys the status of an ‘unmarked category’; it is ‘everywhere but nowhere’ and, within scholarly discourse, implicitly privileged as ‘unproblematic, or exempted from determination by [social] relations’.³ The paradox is, of course, that unless attention is paid to what it means to be an adult in any given period, it is difficult to understand what it means to be a child, or an elderly person, or a dying or dead person, and impossible to get a sense of cultural and literary understandings of the life course as a whole.

One caveat to this observation is that a great deal of scholarship has concerned itself with the construction of gender in Old English writings and medieval culture more broadly, and the question of adulthood and midlife has been broached from this angle. Some studies have highlighted gender identity as something that a person develops into in a process of ‘becoming’, sometimes overlapping with ageing in complex ways.⁴ On the whole, though, it has been common for studies of gender identity in medieval texts to silently restrict their focus to adults and their behaviour, dwelling on the complexities and ambivalences of the gendered identities of characters in Beowulf and many other Old English poems.

This chapter will argue that the presentation of the experience of adulthood in Old English poetry does not begin and end with gender identity, although, of course, it intersects with it. I make this case primarily with reference to three vernacular verse hagiographies – Guthlac A, Juliana, and Andreas – and one verse narrative of the deeds of an Old Testament figure, Judith. These poems exhibit diverse styles and concerns and emerge from different historical milieux, as will be explored shortly, but they share certain motifs in their treatment of adulthood and pose related questions. In Guthlac A and Juliana, ideas of growth and maturation as a kind of flourishing are explored, including the question of what should be done with the initial ‘glory of youth-hood’ (‘geoguðhades blæd’, 168b), which often coincides with unruliness, disobedience, and disruption.⁵ Meanwhile, Andreas and Judith trouble any sense of maturation as straightforward or predictable progress, emphasising that some life trajectories do not follow a path of steady improvement, while still at times affirming the value of obedience and dutiful service as expectations attached to maturity.

Problems of terminology immediately present themselves, even in this short summary of this chapter’s concerns. How are we to understand geoguðhad (‘youth-hood’), for instance – as a part of childhood, adulthood, or both? Judith’s servant is described as gingra (132a), but it is not clear how far this word signifies ‘younger’ and how far ‘junior’, as the language of youth and subordination are closely intertwined.⁶ These issues are best tackled promptly. The Old English language lacks a noun such as ‘adult’ (first appearing in English around 1531) to clearly distinguish a person who has grown out of childhood.⁷ Partly responding to this perceived gap in terminology, some scholars have questioned the applicability of terms such as ‘adulthood’, ‘midlife’, or ‘middle age’ to the medieval period – more recently, these suggestions have been rebuffed.⁸ As will be seen, Old English does in fact offer a number of explicit terms for ‘midlife’ or ‘middle age’, such as midferhð. Moreover, writers often use adjectival constructions to describe people in a ‘full-grown’ condition, defined relatively against previous periods of growth. When formulating his schemes of the four ages (discussed in the Introduction), Byrhtferth sees childhood and youth as succeeded by ‘geþungen yld’ (‘full-grown age’), with geþungen signifying ‘grown, thriven, advanced [morally, mentally, etc.], excellent, pious, noble, perfect’.⁹ Ælfric similarly identifies a period of ‘fulfremeda wæstm’ (‘full growth’), and describes ‘cnihthad’ as a period in which ‘our youth rises’ (‘astihð ure geogoð’), interestingly suggesting that ‘youth’ (geogoð) is a quality present across the first half of the life course, not fixed exclusively to any specific developmental phase, and certainly not constrained to childhood.¹⁰

Ælfric’s understanding of a fluid and wide-ranging geogoð tracks with how flexibly this Old English term is used to gloss Latin age terms – it is found rendering infantia, adolescentia, and iuuentus, and although it enjoys a close relationship with the last of these, it never had an exact equivalent in Latin. Capable of denoting ‘the time before maturity or adulthood’, the noun can also be found contrasting with ‘childhood’; likewise, it may refer to ‘immaturity, inexperience’, but equally it can signify ‘a period of strength or vigour’.¹¹ The related noun geoguþhad (as used in Juliana, 168b) can be found glossing infantia, pueritia, adolescentia, and iuuentus, life stages to which Isidore ascribes the following limits: birth to seven years, seven to fourteen, fourteen to twenty-eight, and twenty-eight to forty-nine.¹² These Latin terms therefore represent a large swathe of the life course, including the perfecta aetas (‘perfect age’) of around thirty years.¹³ The Old English term geogoð is thus used to describe periods of childhood and adolescence, but it also comfortably describes the middle of life.

The modern term ‘adulthood’ is in fact quite useful for navigating this network of Old English age terminology and its usage in poetry, if its etymology is borne in mind. Derived from Latin adultus (‘full-grown, mature, firmly established’, ‘a fully grown person’), the noun and adjective forms of adult are ultimately derived from the past participle of the verb adolescere (‘to grow up’).¹⁴ It shares a root, then, with adolescentia (which, again, it is important to note, extends to twenty-eight years according to Isidore) in that both allude to a process of growing, completed in the case of the adultus. If the historical background behind adulthood is kept in play, it is easier to remain sensitive to how this word can refer to an active process leading to a point of culmination, rather than a static condition one enters into at, say, eighteen years, or twenty-one. The processual aspect of becoming ‘grown’ is instead foregrounded, and indeed in the texts discussed in this chapter, dynamic growth into full maturity is heavily stressed, while frequently shown to be a process dependent on interventions from outside forces. Often, forms of mental and spiritual growth are then presented as continuing through midlife or middle age.

As mentioned, this chapter is largely concerned with three verse hagiographies and one pseudo-hagiography: the Exeter Book poems Guthlac A and Juliana, the Vercelli Book’s Andreas, and the Nowell Codex’s Judith. These are diverse texts. All four could be described as verse holy lives, but this gives a false impression of cohesion, as does the editorial convention of entitling each of these texts using the main figure’s name. These texts exhibit many differences of form, language, and style, and were probably composed centuries apart. Guthlac A seems to be early, possibly dating from the eighth century. Along with Cynewulf’s other works, Juliana seems likely to date between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries. Andreas may also be a product of the ninth century, and has recently been understood as emerging from an Alfredian milieu. Judith is late: a product of the tenth century.¹⁵ Various intertextual and contextual threads nonetheless connect these poems. Guthlac A (along with the poem known as Guthlac B, often attributed to Cynewulf) is situated proximate to Juliana in the Exeter Book, together offering companion narratives of male and female saintly conduct.¹⁶ Meanwhile, Andreas, the Vercelli Book’s lengthy account of St Andrew’s experience with the Mermedonians, shares much of its language with the poetry of Cynewulf (as well as Beowulf), and has long been described as a ‘Cynewulfian’ text. The poet of Judith, an acephalous, relatively short verse adaptation of the Book of Judith, appearing alongside Beowulf in the Nowell Codex, likewise may have drawn on Cynewulf’s Elene.¹⁷

All these poems also share a keen interest in the behaviour of exemplary individuals, servants and soldiers of God. Nonetheless, despite the extraordinariness of their protagonists, the poems are very much concerned with the ordinary worldly pressures, norms, and expectations encountered by the holy figures they age into and through adulthood. Each figure navigates these differently, whether through turning away from earthly communities and replacing them with spiritual ones (as in the case of the hermit St Guthlac or the martyred Juliana) or helping to build up worldly communities as part of a spiritual enterprise (as in the case of Judith or Andreas). As will be seen, the dynamic process of ageing through young adulthood and midlife is explored in each poem as a kind of flourishing, which is to say, the increasingly successful performance of socially and spiritually beneficial behaviour, even when worldly communities are on one level being rejected. Guthlac is particularly interested in the phenomenon of unruly and unproductive youth, as has long been recognised, but (and here I diverge from previous scholarship) so is Juliana.

The life courses of men and women, as traced in these texts, are marked by some distinctions, but in other ways they are not very strikingly different. One of the goals of this chapter is to reintroduce women’s life courses into scholarship on age in Old English poetry, which has thus far largely excluded them: without explaining why, Sánchez-Martí restricts his focus to poetic treatments of ‘the development of Anglo-Saxon males … from boyhood to old age’.¹⁸ To some degree, Old English poems reinforce a gender divide that Joyce Hill has observed as foundational to the prose hagiography of pre-Conquest England: while there is space in vitae of male saints for a phase of ‘developing adolescence’, showing influence from the stratified youth and adulthood of ages of man traditions, female saints do not seem to experience the same delayed onset of full maturity.¹⁹ There may be subtle implication that youth is a condition requiring further growth in Judith, but it is certainly not pronounced. Juliana is a different story, however, as we will see. Cynewulf shows a persistent interest in Juliana’s performance of youthfulness in a manner not previously appreciated, given previous studies’ focus on the poem’s gender politics rather than its politics of age.²⁰

In exploring ideas of heightened usefulness and productivity in maturity, the poems engage with a wide-ranging intellectual tradition that surfaces in various forms in exegetical and homiletic prose from Bede to Ælfric. The present chapter will begin with an overview of this tradition of productive maturity, across prose as well as what seems to be relatively early verse (the Riddles, Maxims I, and Beowulf). The poems, in particular, stress contingency and unpredictability as part of the process of growing towards a condition of useful maturity. Discussion will then turn to Guthlac A and Juliana and their meditations on how youthfulness should be managed, before considering how Andreas and Judith disrupt any sense of continuous, linear progression towards maturity in their narratives. By way of this analysis, this chapter aims to provide a clearer picture of the unsteady and often surprising processes of ageing through adulthood described in Old English poetry.

Traditions of Useful Maturity

In beginning this section, I look back to Chapter 1, because one set of relevant contexts for the treatment of adulthood in Old English poetry accrues around the figure of the ox. As discussed there, this creature makes several appearances in the Riddles, perhaps unsurprisingly given the status of the ox or bullock as (in Salvador-Bello’s words) ‘a traditional allegory of the monk … peacefully “ruminating” the sacred texts’.²¹ The poet of Riddle 70, in particular, seems to see this animal as a fitting opportunity for a meditation on the pressures and coercions which shape the process of ageing into social usefulness in later life:

At first sight, it is hard to identify this creature with the peacefully ruminating figure of the well-behaving monk. Outside of Salvador-Bello’s work, the ox riddles of the Exeter Book have primarily been interpreted in terms of the strict power hierarchy established between the plough-worker and the ox. In its depiction of coercion and unwilling labour, this riddle seems to show specific concern with the lives of enslaved Welsh labourers, while also commenting upon human dominance of the natural world.²² Certainly, the creature of Riddle 70 does not reap anything comparable to pleasurable spiritual fruits, as might be expected on the basis of an argument for the symbolic associations with peaceable monks. The ox’s development is nonetheless explicitly signposted as a life narrative, and it is therefore worth considering whether this poem engages with ideas surrounding human ageing and the doing of work, especially as in medieval texts concerned with education and monastic life, the use of violence and fear is commonly presented as both acceptable and constructive.²³ Understood in this way, the ox riddle may applaud the learned virtue of obedience, shaped by force.

This would be in keeping with the symbolism traditionally attached to the ox, strongly associated with dynamics of obedience and rebellion across scriptural, exegetical, and homiletic contexts, but not without some ambiguity. On the one hand, the ox is associated with reluctance and non-complicity, and, on the other, properly subsumed will and obedience. Both currents are present in, for instance, Ælfric’s homily for the feast of St Paul. Saul is warned that to reject Christ is to ‘kick against the goad’:

Here, the ox is symbolic of the unconverted who refuse to obey and must be forced into submission. Obedience must ultimately be chosen, but this choice is not presented as incongruent with the physical overpowering of the ox.²⁵

Meanwhile, the creature appears in explicitly age-related contexts in intellectual traditions in a manner which emphasises the largely voluntary performance of useful activity. For Isidore, the noun iuuenis (‘a youth’) and the adjective iuuencus (‘young’) both derive from the verb iuuare (‘to help’), reflecting their fundamental connection with forms of social contribution:

Iuuentus is a time when service to society is possible, based on strength. Isidore presents the iuuenis as undergoing a period of development rather than occupying a static state – a person’s maturity builds towards a pinnacle in their thirtieth year, which carries symbolic weight as the ‘perfect age’. This is the age at which Christ’s ministry commences (Luke 3:23); it is also the appropriate age for priests to be ordained, as stressed by Jerome, who also compares the perfect age of cattle.²⁷

To leave the specific figure of the ox behind, other exegetical traditions theorising about midlife similarly stress physical and spiritual strength as enabling full social contribution. In the six-age schemes of Augustine and Bede, the midlife of individuals, the process of Creation, and world history are all comprehended in terms of productivity and social order. The productivity of the Third Age of the world and man (adolescentia), for instance, parallels the fertility of the third day of Creation. Humans become capable of procreation, as the people of God under Abraham are capable of spiritual profit, ‘like a land watered so that it could bring forth the useful fruits’ (‘tanquam irrigata terra, ut fructus utiles posset afferre, sanctas Scripturas et Prophetias accepit’).²⁸ This burgeoning potential for social and spiritual contribution reaches its fulfilment in the Fourth Age (iuuentus), represented in historical terms in the reign of David, symbolic of firm social structure and stability, and in cosmic terms in the creation of the heavenly bodies:

Iuuentus is thus aligned with a well-functioning social structure premised on obedience. Bede follows Augustine closely on these points, noting the associations between adolescentia, procreative ability, and spiritual fertility, as the ‘seed of the patriarchs’ (‘semen patriarcharum’) is ‘fructified with spiritual fruit’ (‘spiritali fruge fecundatum’).³⁰ He chooses to accentuate the fitness of men in the Fourth Age to lead rather than follow, ‘for the dignity of a man in the prime of life is appropriate for ruling’ (‘iuuenilis enim dignitas regno est habilis’).³¹ For Bede, as for Augustine, the Fourth Age features the peak of stability, order, and structure. For Alcuin too, iuuentus is inextricably connected with productivity: in a letter of 799 to the monks of Salzburg, for instance, he declares ‘let there be fervour of work in young men’ (‘Sit … fervor operis in iuvenibus’).³²

In later prose, the image of the sun retains associations with both adulthood and strength, and here we can return to Ælfric’s formulation of the five ages. Ælfric adapts Gregory in tracking human life against the progress of the sun across the sky in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16), but diverges slightly from his source. Gregory mentions the ‘fullness of strength’ (‘plenitudo roboris’) of iuuentus, but more consistently foregrounds heat as the essence that waxes and wanes with age.³³ When Ælfric adapts Gregory’s account, he places emphasis on increasing and decreasing strength, rather than heat:

Ælfric amplifies Gregory’s mention of human robor. More than simply heat, it is the rising and falling of physical, mental, and spiritual strength that interests Ælfric. As will be seen, this connection is also cultivated in vernacular poetry, in a manner which likewise foregrounds the process of achieving strength.

Before turning to the poetry, it is finally worth noting that between Bede and Ælfric, in a ninth-century Alfredian context, the anonymous translator of the Old English Boethius also asserts a close relationship between maturity, strength, and social contribution. This writer makes explicit some of the implications of this intellectual tradition for the meaning of disability: little value can accrue to physically or mentally disabled adulthood if adulthood itself is defined as a time of physical and mental strength. As Nicole Guenther Discenza has observed, this translator was preoccupied with the Old English word cræft, a semantically complex noun capable of denoting ‘strength, power, might’, physical ‘skill’ or ‘ability’ (and, within this, ‘trade, work, livelihood’), and mental or spiritual ‘strength, merit, excellence’ – the translator notably develops a particularly strong emphasis on the sense ‘virtue’.³⁵ At one point in the Boethius, a phase of ‘midlife’ (midferhð) is explicitly connected with the peak of the acquisition of cræftas, in an expansion of a brief and enigmatic passage in the Latin comparing folly to a man becoming blind and forgetting that he had been sighted.³⁶ The translator inserts specific labels for life stages and interweaves references to human cræft as part of describing an individual’s thwarted process of self-improvement:

Upon birth, the child is described in a physiological register in terms of health and wholeness, but moving through boyhood, this figure must begin to learn skills; we might compare the emphasis on possessing a trade or skill (glossed as cræft) in Ælfric’s Colloquy, addressed to children.³⁸ It is once the individual has moved through youth that he – now gendered – becomes fully equipped in both skills and virtues before his sudden, surprising change of direction in midferhð. The middle-aged figure is held culpable for his failure to fully understand the moral and spiritual ramifications of the loss of his sight and mental skill set, left behind as part of a new condition of physical and mental disability. The expectation seems to be that the figure should build up skills, and either maintain these, or apprehend and mourn their loss appropriately: this specific figure is presented as failing on both counts, his life course thereby veering off in a faulty direction.

All the prose outlined here participates in a tradition which views the development of socially useful strengths as core to the process of normatively ageing into adulthood. Similarly, in Old English poetry, a concept of full growth is often associated with the attainment of strength and the ability to contribute to a community. However, in a manner perhaps only paralleled in the passage from Boethius, the poetry places emphasis on the attainment of maturity as a somewhat unpredictable, dynamic, and idiosyncratic process of growth, rather than a static phase experienced uniformly across life courses. Full maturity is not situated at thirty years, or even identified as a distinct phase comparable to iuuentus, but frequently defined loosely and comparatively in relation to preceding life experiences as a more mature stage of life. Several passages emphasise gradation between youth (not always the same as childhood, but also not clearly distinguished from it) and completed growth, situating between the two a crucial tipping point in the form of the table-turning ‘until’ so characteristic of Old English poetry.

Two examples will illustrate the kinds of sudden diversions which shape the process of moving towards maturity in Old English verse. One is offered in the Exeter Book text known as Maxims I, possibly composed as early as the seventh or eighth century – this is a heavily hypermetric passage, typical of the wider poem:

Here we have a distinctly human correlate to the arcs of domestication and making-useful that are narrated in the Riddles: in progressing from youth into an older state, this person must be tamed. At the same time, he grows stronger, with the taming and strengthening processes seeming to feed into each other, suggesting that the learned ability to control the body and mind is what makes strength really meaningful. As other scholars have noted, this passage stresses the need for young people to be socialised. The narrating voice suggests that ‘society needs to domesticate and civilize the younger ones so that in their adult lives they will be able to perform the social function expected of them’, to the point of implying a kind of social constructivism: ‘the trained child assumes a social identity within a politically constituted group, a þeod’.⁴⁰ Continuing the theme of controlled strength, the poet of Maxims I then develops these reflections into a meditation on the storms of the world and of their relation to mental resolve; the person with the well-governed mod may therefore parallel the firm land, remaining steadfast against the exploratory and investigative efforts of the waves. In addition to describing how young individuals grow into social roles, this passage also poses a kind of epistemological problem, casting doubt on whether a person can really be fully known or understood while they are growing. The community are charged with the responsibility of reserving judgement before the person has the chance to ‘show’, ‘reveal’, or ‘manifest’ himself (Old English acyþan), suggesting a kind of delay in the formation of a public identity.

Moving on to our second example of a sudden change on the way to maturity, we might compare the aftermath of Unferth’s allegations in Beowulf, which have attracted extensive critical discussion for the way in which they raise the exciting spectre of Beowulf’s ‘inglorious youth’.⁴¹ Unferth is not initially concerned with the idea of youth, invoking the swimming contest with Breca as evidence to bolster his claim that Beowulf inherently suffers from pride and tendency not to live up to boasts (499–528). It is Beowulf who thematises it when he replies:

Beowulf here covertly appeals to an ideal of tolerance in the face of wayward youth, implying that he grew out of a youthful tendency to risk his own life too readily; given how the poem ends, this may implicitly be debatable. Nonetheless, from Beowulf’s perspective, and according to the voice of Maxims I, to focus overmuch on the events of a person’s youth, however inglorious, is somewhat to miss the point. To consider a person as psychologically or morally fully formed in their youth – even as possessing an identity that will be continuous with their later selves – is a fallacy. A person’s identity can be strongly discontinuous between different segments of their life.

It is further signalled that young people have the prerogative to surprise when Beowulf returns to Hygelac’s court and we are told ‘the sons of Geats did not consider him good’ (‘hyne Geata bearn godne ne teoldon’, 2184), instead ‘slack’ and ‘weak’ (‘sleac’, ‘unfrom’, 2187b–8a). In this moment, Beowulf is distributing the treasure Hrothgar has given him, such that the people of the hall are witnessing a great ‘reversal’ (‘Edwenden’, 2188b). Elsewhere in the poem, Beowulf is certainly presented as having ‘made himself known’, to borrow an idea from Maxims I. His flourishing is described through the term blæd: Hrothgar declares that Beowulf’s ‘glory is established’ after the fight with Grendel (‘Blæd is aræred’, 1703b, echoing Beaw’s widely springing ‘blæd’ while a youth, at 18b).⁴² Blæd is a complex and polysemous noun, distinctly poetic, to be discussed further in this chapter, but understandable provisionally as ‘glory’. It plays a crucial role in the narratives around age presented not only in Juliana, but in Guthlac A, in a manner which has light to shine back onto its usage in Beowulf. For now, I wish to suggest that critics themselves may have been guilty of overdetermining the significance of Beowulf’s ‘inglorious youth’, seeing it as inevitably connected to the hero’s later identities, when he and others actually seem quite relaxed about the concept of major shifts in identity across a life course, especially from youth into later life.

As suggested in Maxims I and these parts of Beowulf, inconsistencies, sudden changes, and dramatic reversals may be the rule, rather than the exception, when growth through adulthood is described in Old English poetry, for all that certain patterns make some transformations more predictable than others. The remainder of this chapter will turn to narratives of holy lives which (with the possible exception of Guthlac A) seem to have been composed later than Beowulf and Maxims I. These poems all evince a similar concern with mature social contribution to that which shapes the prose tradition, while also engaging with issues of epistemology, judgement by peers, sudden shifts, and discontinuous personal identity over the life course which are raised in Maxims I and Beowulf.

Vitality, Rebellion, and Obedience in Guthlac A

The vernacular verse life of the Mercian St Guthlac (c.674–715) known as Guthlac A may have been composed as early as the eighth century. It has been much debated whether the poet knew of Felix’s Latin prose account, the Vita S. Guthlaci (written 731–49), with most agreeing that there is little evidence of this.⁴³ Comparisons between the two texts are nonetheless illuminating. Felix is interested in Guthlac’s behaviour as a child, taking care to highlight the saint’s childhood as dissimilar to that of his peers: he does not chatter or emulate ‘the different cries of the various kinds of birds’ (‘variorum volucrum diversos crocitus’), as other children do.⁴⁴ Along with the other Old English saintly narratives discussed in this chapter, Guthlac A makes no direct reference to the childhood of its central figure, exceptional or otherwise. Instead, the narrative focuses on a sequence of episodes in the middle of Guthlac’s life, beginning with the end of his ‘first age’ (‘ærestan ældu’, 109) in which he loved ‘many dangers’ (‘frecnessa fela’, 110a).⁴⁵ Sánchez-Martí perceives ‘a man who in his youth led a dissipated life’, helped out of it by divine intervention, in what is fundamentally an ‘extraordinary case’ at the same time as being one which speaks to wider anxieties regarding ‘vices that menace the youth’.⁴⁶ However, rather than stressing Guthlac’s development as exceptional, the poem evinces a certain comfort level with the possibility of personal identity being discontinuous across the life course as a result of youthful waywardness. It emphasises that the qualities of strength, liveliness, and potency can be channelled to different ends in youth and later life, presenting this as fairly normal. As such, there are parallels with the hero’s youthful behaviour in Beowulf, presented as discontinuous with his later behaviour in a way which is not framed as especially unusual or troubling.

The ‘acute awareness of time’ shown by the Guthlac A-poet has previously attracted critical attention, especially because the poet seems to show awareness of schemes of the ages of man and the world.⁴⁷ A sense of the world in its Sixth Age seems to shape an early meditation on cosmic decline, which highlights the theme of vitality and its negation:

The poetic word blæd, already encountered in both Juliana and Beowulf, here makes its first appearance in Guthlac A. Now is a good opportunity to pause and appreciate its semantic richness. The DOE suggests that at this point in Guthlac A, it signifies ‘the glories of the earthly kingdom: bounty, abundance’, but its broader meanings encompass ‘fire’, ‘glory’, ‘prosperity’, ‘inspiration’, ‘blowing’, and ‘breath’; it can be found glossing spiritus.⁴⁸ It seems capable of signalling a kind of life force, as Bosworth-Toller suggests the sense ‘life’, and the most recent editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf give the poet’s sense of the word as ‘power, vigor, vitality’.⁴⁹ When using the word, poets can also playfully (even punningly) invoke the separate sense of blēd, blǣd, ‘fruit’, which can figuratively signal ‘anything produced from an action or labour’.⁵⁰ Indeed, in this passage, the decay of fruits and seeds represents a crucial part of the wider decline of the world’s blæd.

The noun remains of considerable significance as the poem progresses, with particular attention paid to what it means for blæd to fully flourish. The noun is next used to describe Guthlac’s redirection of his energies upon conversion, once he has been enlightened and given up his ‘sinful desires’ (‘synna lustas’, 113b):

The word here straddles both sides of Guthlac’s experience, constituting both the force which he earlier committed to worldly pleasures and that which he later devotes to God by taking up a home in the mountains (in the tradition of St Anthony).⁵¹ We are even told that in his earlier years, Guthlac ‘had to’ or even ‘ought to’ direct his energy to worldly joys through the modal verb sculan, which generally designates duty or obligation: something that ‘must’ be done. Once again, Guthlac’s performance of his youthful age identity is not presented as exceptional, but rather following a general trend, and this trend itself creates space for discontinuity between exuberant youthful identity and the properly directed energies which can eventually characterise a person’s maturity.

The saint himself later clarifies the meaning of the shift in his identity through an account of youth in monastic contexts, offered by way of a rebuttal to demons who have been attempting to discourage the saint by describing scenes of indiscipline in monasteries. This scene is seemingly ‘a radical new contribution to the Guthlac-legend’, not present in any surviving analogue, and Guthlac’s response is yoked to the saint’s own experience of youth by the repeated half-line ‘worulde wynnum’ (105a; 498a):⁵²

The specific language of blæd underpins this comparison. According to Guthlac, monks will experience bursts of this force; their first burst (comparable to Guthlac’s first age) cannot bring with it ‘maturity’, or literally ‘a later age’ (æfter-yldu, 496a). When the monks do then reach an ‘older condition’ or yldra had (500b), social integration is key. This stage of life is said to be served through the verb þeowian, etymologically closely connected with the noun þeawas (‘ways’, ‘customs’ or ‘behaviours’) with which it is paired in the half-line (502): such a near-tautology doubly states the connection between the mature person and the social roles they must take up.⁵³

The idea of an ‘older condition’ should furthermore be understood as part of the poet’s wider concern with the significance of had, in its sense of ‘condition’ or ‘state’ and its associations with social structure. In the poem’s opening lines, the angel encountered by a virtuous soul ‘has the older state’ or ‘ … the higher order’ (‘hafað yldran had’, 4b), with the comparative adjective conveying ‘meanings of both greater age and greater rank’.⁵⁴ Soon afterwards, the term appears in a passage which appears to be derived from either the Vitae Patrum of Gregory of Tours or from Lactantius’ De ira Dei, with had in either case glossing Latin gradus:⁵⁵

These lines set the tone for the rest of the poem in stressing order, hierarchy, and systems of categorisation – indeed, the poem’s insistence on the importance of had leads Catherine Clarke to observe that, despite Guthlac’s posture of isolation, the text is deeply concerned with the saint’s ‘continued involvement in human networks’, while also depicting ‘a spiritual world in which identity is still relational’.⁵⁶ The word had thus plays a crucial role in Guthlac A’s portrayal of its communally integrated hermit saint, embedded in both human and divine social structures.

It is within this context that the poem frames issues of human maturation. Individuals can perform their maturity through entering into one of a variety of subsidiary states (502b–3a). Guthlac A presents a multifaceted experience of midlife, broken down into social categories. By contrast, when the youthful monks are first described, as Guthlac is lifted into the air by the demons, a single ‘custom’ of youth is referred to:

These unruly monks are either compared with or identified as youths, through an ambiguous swa. Instead of committing themselves to their monastic vocation, they follow the þeaw of youthfulness, which seems to have a kind of unity to it, in contrast to the many þeawas of maturity (502a). Fear is presented as an efficacious way to control youths, but the demons suggest that sometimes this mode of damage control fails, such that monks perform their youth in a morally faulty way. To Guthlac, as we saw, it is simply a matter of time before each monk grows to love maturity: an unspecified ‘count of winters’ (‘wintra rim’, 498b), which may implicitly vary person to person.

The social role which Guthlac personally takes up in his maturity is described in rather concrete terms. On one level, of course, he is a hermit pursuing a life of prayer on the margins of human society, but on another, more metaphorical plane, he is a ‘builder’ (bytla). The first instance of this term is early in the poem, in an initial description of Guthlac’s cultivation of his hermitage:

Later, when the demons return the saint to his dwelling, the poem similarly states, ‘victory-triumphant the builder came to the hill’ (‘Sige-hreðig cwom / bytla to þam beorge’, 732b–3a). The term bytla is restricted to poetry in Old English, and appears elsewhere only in The Gifts of Men, as part of that poem’s celebration of the various ‘skills of the body’ (‘leoþo-cræftas’, 29a) dispersed by God across the earth: ‘one is a builder, good at raising up a home’ (‘Sum bið bylda til / ham to hebbanne’, 75b–6a).⁵⁷ This formulation nonetheless reflects something of the word’s significance in Guthlac A, particularly in the pairing of ‘bylda’ with ‘ham’ rather than any other structure. Ultimately, Guthlac is a homemaker: a seeker and establisher of a new earthly home on his mound, and pursuer of a parallel ‘home in heaven (‘ham in heofonum’, 98a).⁵⁸ As an agent noun, the epithet bytla leaves space for Guthlac’s work in the world as an ongoing process, never firmly to be completed, and indeed the construction of early medieval buildings seems itself to have been governed by the principle of the provisional; given the nature of timber dwellings, ‘the impermanence of individual structures must always have been taken for granted’.⁵⁹ The worldly ham which Guthlac builds is best understood as temporary in nature, in similar terms to his physical body, soon to be supplanted by heaven as a ‘better home’ (‘fægran / botles’, 382b–3a) for his soul. Nonetheless, Guthlac’s role as a builder is an important dimension of how his particular identity develops as he ages into mature adulthood.

Guthlac A ultimately presents a vision of the life course which resonates in many ways with the taming process implied by many of the Riddles and explicitly set out in Maxims I. Just as the ox of Riddle 70 begins by drinking ‘with desire’ (‘on lust’, 9b) Guthlac’s young monks ‘enjoy their lives through desire’ (‘hyra lifes þurh lust brucan’, 417), and Guthlac experiences ‘sinful desires’ (‘synna lustas’, 113b). As the ox is coerced into cooperation by the herdsman, and as Maxims I describes the need to ‘steer a strong mind’ (‘Styran … strongum mode’, 50a), Guthlac A describes older figures attempting to manage the young so that ‘fear … steers’ them (‘egsa … styreð’, 420b). The young do not bear an overly heavy burden of ethical responsibility in Guthlac A, but are understood to commonly behave in a worldly manner, requiring intervention from elders. There is therefore some sense here that (in the words of Maxims I), the young should not be ‘spoken against’ (‘forcweþan’, 48a), for all that the crowd of fiends around Guthlac attempt to harden his heart. Emphasis is ultimately placed on maturation as an opportunity to create a new social identity, as part of which each person’s ‘vitality’ (blæd) is redirected, and their obedience cultivated, with outside help. A technicolour variety of socially and spiritually beneficial behaviour can follow from such an evolution, including, in Guthlac’s case, the building of a home.

Rebel with a Cause: Juliana

In the Exeter Book, Guthlac A is separated by only thirteen folios from Juliana, a possibly ninth-century poem signed by Cynewulf, that describes the martyrdom of St Juliana of Nicomedia (d. c.303). In their attitudes to youth and maturation, these poems are also neighbourly, but not quite on the same page. The differences are easy to see. St Guthlac is past his ‘first age’, but Juliana is identified simply as ‘young’ (geong, 35a, 91b, 271a), and there is no opportunity to see her grow older: as a martyr, her life is taken quickly. The main events of the poem transpire when Juliana’s suitor, Eleusius, becomes anxious to marry her, an event pinpointed to her eighteenth year in a Greek account of the story, which also states that the couple have been betrothed since Juliana was nine, although these details are not found in the Old English poem’s probable source, a version of the Latin Passio S. Iulianae.⁶⁰ Although she is young, Juliana’s behaviour is never overtly criticised by the narrative voice in Cynewulf’s poem and there are no explicit references to morally disorderly youth.

This alone might be taken as evidence that the maturation of men and women is understood differently in Old English poetry. As mentioned, Hill has noted that prose hagiographies tend to emphasise virginity as a female saint’s ‘single dominant virtue’, and observed that although female saints do progress from childhood to adulthood, ultimately ‘childhood and a still developing adolescence are far smaller elements in the narrative pattern than is the case with men’.⁶¹ At first sight this holds true for the contrast between Guthlac A and Juliana, in that Juliana performs a virtuously chaste youth. Kim Phillips’ work on maidenhood, developed with reference to the later medieval period, is suggestive of a key question here: is Cynewulf working with a concept of maidenhood, situated between childhood and full-fledged adulthood, as the ‘perfect age of woman’s life’, such that Juliana is both ‘sexually and psychologically mature’ at the same time as being virginal?⁶²

Not necessarily, as Cynewulf is in fact rather interested in the saint’s youthful identity, and Juliana herself is not unproblematically ‘psychologically mature’. The poem describes bursts of unruly behaviour from the saint which are linked to her youth, but legitimised by her spiritual purity: in rebelling against worldly authorities, she shows her obedience to God. A path of life development in the worldly realm clearly lies ahead of Juliana, in the form of marriage and instalment in the marital home, and these markers seem to constitute a kind of ‘social adulthood’ (to import a term from anthropology), but she does not meet these milestones in her worldly community, and only very implicitly in her eventual union with God.⁶³ Juliana’s age identity remains somewhat liminal even at the end of the poem, especially given the brevity with which the moment of her death is described (669b–71a) and the lack of any sustained depiction of her heavenly rewards; we are simply told her soul is dispatched by a sword blow ‘to the long joys’ (‘to þam langan gefean’, 670b). Cynewulf then turns straight to the death of Eleusius (671b–88a) and Juliana’s burial (688a–95a), before offering an epilogue in the first person which focuses on the poet’s hope for heaven rather than Juliana’s experience of it (695b–731). The poem therefore captures Juliana only at the cusp of attaining social adulthood, and never shows its full realisation – not even in heaven. Unable to step outside of worldly social pressures and remain in the world like Guthlac, but instead caught squarely in the cross hairs of her father’s and Eleusius’ expectations, Juliana escapes only through death, and she anticipates the enjoyment of an afterlife that the audience cannot quite see.

The adjective geong is used to describe Juliana on three occasions, in each instance coinciding with an expression of the saint’s psychological resistance against worldly or devilish forces. Initially, the word appears when Juliana’s intention to maintain her virginity (‘mægðhad’) is stressed – this decision is emphasised more strongly in the Old English poem than in the Latin source, where Juliana objects to marriage primarily due to Eleusius’ pagan faith.

Prominent here is the emphasis on Juliana’s cognitive process, and indeed Antonia Harbus has described this poem as the most ‘explicitly psychological’ of all the vernacular verse hagiographies, showing an interest in mental worlds far beyond its source. When considering this passage, Harbus translates the phrase ‘geong on gæste’ as ‘young in spirit’, as I do here.⁶⁴ This translation may be contested – it is common to think or feel in one’s spirit in Old English poetry, and the noun may be paired with the verb hycgan in the previous half-line. Nonetheless, the pairing of ‘gæst’ and ‘geong’ within a half-line may indeed signal a semantic relationship: her spirit is young. In the passage as a whole, Juliana’s mental world is shown to be inscrutable and inaccessible to her father, Africanus – in contrast to the youths who must be protected from negative judgements in Maxims I, here is a youth who cannot even be understood enough to be evaluated. Her mental world is at too much of a remove.

The remaining two instances of the word geong in the poem similarly occur amid descriptions of Juliana’s intentions diverging from powerful figures around her. On the second occasion, Africanus has grasped that Juliana’s intention is at odds with his own and he is furiously approaching their home:

Youth and happiness are connected here (in a manner again comparable to the condition of the young ox in Riddle 70), where the parallel passage in the source mentions neither attribute.⁶⁵ As before, geong marks a distinct disjunction of thought and intention between Juliana and a more socially powerful figure. Lapidge describes the final half-line of the Old English passage as ‘nonsensical’, explicable by an error in the exemplar which sees Africanus run ‘ad familiam’ (‘to his household’) in a great rage, rather than ‘ad filiam’ (‘to his daughter’).⁶⁶ Parallels for ‘wic weardian’ can nonetheless be found in The Whale (26a) and The Phoenix (448a), both offering ‘wic weardiað’.⁶⁷ The first of these instances describes travellers watching over their dwellings on the false ground of the whale’s back, allegorically representative of the devil, while the second (in The Phoenix, which immediately precedes Juliana in the Exeter Book) depicts the habitation of the holy on the tree of salvation, the cross. Juliana’s power over the home may thus carry more spiritual significance than Lapidge perceives; in her final speech, Juliana does, after all, exhort her listeners to build their spiritual houses strong (647–57a). Juliana governs not only her physical dwelling, but her soul too. At the same time, she is affectively and morally at odds with Africanus.

The final instance of the adjective geong is situated amid a description of Juliana’s emotional response to the attempted manipulation of the demon in angelic guise, encouraging her to evade her imminent death:

The Latin account, at this point, describes Juliana as sighing and shedding tears. It contains no direct reference to her being overwhelmed with fear, although Juliana does appeal to God to ‘confirma cor meum’ (‘strengthen my heart’).⁶⁸ In the Old English poem, Juliana’s response to overwhelming fear (egsa) is to steady her own spirit, contrasting also with the trajectory of Constantine in Cynewulf’s Elene, who requires a divinely inspired dream to settle his spirit once he has ‘terrified with fear’ in the only other appearance of the half-line ‘egsan geaclad’ in the poetic corpus (57a).⁶⁹ Juliana is self-driven in her resistance to fear. She rebels against the demon, a source of illegitimate power and authority, just as she rejects the worldly authority of Africanus and Eleusius.

In some ways, then, Juliana’s psychological condition shadows the defiant youthfulness of the monks in Guthlac A. In Cynewulf’s poem, the primary authorities in Juliana’s life on earth are wicked and ungodly ones, and Juliana rejects the social roles they ask her to inhabit, but from their perspectives – and as they declare in direct speech – she is both young and unruly. Two speeches in particular draw the problems of her identity to the fore. When he first seeks out Juliana, Africanus addresses her as his child. In the Latin, Africanus calls out: ‘My sweetest daughter, Juliana, light of my eyes’ (‘Filia mea dulcissima Iuliana, lux meorum oculorum’).⁷⁰ Cynewulf turns the vocative address into a more expanded, declarative claim:

Featuring three different iterations of the possessive first-person pronoun, this speech firmly circumscribes Juliana’s identity. Having made his claim, Africanus chastises Juliana for her lack of obedience. These lines lack a direct equivalent in the source, where he simply asks, ‘why do you not want to take the prefect as your husband?’ (‘quare non uis accipere praefectu sponsum tuum?’).⁷¹

Geaþ (‘foolishness’, 96b) is an uncommon poetic word, occurring only three times elsewhere, with one of these forming part of the phrase ‘geoguðe geað’ (‘youth’s foolishness’) in Guthlac A (504a).⁷² Africanus perceives the young Juliana as cognitively and morally faulty: as culpably self-driven.

Africanus’ utterance is then echoed by Eleusius, circumscribing Juliana’s identity as his beloved while cajoling and threatening her. In the Passio, Eleusius addresses Juliana as ‘my sweetest Juliana’ (‘dulcissima mea Iuliana’), again echoing Africanus.⁷³ In the Old English, the element of echo is heightened:

Africanus’ imagery of light (leoht, scima, glæm) reappears, and Cynewulf furthermore inserts here a direct reference to Juliana’s youth. Eleusius invokes specifically the blæd of Juliana’s youth-hood (168b), that quality which Guthlac A links with the young monks who are ‘in their first flush’ (‘in þam ærestan / blæde’, 496b–7a) but who misdirect their energies, and the force which Guthlac personally dedicates to God later in life (102b). Eleusius emphasises Juliana’s glorious youth in the run-up to demanding that she appease the pagan gods; when she refuses, Eleusius declares she will be punished for ‘thinking in resistance’ or ‘in opposition’ (‘wiþerhycgendre’, 196a).

Juliana’s youth thus unfolds amid a collision of earthly, demonic, and divine ‘wills’ (with Old English willa appearing at 32b, 50b, 428b, 441b, 600a, and 602a). Given her development in the midst of conflicting demands, it is appropriate that the devil describes her as þweorh-timbre, an adjective which appears only here in the Old English corpus and appears to mean literally ‘cross-timbered’ and in a more abstract sense ‘resolutely made’:⁷⁴

Equivalents for these lines are absent from the Passio. The devil’s speech connects Juliana’s status as a young woman with her unusually extreme levels of forthright thought. The architectural metaphor is, moreover, one of conjunction, and it highlights how Juliana’s identity has been structured through antagonism and resistance throughout the poem.

This detail also forms part of a broader network of architectural and structural imagery in the text.⁷⁵ As seen, when Africanus first seeks her, he knows where she will be guarding a dwelling (92a), while Eleusius demands she become ‘bride to a home’ (‘bryd to bolde’, 41a). After being forced into a prison, she is ‘led near the boundary of the land’ (‘gelæded lond-mearce neah’, 635) to an execution place. After her death, the crowd brings Juliana’s body ‘in within the city’ (‘burgum in innan’, 691b), possibly mirroring her soul’s homecoming to heaven, which is not described at any length. After these various dislocations, the poem makes use of the language of dwellings most explicitly when Juliana figures spiritual strength as a form of homebuilding, shortly prior to her death. Cynewulf is here prompted by Juliana’s brief exhortation in the Latin to ‘build your houses on firm rock, so you will not be shattered by the coming fierce winds’ (‘aedificate domus uestras super petram uiuam, ne uenientibus uentis ualidis disrumpamini’).⁷⁶ Juliana explains she wishes to teach God’s law:

Without specific reference to Juliana, Anita Riedinger has observed that in Old English poetry, ‘women are often associated with the “home”, particularly in relation to marriage’, picking out Abraham bringing ‘wife to hame’ (1721a) in Genesis A.⁷⁷ In archaeological and cultural-historical scholarship, a connection has long been asserted between women living before the Conquest and markers of control over domestic space, particularly girdle-hangers and latch-lifters.⁷⁸ Juliana likewise forges a strong connection between identity and homemaking, but – given the importance of the rhetoric of establishing a home in Guthlac A – we should bear in mind the potential importance of age to this network of imagery. Here, Juliana’s description of metaphorical homemaking represents the peak of her spiritual development, and it is the closest we get to a description of her entry into social adulthood: across the rest of the poem, she has been moved from place to place, but here she describes the triumphant establishment of a more permanent dwelling.

Both Guthlac A and Juliana understand homebuilding as key to the development of their saints, and other aspects of the poems’ views of youth and maturity are comparable. Although Juliana does not experience a clearly linear trajectory from unruly youth to obedient maturity, she performs elements of both modes of behaviour. She is received as unruly on a worldly level while, on a spiritual level, she subsumes her will in God’s. She is not successfully ‘steered’ by worldly and demonic figures of power, but her experience of youth is nonetheless strongly impacted by their expectations. Cynewulf is not as interested as the Guthlac A-poet in explicitly describing youth as a period of development before a state of full social integration can be achieved, but Juliana does manifest a youthful rebelliousness of spirit. She also envisages a path of development which centres on the prospect and practice of homebuilding, like Guthlac. Nonetheless, when Juliana employs the language of building most emphatically, it is in the form of a set of instructions to others. Juliana herself never accepts a clear social role in the world, dying at the cusp of a new identity as a ‘bride for a home’. She implicitly takes up a version of this identity in heaven, but in a manner that is not dwelt upon by the poet, who allows the liminal quality of Juliana’s age identity to persist even to the poem’s end.

Lifelong Learning in Andreas

Moving from the Exeter Book to the Vercelli Book, Andreas parallels Guthlac A and Juliana in many of its reflections on maturation, but this poem is markedly less concerned with the rebelliousness of youth contrasted with the obedience of maturity. It has more in common, in fact, with the ethos of The Phoenix, which, in its depiction of the wise yet continually regenerating phoenix bird (symbolic of Christ), ‘complicates an unquestioning acceptance of the age–wisdom connection’, as William Rogers has recently observed.⁷⁹ Youth, in Andreas, is often presented as concomitant with knowledge, skill, and good conduct, especially as manifested in Christ’s disguised appearance as a young mariner encountered by the unwitting saint. The poem explores the close association between youth, regeneration, and renewal inherent not only to Christological thought but to the Old English word geong, which can simply mean ‘new’. It stresses the value of youthfulness and renewal as something that should be appreciated and accessed throughout the worldly life course, emphasising youth’s connections with the divine. In his conversation with the disguised Christ, Andreas himself expounds a philosophy of age that would be more at home in Guthlac A, privileging maturity, and the text at this point stages a crisis between two different modes of understanding what it means to be young.

Overall, the Old English poem distils a concern with youth that was presumably present in its source in a more dispersed way. The direct source of Andreas does not seem to survive, but was most likely a Latin adaptation of the Greek apostolic romance, the Praxeis Andreou kai Mattheia eis tēn polin tōn anthrōpophagōn.⁸⁰ The Latin translation in the twelfth-century Codex Casanatensis is considered the closest surviving analogue to the lost source, but other Latin analogues survive in the form of an account in the Codex Vaticanus, as well as the short text known as the Bonnet Fragment.⁸¹ Two Old English prose accounts also survive: Blickling Homily XIX and an account in CCCC MS 198 (eleventh century).⁸² Across these analogues to the poem, the language of age and familial relation abounds. The Greek Praxeis itself contains a high number of these terms: Andrew first addresses Christ – disguised in his mariner form – as ‘young man’ (‘νεανίσκε’) and later exclaims ‘O child’ (‘Ὠ τέκνον’).⁸³ He habitually refers to his disciples as ‘my children’ (‘Τεκνία μου’) while they address him as ‘Father Andrew’ (‘Πάτερ Ἀνδρέα’).⁸⁴ The Latin translations preserve these features. The Bonnet Fragment describes Andrew addressing his followers as ‘my children’ (‘filii mei’), while the Casanatensis describes the disciples as ‘very young’ (‘infantulos’) and adds a diminutive to Andrew’s epithet for them – ‘my little children’ (‘filioli mei’).⁸⁵ In both, the disciples reply to the saint with the mirroring address, ‘Father Andrew’ (‘Pater Andreas’).⁸⁶ In the Old English prose versions of the story, Andrew addresses ‘my children’ (‘mine bearn’).⁸⁷

Only some of these features can be found in Andreas. Like the poets of Guthlac A and Juliana, that of Andreas is relatively uninterested in the language of childhood. The father–child rhetoric between Andreas and his followers is largely excised. Instead, Andreas addresses ‘my thegns’ (‘þegnas mine’, 391b). Outside the gates of Mermedonia, where the analogues have the disciples address him as Father Andrew, the saint’s followers simply call him Andreas (859a). Elsewhere, the text rather neutrally refers to Andreas as ‘the holy man’ (‘se halga wer’, 168b, 1171b, 1395b) as well as ‘hero’ (‘hæleð’, 919a) and ‘noble one’ (‘æðeling’, 990a, 1174a, 1272b, 1459b, 1575b), not specifying his age. Andreas thus engages with his surroundings as an implicitly older, but not explicitly aged and certainly not overtly paternal, figure. His relative age is clearest in his description of Christ-as-mariner as ‘geong’ (505b), in the same place that Christ’s apparent youth is referred to in the analogues.

The poet of the Old English Andreas is furthermore uninterested in describing the qualities attached to childhood. When Christ appears outside the gates in the Praxeis, he does so ‘becoming like a small child in the bloom of youth’ (‘γενόμενος ὅμοιος μικρῷ παιδίῳ ὡραιοτάτῳ εὐειδεῖ’).⁸⁸ In the Casanatensis, he appears ‘in the likeness of a most beautiful youth, a boy’ (‘in similitudinem pulcerrimi iuvenis, pueri’), while the Bonnet Fragment sees him appear ‘in the likeness of a most beautiful boy’ (‘in effigia pulcerrimi pueri’).⁸⁹ In both the CCCC MS 198 homily and the Blickling homily, Christ shows his face ‘in the appearance of a fair child’ (‘on fægeres cildes hiwe’).⁹⁰ Notably less ornately, Christ appears in the Old English poem ‘in the condition of a boy’ or ‘youth’ (‘þurh cnihtes had’, 912b), with the noun cniht capable of denoting ‘young man’.⁹¹ Richard North and Michael Bintley have provocatively observed the lack of an aesthetic element to this description, suggesting that it may signal a view of childhood which is ‘social rather than visual’.⁹² Whether this description refers to childhood at all is unclear, given the ambiguity of cniht.

In general, then, when compared against its analogues, Andreas refers to fewer differently aged individuals, narrowing its field of reference towards young or adult men. The Latin Casanatensis describes the old man of Mermedonia offering up both a son and a daughter (ch. 23), but in Andreas, the ‘old companion’ (‘eald-gesiða’, 1104b) gives up only a son. Those who die in the climactic flood and are brought back to life are described as ‘the youth of men’ (‘gumena geoguð’, 1615a), in contrast to the Casanatensis’ reference to a group including ‘women and infants and beasts of burden’ (‘mulieres, et infantes, et iumentas’), almost too many to be carried to Andreas.⁹³ North and Bintley remark of this passage, ‘the poet … defines them all as young men, as if thinking of a monastery.’⁹⁴ Perhaps – but youth carries a particularly heavy symbolic weight in this poem, as we will see.

The killed and re-enlivened men are geong in earthly terms at the moment of their death (1531a), but once they have been brought back to life, their youth has a new significance. Old English geong spans two senses, ‘in the early stage of life’ on the one hand, and ‘new’ or ‘fresh’ on the other.⁹⁵ The Andreas-poet plays upon these meanings:

The men’s youth is now inseparable from their quality of freshness and wholeness – they are good as new. This moment echoes Andreas’ earlier story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as they are restored and ‘receive their spirit and youth-hood’, (‘gaste onfon ond geogoðhade’, 782), unplagued by old age. This kind of youthfulness recalls that envisioned in the afterlife by the poet of Guthlac A, who explains that blessed souls may ‘enjoy youth and God’s favours’ (‘geoguþe brucað ond Godes miltsa’, 21). Indeed, on the authority of Ephesians 4:13, Augustine asserts that the perfectly restored human form in the afterlife is one of iuuentus, at approximately the age of thirty, in De civitate Dei, and Julian of Toledo likewise specifies that humans will be restored at around this age.⁹⁶ Inherent tensions underpin this conceptual arrangement, as Robin Norris has noted of Guthlac A: paradoxically ‘one must outgrow [youth] in order to enjoy God, and yet heaven is both the proper sphere of enjoyment and the seat of eternal youth’.⁹⁷ Andreas, however, does not focus on the dangers of worldly youth in the manner of Guthlac A, and instead nurtures a close connection between youth and the positive force of newness.

The poem’s enthusiastic interest in youth (rather than childhood per se) may reflect its wider concern with ever-renewed processes of education and growth, which has attracted some critical attention. According to Amity Reading, the poem models ‘perpetual reform of the self’, while Irina Dumitrescu emphasises the poem’s cycles of forgetting and remembering.⁹⁸ Perceiving a process of ‘mental reorientation’, Harbus particularly stresses the importance of the scene in which Andreas’ disciples experience a divinely inspired dream and relate it to their leader, thereby furthering Andreas’ mental development by proxy.⁹⁹ This episode notably foregrounds the youthful status of the followers, previously identified as ‘young noblemen’ (‘æðelingas … geonge’, 857–8a):

The young followers are here depicted in the process of learning, but Andreas learns alongside them; he is thus not solely – or even primarily – a pedagogical figure to his young disciples, as in the Latin and Greek sources, but rather learns through his followers. Moments such as these disrupt any binary relationship between the innocence of youth and the wisdom of Andreas’ older state. In many other ways, the poem suggests Andreas is still in a process of unsteady development. His mode of learning is markedly discontinuous and nonlinear, as Dumitrescu stresses – even at the end of the poem, Andreas ‘seems an inadequate teacher, eager to leave his new flock’, requiring one further corrective divine visitation (1659–74), much as the saint tends to speak with confidence as to the intellectual inferiority of youth, as we will see.¹⁰⁰

When engaging with Christ in his sailor guise and marvelling at his skill, Andreas’ failure of identification can partly be understood as a misunderstanding of the significance of youth, and specifically an underestimation of its spiritual meaning. He apprehends Christ as young in the sense of not yet having had much opportunity to gain knowledge in the world, when Christ more abstractly signifies regeneration and eternal youth as a spiritual possibility. The Andreas-poet seems to draw on Beowulf at several points, and this passage seems to adapt Hrothgar’s compliment to Beowulf when the king declares he has not ‘heard a man, so young in life, speak more wisely’ (‘hyrde … snotorlicor / on swa geongum feore guman þingian’, 1842b–3):¹⁰¹

Andreas here understands the experience of being ‘young’ as prior to a stage of enhanced wisdom and verbal skill, but he fails to perceive the true nature of Christ’s youth as entwined with a more profound kind of wisdom than that which can be obtained over the course of a worldly lifetime. Andreas approaches youth rather like Guthlac does – as something which precedes an improved state – but the rest of the poem challenges this view.

When conversing with Christ, Andreas makes extensive use of the language of cræft to describe the qualities with which this youthful figure is so surprisingly endowed: this semantically rich noun can signal not only ‘strength, power’, but ‘skill, ability’ of a physical or mental nature, ‘trade, work’, and even ‘virtue’ in mostly Alfredian contexts.¹⁰² As we have seen, the Boethius at one stage describes skills and virtues as straightforwardly accumulating across a life course; the blind man is said to forget that he once became fully excellent in all virtues and skills. The preponderance of this word in Andreas is striking: this 1,722-line poem contains twenty-six representatives of the cræft-family of words in a wide range of senses – proportionally, this is substantially more than appear in Beowulf, which contains only twenty-three occurrences in its 3,182 lines.¹⁰³ Arguments have recently been advanced for Andreas emerging from an Alfredian milieu, and the poet’s sustained use of cræft would be congruent with such a provenance.¹⁰⁴ The Andreas-poet leans into the ambiguity of the noun and uses cræft to describe skills not only as they are acquired over a lifetime, but also as they exist as more abstract qualities of power and merit, untethered from any worldly time frame and associated with the divine.

The terminology of cræft initially shapes Andreas’ rhapsodising upon the surprisingly excellent conduct of young mariner (472a, 484b, 500b). Initially, Andreas observes he has not previously met a man wiser in thought and speech or ‘more skilled’ (‘macræftigran’, 472a) in the art of sailing. In asking the mariner to share how he directs the ship so well, Andreas expresses a wish to ‘find out one skill’ (‘anes … / … cræftes neosan’, 483b–4b), and stresses again that he has not before witnessed ‘a more excellent skill among sailors’ (‘on sæ-leodan syllicran cræft’, 500). Andreas then explains he is particularly struck because this sailor seems so young:

Andreas clearly sees wisdom in age-related terms – something a person usually builds up over the course of a lifetime – but, of course, Christ represents divine wisdom of a kind unanchored from temporality. His is a different kind of cræft. The force of this idea is heightened by Andreas’ description of the boat’s miraculously smooth passage in a manner which evokes the absolute stillness of a safe haven, touched neither by storms nor wind (501–4a), where in the Casanatensis, Andrew more prosaically remarks that the boat seems like it is travelling on dry land.¹⁰⁵ The saint’s mistake is to apprehend Christ in terms of skill honed in the world, but his rhapsody nonetheless highlights how Christ possesses a more transcendent kind of skill, existing outside of and beyond time, just as God is also a ‘steadfast steersman’ (‘staðol-fæst styrend’, 121a; ‘staðul-fæst steorend’, 1336a).

For all that Andreas’s education and mental growth is ongoing and nonlinear across the poem, one major achievement is indicated when Andreas himself achieves a condition of being imbued with cræft. He is described as God’s cræftiga or ‘craftsman’ at the point of his raising of the temple after the revivification of the youths. A noun usually found in prose, this is a rare poetic usage of the term:¹⁰⁶

Andreas’s achievement in raising the church is here figured as the peak of his cræft. The poet is keen to stress, though, that the starting point for Andreas’ achievement in building a church remains the regenerating waters of the flood and the place where the youths were re-enlivened. Even here, skill is not synonymous with experience in the world: it is underpinned by the spiritual value of renewal. The polysemy of cræft is useful, as it can signal knowledge acquired through practice, but in its more abstract senses – power, virtue, merit – it can point also towards the atemporality of the divine.

Andreas thus shares with the Old English Boethius, and with Alfredian prose more generally, a keen interest in the concept of cræft and how physical and mental skill may be developed over the course of a lifetime. At the same time, the poet stages a collision between different ways of perceiving the relationship between age and skill, stressing that the eternal youth of Christ accompanies the most profound kind of knowledge, while advanced age in the world is no guarantor of superior wisdom. This poem therefore offers a view on ageing which is related to that found in Guthlac A or Juliana, but the text as a whole does not assert a correlation between youth and rebellion. Instead, Andreas accentuates the spiritual possibilities attached to youth, on the one hand, and on the other, the ways in which later adulthood is still marked by fallibility and the need to watch, learn, and be steered. Guthlac A posits a general trend in the form of youth’s folly and unruliness shading into adulthood’s obedience (for all that this transition works out differently in each person’s case), but in Andreas, even this loose set of norms is disrupted. Andreas moves through phases of understanding and confusion, obedience and disobedience, in a manner not clearly linear or teleological, but instead episodic, reiterative, and strongly idiosyncratic.

Servitude and Spiritual Ruin in Judith

As this chapter found earlier, the figure of the young Juliana stands in a complex relation to social expectations and shows some signs of youthful rebellion. In the Nowell Codex’s Judith, which seems to be a relatively late poem, the central female figure is positioned differently. This text is uninterested in any unruly quality attached to female youth, for example when depicting Judith’s maid, who is ‘younger’ or ‘junior’ (gingra, 132a).¹⁰⁷ Judith is not obviously old or young, described throughout as a ‘maiden’ or ‘woman’ (mægð) – she is widowed in the biblical Book of Judith and in Ælfric’s homily on Judith, but this is not mentioned in what survives of the poem, which also does not dwell on Judith’s efforts to maintain her chastity.¹⁰⁸ She is not presented in a state of social flux in the same way as Juliana, but instead demonstrates qualities which are elsewhere associated with maturity, and at times are referenced by the poet as such. For example, Judith’s maid, closely identified with Judith, is described as ‘excellent’ or ‘mature in in customs’ (‘ðeawum geðungen’, 129a), and as was seen in the Introduction, the adjective geðungen is key to Ælfric and Byrhtferth’s descriptions of maturity, with the sense ‘full-grown’. Like Andreas, Judith is fundamentally concerned with the exercising of good judgement, but rather than presenting the education of its central figure, the latter text forges a contract between the efficacious conduct of Judith (and her maid) and the behaviour of Holofernes (and his followers), whose drunken behaviour at times approaches a death state. Judith is concerned, therefore, with how the traits associated with adulthood can be wholly undermined and negated, and thus raises issues that will recur across the second half of this book. The poem demonstrates that midlife is not always defined in contrast to youth, but also has meaning in contrast to decline and death.

The poem bestows a clear social position on Judith as the ‘Saviour’s servant’ (‘nergendes / þeowen’, 73b–4a). Guthlac similarly identifies himself as ‘dryhtnes þeow’ (‘the Lord’s servant’, 314b, 386b), but Judith is even more interested in this symbolic role, most clearly elaborated in the parallel figure of Judith’s own handmaid. The poem uses Judith’s relationship with her servant to confer seniority on Judith, while also insinuating a likeness between the two figures, as together they are ‘both brave women … bold-spirited blessed maidens’ (‘idesa ba ellen-þriste … collen-ferhðe / ead-hreðige mægð’, 133–5a).¹⁰⁹ The Book of Judith also closely aligns Judith with the figure of the handmaiden, as she repeatedly identifies herself as an ancilla (‘maidservant’); however, muddying the symbolic waters, she initially does so while claiming to be Holofernes’ maidservant (Judith 11:4, 11:13, 12:4) before switching, in the moment of her address to the people of Bethulia, to identifying herself as the maidservant of God (13:18, 13:20).¹¹⁰ When Ælfric adapts the story, he opts not to refer to Judith as a servant. The Old English poem splits the difference, referring to Judith as a ‘þeowen’ (74a), but to God only. It thus stratifies the role of the servant, such that secular servitude is located in the figure of Judith’s handmaid while Judith’s spiritual form of servitude is performed separately.

In order to achieve this, the poet expands the character of Judith’s handmaid from the Vulgate source, when most of the Vulgate characters are erased from the poem.¹¹¹ As one half of a ‘character pairing’, Judith’s maid exhibits qualities that are thereby highlighted in Judith herself, as Helen Damico has emphasised: she is ‘thoughtful-minded’ (hige-ðoncol, 131a; þancol-mod, 172b), and, as has been seen, ‘mature in in customs’ (‘ðeawum geðungen’, 129a).¹¹² Although some sense of inferiority inevitably attaches to the idea of a gingra figure, Judith’s servant is not overtly shown to be in a process of growth, requiring further improvement. She may be subservient to Judith in her status, but the poem stresses that their conduct is comparable. In this regard, the poem’s suggestion of differences between the behaviours of early and later female adulthood is muted.

Moreover, the work of Judith and her maid is subtly distinguished but connected symbolically. Physical work is frequently delegated to Judith’s maid. Tracing a physical detail not noted in the Vulgate, the poet reports that Judith inserts Holofernes’ head into the bag, but:¹¹³

Similarly, in the Vulgate, Judith herself brandishes her trophy: ‘she brought forth the head of Holofernes out of the wallet and shewed it them’ (‘proferens de pera caput Holofernis ostendit illis’, 13:19). In the poem, this action is again delegated:

The Book of Judith stresses the literal intervention of Judith’s hand, guided by God, as Judith declares ‘he hath killed the enemy of his people by my hand this night’ (‘interfecit in manu mea hostem populi sui hac nocte’, 13:18), but the poet emphasises Judith’s hand as a more abstract sign. She announces her people will have victory ‘as the mighty Lord has betokened to you through my hand’ (‘swa eow getacnod hafað / mihtig dryhten þurh mine hand’, 197b–8). Although Judith does work with her hands in slaughtering Holofernes (80a, 99b), the poet thus assigns two key elements of the physical handling of Holofernes’ head to the maid, and emphasises the symbolic status of Judith’s hands, developing a two-tier significance to the work of hands. Judith embodies servitude in the spiritual realm, while her maid performs a complementary role of practical service.

Holofernes, meanwhile, fails to adeptly perform his role as a leader, in a manner which hinges upon both physical and strategic inefficacy. Drunk, he commits a kind of ‘intellectual suicide’, as Maria Flavia Godfrey puts it, ahead of his physical death; this contrasts with Judith’s intellectual power, emphasised in references to her mod (93b, 97b).¹¹⁴ Holofernes’ deathlike drunkenness at the feast, and that of his men, is pitched specifically in terms of uselessness:

Holofernes is the antithesis of Judith’s almost hygienic efficacy; whereas she delegates practical work to her servant, dutifully inhabiting her place within a hierarchy of servitude, Holofernes becomes indistinguishable from his men on both a grammatical and behavioural level. Their mutual ruin takes the form of deathly drunkenness, and the connection between death and drunkenness as different forms of waste in Old English poetry will be treated at greater length in Chapter 4. Within Judith, the uselessness of Holofernes’ followers is emphasised later in the poem, as when standing outside his tent, coughing both pointedly and fruitlessly, they are here described as ‘void of good’ (‘gode orfeorme’, 271b), as their activity ‘did not prosper them a bit’ (‘him wiht ne speow’, 274b), here paralleling Ælfric’s account.¹¹⁵ By contrast, the poet repeatedly emphasises not only Judith, but also her followers as characterised by efficiency. Judith lays Holofernes ‘with skill’ (‘listum’, 101a), doing so as easily as she can ‘well control’ (‘wel gewealdan’, 103a) his body. The warriors that she commands with her ‘clear guidance’ (‘gleawe lare’, 333b) are correspondingly efficient; the poem states the advancing Hebrews ‘spared not one’ (‘nanne ne sparedon’, 233b) of the Assyrian warriors. Judith’s mode of physical and mental excellence finds a consistent foil in her enemy.

The poet of Judith is doing something different to those of the other poems treated in this chapter. Rather than emphasising adulthood itself as a dynamic experience, marked by phases of growth and improvement, with the ultimate end goal of obedience, good conduct, and full social integration, the poet of Judith suggests the failures against which properly performed adulthood is defined. The poem aligns Judith closely with her younger servant, who behaves impeccably, while both meet their foil in Holofernes and his followers. Like Andreas, then, this poem problematises the narrative of rebellious youth and dutiful later adulthood that is set up in Guthlac A and (to a degree) Juliana, stressing that maturity in years and seniority is no guarantee of efficacious or socially useful behaviour. Both of the later poems, then, show a pronounced interest in how life courses in practice do not conform to a norm of steady, uniform development, but we can also detect a relative lack of interest in (spiritually legitimised) youthful female unruliness when Judith is compared with Juliana.

In diverse ways, Guthlac A, Juliana, Andreas, and Judith are all concerned with what it means to grow up. In meditating on the connections between maturity, usefulness, and efficacy, they parallel some orthodoxies of patristic tradition, but also join shorter poems such as Maxims I, and many of the Riddles, in displaying a keen interest in growth towards usefulness. Guthlac A asserts that potentially unruly young manhood will be followed by a period of more orderly and obedient existence, while Cynewulf’s Juliana suggests a path for female maturation which is not so different: although Juliana’s is a divinely sanctioned unruliness, the text abounds with references to her disobedience. Both Andreas and Judith look a little more askance at any idea of maturity which straightforwardly betters a person. These poems do emphasise the importance of a dutiful performance of adulthood, but they are drawn particularly to its hiccups and failures. In Judith, the primary dividing line sits between Judith’s efficacious maturity and Holofernes’ brand of socially disordered behaviour, which constitutes a kind of terrible waste, of an ilk discussed further in Chapter 4.

We might wonder what can happen to blæd in the second half of the life course, as a force that Guthlac A and Juliana describe as flourishing in youth. Beowulf offers a view on this issue. It shares Guthlac A and Juliana’s concern with blæd as a force which accumulates in youth (18b) and suggests this is lamentably lost when a person dies. Hildeburh watches as Finn and Hengest’s warriors are placed on the pyre, as ‘their vitality [or ‘glory’] had departed’ (‘Wæs hira blæd scacen’, 1124b). Similarly, when Æschere is dragged from his rest by Grendel’s mother, he is called a ‘glory-fast man’ (‘blæd-fæstne beorn’, 1299a). Death is not the only force which can compromise a person’s ‘prosperity’, to take another sense of blæd. As Hrothgar memorably declares in his ‘sermon’ to Beowulf, this condition is always threatened by a number of forces, whether old age, sickness, disability, or violent death:

If the ‘one sex’ model has fallen out of popularity amid medievalists (see Introduction, 20–1), a ‘one age’ model of the life course has some value when it comes to evaluating passages like this one. Old age, disability (in the form of blindness), and death are all positioned as enemies to the ideal condition of strength and vitality, and a similar formulation appears in The Seafarer (68–71), and in several other places in Old English poetry, as discussed further in Chapter 3.

The remainder of this book is concerned with the ways in which strength, flourishing, and prosperity are understood to be challenged by old age, sickness, death, and deathlike states. Even despair sometimes seems to constitute a threat to vitality: Hrothgar, for example, lists ‘adl’, ‘yldo’, ‘ecg-hete’ (‘sword-hate’), and ‘inwit-sorh’ (‘dire sorrow’, 1736–8b) as the key misfortunes of which a prosperous king should be mindful. These conditions are at once part of the life course and enemies of life at its most vital. A person’s death, especially, is often presented as the creation of a condition of waste and excessive uselessness. As explored already by the poet of Judith, the death state is disturbingly antithetical to the ideals of efficacy, productivity, and the maintenance of social structure which tend to inform poetic depictions of adulthood.