3 - Owed to Both Sides: W.H. Auden's double debt to the literature of the North

Summary

The basic facts of W.H. Auden's life-long engagement with things Icelandic — and especially its medieval literature and myth — are well known. His father believed that the family came from Iceland, the surname ‘Auden’ being an Anglicization of the Icelandic given name ‘Auðunn’. He even toyed with the possibility that it was related to the name of the god Óðinn, and wrote to the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon for confirmation of this; in a brief reply, Eiríkur dismissed the suggestion. But Dr Auden fostered in his son an interest in Old Norse myth — with considerable success. In Letters from Iceland, Auden writes that having listened to his father reading Icelandic folk tales to him, he now ‘know[s] more about Northern mythology than Greek’. His colouring — fair hair and a pale complexion — tended to confirm both his own and his friends’ assumptions about his Scandinavian ancestry, and he repeatedly referred to Iceland as ‘holy ground’. Towards the end of his life, in 1969, he and Paul Taylor published The Elder Edda, an English translation of selection of Old Norse verse which very largely comprises the mythological poems of the Edda.5

Just as familiar is W.H. Auden's engagement with Old English poetry. His response to J.R.R. Tolkien reciting Beowulf is very widely quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.’ But however positive his attitude to hearing Old English poetry read aloud, he did badly in his exams, and got a Third; a friend reported that he cried when he came out of his Old English paper. Nevertheless, as Chris Jones notes, he was to write in 1962 that: ‘Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ Auden's free translation of the Old English elegy The Wanderer (which begins, confusingly, with a line adapted from the early Middle English alliterative sermon Sawles Warde: ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’) is perhaps his most celebrated Old English derived piece, but the pervasive influence of medieval English alliterative metre is evident throughout Auden's oeuvre.

The distinction between the two elements of Auden's double debt ought, then, to be pretty clear, Old Norse traditions providing the mythic allusions in Auden's work, and Old and Middle English metres influencing or informing his prosody.