1 - Thiu wirsa giburd: Cain’s Legacy, Original Sin, and the End of the World in the Old Saxon Genesis

Summary

SCHOLARS ᴏF OLD SᴀxON alliterative biblical poetry have tended to fall into two camps: those who emphasize the Germanic culture behind the form, and those who emphasize the Christian tradition behind the content. All interpretations take both into consideration, but this difference in basic emphasis can lead to major divergences in what is seen as the overall meaning of the poems. One of the main divergences is that scholars in the first camp, usually in reference to a sociocultural model derived from the Germanic comitatus or the feud, tend to interpret the Adam and Eve story in terms of a relatively straightforward relationship of loss and restoration of favor with one's Lord. These readings, by and large, proceed from what one would call in German a “positives Menschenbild” (positive view of human nature). Those who emphasize the Christian tradition, on the other hand, tend to regard the same story as transporting an essentially negative Christian anthropology and psychology of sin. In a recent study, John Vickrey has called these scholarly camps the “exonerative school” (those “exonerated” being Adam and Eve) and the “orthodox school” (the orthodoxy being that of the patristic, Augustine-oriented exegetical tradition of early medieval Catholic Christianity).

All of this has been argued at length with regard to the Adam and Eve story, the subject of one of the three surviving Old Saxon fragments of biblical poetry, a fragment preserved in a significantly longer version in an Old English transliteration known to scholars as Genesis B. The two other fragments, which deal with the stories of Cain and Abel and the destruction of Sodom, respectively, have received very little independent critical attention. This essay deals primarily with the Cain fragment, which, for reasons that will later become clear, I will call the Cain poem. Specifically, I argue that this poem undertakes a major repositioning of original sin vis-à-vis the orthodox Christian tradition (including a rather puzzling apocalyptic coda), a state of affairs that has not received due recognition in the scholarship.

Original Sin

One of the main achievements of the “orthodox” school has been to demonstrate convincingly the great extent to which the biblical poetry in Old Saxon is informed by contemporaneous Christian sources and perspectives, most notably patristic commentaries on the Bible used in Carolingian monasteries, biblical apocrypha and parabiblical narratives, and Church practice.