5 - Mutual Custodianship in the Landscapes of Guðlac A

Summary

Abstract

Guðlac A details the eponymous saint's relationships with the holy landscape surrounding his hermitage and its other-than-human inhabitants. The poem suggests that the work of Guðlac's sainthood is sustained devotion to the Earth community. As an exemplum of Old English ecotheological living, Guðlac's legend offers a challenge to the concept of environmental “stewardship” of the Earth community in favor of a model of mutual custodianship calls for sustained and deliberate devotion to the created world for its own sake and as a manifestation of the Creator's love and glory. It also suggests that sustained engagement with the natural world even in the face of environmental crisis or collapse will be rewarded, in this life or the next.

Keywords: divinity, sacred land, isolation, mysticism

In the previous chapters, I have suggested that the looming specter of apocalyptic collapse at the end of the tenth century brought human connections to the other-than-human elements of the Earth community into sharp relief for the people of early medieval England. My first chapter argued that the Old English ecotheology which emerged from this cultural-environmental moment— expressed most clearly in the work of Ælfric and Wulfstan—anticipates modern ecotheological principles, such as belief in the interconnectedness of the Earth community in the intrinsic worth, active voice, and resistance of the other-than-human members of the gesceaft, and in the mutual custodianship of human and other-than-human beings on Earth. Subsequent chapters suggested that this Old English ecotheology is also reflected in representations of the Earth community in the Old English poetry of the Exeter Book. These poems are representative of a corpus and an ecotheology which sought points of continuity, rather than conflict, with other-than-human members of the Earth community, and I have suggested that their authors actively sought to engage that community in their work. As they looked back in time to the harmony of Eden and forward to the inevitable apocalypse for help in navigating their relation to the other-than-human, early medieval English writers and thinkers also sought aspirational examples of holy living in their present moment.