United Kingdom
Where the Scandinavian final battle and the Christian apocalypse became one English voice.
The most concrete medieval end-times moment in the corpus is English. Around 1014, with the Danish invasions underway, Wulfstan, archbishop of York, preached the Sermon of the Wolf to the English, reading the raids, the decay of law, and the disorder of the age as the signs of the last age, and turning eschatology into a summons to repentance and order. The sermon's date is fixed under Wulfstan preaches the Sermon of the Wolf. The sermon fuses the North Germanic expectation of a fated end with a Christian frame and an English politics in a single voice.
Before the Normans, the Anglo-Saxon church carried its own eschatological literature. The poem Christ III dwells on the reckoning each soul will face, and The Dream of the Rood speaks of the end and the final victory of the cross. The Old English imagination inherited the Germanic shape of the world decided by a last contest and married it to the Book of Revelation's sequence, so that the final battle of good and evil runs through both the homilies and the poetry.
The synthesis is the contribution. The Scandinavian material supplies a fated, losing-then-renewed battle; the Christian material supplies a dated judgment and a kingdom to come; the English sermon joins them as a warning that the wolf had arrived in living memory. The sermon is treated in Anglo-Saxon Eschatology (Wulfstan and the Wolf) and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf, the shared battle in Ragnarök, and the inherited sequence in Book of Revelation. The interest of the UK entry is that meeting point where the northern final battle and the Christian apocalypse became, for a while, one English voice telling its hearers the end was already at the door.
See also
- Anglo-Saxon Eschatology (Wulfstan and the Wolf)The end preached as an emergency: Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English (
- Wulfstan's Sermon of the WolfThe end preached as an emergency: England is collapsing, the Danes are at the do
- RagnarökIn Norse myth the gods fall in a final battle against the giants and monsters, t
- Book of RevelationThe Christian apocalypse of John, a revealed vision of a final battle, a thousan
Further reading
- Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English) · c. 1014; ed. Dorothy Bethurum, Early Middle English Homilies, 1932 The sermon reading the invasions as signs of the last age.
- Christ III, in The Exeter Book · ed. and tr. Bernard Huppé, Anglo-Saxon Institute, 1995 The Old English poem on the final judgment and the reckoning of each soul.
- The Dream of the Rood · Vercelli Book, c. 10th century The cross speaks of the end and the final victory.
- Malcolm Godden, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature · Cambridge University Press, 2013 (2nd ed.) On the eschatological cast of Anglo-Saxon homiletic and poetic literature.