“The slain fell on all sides, plague-days came,
and death destroyed all the brave swordsmen;
the seats of their idols became empty wasteland.”
The Ruin, lines 24-261
Although this imagery seems like it could come from a vision of our own future—or present—it actually comes from visions of the ancient past. These are lines from The Ruin, an Old English elegy. Composed around the 10th century A.D.2 by an unknown author, this mournful poem takes readers on a tour of a Roman city that has fallen into ruin.3 From landmarks like collapsed towers to details like the lichen growing on the crumbled city walls, the poet paints a vivid, haunting picture of the collapsed city. There is an eerie quiet to The Ruin. It sits in the silence after the worst has happened.
I’ve always been interested in the rhetoric and imaginary of the end times: how it shows up in the past and present and how we can deploy it to help us shape our futures. As a lover of Medieval literature, I’m both excited and comforted when I look back at old texts and find that writers in the Middle Ages were worrying about the same questions I’m trying to write my way through today. How do we understand and explore our past? In the face of the overwhelming world, how do we not just survive, but create something valuable for those who will inherit the Earth we leave behind? When everything ends, what comes after? I don’t have answers and neither does The Ruin, but we are sitting in the space of the poem thinking about these questions together. At the heart of The Ruin is a long-destroyed city and a man wandering through its desolation, considering its glorious past, inglorious present, and dubious future. Through analyzing The Ruin’s narrative style, I intend to explore how the poem utilizes memory and time to reimagine the past and bring it into conversation with the present—and, perhaps, open up space for newly-imagined futures.
Although we’ve lost significant portions of The Ruin due to centuries-old fire damage, enough is left for scholars to understand The Ruin as one of the Old English elegies. In the context of Old English literature, the “elegies” refer to roughly seven to nine poems that contemporary scholars often group together because they have important thematic similarities: a mournful tone, concern with the transience of human life, and a sense of deep loss—much of what comprises an “elegy” as we would describe it today, although Medieval composers and storytellers wouldn’t have conceived of the genre in the same way we do. 4
Unlike in other elegies, such as The Seafarer or The Wanderer, the narrator of The Ruin isn’t really a character in the action of the poem. He—for it is almost certainly intended to be a he—is instead an outside voice exploring what caused the city to fall into ruin and what it’s like now. Scholars often describe him as omniscient, impersonal, and detached, utilizing this characterization of the narrative style as a springboard for questioning whether The Ruin can be categorized as an elegy at all.5 However, I follow James F. Doubleday in describing the narrator not necessarily as omniscient, but rather as imaginative and ruminative: “[. . .] the meditative speaker does not confine himself to his immediate observations. His mind reaches forward to the end of the world and the final doom, and backward to the building of the city.”6 As Doubleday notes, the narration often zooms in and zooms out, so to speak, in repeating cycles throughout The Ruin. The speaker begins by describing the most noticeable things around him, such as how “the roofs are ruined, towers toppled” (line 3), then integrates meditations on the past into his view of the present, considering how “the earth’s grasp / holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, / the hard grip of the ground” (lines 6-8). He evinces a great deal of attention to detail, taking care to point out even the smallest elements of the ruins: how the walls are “rust-stained / and covered with moss” (lines 9-10) and the bright “vermillion” of the collapsing roofs (line 29). In the next breath, he paints vivid pictures of how the people of the city must have lived: “once many a man / glad-minded, gold-bright, bedecked in splendor, / proud, full of wine, shone in his war-gear” (lines 31-33). Content and form are acting in concert here, as the poem’s formal style helps express the speaker’s interiority. This ruminative, wandering style enhances the human, grieving quality I find to permeate the narration and the poem, rather than an impersonal or omniscient quality. The speaker’s thought process as he alternately reaches far into the past, dwells on small details in the present, and imagines the future evokes the basic human desire to understand and imagine the world around him and find a place in it.
As Daniel G. Calder observes, “time shifts” are clearly important to the poem.7 Although The Ruin is not literally a dual-timeline piece, the narrator often presents temporally differing perspectives on the city that interact in complicated ways throughout the piece. I would argue that these time shifts work to blend the past and present, creating overlapping senses of time. Even in the present, the narrator is in close communion with those of the past. Their values, flaws, triumphs, and defeats are brought even more immediately to the forefront of the poem and made even more relevant through this blending, which, as Calder notes, “emphasizes the meaning of the ruins in human terms.”7 The frequent imaginative time shifts also raise the question of memory—if these are imaginative pictures from someone who was not really there, not memories of the events, then where do memories reside in this poem? As the physical structures of a city fall and eventually crumble into dust, the memories that are embedded in them will disappear as well. The narrator recognizes and mourns this, such as in lines 10-11: “This wall, rust-stained and covered with moss, has seen one kingdom after another, / stood in the storm, steep and tall, then tumbled.” The narrator is not just concerned with the fact of lost knowledge, but with the emotional resonance of what is gone: “high noble gates and a great noise of armies, / many a meadhall filled with men’s joys, / until mighty wyrd made an end to all that” (lines 22-23). The idea of memory does not just encapsulate the relatively static ability to contain memory, but also a dynamic process of being able to create new memories and having the space in which to do so. In The Ruin, not only have individual memories been lost, but so has the space in which new ones may be created. In many ways, the city has reached a dead end. It is left to our narrator—and his audience—to imagine the future, which he bleakly references in lines 6-9 while pondering the fate of the city’s long-dead builders: “The earth’s grasp / holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, / the hard grip of the ground, until a hundred / generations of men are gone.” In the Ruin poet’s time, it was commonly thought that Earth would not last longer than a hundred more generations.6 Despite his vivid imagination of the past, the narrator speaks little about the future, and when he does, he does not have hopeful things to say. (Though perhaps, seeing how thoroughly such a once-glorious city of a once-powerful empire can be leveled, his lack of optimism is understandable.)
Due to fire damage, the original ending of The Ruin is long lost, and the ending of the text we do have is extremely fragmented. The last few lines we have read:
the hot streams over the great stones,
under . . .
until the circular pool . . . . hot . . .
. . . . . where the baths were.
Then . . . .
. . . . . that is a noble thing,
how . . . . the city . . . . (lines 42-48)8
The physical destruction of the text mirrors the psychological loss of both community and individual memory. As we travel further into the future, more of the path we’ve traversed is shrouded from view, just as more of the path before us is unveiled. We may be able to peek into the past and catch glimpses of what happened, but the full story is often lost. As the poem trails off, so too do I picture the speaker trailing off; lost in thought, he wanders away from us through the winding ruins, eventually disappearing into the cold mist.
The Ruin, as most ideas, communities, and legacies do, ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But I want to see this as an open door. Perhaps not as an ending at all—not a “no,” one might say, but a “yes, and.” A space open for us to conceptualize how we will shape our lives and communities now and how we will build for the future—for those who will inherit the Earth from us, writing elegies for our ruins.
