Andreas

(ca. ninth century)

   Andreas is a 1,722-line OLD ENGLISH poem preserved in the VERCELLI BOOK. The extant poem is divided into 15 sections, or fits, and retells a story based on a lost Latin translation of the apocryphal Acts of Andrew and Matthew, originally written in Greek in the late fourth century. The story focuses on the apostle Saint Andrew and his miraculous rescue of Saint Matthew from a tribe of cannibals whom Andrew is ultimately able to convert to Christianity.

   In the poem, the Mermedonians are a fiendish tribe of Ethiopia who eat the flesh and drink the blood of any strangers they capture in their land. The prisoners are blinded and forced to drink a potion that robs them of their reason and reduces them to eating hay like beasts while awaiting their slaughter. Saint Matthew is captured and, though he drinks the potion, remains faithful to God, who rewards his prayers with healing and the promise of rescue.

   Andrew is called upon in Achaia, from whence he sets forth somewhat reluctantly with a group of his thanes on a ship captained, as he later learns, by Christ himself. After a stormy voyage he arrives in the land of the Mermedonians, where he is himself captured and tortured for more than three days. But when Andrew miraculously lets loose a great flood from a stone column, the water drowns the Mermedonians in a symbolic baptism. All but 14 of the most wicked of the cannibals are revived and converted to the new faith, while Saint Matthew and the other prisoners are saved. Andreas was once thought to be the work of the poet CYNEWULF, but that attribution is no longer accepted, and the poem is probably of a later date than that poet’s work. Readers have admired Andreas for its vivid description of Saint Andrew’s stormy sea crossing. Scholars have commented upon resemblances to BEOWULF in the text, in things like the sea-voyage to rescue people from man-eating monsters. Some phrases may even be borrowed from Beowulf or other heroic poetry. The heroic language, in fact, seems awkward or even unsuitable to some readers. But the poem is an admirable and effective effort, and seems to invite an allegorical interpretation with Andrew as a type or figure of Christ, harrowing an earthly hell where demonic humans hold captive citizens of God’s kingdom. The bondage may suggest bondage to sin, the blindness a spiritual blindness that results in bondage. Ultimately, Andreas is a more sophisticated poem than it may at first appear, and certainly makes for exciting reading, though the story itself was hardly considered orthodox in its time.

   Bibliography

   ■ Greenfield, Stanley B., and Daniel G. Calder. A New Critical History of Old English Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1986.

   ■ Kennedy, Charles William, trans. Early English Christian Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

   ■ Lapidge, Michael. “The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon England.” In The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 243–263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.