Blickling Homilies

(ca. 1000)

   Most likely compiled sometime in the late 10th century, the collection known as the Blickling Homilies is a series of 18 sermons in OLD ENGLISH, all dealing with major feast days or saints’ days of medieval Christianity and arranged roughly to correspond with the Christian calendar. The author or authors of the sermons are unknown, but in Sermon 11, for Ascension Day, the author—or perhaps the scribe—purports to be writing in 971. It is possible the entire collection was written at approximately that time.

   Such a date would be consistent with one of the chief thematic concerns of the sermons—that is, the imminence of Judgment Day. There was widespread anxiety throughout Christian Europe concerning the approaching end of the millennium, interpreted by many as the date that would usher in the end time.While the author(s) of these homilies make orthodox statements to the effect that only God knows the day and hour of the end, he or they seem obsessed by the topic and bring it into the sermons of the collection at every opportunity. Some of the better-known homilies are Sermon 7, on Easter Sunday, which contains a HARROWING OF HELL episode, a dialogue between Christ and Adam and Eve, and in the second half, like so many of the homilies, a sermon concerning signs of the end of the world. Sermon 10, for Rogation Wednesday (preceding Ascension Day), is concerned specifically with the coming day of judgment. Sermon 16, on Michaelmas, is of particular interest to students of BEOWULF because the sermon contains an account of St. Paul’s Vision of Hell that echoes the description of Grendel’s mere and suggests a possible knowledge of the poem by the homilist.

   The style of the sermons in the Blickling collection is more colloquial, more popular, and more manifestly intended for oral delivery than the later, more polished and scholarly sermons of AELFRIC and WULFSTAN. They contain fantastic elements and eschatological urgency that is likely to have appealed to the average citizen more than the scholar. This is not to say that the sermons evince no knowledge of learned sources, both secular and nonsecular. In addition to Beowulf and the Vision of St. Paul, the homilist(s) apparently knew the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Apocalypse of Thomas, and the New Testament of James as well as a number of saints’ lives, to mention only a few apparent sources. The manuscript of the homilies seems to have been produced in Mercia, and it has been conjectured that it was compiled for a monastic foundation in the vicinity of Lincoln. From at least the late 13th century, the book belonged to the Corporation of the City of Lincoln. In its margins are recorded lists of Lincoln city officials over a period of some 400 years, well into the 17th century. In 1724 the city gave away the manuscript, and for about 200 years it was in the library of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, from which it received the name by which it is now known. In 1932 the manuscript was auctioned, and now belongs to the John H. Scheide library in Princeton. It is the most important and valuable Old English manuscript currently situated in the United States.

   Bibliography

   ■ Dalby, Marcia. The Old English Homily and Its Background. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978.

   ■ Gatch,Milton McCormick. Eschatology and Christian Nurture: Themes in Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Religious Life. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000.

   ■ Jeffrey, Elizabeth J. Blickling Spirituality and the Old English Vernacular Homily. Studies in Medieval Literature 1. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1989.

   ■ Morris, Rev. R., ed. The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century. London: Early English Text Society, 1874.

   ■ Swanton, Michael, ed. Anglo-Saxon Prose. London: Dent, 1975.