from the Exeter Book

In the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731, many codices in the Cotton Library, including the Exeter Book (c. 960 C.E.) which contains the only copy of ‘The Ruin,’ were destroyed or damaged by the fire. The text of ‘The Ruin’ itself was partially obliterated and can never be recovered. So the poem’s conventional title is fitting with regard not only to the poem’s subject matter—a meditation on a (probably Roman) ruined city in which baths feature heavily—but also to its material-textual state. In the heat of conflagration, the poem’s material has melded with its matter.

Ruins are tourist attractions only for those countries and those people for whom comfortable shelter is not in question. This is not the situation of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Much Old English poetry revolves around access to shelter, the loss of it, the attendant danger of weather, and the perils of travel. The poem was written on an island still populated by wolves, which were a threat to travellers. The countryside was no pacified idyll and the towns belonged to frequently warring kingdoms. The ruined city, then, could not be the curiosity that Pompeii would be to eighteenth-century antiquarians. Instead, it was an admonition of frailty and precarity in a world not yet thought to always grow better. The poet knows himself a latecomer. I have tried to explicate the significance of this ideological delta in the carrying out of my translations, myself also a latecomer, and knowing it. This translation is one of approximately thirty translations of ‘The Ruin’ I have done according to different principles and through different historical mediators (dictionaries, articles, literary forms) in the manuscript for a forthcoming book. The original poem was in alliterative meter in which two or three words per line start with the same sound; this particular translation imitates that meter.