Why read Marx at all? Why take any notice of his biographical circumstances? Why read his works in historical context? Why should it matter reading one edition or translation rather than another?

In order to answer these questions we must first address some general issues about reading. The terms that characterize biographical narrative and bibliographical advice are all too familiar, and this is particularly so in the case of Marx, as the story of his life is well established and the list of standard works very well known. Familiarity is no excuse for leaving these terms unexamined, however, and I shall put my own discussion of Marx into perspective.

Seeking enlightenment from the texts of the past is an apparently paradoxical exercise. After all, the events and ideas of the past are no longer, by definition, literally in the present. “Living in the past” is generally no compliment, and taking advice from those unacquainted with present circumstances does not sound like a good idea. Indeed, it might seem that Marx is now particularly discredited as an inspiration, since nearly all the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe have collapsed from within, and reformist Marxism seems to take its cue from contemporary economic and political liberalism. Perhaps an examination of thoughts from the past is a bad habit, and we should keep our minds on current affairs.

Marx's writings include over a thousand pages of theories, explanations, and arguments concerning capitalist societies, some brief but intriguing discussions of precapitalist societies, and at most ten pages of general statements about all (or all class-divided) societies. The meaning of the general statements, important though they are, can be discovered only by understanding how they are used in his historically specific inquiries. So no matter how abstract one's favorite questions about Marx's social and political theories may be, it is helpful to begin with his favorite specific target, capitalist society.

CAPITALISM AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM

A society is capitalist, in Marx's way of thinking, if the production of material goods is dominated by the use of wage labor, that is, the use of labor power sold, to make a living, by people controlling no significant means of production and bought by other people who do have significant control over means of production and mostly gain their income from profits on the sale of the results of combining bought labor power with those productive means. The proletariat are, roughly, the first group - in the Communist Manifesto's slightly flamboyant description - “a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital” (Marx, 1974b: 73). The bourgeoisie are, roughly, the second group, whose income mainly derives from the sale of commodities produced with bought labor power. Marx thinks that these relations of control in the process of production have a pervasive influence on politics, culture, and society.

For many contemporary liberals, Anglo-American democracy seems unimpeachably the best political form. In contrast, most Marxian regimes and perhaps Marx himself seem deficient in defending democracy. Further, Marxian theory identifies oppressive ruling classes in all capitalist societies and calls for class struggle and violent revolution to achieve a more cooperative regime - theses that liberal social theories tend peremptorily to dismiss.

Yet Marxian theory also affirms ethical claims about the benefits of mutual recognition of persons and self-respect, realizing a general human capacity for moral personality and individuality, which are at the heart of liberalism. Thus the Communist Manifesto envisions a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In addition, Marx began his career as a radical democrat, seeking to spur a democratic revolution in Germany in 1848 as a prelude to "an immediately following proletarian one." His insights traced a path later to be followed by many Russian radical democrats, Chinese “new democrats,” and participants in the 1960s American Students for a Democratic Society. Marx's political theory aims to realize democracy's promise of equal liberty, now corrupted by the severe impact of capitalist wealth. His democratic insights shine through his political activity, his strategic and historical writings, and, even with attention to context, his economic theory.

One of the most significant literary achievements of the Anglo-Saxons was the establishment of vernacular prose as an acceptable medium both for the dissemination of knowledge on a wide range of subjects and for the provision of moral instruction and entertainment. By the time of the Norman Conquest, English was being used for scientific and medical works, legal documents, historical records and religious instruction of all kinds, thus fulfilling a public and official role in society. Translations and reworkings of Latin texts had made available to educated laymen and clergy alike key works on philosophy and theology, world history and geography, along with travellers' tales and accounts of the east - occasionally even fiction - while for students in the monastic schools there were textbooks on computus (the science of calculating moveable Christian feasts, such as Easter) and on grammar and rhetoric. Even the gospels and a considerable portion of the Old Testament had been rendered into English.

The country in which this book was conceived, and the literary language in which it is written, are both more than a thousand years old. The 'kingdom of England' was created by Anglo-Saxon politicians, soldiers and churchmen in the ninth and tenth centuries. They and their subjects have left us a significant literature in their own language. Readers may be tempted to take both facts for granted. Yet each is not only exceptional but also extraordinary. No other European state has existed within approximately its modern boundaries for anything like so long. Few other current European literatures have specimens anything like so old. France, Spain and Italy reached roughly today's political shape before England, Germany at much the same time. But all were to be broken up by external conquest or internal collapse. Their 'resurrection' belongs to latermedieval, early-modern or nineteenth-century history. England itself, notoriously, was overrun by the Normans in 1066, but it did not break up. Among sub-Roman successor-states, at least one other had a vernacular literature for a time.

During the Anglo-Saxon period, English schools were among the finest in Europe. From English schools came the great masters whose writings instructed generations, centuries even, of Insular and continental students alike: one has only to think of the works of Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin, which were copied and studied intensively up to the twelfth century and beyond. This achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers that the Anglo-Saxons were among the first peoples in Europe who were obliged to learn Latin as a foreign language if Christianity - a religion of the book par excellence - was to flourish. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, English schools benefited from the instruction of foreign masters domiciled there: the Roman monks who came with the Gregorian mission; Aidan and his fellow Irishmen who established a school at Lindisfarne in the mid-seventh century; Archbishop Theodore (d. 690) and Abbot Hadrian who taught at Canterbury in the late seventh century; John the Archchanter from St Peter's in Rome who taught at Wearmouth-Jarrow at roughly the same time; Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, John the Old Saxon and Asser of St David's in Wales, all of whom were invited by King Alfred in the late ninth century to assist him in the establishment of English schools; then men such as Lantfred and Abbo, both from Fleury, who in the later tenth century spent brief periods at the schools of Winchester and Ramsey respectively; and finally scholars such as Goscelin and Folcard, both from Saint-Bertin, who resided in England in the later eleventh century.

The Old Testament captured the Anglo-Saxon imagination in some unexpected ways, as one of the poetic riddles in the Exeter Book testifies:

The conundrum by which twelve people turn out to be only five finds its explanation in the book of Genesis, where it is recorded that Lot's two daughters lay with him and each had a son by him. Yet if this poet found such episodes a gleefully unembarrassing source of wit, other Anglo-Saxon writers clearly found them a troubling challenge, finding it necessary to argue against taking the morals of the patriarchs as any sort of precedent for present practice.

Preoccupation with transience is not found solely within Old English elegiac poetry, though students of the genre may be forgiven for gaining that impression. There can be no major literature of the world that does not number among its themes wonder at the demise of earlier civilisations and regret for the brevity of human life and human joy. In a literature such as that of the Anglo-Saxons, marked by a variety of influences and traditions, it is hard to attribute with certainty all manifestations of the transience motif. Earlier scholars drew our attention to parallels in other Germanic medieval literatures, notably in the prose and poetry of Scandinavia written down in Iceland. Old Icelandic poetry of the type called 'eddic' has obvious similarities with Old English in style, vocabulary and subject matter. Possible influence on Old English elegy from Celtic lament has also been explored. Recently scholarship has focused more on the Christian Latin background to Anglo-Saxon thought, and shown how many apparently native wood-notes wild are in fact straight translation from theological sources.

Most Old English poetry and a considerable amount of Old English prose is now accessible through Modern English translations. But in order to understand fully and appreciate the literature of the Anglo- Saxon period - its style, verse structure and content - it is necessary to read the texts in their original language. The following chapter is intended as an introduction to Old English, with emphasis on those characteristics and developments that distinguish this older stage of the language from Modern English. The chapter is not, however, meant as a grammar or work of reference, particularly since some simplification of the complex linguistic facts has been unavoidable. Some standard works on Old English language are listed below (Further reading, pp. 284-5).

For the speaker and reader of Modern English who is beginning to study Old English, texts written in that language may at first appear strange and somewhat difficult. This is due mainly to the momentous changes that English has undergone during the last nine hundred years of its development, particularly during the Middle English period (c. 1100- 1500), when the structure of English changed from that of an inflected language to one with hardly any inflexional endings, when sound changes affected the pronunciation and spelling of most of the vocabulary, and when this vocabulary became subject to almost revolutionary changes owing to the loss of a large number of older, native words and to the large-scale borrowing of words from other languages, especially French and Latin.

Scholarly tradition wants us to speak well of the works we study; there would be little point in talking about something that was not beautiful and truthful, not 'interesting'. Germanic legend has interest, almost too much so, but its beauty is not in the usual places. The names of heroes and nations that the poets so endlessly roll off are not there for their euphony. It is a rare ear that lingers in delight over –

or

As for uplifting plots, the poets seldom tell the stories they allude to, and their allusions are elliptical to the point of obscurity. When the tales are told, they turn out to be about sibling rivalry, kin murder, incest, shaky marriages, treachery and theft. Germanic legend seldom eulogizes the figures it condemns to historical action, and its themes are the stuff that fantasies of younger brothers are made of: an underdog's defiant resistance, the fall of a leader, the automaticity of revenge (called by Auden the earth's only perpetual motion machine). And as for truth, the poets prove by their inventiveness, their cavalier reorganization of chronology and geography, that the urge to create history out of next to nothing was not lost with the Greeks and Romans.

Bede tells the story of the conversion of the pagan English with lively detail and predictable bias in the first half of his Ecclesiastical History, For Bede, as for the sixth-century British historian Gildas, on whose writings he leans, the Angles and Saxons were invited to mid-fifth-century Britain as mercenaries who then turned against their Romano-British employers. Bede refers to them bluntly as 'pagans', 'heathen conquerors' and 'the enemy'. On the other hand, he is careful not to direct sympathy towards the Christian Britons, whose heart-wrenching miseries at the hands of the Saxons he paints with equanimity, assuring his readers that 'the fires kindled by the pagans proved to be God's just punishment on the sins of the nation'. Having characterized the main parties in this warfare as equally corrupt, whether through rapacity or inner depravity, Bede proceeds to introduce the heroes of his tale. These are St Gregory's Roman missionaries, together with the enlightened English rulers who accepted their teachings.

Among the major concerns of the Anglo-Saxons, as the surviving Old English prose and poetry attest, were the questions of fate and free will, providence and individual responsibility. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a great deal of scholarly attention was given to a search for a common philosophical background for Germanic literature (distinct from the Latin learned tradition) to complement the readily identifiable shared elements in diction, style and verse form among Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. One school of thought, once espoused widely and not without adherents today, holds that the belief in fate was a key feature of paganism, and that the degree to which humankind is seen to be controlled by fate in Old English literature shows the extent to which the inherent paganism of the text comes through untarnished or unalloyed. When fate is in competition with God, the text has been 'contaminated', usually by a 'pious interpolator', whose 'spurious' additions obscured the underlying Germanic heroic fatalism (never clearly defined or exemplified in any extant text).

In an image of compelling sadness, the Wanderer evokes the life of a lordless man. Cold and alone, he can do nothing but remember the joys of the past-companions in the hall, the giving of treasure and the favour of his lord. Not even sleep brings forgetfulness:

Sleeping, the lordless man dreams of what he longs for most, the life of a retainer, here represented by synecdoche in the act of homage and the giving of treasure. To lack a lord is to lack place and role, friend and kin, help in need, and vengeance after death. The Wanderer's misery, having no remedy in this world, is balanced by the astringent comfort of the next. But even the Wanderer's final spiritual rejection of the world is figured in a lovingly detailed enumeration of its heroic joys: horse, kinsman, giftgiving, feasting, hall-joys, treasure, warriors and lord (The Wanderer 92-5).

Unlike the Old Testament poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period, Old English poems on New Testament themes were essentially non-narrative works. Anglo-Saxon poets ignored what one might consider to be the most attractive parts of the gospels, the stories of the nativity, the shepherds and the magi, the baptism of Christ, the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the moral teachings of the sermon on the mount and the accounts of miraculous healings, and chose instead to write about the great events of salvation history: the incarnation, the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell, the ascension and the last judgement. Moreover, in treating these subjects they did not draw primarily on the gospel texts: their main sources were the liturgy, apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, Latin homilies and the traditions of the church.

If in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England there are strong motifs of fatalism about life in this world and a sense of its transience, there is the equally persistent belief that this life prepares one for a more enduring life. At the end of The Seafarer, the speaker declares that wyrd ('what happens') and meotud (God as the ordainer of what happens) are more powerful than anyone's gehygd ('mind', 'thought') and concludes:

This present, worldly life is passing, but there is hope for a more stable and enduring life. The content of this hope and the forms it took are the subject of this chapter. We shall consider first the major thrust of early medieval eschatology, its focus upon the last judgement and the kingdom of God which the judgement will initiate. Then we may review the lesser motif of expectations concerning the state of the soul between the time of death and the day of judgement.

If a modern English traveller could suddenly be transported back a thousand years into an Anglo-Saxon church, he would be astonished at the differences between that and the churches with which he is familiar today: here, the atmosphere inside most churches is one of calm and beatific silence; there, the prevailing atmosphere would be one of tumult and squalor, the church packed day and night with crowds of diseased and penitent persons seeking release from their sufferings through the intercession of the saint whose shrine they were besieging. A memorable picture of such tumult is given by Lantfred, a foreign monk at Winchester in the 970s, who, describing the miracles performed through the agency of St Swithun - then recently discovered and recently translated - shows us the inside of the Old Minster crammed with persons afflicted with appalling physical deformities, festering wounds, blind, paralytic, deaf, dumb, mutilated indescribably by the just process of the law or by self-imposed penitential torture, all clustered around the shrine of St Swithun, lying there day and night moaning in pain and praying aloud for deliverance from their suffering. On occasion, Lantfred reports, the church's precincts were so plugged with diseased persons that they had periodically to be cleared to make way for the clergy. Whereas today such appalling sights of disease, deformity and suffering are hidden from sight in sanitized hospitals, a thousand years ago they were on full view, every day of the year, in every church which had a saint deemed to be capable of performing a miraculous cure.