Fate, Virtue and the Metaphysical Winter in the Poetry of Wessex

West-Saxon poetry occasionally describes a world of beauty and delight-the blossoming woods and verdant fields of The Seafarer, the comforting love of the Frisian wife in the Exeter Gnomics, the treasure allegory of The Nature Song-but these images are rare.¹ More commonly the poets praise is reserved for the constancy and companionship of the ring-sworn brethren, and the images favoured are of the hardships within which these brethren operate: the deep, dead waves; the storm-swept cliffs; the fierce snows of the long northern winter. These winters, however, are more than just a season to the West Saxons. In the poetry of these people, winter becomes a complex metaphor for the ephemeracy of joy and light and life itself. The warmth of summer will come to unlock the promise of life gripped tight by frost, but, all too quickly, the brief joys of the abundant field will pass back under the winter snows. These cycles of nature also inspired the West Saxons to count their years by the passage of seasons, a common enough phenomenon, but where other early peoples lived in anticipation of the summer or of spring, the West Saxons measured their lives by the number of winters endured. There is a significant covert dialogue in operation here as West-Saxon poetry indicates that this choice of seasons was not just a matter of expediency. The vernacular poetry of Wessex evinces an intense engagement with the concept of wyrd [Fate], and it was this powerful belief in fatalism that coloured West-Saxon expressions of the bleakness of nature and found a voice in the dialogue of Insular visual art-and it did so not just because of its intersection with West-Saxons beliefs about living and dying, but because of its inextricable links to their very language, the process by which they spoke themselves into being. This paper explores this reality of the West-Saxon psyche that shaped so much of their ontology and subsequent poetic discourse, and it will look at the complex relationship of fatalism and Christianity and the ways in which this relationship found expression. Moreover, this paper will propose that the West-Saxon mind perceived the machinations of wyrd as neither benevolent nor ambivalent, but as an arbitrary and inhuman force that pulled all things inexorably towards destruction. More than just fatalism, the poetry of Wessex embraced a vision of predestination that was allpervading, inescapable and entropic.