Beasts of battle

History, content

The beasts of battle likely come from an older Germanic tradition, since these animals are known scavengers of corpses. There may have been a mythological link originally, but by the time Old English manuscripts were written in Christianized England, no connection remained between the raven and Huginn and Muninn or the wolf and Geri and Freki. That mythological or religious link lasted much longer in Scandinavia. No one knows their literary origins. John D. Niles suggests they may have started with the wolf and raven as animals sacred to Wōden; their job of eating the fallen fits, he says, with Old English poets’ fondness for litotes—deliberate understatement that gives ironic expression to war’s horror from the losers’ perspective. Although the beasts have no pagan mythological or theological ties in the Old English poems they appear in, such a connection surprisingly reappears in Christian hagiography. In Ælfric of Eynsham’s Passio Saneti Edmundi Regis, a wolf guards the head of Saint Edmund the Martyr. In John Lydgate’s The Life of Saint Alban and Saint Amphibal, the wolf and the eagle, at Christ’s explicit command, protect the martyrs’ bodies from all other carrion beasts. In Old English literature, the beasts of battle also served as omens of destruction and death. They were present on a battlefield just before a fight began, and they fled in distress just before the battle took place. This evacuation of life before the conflict signified the death and suffering that would soon follow.