In this link we discuss some Old English poetry and some impressions that the Anglo-Saxons formed of Roman architecture.
"The Ruin" and "The Wanderer"
The words enta geweorc, meaning "the work of giants," appear in a number of Anglo-Saxon texts, including The Wanderer and The Ruin. Are these words indicative of a race of giants who inhabited Britain before the Anglo-Saxons or merely a formulaic phrase? We need to start such an investigation by looking at the texts themselves.
In "The Wanderer", the narrator points out how fleeting life is on the earth:
Here possessions are fleeting, here friends are fleeting,
here man is fleeting, here kinsman is fleeting,
the whole world becomes a wilderness.
(translation from the Anglo-Saxon World. ed. Crossley-Holland, 50-53).
List several of the themes of this poem, then formulate some ideas that connect those themes (e.g., loss of one's lord) to looking back on vanished monumental greatness.
Earlier, as an example of fleeting possessions, the narrator describes crumbling walls and meadhalls, which were the "work of giants." These giants, then, must have been builders in stone.
Likewise, in "The Ruin", the narrator describes a stone town, "the work of giants," that has fallen into disrepair.
Wondrous is this masonry,
broken by the Fates;
burst city,
the work of giants is decaying.
(Translation by Gordon B. Sellers, 1991; also in Crossley-Holland, 59-60).
Most critics of this work say that this description is of the Roman-British town of Bath. The giants, then, are Romans.
Given the discussion in the monastery module of SEAFARER, this answer would seem logical, in that Anglo-Saxons did not build in stone during this time. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon poets were admiring the stone work of the Romans (this is pointed out in a note to Maxims II in Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader 374).
When we examine these texts, are we then looking at a mirror of Anglo-Saxon culture? A problem arises, however, in The Ruin, when we read that these giants died of some pestilence. Archaeological grave studies have not revealed any evidence of pestilence killing a large number of Romans in Britain.
This record does show that the plague struck down many Anglo-Saxons, beginning in the sixth century. This it is possible that the "giants" were really Anglo-Saxons. Is this evidence that they did know how to build in stone? Were they admiring their own works? What we are seeing is a conflict within the text.
We are also asking if the Anglo-Saxons could look back on their own culture as heroic and faded--not just see the culture of their former conquerors that way.
You might want to ask what expectations the Anglo-Saxons had of Roman buildings. Bede (Book 2, Ch. 4) takes about the Pantheon in Rome as a pagan temple converted to a church, and we are very familiar with this idea from Bede elsewhere--in particular in the letters of Gregory (again, a Roman source--Gregory writes from Rome) that tell the Abbot Mellitus to turn temples into churches.
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