Hail, Earendel!

The Dayspring Over Middle Earth

Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels,
Sent to men over middle-earth,
And true radiance of the sun,
Fine beyond stars...

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This is part three of a series of posts on the 10th century book of Anglo-Saxon poetry, The Exeter Book. This will be the last post in this series for a while, although I may return to some other works from the Exeter book in the future. See the first two here if you missed them:

The Wanderer

The Seafarer

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I am using the above section’s opening words, “Hail Earendel” as the title of today’s poem. It is part of a larger work in the Exeter Book that scholars have come to call Christ I, or, The Advent Lyrics, to distinguish it from another poem in the Exeter Book, Christ II.

A Genealogy of Ideas

But it is likely better to start with this poem’s genealogy rather than with a discussion about its name. It is an anonymous poem, but that does not mean that it has no father. The poem itself bears no author’s signature or title, but it is clearly a member of a family of poetry, reaching back five centuries before Christ. Here is its genealogy:

Malachi begat 
    Benedictus begat 
        O Oriens begat 
            Hail Earendel.

Malachi

God sent the prophet Malachi to preach repentance to Israel circa. 500 B.C. Part of that preaching included a promise of the coming day of the Messiah. It was a promise of the warmth of the sun in exchange for bitter cold, of righteousness in exchange for wickedness, and of light in exchange for darkness:

But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. (Malachi 4:2)

The Benedictus

Five hundred years later, we see the words of the Lord spoken through Micah again in the Gospel of Luke. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, sings a song of praise to God following the restoration of his voice. He was “filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, saying, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel…’”

In the Vulgate translation, Zechariah’s song starts, Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel, giving it its name for liturgical use in the Western church, the Benedictus.

Zacharias Writes Down the Name of his Son, by Domenico Ghirlandaio

In the second line of the excerpt below, we see Zechariah’s reference to Malachi’s prophesy, which was being fulfilled through the coming of Christ.

because of the tender mercy of our God,
    whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
    to guide our feet into the way of peace. 
(Luke 1:78-79)

O Oriens

Five hundred years after Zechariah, likely in the fifth or sixth-century A.D., someone composed some short chants to be used during Advent. They would be sung or chanted for evening prayer before singing or chanting the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise found in Luke 1:46-55. These chants are called the O Antiphons, or the Advent Antiphons. Our first reference to them appears to be in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, but they may be older.

One of these antiphons is O Oriens, or, “O Morning Star.”

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. 
(Advent Antiphons, O Oriens)

It is based on the two previously mentioned passages, as well as a title that Christ gives to Himself in the book of Revelation: “I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the Bright and Morning Star” (Revelation 22:16). We can see the “sun of righteousness“ and enlightening “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” language, drawn from Micah and Luke respectively. Christ is called the Morning Star, for He is brightest and first. He is called the Light, for He dispels the darkness of sin. He is the Sun of Righteousness, because He gives true life and true light to the world.

The Dayspring on the Isles

And, at last, we arrive at our poem for this post. Another five hundred years after the adoption of the O Antiphons into the liturgies of the Western church, we find ourselves in Anglo-Saxon lands, speaking Old English.

Hail Earendel is an excerpt from the larger poem Christ I, which paraphrases and expands upon many of the Advent antiphons. The Hail Earendel section inherits directly from O Oriens. It is clearly the son of its father-poems, but it has grown up in a new land, with a new language. It takes the old words, originally foretold by Malachi, fulfilled in the gospel of Luke, and celebrated in the chants of late antiquity, and it sings them in Englisċ. It is the old truths newly believed by baptized, Anglo-Saxon hearts. The Dayspring has risen on the Isles also.

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
Sent to men over middle-earth,
And true radiance of the sun,
Fine beyond stars, you always illuminate,
From your self, every season!

As you, God born wholly of God,
Son of the true Father, were ever
In the glory of heaven without beginning,
So now your own creation awaits you
Through eternity in need, that you send
To us that bright sun, and you yourself come
So that you illuminate those who for the longest time,
Covered by smoke, and in darkness here,
Dwelled in continual night; enfolded in sins,
They had to endure the dark shadow of death.

Now we believe in joyful salvation,
Brought to people through the Word of God,
Which in the beginning was from the Father almighty,
Jointly eternal with God, and now again became
The flesh without sin that the virgin bore
Through suffering to safety. God was with us,
Seen among sins; the mighty child of fate
And the son of man dwelt together,
United amidst the people. We may express
Our thanks to the Lord of victory always through our deeds,
Because he wanted to send himself to us. 

In the Old English of this period, Earendel was the name of the morning star. The term Earendel may have referred originally to Aurvandill, a figure in pagan Germanic mythology, before being applied to the morning star. But as with The Seafarer and The Wanderer, we see the Anglo-Saxon culture bowing its knees at the name of Jesus Christ. To call Christ Earendel is to echo the words of O Oriens (which is itself echoing Micah, Luke, Revelation, etc…) in calling Jesus the Morning Star. The people dwelling in middangeard have seen a great light.

Christology & Devotion

Another thing to notice about this poem is its high Christology¹. In its second stanza, it practically rephrases the truths of Christ summarized in the Nicene Creed. In the vulgar language, we see soaring devotional language that puts many of our more modern hymns to shame.

A common critique today (or maybe just a general attitude) of theological writing is that it is cold, boring, and dead. That may be true of many writers, and pardon me if I am of their number. One of the things I discovered when I first picked up the writings of the early church fathers² was that they were theologically articulate, but also devotionally rich. They were not boring. There is a devotional fire to their theological treatises that I did not expect. Rich doctrine was married with the red-hot zeal of martytrs in those early centuries.

This is why I wrote a series of posts, His Sufferings Were Before Your Eyes, to highlight the warm love for the Saviour expressed by the early church even in polemical or doctrinal works. I find Hail Earendel to be of a similar spirit: it contains a richness in doctrine that only pumps the bellows of devotion. All good theology should be doxology. How can we say pages and pages of true things about God without turning to Him in worship? God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, causing us to cry, “Abba, Father!”³ This is not just us stating a theological syllogism. It is a confession of faith, wrought in us by the Holy Spirit.

Eärendil the Mariner

In 1911, J.R.R. Tolkien first read our poem for today. He was deeply inspired by it. Specifically, the original Old English for the first line, eala Earendel, engla beorhtast. He called these words,

rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology.⁴

If you have read Tolkien’s books⁵, then you can see in Hail Earendel the beginnings of the beloved Lord of the Rings stories. It can even be said that Hail Earendel begat Lord of the Rings. Tolkien named a character Eärendil, the legendary Mariner of the First Age.

Eärendil was the first, seminal character of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology; his name and purpose as a character were inspired by an excerpt of [the Exeter Book] that Tolkien found in the poem [Christ I]. Eärendil's story is found in The Silmarillion, but he is invoked and referred to by many characters throughout The Lord of the Rings. (LOTR Wiki⁶)

The Middle-earth legendarium began to form around Eärendil. Lord of the Rings is fiction, but all good fiction says true things. Good art is True, Good, and Beautiful. But any of the goodness we see in that art it is ultimately a reflection of the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty we find in the face of Christ Jesus. It is only reflecting some of the light that the true Sun of Righteousness is casting.

Eärendil searches Tirion, by Ted Nasmith

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1. You may notice that the poem calls Jesus brightest of angels. To refer to Christ as “angel” is not to say that He is a created being like the angels we see in the scriptures. Angel simply means “messenger”, so Christ is indeed the Angel of the LORD: the Messenger of the Father, the Faithful Witness, the Son.

2. Referring to the Ante-Nicene fathers of the first and second centuries.

3. Galatians 4:6-7

4. See the work from Clerk of Oxford here for more on the Tolkien connections.

5. To all the Christians who love Lord of the Rings because it is a Christian story, enjoy this lore extending out of Middle-Earth back to the prophet Micah. To all you nerds who like Lord of the Rings but aren’t Christians, believe in the “Son of the true Father,” who was “sent over middle-earth” to illuminate us in the darkness of our sins.

6. From the LOTR Wiki here.