Entering Behind the Veil: Uurd and the Evangelistic Ingenuity of the Hêliand

Abstract

Much recent scholarship on the ninth-century Old Saxon gospel harmony known as the Hêliand has focused on how the poem presents Christ to its original audience. Written in the early days of the Franks’ religious domination of the Saxons, the Hêliand was almost certainly a pivotal text in shaping the Saxons’ understanding of their new religious identity. Indeed, as Stephen Pelle notes, by the middle of the ninth century, “Continuing rebellions against Charlemagne and the new faith soon convinced Carolingian churchmen that forced baptism and mandatory church attendance were not enough to ensure obedience and compliance.”1 As scholars have continually observed, the Hêliand very deliberately responds to these religious tensions by tailoring the depiction of Christ's life and work to the political and cultural circumstances of the original audience.But scholars have been quite divided regarding what, precisely, the ninth-century Saxons were supposed to understand about their new faith from this text. There is no doubt that Christ and his followers are in a sense “Germanized” in the Hêliand, and these alterations seem to offer the original audience a familiar exemplum to emulate. But the precise nature of the emulation is far from settled. Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, for example, finds a tacit condoning of violence in certain changes to the Hêliand's handling of the Sermon on the Mount and in its expansion of Peter's attack on Malchus in Gethsemane, while Richard Fletcher asserts forcefully that the author of the Hêliand “presents Christianity as a mild, peaceable faith” and “nowhere even implicitly suggests that the faith might come in another manner.”2 On a more politically acute note, Perry Neil Harrison sees in the Hêliand's pathos-laden expansion of the Massacre of the Innocents episode a condemnation of the violence that characterized the Frankish efforts to convert Saxony, while Samuel J. Youngs views Christ's passive acceptance of his “fate” in the text as an admonishment to the Saxons to accept their political circumstances with the same passivity.3 Thus, while there can be no doubt that the deliberate Germanization of the narrative communicates something specific to the original Saxon audience, there is little agreement among scholars about what, precisely, that something is.The present essay seeks clarity to these questions of purpose in the evangelistic as opposed to the political agenda of the work. However political the work may be, it is certainly also, and perhaps even primarily, a work of evangelism. Indeed, as the author notes in a prefatory fytt for which the source text has no parallel, his purpose in recording Christ's life and work is to present “hw sia [is gibodskip skoldin/ frummian, firiho barn” (ll. 8–9; how best God's bidding to carry out, the children of mankind).4 Given that the author of the text was likely a highly educated Saxon cleric, it strains credulity to think that his own feelings about the means by which Saxony was converted were not deeply conflicted. And explorations of how the text reflects those feelings are necessary to produce a holistic view of the work itself. But the author's personal confession of Christian faith was also likely sincere and certainly theologically nuanced, and so there is ample reason to consider the possibility that his primary goal was to make better Christians rather than to make better Carolingian subjects or rulers.In other words, the Hêliand prioritizes thinking Christianly over behaving Christianly. And while scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the way that events and actions are Germanized throughout the text, they have paid significantly less attention to the linguistic and conceptual efforts to present Christianity in terms relevant to an early Saxon audience.5 As James E. Cathey observed some time ago, the text of the Hêliand presents a “constant redefinition of one term by another, the restatement of an old idea by a new concept, augmentation of pre-Christian by Christian phraseology, and semantic displacement by equating of old words with new concepts.”6 Cathey's brief overview of the examples and types of redefinition invited further discussion of the ways that such linguistic features might have produced “long term cultural penetration” of Christian thinking, and the present essay responds to his call by exploring the deliberate ways that the text subordinates uurd (fate, lot, providence) to the authority of Christ.7 I argue that, through the methods of semantic displacement and redefinition outlined by Cathey, the work of Christ in the Hêliand becomes a conquest of a Germanic worldview that conceives of uurd as Christ's primary rival for religious dominion.It is important at the outset that I situate my interpretation of uurd and its Old English cognate wyrd, words that were commonly translated as “fate” in the early days of Germanic philology, within the long and rather vitriolic history of scholarship on Germanic fatalism. My aim is certainly not to rehearse the arguments of early Germanic philologists who sought in Old English literature to reconstruct a pre-Christian Germanic cosmology.8 These scholars often fixated on occurrences of wyrd in the Old English literary record, particularly those instances in which it is personified, arguing that wyrd served as the supreme divinity in Teutonic paganism. As has been often and conclusively demonstrated, the century and a half between the conversion of England and the earliest Old English texts, along with the fact that the advent of Christianity was almost exclusively responsible for written literacy in Germanic contexts, precludes the possibility of any deliberate preservation of pre-Christian belief in early Germanic literature.9But I am also not fully convinced by the reactionary arguments of scholars since the beginning of the twentieth century who contend that wyrd (and, by extension, its Old Saxon and Old Norse cognates) is fully and comfortably Christianized “in the literature as we have it.”10 As I have demonstrated elsewhere, wyrd is often a lightning rod for anxieties about cosmic governance in Old English vernacular literature, and demonstrating God's dominion over wyrd is precisely the focus of many of the texts in which the word occurs.11 Thus I have proposed a “middle way” between the fully Christian and fully pagan interpretations of wyrd, suggesting that it refers to a cosmic unknown that governs what is “becoming” (from OE weorðan—“to become”). And the purpose of Old English texts like Solomon and Saturn II, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer is to subordinate wyrd to the Christian God in order to allay the existential doubt of one or more of the text's characters.12 My purpose here is to demonstrate the validity of applying this interpretation to uurd in the Hêliand in order to suggest that existential dread about “the becoming of things” was precisely what Christ had to alleviate in order to captivate the religious imagination of ninth-century Saxons.In order to understand the significance of the initial effort to redefine uurd in the text, we must begin near the end of the Hêliand's account of Christ's life and work with the tearing of the temple curtain at the moment of Christ's death. The Saxon author carefully and deliberately emphasizes and expands this moment, which receives only a passing mention in Tatian's Diatessaron (202)—the primary source text for the Hêliand—and which receives similarly limited attention from the three synoptic gospels:13 . . . endi that [fha lakan] tebrastan middion an tu, that r managan dagan themo uuhe innan uuundron gistriunidhl hangoda - ni muostun heliðo barn,thia liudi scauuon, huat under themo lacane uuashlages behangan: thuo mohtun an that horð sehanIudeo liudi. (LXVII.5658–70)(The colorful curtain so wonderfully woven which had for many a day been hanging without harm inside the shrine [people, heroes’ sons, were never allowed to look at the holy things hidden behind the curtain] was torn in two down the middle—Jewish people could then see the treasure-hoard! [p. 187].)14In the seven poetic lines that the author devotes to this event, he adds to his source material a detailed description of the curtain, an articulation of the curtain's prohibitive purpose in an ancient Jewish context, and an emphasis on the access the tearing provides to the horð ([treasure]-hoard; LXVII.5664–70).15 The author of the harmony is indeed at great pains to present the significance of this moment to his Saxon audience from an ancient Israelite perspective.To a modern reader initiated into the symbolic significance of the Holy of Holies, this emphasis on the torn curtain is unsurprising. Indeed, the removal of the barrier between the Jewish people and the very presence of Yawheh is deeply symbolic and profoundly moving. Prior to the destruction of the curtain, no person was allowed access into the Holy of Holies save for the high priest, and even he only once each year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most holy day in the Jewish liturgical calendar.16 On this day the high priest entered the Holy of Holies to offer a sacrifice that atoned for the sins of the Israelites in order that they might be covered again by the covenant that God had made with their patriarch Abraham. This sacrifice was offered before the Ark of the Covenant, believed to house the earthly presence of Yahweh, whose awesome essence is at all other times fatal to an imperfect human.17 Even on this day the priest had to undergo a strict purification process, and he was required to be covered in bells and bound to a rope in the event that he be struck dead by the presence of Yahweh (resulting in a silencing of the bells) and need to be removed from the inner sanctum without anyone else entering.18 In light of this ritual, the tearing of the curtain at the moment of Christ's death represented the end of the sacrificial system that had defined Yahweh's relationship with his people since their exodus from slavery in Egypt, marking Christ as the perfect eternal sacrifice who provides access to the presence of Yahweh for all who confess Christianity.It is into this terrifying, holy setting that the author of the Hêliand introduces his initial redefinition of uurd as the very power of Yahweh (maht godes) that haunted the ancient Israelite religious imagination. When the angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah as he offers the atonement sacrifice inside the Holy of Holies at the beginning of the narrative, Gabriel names in the Hêliand both uurdgiscapu (the workings of uurd) and maht godes (the power of God) as the active force behind his prophecy:19 thi kind giboran,fon thînera alderu idis ôdan scoldiuuerðan an thesero uueroldi, uuordun spâhi.. . . . . . s haƀed im uurdgiscapu,Medot gimarcod endi maht godes. (II.123–125, 127–128)(a child will be born to you—from your elderly wife a child will be granted to you in this world—and he will be wise in words . . . this is the way the workings of uurd made him, time formed him, and the power of God as well [p. 7].)The identification of both uurdgiscapu and maht godes as the agent behind the birth of John the Baptist may be simple apposition, though I suspect the inclusion of both named agents is something more ambiguous.20 But even if this is the case, the inclusion of both names is significant. First, it implies that establishing the conflation of the two is important to the author, suggesting that his audience needs reinforcement of such a conflation. Second, and more importantly, it places uurdgiscapu alongside maht godes behind the veil of the temple curtain. In this way, the author skillfully connects deep religious desires from both Judaic and Germanic cultures.21While the conflation of uurdgiscapu and maht godes seems superficially to support a simple redefinition of the pagan term with the Christian, such a simplistic understanding of this particular moment fails to recognize the perspective of the original audience. The author of the Hêliand wrote to dubiously literate Saxons who were significantly removed both chronologically and geographically from a pre-Christian, Mediterranean Jewish context. And yet the author's emphasis of the torn temple curtain suggests that, by the end of the work, the audience had come to understand the significance of the space to which the curtain had barred access prior to its destruction. Given that the account of Zechariah's sacrifice is the only discussion of the Holy of Holies in the text prior to the elaboration of the torn curtain, only three possibilities explain the author's assumption of his audience's understanding of the significance of this space: 1) that his audience had prior knowledge of the significance of the Holy of Holies from an ancient Israelite perspective; 2) that the author's situation of the horð behind the curtain was sufficient to communicate its significance; or 3) that the knowledge of uurdgiscapu was a sufficient parallel in a Germanic context to the presence of maht godes in an ancient Israelite context. The existence of the harmony itself likely excludes the first option; otherwise we are left to assume that the original audience understood the significance of the Holy of Holies without knowing the basic account of the life and work of Christ. And accepting the second option would require us to assume that the author was willing to monetize the presence of Yahweh. The only option left is to understand that uurdgiscapu communicated to a Saxon audience the existential dread that the Holy of Holies represented in the ancient Israelite sacrificial system.22While the initial and the subsequent occurrences of uurd establish a parallel between the shared responsibility of uurd and maht godes over the process of birth, specifically the birth of John the Baptist,23 later occurrences establish a similar parallel in their responsibility over death.24 Indeed, uurd is named in the text as the agent responsible for the deaths of the prophetess Anna's husband (VI.512), of the widow at Naim's son (XXVI.2189), of the wicked king Herod (9.761–62), of the rich man in the parable of “The Rich Man and Lazarus” (XLI.3354–56), and of Christ (LVII.4778). And Christ asserts this association between uurd and death axiomatically as he explains the significance of healing blind men outside of Jericho: menniscono barn:farad endi folgod, frôde sterƀad,uuerðad eft iunga aftar kumane,uueros auuahsane, unttat sie eft uurd farnimid. (XLIV.3630–3633)(The sons of mankind come and go in sequence, the old die, then the young who come after will wax older—until uurd takes them away [p. 118].)In fact, every occurrence of uurd in the text is associated with either birth or death, and death is the far more attested association.25While maht godes does not explicitly share responsibility in any of these deaths, the text subtly undermines the singular responsibility of uurd over death by references to metod (“the measurer”) in the cases of Anna's husband (VI.511) and the widow at Naim's son (XXVI.2190). Of course metod does not carry the overtly Christian connotation of maht godes, and Prisca Augustyn and Murphy both conclude that these references are meant to carry distinctly Germanic connotations.26 But metod's Old English cognate meotod is regularly used as a clear reference to the Christian God,27 and naming both metod and uurd creates an awkward redundancy if the two are both meant in a Germanic sense. Given the likely influence of Insular missionaries on the Hêliand, we might assume that metod is meant to carry a relatively comfortable Christian connotation.28 Thus the dual responsibility of both metod and uurd over these deaths creates a parallel with the relationship between uurdgiscapu and maht godes at the birth of John the Baptist. And the ambiguity the poet creates by naming metod rather than maht godes hints at a tendency throughout the text to equivocate regarding how precisely to name the entity that governs life and death.29 Such equivocation may validate the anxiety about the entity that directs uurd/wyrd—the unknown “becoming”—that seems to have plagued the Germanic religious imagination.More importantly at present, though, this function of uurd as the active agent behind human mortality—the movement from birth to death—resonates with the maht godes expressed in the lapsarian curse in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the so-called “Fall of Man,” Yahweh cursed humankind to bring forth children in pain and to die (Gn 3:16). While the pain of childbirth imposed by the curse refers explicitly to the pain of the mother, King David (Ps 51:5) and St. Paul (Rm 5:12–21) both explain that this pain also refers to the passing of the curse on to the child as a sort of birthright. Thus, humans are born into uurd, into the process of becoming dead, a process that is an expression of the righteousness and power of Yahweh, or the maht godes, in the Judeo-Christian tradition.And this parallel between uurd and the lapsarian curse in the text circles right back to the separation of the presence of Yahweh within the Holy of Holies from the presence of his mortal creations without. For immediately after articulating the curse, Yahweh banished Adam and Eve from Eden, placing Cherubim as guards against their return (Gn 3:24). According to Ex 25:18–20, at the command of Yahweh, images of these angelic creatures also grace the Ark of the Covenant housed within the Holy of Holies, creating a symbolic link between Eden, where humankind walked with Yahweh freely before the “Fall,” and the inner sanctum of the Jewish temple, where the presence of Yahweh dwells among but separate from humanity. The desire to enter in to the Holy of Holies, then, is a desire to lift the lapsarian curse, to live again and forevermore in the presence of Yahweh. Put another way, the desire to enter into the Holy of Holies is a desire to be delivered from uurd.Despite these parallels, the appositional relationship between uurd and maht godes is not long sustained in the Hêliand. As Elizabeth awaits her delivery, the text once again reinforces uurdgiscapu's governance of her time of pregnancy (III.196–97), but when Mary awaits her delivery it is godes giscapu rather than uurdgiscapu that is the named overseer.30 And when the time comes for Mary to deliver Jesus, both behrtun giscapu (“bright workings”) and maht godes inform Mary that her time has come (V.367). Augustyn sees this and other similar collocations with giscapu that do not name a clear agent as grounds for rejecting Alfred Hagenlocher's conclusion that giscapu must always have an agent.31 Such collocations that name the nature or (in some cases) the object of the giscapu are for Augustyn proof that giscapu may refer to the “cosmic principle of the waxing and waning of life” that is subject to God.32While I agree that the text ultimately supports Augustyn's conclusion, I believe that asserting this conclusion too hastily glosses over the “semantic displacement” for which Cathey advocates. Indeed the subordination of giscapu to the Christian God, as opposed to the arcane and terrifying uurd, is a central project of the Hêliand, and at the announcement of Christ's birth that project is far from complete. In fact, the absence of a named agent for giscapu here is both poetically and conceptually significant. The authorial decision here to name both maht godes and –giscapu as the active force behind this birth recalls the birth of John, where uurd was explicitly the agent behind giscapu. Thus, the absence of uurd—or of any named agent of giscapu—is conspicuous, a conspicuousness that is underscored by the fact that the adjective behrtun serves as the “heavy” stress that governs the alliteration.33 The author appears to be drawing attention to the lack of uurd, at least explicitly, in governing the birth of Christ. He is, of course, also not explicitly denying the presence of uurd, suggesting perhaps through this ambivalence that the precise relationship between uurd and Christ is a significant subject of his harmonizing project.34 Regardless of the purpose, though, the effect of this omission is to open the possibility that uurd's domain might be somewhat smaller than that of maht godes—that uurd governs the birth of John but not of Christ.Accounts of death in the text reveal a similarly limited influence of uurd. The death of the Lazarus of the parable, for example, is attributed to another [adjective]-giscapu construction, reganogiscapu (41.3347; “the sovereign's workings”), creating an ambiguity comparable to the giscapu that governs Christ's birth. Similarly, while the death of Lazarus of Bethany, whom Christ resurrects, is not attributed explicitly to any cosmic authority, Lazarus's sister Martha acknowledges that Christ wields the power to resurrect her brother “thurh thiu hlagon giscapu” (XLIX.40.60; “by decree of holy fate” [p. 132]). And the deaths of John the Baptist and Judas are not attributed explicitly to any divine agent (XXIII.2760–2784, LXI.5163–5170). As is the case with birth, then, uurd's precise association with death is kept deliberately ambiguous throughout the text.Despite this ambiguity, the text reveals a clear, if not quite absolute, correlation between a character's alignment with Christ's teachings and the ambiguity surrounding uurd's participation in that character's death. In the two deaths where uurd alone is the named agent, both of the deceased characters are hostile to Christ or to his efforts. The account of Herod's death, the initial death attributed to uurd alone in the text, follows almost immediately the account of the so-called “Massacre of the Innocents”—when Herod had every male Jewish child in Bethlehem killed in the hopes of destroying the Christ-child (IX.722–54).35 And the rich man of the parable, the other death attributed solely to uurd (or uurdgiscapu), serves as a type for those who refuse to give up favor on earth for the sake of divine favor (XLI.3376–86). On the other hand, the two death accounts associated ambiguously with an agentless giscapu are both characters who enjoy unequivocal divine favor. The Lazarus of the parable is a type for those who experience heavenly treasures at the expense of earthly rewards (XLI.3379–82), and Christ offers the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany as an example of the reward for those who believe in him (XLIX.4055–56). Similarly John the Baptist, whose death is in no way attributed to uurd, is introduced as one who will be a gesið heƀankuninges (2.129–30; “thane of heaven's king”).36 Finally, the two characters whose deaths are attributed both to uurd and to metod, the deaths of Anna's husband and the Widow at Naim's son, both presumably die in good standing with Jewish tradition but are not yet aware of Christ himself or the reconciliation to Yahweh that he will provide. Thus, the more a character abides in the hope of the communion with Yahweh symbolized by the Holy of Holies, the more ambiguous the control that uurd asserts over that character's death.Of course, if this correlation between the favor of Yahweh and diminishing certainty regarding uurd's authority is meaningful, then the death account of Judas is quite problematic. One would expect Judas, the individual responsible for betraying Christ, to be given over to uurd unequivocally. But no divine agent behind Judas's death is ever identified. This inconsistency can be explained by the author's interest in the role of human culpability. Pointing to the particular interest the text demonstrates in emphasizing the egregiousness of Judas's betrayal of a Chieftain, a particularly heinous offense in heroic culture, Murphy suggests that the absence of any reference to divine responsibility in Judas's death account amounts to an assertion of Judas's personal responsibility in his own demise.37 This same suggestion could also explain why there is no reference to a divine agent in John the Baptist's death account despite his obvious favor with Yahweh. As in the case of Judas, John's death is the direct result of human effort; he is beheaded by a Jewish king at the request of his niece (XXXIII.2745–76).38 Divine agency over death, it seems, does not absolve those who have participated in killing ignobly.This correlation certainly does not provide a clear limit to uurd's authority over death. It does, however, reveal some sense of Christ's effect in the text on a source of existential anxiety in the Germanic religious imagination. Uurd is conspicuously absent from the account of Christ's birth, and the ambiguity regarding its claim on Christ's life is maintained until the final occurrence of the word in the text. Furthermore, while no death in the text is ever explicitly free of uurd's agency, its association with an individual's death becomes increasingly ambiguous the more that individual aligns him or herself with Christ or the promise of his authority.But Christ's relationship to uurd throughout the harmony perfectly inverts the process of salvation (for lack of a better word) from the cold, unfeeling, “becoming of things.” Indeed in the Christ—the hêliand—of this text we have a hero whose birth is conspicuously free of any explicit mention of uurd, and he proves to wield power over the final becoming of things attributed explicitly to uurd by resurrecting the son of the Widow at Naim. Furthermore, Martha's belief that Christ can raise her brother “thurh thiu hlagon giscapu” asserts explicitly Christ's authority over the “shaping” that is elsewhere placed within the domain of uurd. The Saxon author of this text seems to offer in this hêliand a unique hero in the early Germanic world—a hero defined not by his noble acceptance of uurd/wyrd but by his insubordination to and even authority over it.In fact we might imagine that this hêliand is a sort of Germanic wish-fulfillment, a fantasy of humanity born outside of and immune to the power of the natural “becoming of things” that represents a singular source of existential anxiety throughout the early Germanic corpus. It is, after all, wyrd that the frame narrator of The Wanderer uses to define the circumstances against which the eardstapa (earth-stepper, wanderer) must assert his stoic heroism: “wyrd bið ful aræd” (l. 5; “wyrd is fully fixed”).39 Similarly, Beowulf asserts his heroic nature by facing wyrd in his confrontation with Grendel: “Gæð wyrd swa hio scel” (l. 455; “wyrd goes as she shall”).40 In both of these cases, however the speaker conceives of wyrd, the term certainly refers to a cosmic unknown against which the hero demonstrates his courage. It represents a “becoming of things,” ultimately death and oblivion, that he must face head-on. By contrast, the titular hero of the Hêliand is not born into the ful aræd “becoming of things,” and he is even able to supersede its authority.Yet this hero, for whom uurd is not ful aræd, conspicuously submits himself to the becoming of things that the author has so carefully allowed him to avoid. In the text's account of Christ's discussion with his apostles in Gethsemane, Christ attributes his imminent crucifixion to uurd, even acknowledging the anxiety that this entity consistently evokes throughout the Germanic corpus: Thiu uurd is at handun, . . . mîn flêsk is an sorgun,letid mik mîn lîchamo: lêð is imu suîðouuîti te tholonne (LVII.4778–84)(Uurd is at hand . . . My flesh is worried, my body is holding me back, it is very loathe to suffer pain [p. 157].)This is the first (and only) time in the text that uurd refers to a “becoming of things” that Christ must face, suggesting that he has become subject to uurd during his life. Furthermore in a prayer immediately preceding this admission, Christ accepts his uurd willingly, knowing full well what it will be: “ef nu uuerðen ni mag,” quað he,“mankunni generid, ne sî that ik minan geƀelioƀan lîchamon for liudio barnte uuêgeanne te uundrun, it sî than thîn uuilleo sô,ik uuilliu is than gicoston: ik nimu thene kelik an hand,drinku ina thie te [diurðu], drohtin frô mîn,mahtig mundboro. Ni seh thu mines hêrflêskes gifôries. Ik fullon scaluuilleon thînen; thu haƀes gewald oƀar al.” (LVII.4760–68)(“If mankind cannot be rescued,” He said, “unless I give up My body, which I love, to terrible torture for the sake of the sons of the people—if You want it to be this way—then I want to drink it. I take this chalice in my hand and drink it to Your honor, my Lord Chieftain, powerful Protector! Do not consider what might be good for My flesh, I will carry out Your will. You have authority over all things!” [p. 157].)While the willing acceptance of “the becoming of things” does not necessarily imply an ability to contradict it, the fact alone that Christ has complete knowledge of what will happen makes his relation to uurd unique. And his ability to countermand uurd earlier in the text suggests ontological agency over this submission. Thus, just as Christ willingly took the lapsarian curse upon himself in the gospel accounts—the curse that condemns humankind to death in the Judeo-Christian mythos (2 Cor 5:21)—this hêliand has placed himself under the domain of the Germanic delimiter of human life.And Christ's death, the consummation of his willing submission to uurd, has the very specific effect of demystifying uurd for all in the narrative.41 For it is here, at the moment of Christ's death, that the author draws the audience's attention back to the Holy of Holies, the locus of uurd's demystification in the first occurrence of the word, by describing the torn temple curtain with elaborations to his sources that emphasize the access to this space that Christ's work has provided. Moreover, Christ's sacrifice makes widely available the salvation from uurd's final “becoming.” Immediately after recounting the torn temple curtain, the author includes Matthew's account of the resurrection of the saints: graƀu uuurðun giopanodddero manno, endi sia thuru drohtines craftan iro lchamon libbiandi astuodunupp fan erðu endi uuurðun gigida tharmannon te mrðu. (LXVII.5670–74)(graves of dead men opened up; and, by the Chieftain's power, they got up out of the earth alive in their bodies, and were caught sight of there, to the amazement of human beings [p. 187].)While this account is not elaborated like the description of the torn curtain, its inclusion is significant in that it links the paralleled associations of access to the presence of Yahweh and to the mystery of uurd with victory over death. In effect, uurd is revealed in this moment as the Saxon name for the fear that the temporal presence of Yahweh inspired among Israelites who had not yet been freed from the lapsarian curse. And the very work of Christ has been to reveal the God of uurd, so that the “becoming” uurd represents need not be unknown or terrifying any longer.Insofar as uurd operates in the Hêliand as a parallel to the lapsarian curse in the Judeo-Christian religious imagination, the word seems to fit rather nicely into B. J. Timmer's caveat that every wyrd/uurd (“lot”) is directed by divine providence.42 The curse is, after all, imposed by God as an expression of his providential will. And the implied apposition of uurdgiscapu and maht godes in the governance of John's birth, as well as the explicit apposition of uurd and uuilleon thînen ([The Father's] will) in the author's handling of the Gethsemane account, certainly reinforces such an interpretation. But a too hasty arrival at this conclusion elides the significance of the care the author is taking to assert this conflation in the text. Far from taking for granted the conflation of uurd and the maht godes revealed in the lapsarian curse, the author has woven the two concepts together carefully and deliberately, using tropes and images that are deeply significant to both religious contexts.43 After all, the existence of a vernacular gospel harmony, a harmony that reimagines the life of Christ in a distinctly Germanic setting and imbues it with distinctly Germanic values, implies the existence of an audience for such a harmony. This is not a text written to an audience equipped to understand the conflation of Germanic and Judeo-Christian concepts a priori. It is a text written to present and defend such conflations, to make foreign concepts relevant to a local audience.And examining precisely how the Germanic author inserted uurd into a Judeo-Christian paradigm can provide a fascinating window into the pre-Christian history of the concept the word identifies. We can conclude, for example, that it evoked a sense of terrified awe comparable to the awe that the Holy of Holies evoked from ancient Israelites. Uurd was the thing from which Saxons yearned for salvation, the source of existential “thrownness” that, in the words of Northrop Frye, forces humankind to confront the possibility that “the fact of human existence is an arbitrary fact.”44 More than that, we might assume that this existential dread was, in some sense, ful aræd for the Saxons, that their religious paradigm lacked a satisfying prophetic tradition to rival the OT prophecies of Israel's inevitable reconciliation to Yahweh. In other words, the Saxons lacked a Christ to save them from uurd, and so needed this Judeo-Christian hêliand to destabilize the dread that uurd evoked.Just as I have argued of wyrd in Solomon and Saturn II, uurd in the Hêliand is not Christianized but Christianizing. It had a pre-Christian meaning among the Saxons, a meaning that went far beyond the innocuity implied by the translation “lot” or “event.” This is not to say that there is any recoverable sense of personality or divinity in the word's connotation. Indeed, the word seems to have represented for the Saxon audience of this harmony something far more terrifying—a cosmic Orwellian unknown that utterly obfuscates any sense of teleological significance. And such an interpretation implies within this culture a sense of philosophical nuance and existential rigor that its reputation among scholars has rarely enjoyed. In other words, texts like the Hêliand evangelize to a Germanic audience not by forcing them to accept their sociopolitical circumstances but by teaching them that Christianity has something essential to teach them about their worldview.