2 - Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B

Summary

The poem known as Genesis B is an important intrusion in the sequence we find in Junius 11. As discussed in the previous chapter, the beginning of Genesis A resituated biblical history by describing the building of hell as God's first creation. Genesis B disturbs the linear narrative of this history further by returning manuscript readers and viewers to the events of Lucifer's rebellion and contributing, as Janet Schrunk Ericksen writes, to the make-up of Junius 11 as ‘both a continuous whole and a collection with ruptures, discontinuities, and functionally independent pieces’. Interpolated into the longer Genesis A at lines 235–851, the poetry of Genesis B provides further insights into Lucifer's disastrous attempt to rule the heavenly kingdom and therefore expands on the tragedy that structured the first pages of the manuscript. This flashback means that some of the preoccupations and warnings of Genesis A's prologue, such as those concerning the destructiveness of ill counsel, re-emerge and are reiterated. But Genesis B also deepens the tale of the angelic rebellion and the warnings both implicit and explicit in those first 235 lines of Genesis A: this is poetry that provides another perspective on the rebellion as a political failure by tracing its fallout and by having Satan boast about his desire for compensation in long, grandiose speeches. This is a poem that is also interested in the dire consequences of poorly counselled pursuits of amends by those engaged in futile struggles for dominance. Despite Satan's bad politics, his ideal of revenge does result in immense suffering and Adam and Eve are led astray by the devil's ‘boda’ (messenger), a servant of hell, forcing the inhabitants of Eden to abandon the divine teaching and guidance gifted to them. Through this re-casting of the fall of Adam and Eve, Genesis B evokes the destruction wrought by the madness of those viewing themselves as greater than God.

On page 13 of Junius 11, where Genesis B enters the fray and begins at the top, there is no capitalisation or decorated initial, suggesting that compilers did not see the poem as out of sync with the cycle of history they sought to portray in poetry (see Fig. 4).