[Greetings from Austin! I’ve always been almost irresistibly drawn to the world of the Medievals. Boethius. Beowulf. King Arthur and his Knights. Romanized Britons mingling with invading Saxons. Dark castles and gothic cathedrals. Wandering in foggy cemeteries and meditating on mortality. All of it.
Earlier in life, I believed I had been born in the wrong age—that Time made a mistake when it forgot to send my soul into a medieval knight poet (the Medieval equivalent of a warrior poet). As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to believe that Time does not make mistakes. I no longer wish that I was a medieval knight in a Medieval World, but I do still wonder what it would be like. Then I go to Boethius and Beowulf, and they show me. I thumb through the stories of King Arthur and his Knights, and they let me accompany them on their quests. They remind me I need not live in their age to embody their spirit. To be a good knight now means the same as it did then, even if it looks a lot different. It is, as Godfrey says in Kingdom of Heaven, to “[b]e without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong.”
Among my favorite practices of the Medieval poets and philosophers were their profound ways of meditating on mortality and the fleeting nature of all things. We devote the rest of this essay to one specific method intended to provoke thoughts on the transient nature of life.]
Used by several medieval European poets, ubi sunt, meaning “where are [they]?” was a device intended to make the audience ponder the fate of all, especially the strong, virtuous, and powerful. Along with its common variant, ubi nunc (“where now?”), poems and plays used the phrase to inspire meditation on the transient nature of life, the inevitability of death, and the supremacy of placing faith in the eternal.
As a phrase, it traces its origins to the Book of Baruch1—verses 3:16-19 start with the words ubi sunt principles (“where are the princes?”):
[Ubi sunt principes] Where are the princes of the nations, and those who rule over the beasts of the earth; those who mock the birds of the air, and those who hoard up silver and gold, in which men trust, and there is no end to their getting; those who scheme to get silver, and are anxious, whose labours are beyond measure? They have vanished and gone below, and others have arisen in their place.
After the Book of Baruch, the phrase proliferated into much of the great literature from the late Roman era to the Middle Ages. We see its use in Book II, Poem 7 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, where Boethius employs the ubi nunc variant: “Where now [Ubi nunc] are the bones of faithful Fabricius? What has become of Brutus and stern Cato?” In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius uses it to remind himself that he, too, will one day pass from the memory of men like smoke:
[A]nd when you look at yourself, picture one of the Caesars—for each, then, a parallel in the past. Then let this further thought strike you: Where are those men now? Nowhere, or wherever. In this way you will always look on human life as mere smoke and nothing, especially if you remind yourself also that what has once changed will be no more for the infinity of time. Why then this stress? Why not be content with an orderly passage through the brief span you have?2
Shakespeare found a use for the device in Hamlet when Hamlet finds a skull in the graveyard and asks, “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”3
But perhaps my favorite example of its usage comes from an anonymous Medieval Anglo-Saxon poet. After the Anglo-Saxons conquered the Romanized Britons, they found massive stone works and elaborate Celtic designs that seemed straight out of a lost era of (Roman) glory. The sense of ubi sunt that ran from these encounters is encoded in the Anglo-Saxon poems part of the collection known as the Exeter Book (or, the Codex Exoniensis). One particular poem, The Wanderer, invites the reader to participate in the ubi sunt sentiment present among relics of the once-great:
Where is the horse, where is the man? / where is the treasure-giver? / where are the festive settings? / where are the joys of the hall? / Alas bright cup! / alas mail’d warrior! / alas cheftain’s splendour! / how the time has pass’d, / has darken’d under the veil of night, / as if it had not been … here is a wealth transient, / here is a friend transient, / here is man transient, / here is a kinsman transient … Well it is for him who seeketh / comfort, at the Father in heaven, / where all our fastness standeth.4
At the end of the excerpt above (the end of The Wanderer), we see what the ubi sunt poets were up to. Using the meditation, they wanted to turn our attention away from the mortal and toward the immortal. They wanted us to peel our hearts away from the world and fix them instead on the eternal. They wanted us to “[r]eflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder.”5
Their aim, similar to King Hrothgar’s when he tells Beowulf (fresh from killing Grendel’s mother and glowing with glory) to remember the fickleness of fortune and remember eternal counsel:
[W]hat the [foolish] has long held seems too little, / angry and greedy, he gives no golden rings / for vaunting boasts, and his final destiny / he neglects and forgets, since God, ruler of glories, / has given him a portion of honors. / In the end it finally comes about / that the loaned life-dwelling starts to decay / and falls, fated to die; another follows him / who doles out his riches without regret, / the earl’s ancient treasure; he heeds no terror. / Defend yourself from wickedness, dear Beowulf, / best of men, and choose better, / eternal counsel; care not for pride, / great champion! / The glory of your might / is but a little white; too soon it will be / that sickness or the sword will shatter your strength, / or the grip of fire, or the surging flood, / or the cut of a sword, or the flight of a spear, / or terrible old age—or the light of your eyes / will fail and flicker out; in one fell swoop / death, o warrior, will overwhelm you.6
Sic transit gloriamundi. So passes worldly glory. That’s the central message of ubi sunt. A message that reminds us that the only thing that truly matters is being good in the present and guided by eternity. The rest—wealth, status, power—just ornaments we ought to be indifferent to. Because where we’re going, they can’t come.
—
P.S. Let me end with one caveat. While the rhetorical question “where now?” is typically intended to get the reader to respond, “gone… they are gone,” that’s not entirely true, is it? In a sense, sure, they are gone, just as we one day will be. But in another sense, they are not. We are not entirely wrong to answer “ubi sunt” with “here! They are here!” Because while their bodies may be gone, their legacy lives on—their spirit is in the artifacts of their lives that they left behind. As their descendants, we carry not only the vestiges of their DNA but have inherited their ideas. So yes, they are gone, but not entirely. Just as one day our bodies, too, will return to dust. But what we do ripples into eternity. It is up to us to live accordingly.
A deuterocanonical book—meaning it’s accepted as canon by some variants of Christianity but not others—thought to have been written between 200 - 100 BC by Baruch ben Neriah, the scribe of Jeremiah, that reflects on the circumstances of Jewish exiles from Babylon.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.31.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1.
Anonymous, The Wanderer (in the Codex Exoniensis). Inspired by the poem, The Wanderer, Tolkien wrote a version of it into The Two Towers, when on the way to Edoras, Aragorn chants a poem in remembrance of the Rohirrim: “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; the days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, Chapter 6, p. 508.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius: Letter 8 (On the Philosopher’s Seclusion).
Anonymous, Beowulf (translated by R.M. Liuzza), lines 1740 - 1768.