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In this restructured and greatly expanded version of Burton Raffel's out-of-print classic, Poems from the Old English, Raffel and co-editor Alexandra H. Olsen place the oldest English writings in a different perspective. Keeping the classroom teacher's needs foremost in mind, Raffel and Olsen organize the major old English poems (except Beowulf) and new prose selections so as to facilitate both reading and studying. A general introduction provides an up-to-date and detailed historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period, and concise introductions open the literature sections of the book and many of the translations.
Unique and beautiful, Beowulf brings to life a society of violence and honor, fierce warriors and bloody battles, deadly monsters and famous swords. Written by an unknown poet in about the eighth century, this masterpiece of Anglo-Saxton literature transforms legends, myth, history, and ancient songs into the richly colored tale of the hero Beowulf, the loathsome man-eater Grendel, his vengeful water-hag mother, and a treasure-hoarding dragon. The earliest surviving epic poem in any modern European language. Beowulf is a stirring portrait of a heroic world–somber, vast, and magnificent.
In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions. Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.
R.M. Liuzza’s Broadview edition of Beowulf was published at almost exactly the same time as Seamus Heaney’s; in reviewing the two together in July 2000 for The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode concluded that both translations were superior to their predecessors, and that it was impossible to choose between the two: “the less celebrated translator can be matched with the famous one,” he wrote, and “Liuzza’s book is in some respects more useful than Heaney’s.” Ever since, the Liuzza Beowulf has remained among the top sellers on the Broadview list. With this volume readers will now be able to enjoy a much broader selection of Old English poetry in translations by Liuzza. As the collection demonstrates, the range and diversity of the works that have survived is extraordinary—from heartbreaking sorrow to wide-eyed wonder, from the wisdom of old age to the hot blood of battle, and to the deepest and most poignant loneliness. There is breathless storytelling and ponderous cataloguing; there is fervent religious devotion and playful teasing. The poems translated here are meant to provide a sense of some of this range and diversity; in doing so they also offer significant portions of three of the important manuscripts of Old English poetry—the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Exeter Book.
This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons - the animals, diseases, landscapes, seas and weather with which they had to contend. She argues that poetic descriptions of these elements were not a reflection of the existing physical conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues: the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation and the power of writing to control information. Examples of contemporary literature in other languages are used to provide a sense of Old English poetry's particular approach, which incorporated elements from Germanic, Christian and classical sources. The result of this approach was not a consistent cosmological scheme but a rather contradictory vision which reveals much about how the Anglo-Saxons viewed themselves.
"The art of posing riddles is possibly as old as mankind and spans two apparent extremes which, nevertheless, converge in the riddlic form: that of wisdom and that of play. With this perspective in mind, the author examines the poetic enigmas present in the culture of Anglo-Saxon England, exploring both the Anglo-Latin riddles of Aldhelm and those recorded in the Exeter Book. His study investigates the Old English riddlic texts from a variety of angles, arguing for the possibility of establishing patterns of Anglo-Saxon riddlic composition as such. The author intends to prove that both the Exeter collection and the Aenigmata of Aldhelm are constructed on the grounds of an identifiable structure of interrelations and interdependencies. Additionally, he argues that the riddlic mode of literary representation is also visible in other Anglo-Saxon poetic compositions. The analysis of such an assumption leads to the conclusion that the predilection for the riddle form in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry results from an Old English vision of the Christian world".--BOOKJACKET.
This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This mode of analysis is therefore able to show what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style can aid in literary analysis.
After a distinguished career as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer and literary critic, Stanley Brian Greenfield, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, one of the founders of the annual Anglo-Saxon England and of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, died in 1987. He wrote primarily on Anglo-Saxon topics as well as later English poetry. He deeply explored the Old English poetic corpus, pointing out important meanings and qualities in insightful and sensitive readings. Hero and Exile brings together some of his most important essays, divided into three sections - Beowulfian Studies, The Old English Elegies and The Theme of Exile - attesting to his long and fruitful engagement with Old English literature.