The scholarly recovery of the significance of Anglo-Saxon records in prose and verse: a new bibliography

1980 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 223-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The new bibliography by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson of the entire body of publications on Old English literature provides the occasion for reviewing not so much the bibliography itself as the subject it covers. This article is, of course, not a brief history of Anglo-Saxon studies from the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII's reign to the 1970s. It is a highly selective exemplification of some of the changing aims and achievements of scholars when they went to the vernacular records in prose and verse that survive from Anglo-Saxon times.

On Translating Anglo-Saxon Poetry

PMLA ◽  
1898 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-296
Author(s):  
Edward Fulton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Verse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early English

What verse to use in translating Anglo-Saxon poetry is a question, which, ever since Anglo-Saxon poetry has been thought worth translating, has been discussed over and over again, but unfortunately with as yet no final conclusion. The tendency, however, both among those who have written upon the subject and those who have tried their hand at translating, is decidedly in favor of a more or less close imitation of the original metre. Professor F. B. Gummere, in an article on “The Translation of Beowulf and the Relations of Ancient and Modern English Verse,” published in the American Journal of Philology, Vol. vii (1886), strongly advocates imitating the A.-S. metre. Professor J. M. Garnett, in a paper read before this Association in 1890, sides with him, recanting a previously held belief in the superiority of blank verse. Of the various translations which imitate the A.-S. metre, the most successful, undoubtedly, is the Beowulf of Dr. John Leslie Hall, which appeared in 1892. Stopford Brooke, in his History of Early English Literature, also declares his belief in imitations of the original metre, though in his translations he does not always carry out his beliefs. He lays down the rule—and a very good rule it is—that translations of poetry “should always endeavour to have the musical movement of poetry, and to obey the laws of the verse they translate.” For translating A.-S. poetry, blank verse, he thinks, is out of the question; “ it fails in the elasticity which a translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry requires, and in itself is too stately, even in its feminine dramatic forms, to represent the cantering movement of Old English verse. Moreover, it is weighted with the sound of Shakspere, Milton, or Tennyson, and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.”

‘Beowulf’ and the Celtic World: The Uses of Evidence

Traditio ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 109-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Dumville
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
Under Five ◽  
English Poem ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Made In

Sporadic attempts have been made in the past to demonstrate direct connexions between the various Celtic literatures andBeowulf; I think it fair to say that the proposed links have always seemed tenuous or imaginary and have not been taken seriously by most students of the Old English poem. A century of desultory comparisons, leading to a negative result, by persons qualified in either Old English or Celtic or neither, does not, however, exhaust the subject or indicate its irrelevance. It seems to me that a determined attack on the subject may indicate desirable approaches and cautions which students ofBeowulfcould consider as they contemplate further work on the poem. I shall organise my remarks under five headings: the possibility of Irish (or other Celtic) influence onBeowulfin particular and on Old English literature in general; archaism in the language and metrics of ‘traditional’ verse; problems of archaism and anachronism in ‘traditional’ literature; the search for a text-history ofBeowulfwith its consequent issues of transmission and problems of dating; and general historical questions.

The tradition of penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 23-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen J. Frantzen
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Better Than

Anglo-Saxonists have often referred to a ‘penitential tradition’ in Old English literature, the poetry in particular, without establishing a connection between that tradition and the administrative sources on which it rested. Especially in the later Anglo-Saxon period, the time of Ælfric and Wulfstan, the literature pertaining to penance was extensive. It included handbooks of penance or ‘penitentials’, homilies about penitential practice and liturgical texts of various kinds, among them instructions for confessors, prayers for penitents and rites of public penance. Whether this material should be called ‘literature’ is an open question, but certainly its relevance to penitential themes in Old English poetry needs to be examined. Before we can grasp the significance of the ‘penitential tradition’ for either the literary or the social history of Anglo-Saxon England, it would seem necessary to understand better than we now do the sources and affiliations of the legislative texts, the penitentials in particular, which governed the practice of penance.

The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Dumville
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

Studies in the History of Old English Literature

1954 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
R. M. Wilson ◽  
Kenneth Sisam
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals In Defence of the Textual Integrity of the Old English Resignation

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
Helena W. Sobol
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Manuscript Context ◽  
Devotional Texts

Abstract Bliss & Frantzen’s (1976) paper against the previously assumed textual integrity of Resignation has been a watershed in research upon the poem. Nearly all subsequent studies and editions have followed their theory, the sole dissenting view being expressed by Klinck (1987, 1992). The present paper offers fresh evidence for the textual unity of the poem. First examined are codicological issues, whether the state of the manuscript suggests that a folio might be missing. Next analysed are the spellings of Resignation and its phonology, here the paper discusses peculiarities which both differentiate Resignation from its manuscript context and connect the two hypothetical parts of the text. Then the paper looks at the assumed cut-off point at l.69 to see if it may provide any evidence for textual discontinuity. Finally the whole Resignation, seen as a coherent poem, is placed in the history of Old English literature, with special attention being paid to the traditions of devotional texts and the Old English elegies.

Histories and surveys of Old English literature: a chronological review

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 201-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel G. Calder
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
Special Quality

Literary history emerges when critical readers in sufficient number move beyond primary recognition of individual texts into a secondary awareness of a scheme, a sense of the connections that exist between these texts.1 Literary history considers the development of a whole body of literature, tracing multifarious influences and innovations through time. In the course of Anglo-Saxon studies the slow and sporadic reappearance of the literary remains resulted in the late nourishing of a schematic or historical overview. As Wellek reminds us, ‘the antiquarian study of Anglo-Saxon remained…outside the main tendency towards literary history’2 that occurred in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. So, too, the special quality of Old English poetry itself contributed to the laggard creation of a history. It is difficult to map the path of a literature in which all dating is only good guessing and in which a tenaciously conservative oral—formulaic style makes attempts at suggesting influence hazardous.

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