The ‘Variegated Obit’ as an Historiographic Motif in Old English Poetry and Anglo-Latin Historical Literature

Traditio ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 101-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Stylistic Feature ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Study ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Genesis A

The object of this paper is to identify a particular stylistic feature in the Old English Genesis A, to point out its affinities in Anglo-Latin historical literature (particularly in the historical writings of Byrhtferth of Ramsey), and to discuss the implications of those affinities. In conclusion I propose to discuss the literary history of this motif and some occurrences in other Old English poems — notably in Beowulf. I will thus move from fairly mechanical problems of source-study and stylistic affinity to some important ideological and literary issues, but unfortunately the more important issues are also more difficult to resolve.

The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 334-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry D. Benson
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exciting Development

Perhaps the most fruitful and exciting development in Old English studies in recent years has followed from F. P. Magoun's discovery that the Parry-Lord theory of oral verse-making can be applied to Old English poetry. This theory has caught the imagination of critics and has produced a “kind of revolution in scholarly opinion” not simply because it shows us that the style of this poetry is traditional—that has been known for many years—but because it offers a new and useful way of approaching the problems raised by this style, because it provides a new way of considering some of the relations between these poems, and because it casts light on an area that we thought was forever darkened, the pre-literary history of Germanic and Old English verse.

Poetic words, conservatism and the dating of Old English poetry

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Cronan
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
A Priori ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Limited Distribution ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Patterns Of Distribution ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Genesis A

Although the lexicon has frequently been used in discussions of the dating of Old English poetry, little attention has been paid to the evidence that poetic simplexes offer. One exception is an article by R. J. Menner, who noted that Beowulf and Genesis A share three poetic words, apart from compounds, that are not found elsewhere: freme ‘good, valiant’, gombe ‘tribute’, and secg ‘sword’. Menner used these words as part of an argument for an early date of Genesis A, an argument which hinged, in part, on lexical similarities between this poem and Beowulf, which he assumed was early. Although such an a priori assumption is no longer possible, evidence provided by the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes is nonetheless useful for demonstrating the presence of a connection between two or more poems. Such a connection may be a matter of date or dialect, or it may indicate that the poems were the products of a single poetic school or subtradition. Unfortunately, we know little, if anything, about poetic subtraditions, and the poetic koiné makes the determination of the dialect of individual poems a complex and subtle matter that requires a much wider variety of evidence than poetic words can provide. However, the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes can serve as an index of the poetic conservatism of the poems in which these words occur. This conservatism could be due to a number of factors: genre, content (that is, heroic legend vs biblical or hagiographical), style, or date of composition. As will emerge in the course of this discussion, the most straightforward explanation for this conservatism is that the poems which exhibit it were composed earlier than those which do not. Other explanations are, however, possible, and the evidence of poetic words is hardly sufficient by itself to determine the dating of Old English poems. But by focusing on patterns of distribution that centre upon Beowulf, we can examine what certain words may tell us about the conservatism of this poem and of those poems which are connected to it.

Old English poetry, verse by verse

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 95-130
Author(s):  
Eric Weiskott
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Half Line ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Critical Editions ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
State Of Affairs

AbstractCertain syntactical ambiguities in Old English poetry have been the focus of debate among students of metre and syntax. Proponents of intentional ambiguity must demonstrate that the passages in question exhibit, not an absence of syntactical clarity, but a presence of syntactical ambiguity. This article attempts such a demonstration. It does so by shifting the terms of the debate, from clauses to verses and from a spatial to a temporal understanding of syntax. The article proposes a new interpretation of many problematic passages that opens onto a new way of parsing and punctuating Old English poetry.In this essay in the history of poetic style, I demonstrate that the sequence in time of Old English half-lines sometimes necessitates retrospective syntactical reanalysis, a state of affairs which modern punctuation is ill-equipped to capture, but in which Anglo-Saxon readers and listeners would have recognized specific literary effects. In the second section, I extrapolate two larger syntactical units, the half-line sequence and the verse paragraph, which differ in important ways from the clauses and sentences that modern editors impose on Old English poetic texts. Along the way, I improve the descriptive accuracy of Kuhn's Laws by reinterpreting them as governing half-line sequences rather than clauses. I conclude with a call for unpunctuated or minimally punctuated critical editions of Old English verse texts.

Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Battles
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Cultural Myth ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Historia Ecclesiastica ◽  
Adventus Saxonum ◽  
Genesis A

In his study of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe has argued that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the ancestral migration from the Continent as ‘the founding and defining event of their culture’. He suggests that the adventus Saxonum gave the Germanic tribes in England a shared identity, and proved central to their historical, cultural and even theological self-definition. Howe investigates what he calls the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’, which links the Germanic tribal migration to England with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, both being transmarine journeys from a land of spiritual bondage to one of spiritual salvation. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England traces the development of this concept from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica to Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, and discusses its function in the writings of Alcuin and Boniface, as well as in Old English poetry. Howe's elegant analysis succeeds in demonstrating the pervasiveness of migration as a cultural myth, that is, a story that endures in a people's memory because it speaks powerfully to their collective imagination.

Hidden glosses in manuscripts of Old English poetry

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 43-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Bammesberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Junius 11

The editorial history of Old English poetry has known two extremes in its attitude to the transmitted manuscript readings. Whereas Franciscus Junius in his Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetic a Genesios ac Praecipuarum Sacrae Paginae Historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonice Conscripta & nunc Primum Edita (Amsterdam, 1655) aimed essentially at reflecting the readings of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, and was by and large successful in transcribing what the manuscript offered, by the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest an entirely different approach had become predominant. By then it had become clear that our manuscripts are by no means authors' originals; in the course of transmission numerous errors have crept into them. Since it was undeniable that in the copying process errors had occurred it was considered imperative to try to restore the original versions.

The probable derivation of most of the illustrations in Junius II from an illustrated Old Saxon Genesis

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Raw
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
History Of

Junius II in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is the only one of the four principal manuscripts of Old English poetry to be illustrated. The pictures are important not only because they form one of the most extensive sets of Genesis illustrations of the early Middle Ages but also because the text which they illustrate is a composite one, 600 lines of which were translated into Old English from an Old Saxon poem probably of the second quarter of the ninth century. By tracing the sources of these illustrations one can throw light on the history and transmission of the text as well as on the history of manuscript art in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

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