scholarly journals God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. John D. Niles. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+288.

2020 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. E4-E7
Author(s):  
Tiffany Beechy
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Verse

The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry

1996 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 135-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gameson
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Exeter Book ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
English Verse

Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, fols. 8–130, the celebrated Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, preserves approximately one-sixth of the surviving corpus of Old English verse, and its importance for the study of pre-Conquest vernacular literature can hardly be exaggerated. It is physically a handsome codex, and is of large dimensions for one written in the vernacular: c. 320 × 220 mm, with a written area of c. 240 × 160 mm (see pl. III). In contrast to many coeval English manuscripts, particularly those in the vernacular, there is documentary evidence for the Exeter Book's pre-Conquest provenance. Assuming it is identical with the ‘i mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisum geworht’ (‘one large English book about various things written in verse’) in the inventory of lands, ornaments and books that Leofric, bishop of Crediton then Exeter, had acquired for the latter foundation, then it has been at Exeter since the third quarter of the eleventh century. This, however, is at least three generations after the book was written, and it has generally been assumed that it originated else where. Identifying the scriptorium where the Exeter Book was made is clearly a matter of the greatest interest and importance. A recent, admirably thorough monograph has put forward a thought-provoking case for seeing Exeter itself as the centre responsible, and has proceeded to draw a range of literary and historical conclusions from this. The comprehensive new critical edition of the manuscript has favoured the thesis, and it has been echoed elsewhere. If correct, this is extremely valuable and exciting – but is it correct? The matter is of sufficient importance to merit further scrutiny.

scholarly journals The Fall of Arthur and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún : A Metrical Review of Three Modern English Alliterative Poems

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-56
Author(s):  
Nelson Goering
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Medieval Poetry ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Poetic Edda ◽  
Narrative Poems ◽  
Considerable Body

J.R.R. Tolkien produced a considerable body of poetry in which he used the traditional alliterative metre of Old Norse and Old English to write modern English verse. This paper reviews three of his longer narrative poems, published in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, examining Tolkien’s alliterative technique in comparison to medieval poetry and to the metrical theories of Eduard Sievers. In particular, the two poems in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which are adapted from Old Norse material, show a number of metrical and poetic features reminiscent of Tolkien’s sources in the Poetic Edda. The Fall of Arthur, on the other hand, is in a style that is, in detail and in general, strongly reminiscent of Old English poetry. Throughout all these compositions, Tolkien employs a distinctive alliterative style, closely based on medieval and philological models, but adjusted according to the linguistic needs of modern English and to his own preferences.

Old English poetic diction not in Old English verse or prose – and the curious case of Aldhelm's five athletes

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 99-131
Author(s):  
Mark Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Old English ◽  
Educational Development ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Poetic Diction ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
Significant Discovery

AbstractThree contexts characterized by the occasional appearance of Old English poetic diction outside of Old English poetry — debased verse, rhythmical prose, and prose passages with rhetorical heightening — have been surveyed by previous scholars, but no serious consideration has been given to the use of poetic lexis to be found in the surviving glosses and glossaries. The article first looks at some examples in these non-poetic texts of poetic words used as markers of the heroic, the elegiac, the sublime, the exotic and the monstrous, before moving on to a detailed analysis of a significant discovery. The glosses and glossary batches to Aldhelm's extended simile in De Virginitate comparing the educational development of Christian nuns to the exertions of various athletes display (when taken together) a unique cluster of poetic diction, comparable in density (and perhaps also in motivation) to that found only in the most enriched passages of traditional heroic poetry.

Old English Poetic Superlatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-273
Author(s):  
E. G. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
General Survey ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis paper is designed to show how difficult it is for us in the twenty-first century to establish a valid response to the superlative of adjectives as used in Old English verse. In contradistinction to the monochromatically excessive use of superlatives in modern advertising, the distribution of superlatives is very varied in the English verse of more than a thousand years ago. The first part of the paper consists of a general survey of Old English superlatives, chiefly in the vernacular verse of the Anglo-Saxons, but their prose has not been wholly neglected. The study is evaluative, more so than is usual in sober Linguistics; to this purpose the superlative degree and its statistics contribute to an understanding of the triumphant ending of Beowulf, and grammar is to be seen as the handmaiden of literature. The second part of the paper is more literary, and is based on the incidence of superlatives as presented in the first part. The density of superlatives in the opening of the minor poem Maxims II is observed, without any reasoning for that density. The density of rare superlatives in the last lines of Beowulf is admired for its aesthetic quality, brought out in Edwin Morgan’s poetic rendering of the poem. It is not forgotten that the rarity of a superlative in the extant verse may be because we cannot know if it would have been less rare had more verse survived. The reading of poetry must, if worthwhile, involve an aesthetic response. The paper, at the same time as exercising that response, stresses our insecurity when we respond to Old English poetry.

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.

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