Flodu in the franks casket’s whale poem: A fluvial meaning with regional implications (original) (raw)

Reevaluating Emendations to the Old English Riming Poem LL. 17-18

Notes and Queries, 2010

Notes REEVALUATING EMENDATIONS TO THE OLD ENGLISH RIMING POEM LL. 17-18 LINES 17-18 of the Old English Riming Poem appear in the manuscript beginning in the third to last line of folio 94r as follows: þ -he insele saege sinc ge Uaege Á þegnu˜geþyhte þenden Uaes ic maegen Á

The Light in the Old English 'Rhyming Poem', lines 1-2

Notes and Queries 66, 2019

This article offers a new account of the significance of the unveiled 'leoht' (‘light’) in the opening lines of the highly enigmatic 'Rhyming Poem' of the Exeter Book, a text often viewed as lacking in sense, once described as ‘a bit of trash’ by Edward B. Irving, Jr. The lines can be contextualised through Latin and vernacular traditions which map the passage of the day onto the human lifespan, including exegetical treatments of ‘The Parable of the Vineyard’. The lines furthermore signal the poem’s continued interest in fluctuations between clear vision and obfuscating darkness. Ultimately, it is argued that the poem’s combination of a sustained rhyme scheme with antithetical structures of imagery can be profitably understood as ‘post-Cynewulfian’ (after O. D. Macrae-Gibson), reminiscent particularly of Christ II, lines 592–3.

Ruins in the Realm of Thoughts: Reading as Constellation in Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2009

All citations of The Ruin and Deor are taken from this edition and are cited by line number, and all translations throughout are my own. I would like to thank Jim Hansen, Bruce Holsinger, Eileen Joy, Rebecca Stephenson, Jacqueline Stodnick, and the anonymous readers for their generous and insightful comments on successive versions of this article. 2.

The Ruin: Ancient Imagery in Medieval Poetry

International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature, 2020

The beauty and the mystery of a small fragment of 45 lines makes it stand out among extant monuments of Old English poetry; some of its lines are impossible to read, in the central part (lines 12-17) only a few isolated words can be deciphered. Publishers call the surviving fragment 'The Ruin', as it describes a city deserted by its inhabitants and destroyed. The poem is included into the manuscript of the Exeter Book [1], which was presented by Bishop Leofric to the Cathedral Library in Exeter shortly before his death in 1072. The prominence of the motif of ruins in this poem of the Exeter Book can be accounted for by its composition during one of the most unstable periods of English history, marked by the mutinies of Mercian and Northumbrian lords, the raids of the Vikings, and the desolation of buildings. The poem is a meditation on the transience of worldly glory (Fell [2]), which comprises a series of living pictures, juxtaposing images of past magnificence and contemporary decay: the present with its desolated cities is reassessed against the background of past glory. The concept of nostalgia is frequently mentioned by scholars in connection with the Old English 'Ruin', which was called 'an imaginative nostalgia for a glorious past, stimulated by a particular scene spread out before the poet's eyes' (Leslie, [3]) and was said to embody a 'nostalgia for a past that is unbroken, inhabitable, articulate and contiguous as well as a reminder of the speaker's own present state of brokenness, isolation, fallenness, and silence' (Liuzza, [4]). The poem permits various interpretations, which range between historicalarchaeological 1 and allegorical 2 , and account for its special impact on the audience both medieval and modern. The first lines of the poem (Wraetlic is þes wealstan, / wyrde gebraecon 3 , 'This wall-stone is wondrous; calamities broke it') briefly summarise its theme, reminding the audience that all the works of man are as transient as himself. Attention is first drawn to the fate of the buildings (burgstede burston, / brosnað enta geweorc, 2, 'these city-sites crashed, the work of giants is decaying'), and then to its builders 1 Historical-archaeological interpretations concentrate on analysing archaeological, architectural, historical and other extra-linguistic evidence with a view to identifying the place described in the poem (cf. Herben, [5], Herben, [6]. 2 Allegorical explanations of the poem range from suggesting a Christological interpretation (Murgia [7]) and defining the poem as a metaphor for Christ (Cammarota, [8]) to viewing it as a description of the fall of Babylon (Keenan, [9]), or as a body-city riddle (Johnson [10]). 3 The text of 'The Ruin' is quoted from: Klinck [11].