Old English literature: a short introduction (original) (raw)

International Journal Online of Humanities (IJOHMN) A Study of Old English Period (450 AD to 1066 AD

Ijohmn, 2019

In this study, the researcher has talked about Old English or Anglo-Saxons history and literature. He has mentioned that this period contains the formation of an English Nation with a lot of the sides that endure today as well as the regional regime of shires and hundreds. For the duration of this period, Christianity was proven and there was a peak of literature and language. Law and charters were also proven. The researcher has also mentioned that what literature is written in Anglo-Saxon England and in Old English from the 450 AD to the periods after the Norman Conquest of 1066 AD. He also has argued that from where the composed literature begun of the era with reference to the written and composed literature. The major writers of the age are also discussed with their major works. There is slightly touch of the kings of the time have been given in the study with their great contribution with the era. The researcher also declared that what kinds of literary genres were there in the era. It is the very strong mark that Anglo-Saxon poetic literature has bottomless roots in oral tradition but observance with the ethnic performs we have seen elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon culture, there was an amalgamation amid custom and new knowledge. It has been also declared that from which part literary prose of Anglo-Saxon dates and in what language it

Transition of Old English Middle English and Modern English Literature20191201 106899 1xonzke

History of Language, 2019

The role of literature in history is reified by the growth, creation and unification of literary times, movements, events, authors and literary works that follow each other. On the basis of the opposition between normative tradition and experimental innovation, each new literary period, movement, trend results in and rejects the previous ones. Tradition and innovation are part of a single cycle of literary change and growth, contrary yet interrelated, arising under different names in different times and in the context of different movements, trends and literary works. Considering the major periods in the history of English literature, it can be divided mostly in three parts; Old English period, Middle English period and Modern English period. Old English literature, also known as Anglo-Saxon literature, is generally dated between 449/600 (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invasion of Britain) and 1100/1200 (Norman rule establishment). It is speculated that the British Isles were populated by Iberians until the sixth century BC and by Celts from the sixth / seventh century BC. The year of the Roman conquest is 55 BC, and the years between 410 AD and 441 AD are the time of the Roman withdrawal. 449 is the standard date of the arrival from the land of the Germanic people. The invasion continued for a century and a half with irregular arrivals, up to about 600. During Roman rule, the Christianized Celtic people of Britain were pushed westward by the invaders to Wales and Cornwall and north into Scotland's Highlands, bringing modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh.

A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

With this study we hope to serve the needs of those students and teachers who feel particularly committed to the changes that have characterized our field in recent years. The renewed emphasis on historicism and the decline of formalist aestheticism in medieval studies have rendered it desirable to have a literary history that attends more singularly to the material and social contexts and uses of Old English texts. Although the need is greater than this volume can really satisfy, we hope that the present study will nonetheless prove useful to those who, like us, see literature’s relation to history and culture as our field’s area of chief pedagogical interest, and the respect in which it has most to offer literary studies at large.

An Introduction to the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Vernacular Literature

A companion to Anglo-Saxon literature, 2001

1 An Introduction to the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Vernacular Literature Elaine Treharne and Phillip Pulsiano In terms of extant manuscript numbers, the more significant body of prose writings that survives from Anglo-Saxon England is Anglo-Latin. Along with the arrival of Christianity in ...

The literary languages of Old English: words, styles, voices

The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature

Neque enim possunt carmina, quamuis optime conposita, ex alia in aliam linguam at uerbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri. HE, iv. 24 For it is not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one language to another without some loss of beauty and dignity. Along with the Alfredian aphorism 'hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete' [sometimes word for word, sometimes sense for sense] and AElfric's comments in the preface to his translation of Genesis, the passage from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum quoted above is one of the most well-known Anglo-Saxon meditations on the problems and possibilities of translation. 1 What is remarkable about Bede's phrase is not the concern for the integrity of words that it expresses, but the respect it bestows on the vernacular language. Although he advocated translating certain Christian works such as the Pater Noster from Latin into Old English, 2 and according to Cuthbert was working on his own translation of the Gospel of St John at his deathbed, 3 in the Historia ecclesiastica, even though he took the trouble to list them, Bede gave the vernacular languages of early medieval Britain and Ireland short shrift. 4 Here, however, he indicates that the language we now know as Old English might be capable of great artistry and power. Bede also makes a wider point, which isn't actually about translation at all but about how languages function. The loss of

Looking for an Echo: The Oral Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Oral Tradition, 2004

William of Malmesbury, writing more than four centuries later, tells a tale of the Anglo-Saxon Aldhelm standing on a bridge in seventh-century Malmesbury, charming passers-by with his Old English verse. William also tells us that no less an afficianado of vernacular poetry than King Alfred the Great himself valued Aldhelm's Old English verse more highly than that of anyone else, even though two hundred years and more had passed since it was first performed. But not a scrap of Aldhelm's Old English verse can be identified of the roughly 30,000 lines that survive. Instead, we have more than 4,000 lines of Aldhelm's Latin poetry, composed in an idiosyncratically formulaic and alliterative style that appears to derive at least in part from the same native and ultimately oral tradition that produced Beowulf. The tale of Aldhelm's near-contemporary Caedmon is often cited as an example of oral poetry, but for all the scholarly wrangling over its significance, it is as well to remember that if vernacular verse was remembered and recited in monasteries (something Alcuin also complained about) then it largely survives through that connection: without Bede, we would know nothing of Caedmon, just as Beowulf only survives through its manuscript-association with four texts translated from Latin sources. With Bede, Aldhelm, Alfred, and Caedmon, we have all but exhausted the list of all the Old English poets whose names we know. And Cynewulf too, the most prolific named poet of all, actively sought to combine aspects of the vernacular oral and literate Latin traditions he inherited. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first application of what was termed "oral-formulaic" theory to Old English verse. Since then, the scholarly debate has thankfully moved beyond a rather sterile stand-off between those arguing that the formulaic phrasing of Old English poems such as Beowulf necessarily implied oral composition, and those noting similar levels of formulaic phrasing in other poems that unquestionably derived from literate, which is to say Latinate, models. Two articles by