Download or read book On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems written by John M. Hill and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes one Anglo-Saxon poem better than another? Why does Beowulf still have the power to move us after so many centuries? What might have been aesthetically pleasing to Old English readers and writers of poetry? While there is an apparent consensus by scholars on a core of poems considered to be exceptional literary achievements - Beowulf, Judith, the Vercelli book - there has been little systematic investigation of the basis for these appraisals. With new essays on rhetoric, wordplay, meter, structure, irony, form, psychology, ethos, and reader response, the contributors to this collection aim to find objective aesthetic qualities in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Posing questions of quality and beauty as discoverable in artefacts, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems significantly advances our understanding not only of aesthetics and Old English poetry, but also of Old English attitudes towards literature as an art form.
Download or read book Beowulf and Other Old English Poems written by Constance Hieatt and published by Bantam Classics. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique and beautiful, Beowulf brings to life a society of violence and honor, fierce warriors and bloody battles, deadly monsters and famous swords. Written by an unknown poet in about the eighth century, this masterpiece of Anglo-Saxton literature transforms legends, myth, history, and ancient songs into the richly colored tale of the hero Beowulf, the loathsome man-eater Grendel, his vengeful water-hag mother, and a treasure-hoarding dragon. The earliest surviving epic poem in any modern European language. Beowulf is a stirring portrait of a heroic world–somber, vast, and magnificent.
Download or read book Old English Poetics written by Elizabeth M. Tyler and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to the study of Old English Poetry, featuring close reading of the text, its form and style. Traditions are created and maintained by groups of people living in specific times and places: they do not have a life of their own. In this radical new approach to Old English poetics, the author argues that the apparent timelessness and stability of Old English poetic convention is a striking historical phenomenon that must be accounted for, not assumed, and that the perceived conservatism of Old English poetic conventions is the result of choice. Successive generations of poets deliberately maintained the traditionality of Old English poetry, putting it into dialogue with contemporary conditions to express critique and dissent as well as nostalgia. The author makes particularuse of the rich language of treasure to be found in Anglo-Saxon verse to historicise her argument, but her argument has wide implications for how we approach the role of tradition in the poetry of earlier societies. DrELIZABETH TYLER teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York.
Download or read book Beowulf and Other Old English Poems written by Craig Williamson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter. Williamson's Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.
Download or read book Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems written by Elise Louviot and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry.
Download or read book Performance in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems written by Steven J. A. Breeze and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acts of performance, such as music, storytelling, and poetry recital, have made significant contributions to the rediscovery and widening popularity of Old English poetry. However, while these performances capture the imagination, they also influence an audience's view of the world of the original poems, even to propagating certain assumptions, particularly those to do with performance practices. By stripping away these assumptions, this book aims to uncover the ways in which representations of performance in Old English poetry are intimately associated with poetic production and fundamental cultural concerns. Through an examination of Beowulf, diverse wisdom poems, and the "artist" poems Deor and Widsith, it proposes that poets constructed an imaginary domain of "poetic performance", which negotiated tensions between early medieval creativity and core social beliefs. It also shows how the poems' relationship with oral methods of composition and circulation weakened in later medieval poetry as both language and poetic form altered. Overall, the book explores what depictions of performance within these texts can tell us about early medieval conceptualisations, processes, and practices, in the poetic imagination and in wider culture. Through an analysis of Eddic poetry and Laȝamon's Brut, it also highlights a tradition of "poetic performance" in English poetics.
Download or read book Companion to Old English Poetry written by Henk Aertsen and published by Vu University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion contains original essays by scholars in Britain, the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. In addition to general surveys on the nature of old English poetry and its material context, there are detailed discussions and interpretations of individuals poems: ''Beowulf'' in its Germanic and Christian backgrounds, ''The Wanderer'' and ''The Seafarer'' as wisdom poetry, ''The Dream of the Rood'' and the related religious poetry, the shorter heroic poems, the personal lyric, Biblical narrative poetry, saints' lives and riddles and maxims. The purpose in each case is to stimulate a critical engagement by providing a literary approach and some historical context.
Download or read book Old English Philology written by Leonard Neidorf and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays bringing out the crucial importance of philology for understanding Old English texts.
Download or read book The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry written by Geoffrey Russom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolution of traditional English verse structures from their Old and Middle origins to the Modern English period.
Download or read book The Life Course in Old English Poetry written by Harriet Soper and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, Harriet Soper reveals how poets depicted varied paths through life, including their staging of entanglements between human life courses and those of the nonhuman or more-than-human. While Old English poetry sometimes suggests that uniform patterns shape each life, paralleling patristic traditions of the ages of man, it also frequently disrupts a sense of steady linearity through the life course in striking ways, foregrounding moments of sudden upheaval over smooth continuity, contingency over predictability, and idiosyncrasy over regularity. Advancing new readings of a diverse range of Old English poems, Soper draws on an array of supporting contexts and theories to illuminate these texts, unearthing their complex and fascinating depictions of ageing through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Download or read book The Complete Old English Poems written by and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 1248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / And a tempting truth hidden in her heart," to the trust of Noah who builds "a sea-floater, a wave-walking / Ocean-home with rooms for all creatures," the world of the Anglo-Saxon poets is a place of harshness, beauty, and wonder. Now for the first time, the entire Old English poetic corpus—including poems and fragments discovered only within the past fifty years—is rendered into modern strong-stress, alliterative verse in a masterful translation by Craig Williamson. Accompanied by an introduction by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on the literary scope and vision of these timeless poems and Williamson's own introductions to the individual works and his essay on translating Old English poetry, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead-hall, to share a herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation or a people's sorrow at the death of a beloved king, to be present at the clash of battle or to puzzle over the sacred and profane answers to riddles posed over a thousand years ago. This is poetry as stunning in its vitality as it is true to its sources. Were Williamson's idiom not so modern, we might think that the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing once more.
Download or read book Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia written by Catalin Taranu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.
Download or read book Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry written by Jennifer A. Lorden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.
Download or read book Reading Old English Biblical Poetry written by Janet Schrunk Ericksen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Old English Biblical Poetry considers the Junius 11 manuscript, the only surviving illustrated book of Old English poetry, in terms of its earliest readers and their multiple strategies of reading and making meaning. Junius 11 begins with the Creation story and ends with the final vanquishing of Satan by Jesus. The study is framed by particular attention to the materiality of the manuscript and how that might have informed its early reception, and it broadens considerations of reading beyond those of the manuscript’s compiler and possible patron. As a book, Junius 11 reflects a rich and varied culture of reading that existed in and beyond houses of God in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it points to readers who had enough experience to select and find wisdom, narrative pleasure, and a diversity of other things within this orany book’s contents.
Download or read book Early English Poetic Culture and Meter written by Lindy Brady and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.
Download or read book Language Sign and Gender in Beowulf written by Gillian R. Overing and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a book about what Beowulf means but how it means and how the reader participates in the process of meaning construction; to this end, it is a bringing together of contemporary critical theory and Old English poetry. Overing's primary aim is to address the poem on its own terms, to trace and develop an interpretive strategy consonant with the terms of its difference from all other poems. Beowulf's arcane structure describes cyclical repetitions and patterned intersections of themes that baffle a linear perspective; the structure suggests instead the irresolution and dynamism of deconstructionist freeplay of textual elements.
Download or read book Narration and Hero written by Victor Millet and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early middle ages vernacular aristocratic traditions of heroic narration were firmly established in Western and Northern Europe. Although there are regional, linguistic and formal differences, one can observe a number of similarities. Oral literature disseminates a range of themes that are shared by narratives in most parts of the continent. In all the European regions, this tradition of heroic narration came into contact with Christianity, which led to modifications. Similar processes of adaptation and transformation can be traced everywhere in this field of early European vernacular narrative. But with the increasing specialization of academic fields over the last half century, inter-disciplinary dialogue has become increasingly difficult. The volume is a contribution to renew the inter-disciplinary dialogue about common themes, topics and motifs in Nordic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature, and about the different methodologies to explore them.
