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stone pillar and almost overwhelms the pagan cannibals of Mermedonia. Despite their differences, all the poems share an interest in two themes, which emerge from the biblical story of the Flood and its theological interpretation: covenant and apocalypse. Genesis A Scholars of Old English poetry generally agree that Genesis A is an early poem, perhaps written as early as the
This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining the translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together.
Riddles at work is the first volume to bring together multiple scholarly voices to explore the vibrant, poetic riddle tradition of early medieval England and its neighbours. The chapters in this book present a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. They treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated in scholarship. The ‘General Introduction’ situates this book in its scholarly context. Part I, ‘Words’, presents philological approaches to early medieval riddles—interpretations rooted in close readings of texts—for riddles work by making readers question what words really mean. While reading carefully may lead to elegant solutions, however, such solutions are not the end of the riddling game. Part II, ‘Ideas’, thus explores how riddles work to make readers think anew about objects, relationships, and experiences, using literary theory to facilitate new approaches. Part III, ‘Interactions’, explores how riddles work through connections with other fields, languages, times, and places. Together, the sixteen chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but many productive paths—some explored here, some awaiting future work.
-Wiglaf’s response is arguably far more logical and reasonable; his companion and leader is wounded and dying and he wants nothing more than to seek immediate help. Such departures from the Old English text in the modern imagination underscore just how strangely illogical it is that healers aren’t ever seen on the battlefield in Old English poetry, how bizarre it appears that Wiglaf did not even attempt to summon healing assistance during Beowulf’s final moments. It should perhaps be unsurprising, then, that the Exeter Book riddle Anhaga
Beowulf and The seafarer that in turn reinforced his hierarchy of their importance. 29 In his 1914 essay ‘The renaissance’, Pound already establishes a hierarchy of Old English poetry within the larger medieval corpus that should constitute the ‘medieval songbook’ for the modern poet, excluding Beowulf : I should want Dante of course, and the Poema del Cid, and the Sea-farer and one passage out of The Wanderer . In fact
incorporate them, the way an artist would try to make a spolium fit into its surroundings. Beowulf always stands apart among the surviving Old English poetry, even though the scholarship often treats it as paradigmatic. It accumulates, even hoards, references to war plunder. Beowulf comes at the end because it follows the thematic and structural patterns described above, but, unlike the religious verse in Borrowed Objects , has a cloud of uncertainty hanging over it: the narrator cannot say what happens to his heroic pagan characters after death. The order of
Modor Monigra (R.84) The phrase dyre cræft sits in the middle of the first of two damaged sections of Modor Monigra (R.84). It struck me, glancing at the poem for the first time, because of its clarity—a small floating raft of remaining language poking up right in the middle of three heavily burned lines. This may be too much to ask of two words, but dyre cræft , or ‘dear craft’, seems to speak to fragmentary Old English poetry as a whole: worthy, glorious, dear, beloved, precious, costly, that which does not come cheap, or easily. Each of these linked
PRINT.indd 113 16/02/2018 13:07 114 Part I: History English by the autumn of 1926 and there are very full accounts of his first encounters with Old English poetry, by now a cornerstone of the Oxford English degree.41 It appears that his childhood reading of Northern European literature had been in Norse mythology and collections of Icelandic stories – in prose, not poetry.42 Chris Jones points out that Auden was ‘the first Saxonizing poet to receive a university education which would have been familiar to most British students of English during the twentieth
sustained attention, or assignments related to variation. Nor, aside from the tendency of translations of Old English poetry as class-preparation to proceed half-line by half-line, can I find any special attention to variation in the language of their translations. This does not mean, however, that their poetics, marked as they are by the heat of Beowulf , are not positioned to help describe the function of variation within the translative perceptual aesthetics elaborated in the previous chapters. As I explore below, Blaser's and Spicer's work implicitly responds to a