2.1.

Old English Literature:

General Remarks

• Some 30,000 lines of OE poetry have

come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times
• Their alliterative form appears, with minor
modification, in the oldest poetic remains
of other early Germanic languages, such
as Old Icelandic
• Certain features of its diction, even verse
formulas and themes, are similarly shared
and betray a common Germanic
inheritance
• In England itself the earliest poetry of the
Anglo-Saxon settlers was necessarily
composed orally
• It was often sung or chanted to the
accompaniment of a stringed instrument
• Despite the introduction of writing, oral
composition was practiced throughout the
period
• Writing as a literary art was introduced
among the Anglo-Saxons in the
seventh century by missionaries from
the Mediterranean world
• Englishmen were engaged in literary
pursuits, writing in Latin or English,
prose or verse, soon after the
Conversion
• Thus we have some four and a half
centuries of writings in OE before the
Norman Conquest
• Poetic discourse in OE is marked by the use of
poetic vocabulary.
• Many OE words are found only in verse with
the frequent occurrence of hapax legomenon
• Everything in OE verse promotes the use of a
wide variety of poetic terms
• The need to multiply poetic diction
prompts the widespread use of
apposition as rhetorical device
• Much of the appeal of poetic vocabulary to
the Anglo-Saxons derived from its
traditional nature: poetic words are
mostly archaic or dialectal terms that
have passed out of use
• They evoke the better world of days gone
by
• The poets also continually coined
new poetic terms by the method of
compounding, or the combining of
two words to express new or
complex concepts
• This is a vital process of word
formation in all the Germanic
languages to this day—English
examples are battleship and
barefoot
• A particular type of compound is
characteristic of the traditional diction of
heroic verse:
• neither element of the compound refers
literally to the thing denoted, but meaning is
derived from the juxtaposition of terms in a
metaphoric or metonymic process
• For example, feorh-hus is literally “life-
house,” the dwelling place of the spirit, and
thus the body
• Compounds of this sort are known as
kennings or kenningar
• So conservative are the traditions of OE
verse composition that the formal
properties of Cædmon’s Hymn, composed
between 657 and 680, are
indistinguishable from those of The Battle
of Brunanburh, written between 937 and
955
• As a consequence of this compositional
uniformity, in conjunction with the Anglo-
Saxon practice of anonymity, most OE
poems cannot be dated even to a
particular century or two
• Most OE poetry is preserved in
manuscripts datable to the second half
of the tenth century, the time of the
Benedictine reform, when monastic life
was revitalized throughout England
• Scribes did not always treat vernacular
texts in verse the way they did texts in
Latin, but being familiar with poetic
traditions, they sometimes recomposed
the poems as they copied them
• The result is the virtual assurance that the OE
poetic texts known to us must contain many
manuscript readings that were never intended
by those who first wrote them down