Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

1. Heroic behavior and how it is always praised.

2. No love or romance.
3. Formalization and elevated language, often through the literacy devices such as:
Synecdoche: a part used to express the whole, or vice versa. Metonymy: the naming of a
person, institution, or human characteristic by some object or attribute with which is
closely associated. Kenning: a compound of two words in place of another. Litotes: ironic
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statements; an emphatic expression through an ironic statement.

The works were originally oral, and not written (most people could not read or write).
Aristocratic (warriors)
Often repeated names and descriptions.
Three types of poetry: Heroic, lyric, and elegiac.
Rhythm, caesura, alliteration, compounding, and variation are all marks of Anglo-Saxon

oral traditions.
9. All of the stories provided moral structure. Epic poetry was one of the most common
genres of literature at that time.
10. Anglo-Saxon poetry used metaphors, and similes for comparison often.
11. The stories or poems where often filled with violence and gore. Most characters are
driven by fate and their courage was always tested.
12. The Anglo-Saxons spoke Old English
13. Most of the poetry consists of simple sentence structure. The typical Anglo-Saxon
sentence is as simple as it strong.
14. Repetitive thoughts with variation of express was also a popular style of A-S poetry.
15. A-S poetry also uses a great bit of parallelism to provide the get the idea of the moral
structure across.