A.

History of Old English Literature

Old English literature (sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon literature) encompasses
literature written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th
century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cdmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th
century according to Bede, is often considered the oldest extant poem in English, whereas the later
poem, The Grave is one of the final poems written in Old English, and presents a transitional text
between Old and Middle English.Likewise, the Peterborough Chronicle continues until the 12th
century.
The poem Beowulf, which often begins the traditional canon of English literature, is the most
famous work of Old English literature. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has also proven significant for
historical study, preserving a chronology of early English history. Alexander Souter names the
commentary on Paul's epistles by Pelagius "the earliest extant work by a British author"
In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of: sermons and saints' lives,
biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles and
narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works on grammar, medicine,
geography; and poetry. In all there are over 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, of which
about 189 are considered "major".

B. Scholarship
Old English literature has gone through different periods of research; in the 19th and early 20th
centuries the focus was on the Germanic and pagan roots that scholars thought they could detect in
Old English literature. Later, on account of the work of Bernard F. Hupp, the influence of
Augustinian exegesis was emphasised. Today, along with a focus upon paleography and the physical
manuscripts themselves more generally, scholars debate such issues as dating, place of origin,
authorship, and the connections between Anglo-Saxon culture and the rest of Europe in the Middle
Ages, and literary merits.

C. Extant manuscripts

A large number of manuscripts remain from the AngloSaxon period, with most written during its last 300 years (9th
to 11th centuries), in both Latin and the vernacular. There
were considerable losses of manuscripts as a result of the
Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Scholarly
study of the language began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth
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when Matthew Parker and others obtained whatever

manuscripts they could. Old English manuscripts have been
highly prized by collectors since the 16th century, both for

their historic value and for their aesthetic beauty of uniformly spaced letters and decorative
elements.
There are four major poetic manuscripts:

The Junius manuscript, also known as the man hunt, is an illustrated collection of
poems on biblical narratives.

The Exeter Book, is an anthology, located in the Exeter Cathedral since it was donated
there in the 11th century.

The Vercelli Book, contains both poetry and prose; it is not known how it came to be
in Vercelli.

The Beowulf Manuscript (British Library Cotton Vitellius A. xv), sometimes called
the Nowell Codex, contains prose and poetry, typically dealing with monstrous
themes, including Beowulf.

Seven major scriptoria produced a good deal of Old English manuscripts: Winchester, Exeter,
Worcester, Abingdon, Durham, and two Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St.
Augustine's Abbey; regional dialects include: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon
(the last being the main dialect). Some Old English survives on parchment, stone structures,
and other ornate objects.

D. Old English Poetry

All this poetry was composed in effectively the same meter. The metrical unit is the
rhythmic phrase (half-line), usually of two stresses, linked into pairs by alliteration. Endrhyme is hardly ever used, and the meter is not syllable-counting. Although it is theoretically
very different from most later poetry, it feels in most respects natural and immediate to a
modern ear when spoken aloud.
Some poems recount or refer to inherited heroic legend. Much else is religious. Some of
this is "public" poetry, fairly obviously intended to edify its audience; other religious poems
seem rather to be private and personal meditations on the human condition. A few poems deal
with events of recent history, whether as propaganda or memorial. Some, such as the Riddles,
seem to be primarily intended for entertainment, although they come from a learned, Latin
tradition. Not all surviving Old English poetry is particularly good. Some poems, versified
saints' lives or versified translations of books of the Bible, have little or no present-day
interest other than for specialists. But some poems still speak very directly to modern readers,
for instance, "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," often paired and often translated. They give
an intense sense of weary longing in the midst of transience, desolation and darkness,
transmuted into a hungry quest for enlightenment.
E. Old English Prose
The amount of surviving Old English prose is much greater than the amount of poetry. Of the
surviving prose, the majority consists of sermons and translations of religious works that were
composed in Latin. The division of early medieval written prose works into categories of "Christian"
and "secular", as below, is for convenience's sake only, for literacy in Anglo-Saxon England was
largely the province of monks, nuns, and ecclesiastics (or of those laypeople to whom they had taught
the skills of reading and writing Latin and/or Old English). Old English prose first appears in the 9th
century, and continues to be recorded through the 12th century as the last generation of scribes,
trained as boys in the standardised West Saxon before the Conquest, died as old men.

1. Christian prose
The most widely known secular author of Old English was King Alfred the Great (849899), who
translated several books, many of them religious, from Latin into Old English. Alfred, wanting to
restore English culture, lamented the poor state of Latin education:

So general was [educational] decay in England that there were very few on this side of the
Humber who could...translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not
many beyond the Humber
Pastoral Care, introduction
Alfred proposed that students be educated in Old English, and those who excelled should go
on to learn Latin. Alfred's cultural program produced the following translations: Gregory the
Great's The Pastoral Care, a manual for priests on how to conduct their duties; The
Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius; and The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine. Alfred the
Great was also responsible for a translation of fifty Psalms into Old English.
Other important Old English translations include: Historiae adversum paganos by Orosius, a
companion piece for St. Augustine's The City of God; the Dialogues of Gregory the Great;
and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
lfric of Eynsham, wrote in the late 10th and early 11th century. He was the greatest and
most prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, which were copied and adapted for use well
into the 13th century. He translated the first six books of the Bible (Old English Hexateuch),
and glossed and translated other parts of the Bible. His Lives of Saints in the Julius
manuscript contains Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Eustace, and
Saint Euphrosyne. lfric also wrote an Old English work on time-reckoning, and pastoral
letters.
In the same category as Aelfric, and a contemporary, was Wulfstan II, archbishop of York.
His sermons were highly stylistic. His best known work is Sermo Lupi ad Anglos in which he
blames the sins of the English for the Viking invasions. He wrote a number of clerical legal
texts Institutes of Polity and Canons of Edgar.
One of the earliest Old English texts in prose is the Martyrology, information about saints and
martyrs according to their anniversaries and feasts in the church calendar. It has survived in
six fragments. It is believed to date from the 9th century by an anonymous Mercian author.
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The oldest collections of church sermons is the Blickling homilies, found in a 10th-century
manuscript.
There are a number of saint's lives prose works; beyond those written by Aelfric are the prose
life of Saint Guthlac (Vercelli Book), the life of Saint Margaret and the life of Saint Chad.
There are four lives in the Julius manuscript: Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Saint Mary of
Egypt, Saint Eustace and Saint Euphrosyne.
The Wessex Gospels are a full translation of the four gospels into a West Saxon dialect of Old
English, produced about 990. The Old English Gospel of Nicodemus manuscripts date from
the 11th century AD. Other translations include "...the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Vindicta
salvatoris, Vision of Saint Paul and the Apocalypse of Thomas".
One of the largest bodies of Old English text is found in the legal texts collected and saved by
the religious houses. These include many kinds of texts: records of donations by nobles;
wills; documents of emancipation; lists of books and relics; court cases; guild rules. All of
these texts provide valuable insights into the social history of Anglo-Saxon times, but are also
of literary value. For example, some of the court case narratives are interesting for their use
of rhetoric.
2. Secular prose

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably started in the time of King Alfred the Great and
continued for over 300 years as a historical record of Anglo-Saxon history.
A single example of a Classical romance has survived, it is a fragment of the story of
Apollonius of Tyre, from the 11th century.
A monk who was writing in Old English at the same time as Aelfric and Wulfstan was
Byrhtferth of Ramsey, whose books Handboc and Manual were studies of mathematics and
rhetoric.
Aelfric wrote two neo-scientific works, Hexameron and Interrogationes Sigewulfi, dealing
with the stories of Creation. He also wrote a grammar and glossary in Old English called
Latin, later used by students interested in learning Old French because it had been glossed in
Old French.

There are many surviving rules and calculations for finding feast days, and tables on
calculating the tides and the season of the moon.
In the Nowell Codex is the text of The Wonders of the East which includes a remarkable map
of the world, and other illustrations. Also contained in Nowell is Alexander's Letter to
Aristotle. Because this is the same manuscript that contains Beowulf, some scholars speculate
it may have been a collection of materials on exotic places and creatures.
There are a number of interesting medical works. There is a translation of Apuleius's
Herbarium with striking illustrations, found together with Medicina de Quadrupedibus. A
second collection of texts is Bald's Leechbook, a 10th-century book containing herbal and
even some surgical cures. A third collection, known as the Lacnunga, includes many charms
and incantations.
Anglo-Saxon legal texts are a large and important part of the overall corpus. By the 12th
century they had been arranged into two large collections (see Textus Roffensis). They include
laws of the kings, beginning with those of Aethelbert of Kent, and texts dealing with specific
cases and places in the country. An interesting example is Gerefa which outlines the duties of
a reeve on a large manor estate. There is also a large volume of legal documents related to
religious houses.
F. Reception of Old English

Old English literature did not disappear in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. Many
sermons and works continued to be read and used in part or whole up through the 14th
century, and were further catalogued and organised. During the Reformation, when monastic
libraries were dispersed, the manuscripts were collected by antiquarians and scholars. These
included Laurence Nowell, Matthew Parker, Robert Bruce Cotton and Humfrey Wanley. In
the 17th century there began a tradition of Old English literature dictionaries and references.
The first was William Somner's Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (1659).
Lexicographer Joseph Bosworth began a dictionary in the 19th century which was completed
by Thomas Northcote Toller in 1898 called An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which was updated
by Alistair Campbell in 1972.
Because Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down,
nineteenth-century scholars searching for the roots of European "national culture" (see
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Romantic Nationalism) took special interest in studying Anglo-Saxon literature, and Old
English became a regular part of university curriculum. Since WWII there has been
increasing interest in the manuscripts themselvesNeil Ker, a paleographer, published the
groundbreaking Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon in 1957, and by 1980
nearly all Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts were in print. J.R.R. Tolkien is credited with creating
a movement to look at Old English as a subject of literary theory in his seminal lecture
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936).
Old English literature has had some influence on modern literature, and notable poets have
translated and incorporated Old English poetry. Well-known early translations include
William Morris's translation of Beowulf and Ezra Pound's translation of The Seafarer. The
influence of the poetry can be seen in modern poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden.
Tolkien adapted the subject matter and terminology of heroic poetry for works like The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and John Gardner wrote Grendel, which tells the story of
Beowulf's opponent from his own perspective.
More recently other notable poets such as Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov
and U. A. Fanthorpe have all shown an interest in Old English poetry. In 1987 Denise
Levertov published a translation of Caedmon's Hymn under her title "Caedmon" in the
collection Breathing the Water. This was then followed by Seamus Heaney's version of the
poem "Whitby-sur-Moyola" in his The Spirit Level (1996) Paul Muldoon's "Caedmon's
Hymn" in his Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and U. A. Fanthorpe's "Caedmon's Song" in her
Queuing for the Sun (2003). These translations differ greatly from one another, just as
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (1999) deviates from earlier, similar projects. Heaney uses Irish
diction across Beowulf to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem,
foregrounding his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render (the poem) ever more 'willable
forward/again and again and again.'"