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This book claims to be concerned with Old English poetry in its social context. The first half considers the relationship of the poet to his audience on the one hand; on the other to the world he describes. So the emphasis is on performance, on the varieties of poetic authority, and on the kinds of abstraction from the real world which the poet chooses to make. The second half of the book is about the style and structure of the poems.
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The Art and Background of Old English Poetry The Art and Background of Old English Poetry Barbara C. Raw Edward Arnold © Barbara C. Raw 1978 First published 1978 by Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 25 Hill Street, London W iX 8LL British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Raw, Barbara Catherine The art and background of Old English poetry. I. Anglo-Saxon poetry— History and criticism I. Title 829'. i PR201 ISBN 0-7131-6100-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. Filmset in ‘Monophoto’ Baskerville io on 1 1 pt by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk and printed in Great Britain by Fletcher & Son Ltd, Norwich Contents Introduction 1 The manuscripts of Old English poetry: the material and its limitations i Poets and poetry 2 3 4 The art of poetry The poet and his audience The poet and his world 11 30 45 Poetic art andform 5 6 7 Poetic form Narrative method Rhythm and style 65 82 97 Epilogue 8 Private poetry 123 Bibliography Index 133 140 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Old English poetry are taken from The Anglo-Saxon poetic records, edited by G. P. Krapp and E. van K . Dobbie (New York 1931-53), 6 volumes, by kind permission of Columbia University Press. Footnotes have been limited to specific references; books and ar ticles which have influenced the work in a more general way are listed in the Bibliography. The translations of the verse passages are in tended to be literal rather than elegant; they are included simply as an aid to readers with a limited knowledge of Old English. Introduction i The manuscripts of Old English poetry: the material and its limitations The only poetry which has survived from the six hundred years be tween the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the mid-fifth century and their defeat by the Normans in the mid-eleventh is some 30,000 lines, considerably less than Chaucer’s total output in verse. The main sources are four large manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period: the Vercelli and Exeter books which date from the second half of the tenth century, the Beowulf manuscript from about the year 1000, and the Junius manuscript of the second quarter of the eleventh century.1 A few isolated poems have been preserved in liturgical or historical manuscripts. O f the four main manuscripts only one, the Junius manuscript, seems to have been written according to a coherent plan. The original design was for a lavishly illustrated copy of three Old Testament poems, Genesis, Exodus and Daniel, probably a presentation copy. The material in this first section of the manuscript, which includes the stories of the creation and fall of man, of Noah and Abraham, the crossing of the Red Sea and the saving of the three youths from the fiery furnace, corresponds very closely to the Breviary readings during Lent and to the prophecies read during the vigil service of Easter, and this suggests that the book may have been intended for reading dur ing Lent. The poems are divided into fifty-six numbered sectio