The Composition of Old English Poetry PDF Download

Author: H. Momma
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521554817
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.

Author: Hal Momma
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521030762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book offers an imaginative new way of understanding the relationship between syntax and meter in Old English verse. It challenges the view that Old English poetry is composed in loose syntax to compensate for the strict requirements of prosody, such as meter and alliteration. The author proposes a "prosodical" syntax to replace the syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application. She formulates three concise rules that apply to the entire Old English poetic corpus.

Author: Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521375504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book throws light on the debate about the 'orality' or 'literacy' of Old English verse, whether it was transmitted orally or written down.

Author: R.M. Liuzza
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1554811570
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
R.M. Liuzza’s Broadview edition of Beowulf was published at almost exactly the same time as Seamus Heaney’s; in reviewing the two together in July 2000 for The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode concluded that both translations were superior to their predecessors, and that it was impossible to choose between the two: “the less celebrated translator can be matched with the famous one,” he wrote, and “Liuzza’s book is in some respects more useful than Heaney’s.” Ever since, the Liuzza Beowulf has remained among the top sellers on the Broadview list. With this volume readers will now be able to enjoy a much broader selection of Old English poetry in translations by Liuzza. As the collection demonstrates, the range and diversity of the works that have survived is extraordinary—from heartbreaking sorrow to wide-eyed wonder, from the wisdom of old age to the hot blood of battle, and to the deepest and most poignant loneliness. There is breathless storytelling and ponderous cataloguing; there is fervent religious devotion and playful teasing. The poems translated here are meant to provide a sense of some of this range and diversity; in doing so they also offer significant portions of three of the important manuscripts of Old English poetry—the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Exeter Book.

Author:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248473
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 1248

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Book Description
Includes the Junius manuscript, Exeter book, Vercelli book, Beowulf and Judith, metrical psalms of Paris Psalter and the meters of Boethius, poems of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, riddles, charms, and a number of minor additional poems.

Author: Rafat Boryslawski
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
"The art of posing riddles is possibly as old as mankind and spans two apparent extremes which, nevertheless, converge in the riddlic form: that of wisdom and that of play. With this perspective in mind, the author examines the poetic enigmas present in the culture of Anglo-Saxon England, exploring both the Anglo-Latin riddles of Aldhelm and those recorded in the Exeter Book. His study investigates the Old English riddlic texts from a variety of angles, arguing for the possibility of establishing patterns of Anglo-Saxon riddlic composition as such. The author intends to prove that both the Exeter collection and the Aenigmata of Aldhelm are constructed on the grounds of an identifiable structure of interrelations and interdependencies. Additionally, he argues that the riddlic mode of literary representation is also visible in other Anglo-Saxon poetic compositions. The analysis of such an assumption leads to the conclusion that the predilection for the riddle form in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry results from an Old English vision of the Christian world".--BOOKJACKET.

Author: Britt Mize
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442644680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Why is Old English poetry so preoccupied with mental actions and perspectives, giving readers access to minds of antagonists as freely as to those of protagonists? Why are characters sometimes called into being for no apparent reason other than to embody a psychological state? Britt Mize provides the first systematic investigation into these salient questions in Traditional Subjectivities. Through close analysis of vernacular poems alongside the most informative analogues in Latin, Old English prose, and Old Saxon, this work establishes an evidence-based foundation for new thinking about the nature of Old English poetic composition, including the 'poetics of mentality' that it exhibits. Mize synthesizes two previously disconnected bodies of theory – the oral-traditional theory of poetic composition, and current linguistic work on conventional language – to advance our understanding of how traditional phraseology makes meaning, as well as illuminate the political and social dimensions of surviving texts, through attention to Old English poets' impulse to explore subjective perspectives.

Author: Constance Hieatt
Publisher: Bantam Classics
ISBN: 0307434826
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Unique and beautiful, Beowulf brings to life a society of violence and honor, fierce warriors and bloody battles, deadly monsters and famous swords. Written by an unknown poet in about the eighth century, this masterpiece of Anglo-Saxton literature transforms legends, myth, history, and ancient songs into the richly colored tale of the hero Beowulf, the loathsome man-eater Grendel, his vengeful water-hag mother, and a treasure-hoarding dragon. The earliest surviving epic poem in any modern European language. Beowulf is a stirring portrait of a heroic world–somber, vast, and magnificent.

Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501708279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem’s written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf’s analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text’s orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

Author: Thomas A. Bredehoft
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802099459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse re-examines the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition from the eighth to the eleventh centuries and reconsiders the significance of formulaic parallels and the nature of poetic authorship in Old English. Offering a new vision of much of Old English literary history, Thomas A. Bredehoft traces a tradition of 'literate-formulaic' composition in the period and contends that many phrases conventionally considered oral formulas are in fact borrowings or quotations. His identification of previously unrecognized Old English poems and his innovative arguments about the dates, places of composition, influences, and even possible authors for a variety of tenth- and eleventh-century poems illustrate that the failure of scholars to recognize the late Old English verse tradition has seriously hampered our literary understanding of the period. Provocative and bold, Authors, Audiences and Old English Verse has the potential to transform modern understandings of the classical Old English poetic tradition.