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Author: Geoffrey Russom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1998-03-05
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 0521593409
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This 1998 book is a clear account of early Germanic alliterative verse and how it was treated by the Beowulf poet.
Author: R. D. Fulk
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2015-08-12
Total Pages: 489
ISBN-13: 1512802220
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In A History of Old English Meter, R. D. Fulk offers a wide-ranging reference on Anglo-Saxon meter. Fulk examines the evidence for chronological and regional variation in the meter of Old English verse, studying such linguistic variables as the treatment of West Germanic parasite vowels, contracted vowels, and short syllables under secondary and tertiary stress, as well as a variety of supposed dialect features. Fulk's study of such variables points the way to a revised understanding of the role of syllable length in the construction of early Germanic meters and furnishes criteria for distinguishing dialectal from poetic features in the language of the major Old English poetic codices. On this basis, it is possible to draw conclusions about the probable dialect origins of much verse, to delineate the characteristics of at least four discrete periods in the development of Old English meter, and with some probability to assign to them many of the longer poems, such as Genesis A, Beowulf, and the works of Cynewulf. A History of Old English Meter will be of interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon, historians of the English language, Germanic philologists, and historical linguists.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-05-16
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 1501708279
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Matthias Friedrich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2020-11-23
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 3110701626
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire’s successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.
Author: Seiichi Suzuki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2023-05-22
Total Pages: 764
ISBN-13: 3110788063
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Old English Genesis is the sole illustrated Anglo-Saxon poem. In full appreciation of this unique concurrent execution of visualization and versification in a single manuscript, this multidisciplinary work explores the pictorial (Vol. 1) and the metrical (Vol. 2) organization from both synchronic–structural and diachronic–comparative perspectives. Among the most significant findings of each volume are: The first twenty-two images in the Old English Genesis originated on the whole from the Touronian Bibles; and the underlying classical Old English and Old Saxon meters were interactively reshaped through mutual adaptation and recomposition aimed at their firm integration into a synthesized Old English Genesis. While each part is solidly embedded in the respective scholarly tradition and pursues its own disciplinary concerns and problematics, vigorous formal and cognitive reasoning and theorizing run commonly through both. By way of mutual corroboration and integration, the twin volumes eventually converge on the hypothesis that the earliest portion of the extant Old English Genesis (lines 1–966) derived from the corresponding episodes of an illustrated Touronian Old Saxon Genesis in both pictorial and metrical terms.
Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 0859917665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.
Author: Michael Getty
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2002-01-01
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 3110905418
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book presents a novel treatment of the metre of Beowulf, an Old English epic poem of uncertain date and origin which is nonetheless considered one of the gems of Germanic Alliterative Verse. Building on recent advances in generative linguistics, the analysis presented in this book offers compelling explanations for a wide range of metrical phenomena that have been observed but only poorly understood for over a century.
