The Exeter Book Riddles

The Exeter Book Riddles PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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"The ninety-six Anglo-Saxon riddles in the eleventh-century Exeter Book are poems of great charm, zest, and subtlety. Ranging from natural phenomena (such as icebergs and storms at sea) to animal and bird life, from the Christian concept of the creation to prosaic domestic objects (such as a rake and a pair of bellows), and from weaponry to the peaceful pursuits of music and writing, they are full of sharp observation, earthly humour and, above all, a sense of wonder. The main text of this volume contains Kevin Crossley-Holland's newly-revised translations of seventy-five fascinating and discursive riddles - all those not very badly damaged or impenetrably obscure - while a further sixteen are translated in the notes. These translations are very widely anthologised in Britain and the USA. Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias set some of them to music, Ralph Steadman has illustrated them and Michael Fairfax has incorporated them in his Riddle Sculpture."--BOOK JACKET.

The Anglo-Saxons

The Anglo-Saxons PDF

Author: Marc Morris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 164313535X

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A sweeping and original history of the Anglo-Saxons by national bestselling author Marc Morris. Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters. The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the vikings. It explores how they abandoned their old gods for Christianity, established hundreds of churches and created dazzlingly intricate works of art. It charts the revival of towns and trade, and the origins of a familiar landscape of shires, boroughs and bishoprics. It is a tale of famous figures like King Offa, Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, but also features a host of lesser known characters - ambitious queens, revolutionary saints, intolerant monks and grasping nobles. Through their remarkable careers we see how a new society, a new culture and a single unified nation came into being. Drawing on a vast range of original evidence - chronicles, letters, archaeology and artefacts - renowned historian Marc Morris illuminates a period of history that is only dimly understood, separates the truth from the legend, and tells the extraordinary story of how the foundations of England were laid.

The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons

The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons PDF

Author: George Kumler Anderson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1400879612

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This is a one-volume descriptive history of English literature from the beginning to the Norman Conquest. Emphasis is literary rather than linguistic. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Land and Book

Land and Book PDF

Author: Scott Thompson Smith

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1442644869

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Land and Book places a variety of texts in a dynamic conversation with the procedures and documents of land tenure, showing how its social practice led to innovation across written genres in both Latin and Old English.

Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature PDF

Author: Seth Lerer

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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At the close of the ninth century Alfred the Great lamented the decay of teaming in England and proposed a program of official translations and scholarly study to set his country back on the path of intellectual inquiry. In his Preface to Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, Alfred equated a knowledge of texts with the right governance of self and state. That document, rich in the history of Anglo-Saxon England and suggestive of the uses of literacy, has long been a canonical text in the teaching of the Old English language, and it begins Seth Lerer's study of the place of texts in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon literary imagination. Beowulf, the Old English Daniel, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Exeter Book Riddles--all contain scenes of reading and writing, moments of self-conscious inscription and decipherment that have the power to alter the reader's conception of the mythical and historical, the commonplace and the fantastic. Lerer analyzes these scenes, which, taken in sequence, contribute to a reassessment of Old English literature, its nature and social function. He seeks to understand the workings of the lit-erate imagination in the history and fiction of the Anglo-Saxons. In the course of the book he addresses questions about how a Christian literature evokes its pagan past; about the nature of authority in Anglo-Saxon history, politics, and literature; and he considers how scholarly approaches to these questions--whether by medieval or by modern readers--create canons of literary history. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature is the first book-length study to consider the construction of an early English cultural mythology of writing. Lerer's philological and historical explication of the texts provides new approaches for assessing representations of reading and writing in pre-Conquest literature. His book is a timely and provocative addition to medieval studies.

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems PDF

Author: Daniel Donoghue

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0812294882

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The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system. How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.

Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture

Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture PDF

Author: James Paz

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1526116006

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture uncovers the voice and agency possessed by nonhuman things across Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. It makes a new contribution to ‘thing theory’ and rethinks conventional divisions between animate human subjects and inanimate nonhuman objects in the early Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxon writers and craftsmen describe artefacts and animals through riddling forms or enigmatic language, balancing an attempt to speak and listen to things with an understanding that these nonhumans often elude, defy and withdraw from us. But the active role that things have in the early medieval world is also linked to the Germanic origins of the word, where a þing is a kind of assembly, with the ability to draw together other elements, creating assemblages in which human and nonhuman forces combine.