Old English Poetry

1.Among the earliest textual insertions in Old English are the pieces of Old English poetry. They are to be found in “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People” written in Latin in the 8^th c. by Bede the Venerable, an English monk. These two pieces are:

5 lines know as “Bede’s Death Song”;

9 lines of a religious poem “Cædmon’s Hymn”.

2.All in all we have about 30 000 lines of OE verse from many poets, but most of them are unknown or anonimuos. The two best known Old English poets are Cædmon and Cynewulf (Northumbrian authors).

3.The topics of Old English poetry:

heroic epic(“Beowulf”, the oldest in the Germanic literature, 7^th c., was written in Mercian or Northumbrian but has come down to us only in a 10^th c. West Saxon copy. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons and features the adventures and fights of the legendary heroes);

lyrical poems(“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, etc. Most of the poems are ascribed to Cynewulf);

religious poems(“Fate of the Apostles” (probably Cædmon), “Dream of the Rood”, etc.).

4.The peculiarities of Old English poetry:

written in Old Germanic alliterative verse:

the lines are not rhymed;

the number of the syllables in a line is free;

the number of stressed syllables in a line is fixes;

the line is usually divided into 2 halves, each half starts with one and the same sound;

this sound may be repeated also in the middle of each half a great number of synonyms (e.g. beorn, secζ, ζuma, wer were all the synonyms of “man”) and metaphorical phrases or compounds describing the qualities or functions of a thing (e.g. hronrād “whale-road” (for “sea”);

bānhūs “bone-house” (for “a person’s body”); hēaþu-swāt “war-sweat” (for “blood”)).

5. Office- hours:

Principal Old English consonants and vowels. Give a comment