Old English or Anglo-Saxon Literature

The term Anglo-Saxon covers the early, foundational period in the formation of the English
people, language and culture, initiated by the Anglo-Saxon conquest the invasion and
occupation, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, of the former Roman colony of Britannia by
the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic peoples generically referred to as the AngloSaxons. The alternative term of Old English has come to be used in literary and cultural
studies only in the 19th century, in order to eliminate any possible suggestion of discontinuity
between Anglo-Saxon and modern English language and culture, thus including the AngloSaxon period as a first and foundational stage in development of English culture and letters.
The development of Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture
The Anglo-Saxon invaders occupied the southern and eastern part of the island, displacing the
largely Romanized and Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain, who retreated to the more
confined, mountain-guarded areas of the west (Wales and Cornwall) and north (the Highlands
of Scotland). The old Roman order and the native Celtic civilization disintegrated rapidly in
front of this new and massive colonization, even though there is a whole mythical tradition
about fierce Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, supposedly led by the
legendary King Arthur. But the islands Germanic colonization brought with it a civilization
that quickly took root in the new soil. This is evident in the abundance of place-names of
Anglo-Saxon origin, now essentially English place-names, which attest their massive
ownership of homesteads and cultivated lands, and the extent to which they imposed their
language in their areas of settlement. Of course, alongside their language, they brought with
them their pagan beliefs and worldview, and their characteristic warrior traditions and social
organization forms.
At first, their social formations were essentially tribal organizations, based on the
cohesion of extended family clans and ties of kinship, grouped around a lord who ruled with
absolute authority, supported by a class of faithful warriors, or liegemen/retainers, bound to
their leader by a strict code of loyalty and mutual duty. Of course, the various tribes were
likely to be conquered by the more powerful ones, and soon became united into small
kingdoms: Wessex, West Mercia, Northumbria. The kingdom of Wessex, with Winchester as
its capital, became the largest, the most powerful and influential one, reaching the peak of its
development in the 9th century, under King Alfred the Great (848-99), who ruled over a large
part of what was to become the English people and nation, then occupying the largest part of
the fertile arable land in southern Britain. Actually, in his writings, King Alfred, who was also

a man of wide learning and culture, refers to the language of his people as englisc. This was
a language that had certainly evolved since the sixth century and become, despite its regional
dialectal variations, into a common language now distinct from the Germanic dialects brought
to the island in the 6th century, as well as from the contemporary Saxon tongue of the
continental Germans. More importantly, this incipient englisc people, language and culture
had been united and catalyzed not only by a common form of speech and common traditions,
but also by the Christian religion, which had been instrumental in establishing the propitious
setting and matrix for the development of the kingdoms cultural life.
Christianity in Anglo-Saxon culture
The process of re-Christianization, or rather the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxon peoples of
Britain began at the end of the 6 th century, in AD 596, when a group of Benedictine
missionaries, led by Augustine, were sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great. The pagan
inhabitants were successfully converted and received Christianity by way of mass baptisms.
But once its evangelizing work was done, the missions preoccupation was to secure the
continuance of its success by establishing the necessary places of worship and Christian
learning necessary for perpetuating and reinforcing the ethos of the new faith. The
Benedictines established an impressive chain of monasteries and seats of ecclesiastical
learning, which linked Britain to the Latin civilization of the Roman Church and to the
incipient Christian national cultures of Western Europe.
Poetry
The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with
them the common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for
panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after the
conversion of King Aethelberht I of Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that
the English wrote poetry in their own language. But St. Bede the Venerable, in his
HistoriaecclesiasticagentisAnglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), wrote
that in the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd, was inspired in a
dream to compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed verses
based on the Scripture, which was expounded for him by the monks at Streaneshalch (now
called Whitby), but only the Hymn of Creation survives. Caedmon legitimized the native
verse form by adapting it to Christian themes. Others, following his example, gave England a
body of vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before the end of the 1st millennium.
Alliterative verse

Virtually all Old English poetry is written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a
syntactical break, or caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration
linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The
poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying
standard epithets to various classes of characters, and depicting scenery with such recurring
images as the eagle and the wolf, which wait during battles to feast on carrion, and ice and
snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems such formulas, far
from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from which
poets could draw. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for
a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g., swan-road used to name the sea); and
variation, the repeating of a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new
level of meaning. That these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of literary
production suggests the extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture.
Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp
accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard. Often bold and strong, but also mournful
and elegiac in spirit, this poetry emphasizes the sorrow and ultimate futility of life and the
helplessness of humans before the power of fate. Almost all this poetry is composed without
rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed syllables alternating with an
indeterminate number of unstressed ones. This line strikes strangely on ears habituated to the
usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmical unit, or foot, theoretically consists of a constant
number (either one or two) of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow any stressed
syllable. Another unfamiliar but equally striking feature in the formal character of Old English
poetry is structural alliteration, or the use of syllables beginning with similar sounds in two or
three of the stresses in each line.

Anglo-Saxon poetry
The experiential and philosophical poetics of the Anglo-Saxons informs a complex,
sophisticated poetry. It speaks of a male-centred, tribal society structured by the bond between
the lord and his liegemen, of the virtues of heroism, and the ineluctability of wyrd (fate).
Deeply set in the social, communal space of the tribe or kingdom, poetry is an
essentially public, communal art, cultivated by skilled bards. It required the learning of rules

of diction and versification. The bard, or scop (from the verb scieppan, meaning to create,
shape), also known as a gleeman, an entertainer (from gleo-man), had to undergo up to 20
years of training. The prosody is characterized by 2 double stress half lines, with the strict
observance of stress, caesura and the wide use of alliteration. The creations chanted at public
festivities are based on the solemnity of repetitions that punctuated the recitation.
Improvisation was an important skill of the Scop or Sceop. Beowulf contains repeated
references to the clear song of the scop, whose dignity is that of a thane of the kings.
Anglo-Saxon poetic forms were preserved in diverse ways. There are 30,000 lines of
written verse which survived in a collection of manuscripts known as Junius, Vitellius,
Vercelli manuscripts and the Exeter Book. There are also numerous Runic alphabet
engravings (the writan means to engrave), which served as mnemonic inscriptions, many
based on the trope of prosopopoea, or personification. Poetry was linked to the recording and
perpetuation of the communal history, its memory verses being actually live records of laws,
genealogies and the mythology of the Thule. Other popular forms were the gnomes,
instructive fables mixing human experience and fairytales. Charms were short, magically
endowed creations based on the use of hypnotic repetition and imperatives.

Epic poetry. Beowulf

Epic poems were the artistic hallmark of a heroic society taking pride in communal sagas of
survival, recited by its minstrels during the festive gathering of warriors in the mead-hall.
They sing of an ordered society, ruled by a developed sense of ornament, tradition,
moralizing, assimilation. A surviving saga known as the Legends of Volkerwanderung (4-6th
c.) speaks of the vagaries of Germanic peoples and reflects on the experience of loyalty,
revenge, treachery, exile. The Battle of Finnesburgh narrates adventures of the Danes. Their
actions predominate in this continental saga of warring with no clear motivation, despite the
reflections which suggest a Christian moral perspective.
The only complete Germanic epic that has come down to us is Beowulf (1st half of 8th
c.) a long heroic epos full of compelling portraits and feelings of grief, loss, compassion,
gratitude, exile, sadness. The surviving 3138 alliterative metres (500 AD) are informed by
Scandinavian history and legend, telling a story of monster-slaying in Scandinavia. Beowulf
narrates the battles of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe in what is now southern
Sweden), against the monstrous Grendel, Grendels mother, and a fire-breathing dragon.

The poem can be seen in the 10 th century manuscript Cotton Vitellius A. XV in the
British Museum. It is believed to be pre-Christian composition transcribed by a monastic
scribe so as to give it a Christian frame of reference, postdating the composition by 3-4
hundred years which is a theory no longer tenable, though.
The anonymous Christian narrator finds a pagan world of heroism compatible with
Christian virtues. The recognizable English elements are the harp and the Kings council (the
Witan). The poem draws together two different ontological and epistemological strands
pagan and Christian and the elements of action, reflection and narration mirror the
progressive transition to Christianity. This double perspective is voiced through the
characters pagan beliefs, intermingled and qualified by those of the Christian narrator. The
systems of belief coexisting in the poem alternately foreground Fate and God, while the
narrative moralization about a truly ideal hero sacrificing himself in the confrontation
between good and evil juxtaposes the pagan and Christian models of the hero and saviour.
All these qualities of form and spirit are exemplified in Beowulf. Beginning and
ending with the funeral of a great king, and composed against a background of impending
disaster, it describes the exploits of a Scandinavian cultural hero, Beowulf, in destroying the
monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. In these sequences Beowulf
is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a saviour of the people. The Old Germanic virtue
of mutual loyalty between leader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the
aged Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert
him in this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry with which fragments of other heroic
tales are incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to
symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized.
Another feature of Beowulf is the weakening of the sense of the ultimate power of
arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That
feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved
by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early
conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities.

The fragile political and social order imposed on their dangerous world by the
Scandinavian chieftains is confronted with supernatural forces beyond their knowledge and
control, represented by the monster Grendel and his kind. His identification with the spawn of
Cain unmistakeably harks back to the Christian representation of the source of evil on earth.

Among the forces undoing human order, Grendel is identified as Godesandsaca, the enemy
of God. Opposed to him is the selfless, self-sacrificing hero and his faithful warriors. The
ensuing parallels with the New Testaments Saviour allow a reading in which supra-biblical
concepts of the hero lend themselves to interpretations of Christs acts and the missions and
martyrdoms of his saints.
Like any foundational epos of a cultural space, this epic poem of the Scandinavian
ethos is aimed at the narrating and celebrating of heroic achievements. Its geographical and
cultural scope is larger than that of other similar epics, but its more loosely structured
accounts of action and location render it less coherent in its enunciation of cultural rooting
and settling. Though casually episodic, it appears as less tight than the poems of Homer or
Virgil. The descriptions of place and character, as well as the protagonists speeches, are
filtered through the narrators qualifying perspective, who, as do the heroes themselves,
mediates between settled and unsettled cultures.
The poem metaphorically reflects on the infinite mysteries of the natural world and its
arcane threats and dangers, whose ways are hard to decipher in the confused signs, portents,
meanings confronting men. King Hrothgar, the powerful creator of the majestic hall Heorot, a
symbol of man-made material splendour, is confronted with the brute force of the man-eating
Grendel. The ordering power of human creation and its works of art is humbled by the
knowledge of the limited demiurgic power of humanity before the destructive force of
overpowering, mysterious nature. Earthly glory bows to the whim of heavenly will. Human
failure is suggested by reference to mans fall, and the Kings feud with his son-in-law mirrors
the Cains mortal sin.
As the king and his warriors prove helpless victims of monstrous forces, Hygelac, who
rules Geatland in southern Sweden, send to the rescue his nephew Beowulf, a mighty Geatish
hero. Beowulf crosses the sea with his 40 thanes to relieve the Danes after 12 years of terror.
Beowulf has three encounters with the otherworldly, occasions for the narrator to expound on
the heroic code, sternness and pride of the Geats. The hero shows his worth in bare-handed
confrontation, and the scop compares him to the valiant Sigmund of Germanic legends. His
journey towards the monsters mother den is a metaphor for all the pains associated with
mans sallying into the unknown outside his familiar world. These are also motifs
characteristic of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon poetics: the horrors of migration and loss.
The cumulative effect of the evocations of desert, darkness, wilderness, emptiness heightens
the sense of the dangers facing the outcast, the exile, the outsider. The atavistic fears of the
unknown are embodied by the monsters.

In the second part of the poem, following his heroic slaying of the monsters, Beowulf
rises to the dignity of king of the Geats. His people are also threatened by a pestering creature
who holds their gold. The king kills the treasure-keeping dragon with his faithful Wiglaf, but
is mortally wounded. His heroic, sacrificial death sanctions his unfailing bravery, and the
funeral he is given, the ceremonial pyre and the high barrow proclaim the passing of a
matchless hero. The pagan death ritual ship suggests his transition into the immortality of
deeds, to be perpetuated in the formulaic, ritualistic records of his world genealogy.
The poems proliferating stories broaden the perspective on civilization and tradition,
opening into a world of strong values, of human communion, blessed with the warmth and
comradeship of the mead-hall, the social haven of home and kin, protecting one from the
dangerous outside. The poem thoroughly reflects an ordered society of decorum and
ceremonial, bound by ties of loyalty for the lord providing protection, nourishment, a place in
the masculine hierarchy of mutual ties and obligations, with its codes of social and military
loyalty. The lord is the worthy defender of his people, while the warriors are bound in loyalty
to their ring-giver, gold-friend and founder of feasts as the lord is variously called in the
text. The story is haunted by premonitions of fate. Fatefully betrayed by his cowardly
liegemen, Beowulf gives his life for his people, but his death leaves a power-vacuum that can
only bring more woe. The poem ends in mourning for Beowulf, interred in a barrow with his
entire armoury, proclaiming his heroism. The description of the funeral rites and interment
customs shows a marked similarity with the funeral barrows full of artefacts discovered at
Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. The poems last lines evoke a pre-Christian spectacle, but the
stress on mortality and the determining nature of wyrd, but to its Christian audience it could
also have sent a message of heroic submission to a benevolent, almighty God.
Beowulf is an integrative cultural synthesis informed by balance and oppositions, by
the binaries of good and evil attending human destiny on earth: social protection/alien nature,
ends/beginnings; rising/setting, youth/age, nature/civilization, familiar space/wilderness,
peace/anger, generosity/selfishness, personal/collective achievement, order/disorder/chaos.
The text echoes with bitter reminders of lifes transience, through its abounding images of
death, temporal existence, mortality, time. An important moral admonition regards the danger
of gold-hoarding, and the futility of greed in front of death. The stress on the treasures
immortality suggests not so much the endurance of gold and material artefacts, but reverence
for the memorial value of the work of old, of the ancestors testimony of their engagement
with their world trough art and creation art. Riches in themselves hold not a material but a
creative value. The poem is imbued with just pride in civilizations artefacts, illustrated by the

ample descriptions of armours, sculptures, metal work, embroidery, the distinguishing

achievements of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Ultimately, Beowulf resounds with genuine human celebration. Its proliferating stories
tell of earthly joys and sorrows, and the heroism of mans struggles, of his transcendence of
time through creation and art. It also contains allegories of salvation. If Christians are saved
through Christ, the heathen Geats are doomed by Beowulfs death. The poems pervasive
mysticism is evident in its careful numerological patterns, in its cycles of creation and
destruction. There is a constant tension between mythical double mentalities and archetypes
of cosmogonies, apocalypses and the promise of the last judgement.
The solemn, yet lively, conversational tonality of the poem owes to the oral style
devices which beckon to the primary public function of the epic. This is particularly striking
in the recurrent appeal for attention Lo, the mark of orality styles and the art of epic
storytelling. The prosody is informed by sound patterns whose calculated effect was meant to
be achieved when the poem was intoned and chanted to harp accompaniment. Its heavy use of
autonomasia, a complex, compound metaphor used for describing a thing, the so-called
kenning (land-dwellers, bone-frame, houses mouth, heath-rover, i.e. stag) is specific to the
Anglo-Saxon poetic sensibility. The account also contains some of the best elegiac verse in
the language, and, by setting marvellous tales against a historical background in which victory
is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the poet gives the whole an elegiac cast.
Beowulf also is one of the best religious poems, not only because of its explicitly Christian
passages but also because Beowulfs monstrous foes are depicted as Gods enemies and
Beowulf himself as Gods champion.
Elegiac and heroic verse
Other heroic narratives are fragmentary. Of The Battle of Finnsburh and
Waldere only enough remains to indicate that, when whole, they must
have been fast-paced and stirring. Of several poems dealing with English
history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most notable is
The Battle of Brunanburh, a panegyric on the occasion of King
Athelstans victory over a coalition of Norsemen and Scots in 937. But the
best historical poem is not from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Battle of
Maldon, which describes the defeat of AldormanByrhtnoth and much of
his army at the hands of Viking invaders in 991, discovers in defeat an
occasion to celebrate the heroic ideal, contrasting the determination of
many of Byrhtnoths thanes to avenge his death or die in the attempt with
the cowardice of others who left the field. The Battle of Maldon (1000)

narrates of the battle of an Essex nobleman against the Vikings around the
year 991. Its heroic style serves the expression of a code of action which
exhorts to martyrdom for the liege-lord King Ethelred and the nation (folc,
foldan), which points to a strong, precocious sense of cultural unity. It also
calls for sacrifice in the name of Christian culture against the pagans.
Minor poetic genres include catalogues (two sets of Maxims and
Widsith, a list of rulers, tribes, and notables in the heroic age), dialogues,
metrical prefaces and epilogues to prose works of the Alfredian period, and
liturgical poems associated with the Benedictine Office.

The elegies
The term elegy is used of Old English poems that lament the loss of worldly goods,
glory, or human companionship. The Wanderer is narrated by a man, deprived of
lord and kinsmen, whose journeys lead him to the realization that there is stability only
in heaven. The Seafarer is similar, but its journey motif more explicitly symbolizes
the speakers spiritual yearnings. Several others have similar themes, and three elegies
The Husbands Message, The Wifes Lament, and Wulf and Eadwacer
describe what appears to be a conventional situation: the separation of husband and
wife by the husbands exile.
Thefewsurviving pieces of lyrical poetry are gathered in a collection of
manuscripts called the Exeter Book, which is kept, as the name indicates, in the
chapter of Exeter Cathedral. The emotional charge and tonality of the poems qualifies
them as elegies, a poetic subgenre informed by expressions of nostalgia and regret for
the better days of bygone times, lamentations for lost life, friends, fortune, privileges,
things and people held dear, in other words for the inexorability of the passage of time,
change, and death.
Even if they are expressions of personal grief, in the Anglo-Saxon elegies,
much as in Beowulf, the key scenes and emotions conveyed concentrate on the ethos
of communal life rather than the singularity of personal experience. Old English poets
produced a number of more or less lyrical poems of shorter length, which do not
contain specific Christian doctrine and which evoke the Anglo-Saxon sense of the
harshness of circumstance and the sadness of the human lot. The Wanderer and The
Seafarer are among the most beautiful of this group of Old English poems.
Deors Lament tells a story of a bards loss of his lords patronage. It
describes the links of loyalty between patron and vassal, and the misfortunes of the
displacement attending disfavour. The poem is a first-person lament of the former scop

now supplanted by a rival. It offers a masterfully conducted instruction in selfconsolation. It begins by offering five examples of misfortune, in which time always
healed the heroes suffering. The echoed refrain That evil passed. And also shall this
covers the dual vision of Anglo-Saxon belief, from pagan endurance of fate to
Christian faith in divine providence. Deors Lament bridges the gap between the
elegy and the heroic poem, for in it a poet laments the loss of his position at court by
alluding to sorrowful stories from Germanic legend.
Widsithreplicates the soliloquy of an imaginary scop, a far-wanderer who
unlocks his word-hoard to describe his journeys among Teutonic peoples, princes,
nations. In depicting his exotic wanderings, he includes references to Jews, Egyptians,
Assyrians, Medes, Persians also mentioned in contexts intended to show a knowledge
of the Bible. He enumerates the rewards he earned and meditates upon the
interdependence between poet and patron.
The Wanderer similarly bemoans a lost lord and patron. It reveals an
alienating vision about the watery wasteland of exile. Sea appears as a disconnecter
from earthbound security, a realm of loneliness, severance, exile. However, the poem
invites to the wisdom of self-comfort and the consolations to be found in wise
patience.
The Seafarer is built on an antithesis between the land and the sea, the realm
of exile and of bitrebreostceare, i.e. bitter breast-sorrow. The feeling of displacement
and loss is literalized through the image of the hlimman sae, iscaldnewaeg, i.e.
pounding sea, ice-cold wave. There is the suggestion of a self-imposed exile, in flight
from the earthly treacherous illusions. The shore seems to represent a transitory
sojourn in an uncertain world, in which only heaven represents mans true home.
The Ruin is an ubisunt type of nostalgic meditation on the relics of past
glory and the insecurity of life on earth. The longing for heavenly resolution ensues
from the speakers musing on the ruins of AquaeSulis (Bath). His wonder at the
former majesty of stone bespeaks the awe of Anglo-Saxons in front of the stone
structures of Roman civilization, which somehow made the invading waves avoid the
Roman settlements. The pervading feeling is that of a temporal exile from vanished
wonders and awe at the ravages of time and wyrd.
The Wifes Lamentreplays thetheme ofbanishment and displacement, this
time in the context of a couples separation due to the husbands social disgrace. The
wife is mourning a banished husband, and deploring the forlornness of loss and
loneliness. The poem is linked to another poem, The Husbands Message.

These poems are remarkable due to their elegiac stress on loss, estrangement,
exile and the transience of early pleasure, but also to their claim to another form of
heroism, mans resilience and resistance in times of adversity.
Other verse forms cultivated by the Anglo-Saxons are riddles. The short poetic
riddles are dense little poems which illustrate a tremendous fascination with the
operation of metaphors. A legendary parable remains that of the metaphor used by
Edwin of Northumbria at the 627 Council, describing mans transitory lot on earth by
comparing it to the disorientation of a sparrow in a hall, whose origins and destination
remain unknown.
Religious verse
Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling
Beowulf in form. At first such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple,
stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of the late 7th
century who was described by the historian and theologian Saint Bede the
Venerable as having received the gift of song from God. Caedmons Hymn
to God the Creator was composed at the monastery of Whitby during the
late 7th century. Later the same type of subject matter was treated in the
more ornate language of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf and his school.
The best of their productions is probably the passionate Dream of the
Rood.
If few poems can be dated accurately, still fewer can be attributed
to particular poets. The most important author from whom a considerable
body of work survives is Cynewulf, who wove his runic signature into the
epilogues of four poems. Aside from his name, little is known of him; he
probably lived in the 9th century in Mercia or Northumbria. His works
include The Fates of the Apostles, a short martyrology. The Fates of the
Apostles, signed in runes by Cynewulf, represents Christs apostles as 12
men of noble heart, described as being as hardy as Nordic heroes. The
Ascension (also called Christ II), a homily and biblical narrative; Juliana, a
saints passion set in the reign of the Roman emperor Maximian (late 3rd
century ad); and Elene, perhaps the best of his poems, which describes the
mission of St. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to recover
Christs cross. Cynewulfs work is lucid and technically elegant; his theme
is the continuing evangelical mission from the time of Christ to the triumph
of Christianity under Constantine. Several poems not by Cynewulf are
associated with him because of their subject matter. These include two
lives of St. Guthlac and Andreas; the latter, the apocryphal story of how St.

Andrew fell into the hands of the cannibalistic (and presumably mythical)
Mermedonians, has stylistic affinities with Beowulf. Andreas also extols a
militant St. Andrew who crosses the sea to rescue St. Matthew. Also in the
Cynewulf group are several poems with Christ as their subject, of which
the most important is The Dream of the Rood, in which the cross speaks
of itself as Christs loyal thane and yet the instrument of his death. This
tragic paradox echoes a recurring theme of secular poetry and at the same
time movingly expresses the religious paradoxes of Christs triumph in
death and humankinds redemption from sin. Several poems of the Junius
Manuscript are based on the Old Testament narratives Genesis, Exodus,
and Daniel. Of these, Exodus is remarkable for its intricate diction and bold
imagery. The fragmentary Judith of the Beowulf Manuscript stirringly
embellishes the story from the Apocrypha of the heroine who led the Jews
to victory over the Assyrians.
The Dream of the Rood offers a highly symbolic vision of Christs
cross. It is centred on a daring, surreal play with paradox and images
metamorphosis. Its being quoted in a runic inscription on the Ruthwell
cross on Scottish border suggests an early date of composition. It records
sudden shifts in the narrators perception of Christs cross. It starts with the
dreamers vision of a gilded cross of victory, a sige beam, worshipped by
angels, which inspires a sense of shame in the early beholder. The
paradoxical appearance of the cross yields an image of sacrifice that is
both glorious and moist with blood. The cross tells the story of a tree made
in to a gallows for the young hero. The cross and the hero are nailed
together, scorned and blooded. Then the cross is discarded, buried and
discovered as the symbol of salvation, glorified in heaven as the best of
signs. This vision instils a sense of joy, worship and wonder in the
dreamer. The speaker appears torn between a heavenly serenity and his
attachment to earth. Heaven is glimpsed as a glorified, royal mead-hall full
of the lords bounty a double image of physical, earthly comfort and the
higher comforts of heavenly grace.The poem plays with Christian
paradoxes, in which the cross is represented as an icon, a sign to be
interpreted and merged with its meaning. A most impressive religious
poem, The Dream of the Rood contains a complex parable of sacrifice and
salvation, as well as the human aspiration for spiritual relief.

The major manuscripts

Most Old English poetry is preserved in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th
centuries. The Beowulf manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose
tracts; the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics, riddles,
didactic poems, and religious narratives; the Junius Manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford)
also called the Caedmon Manuscript, even though its contents are no longer attributed to
Caedmoncontains biblical paraphrases; and the Vercelli Book (found in the cathedral
library in Vercelli, Italy) contains saints lives, several short religious poems, and prose
homilies. In addition to the poems in these books are historical poems in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51150; the 31 Metres included in King Alfred the
Greats translation of Boethiuss De consolationephilosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy);
magical, didactic, elegiac, and heroic poems; and others, miscellaneously interspersed with
prose, jotted in margins, and even worked in stone or metal.

Problems of dating
Few poems can be dated as closely as Caedmons Hymn. King Alfreds compositions fall
into the late 9th century, and Bede composed his Death Song within 50 days of his death on
May 25, 735. Historical poems such as The Battle of Brunanburh (after 937) and The
Battle of Maldon (after 991) are fixed by the dates of the events they commemorate. A
translation of one of Aldhelms riddles is found not only in the Exeter Book but also in an
early 9th-century manuscript at Leiden, Neth. And at least a part of The Dream of the Rood
can be dated by an excerpt carved on the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshire,
Scot.). But in the absence of such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and the
scholarly consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North in the 8th and
9th centuries gave way to uncertainty during the last two decades of the 20th century. Many
now hold that The Wanderer, Beowulf, and other poems once assumed to have been written
in the 8th century are of the 9th century or later. For most poems, there is no scholarly
consensus beyond the belief that they were written between the 8th and the 11th centuries.