Old English Literature (450-1066)

English literature does not begin with English as we know it. It begins with a language that looks, on the page, like a foreign tongue: a language of thorns and ashes, of long compound words, of lines that hammer on the same sound again and again. This is Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, and the writing made in it covers roughly six hundred years, from the Germanic settlement of Britain in the fifth century to the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Very little of it survives. What has come down to us is about thirty thousand lines of poetry and a larger body of prose, nearly all of it copied by monks, nearly all of it preserved by accident rather than by plan. Four manuscripts hold almost the whole of the poetry. One of them was scorched in a house fire in 1731. Another sat unread in a cathedral library in Italy for centuries. If any one of those four books had been lost, a quarter of the earliest English poetry would have gone with it.

What survives is strange and strong. There is a poem about a hero who fights a monster in a Danish hall, and dies at the end fighting a dragon. There is a poem in which the Cross on which Christ was crucified speaks in its own voice, like a warrior remembering a battle. There are riddles about onions and icebergs and bookworms. There are men standing on cold beaches thinking about everything they have lost. And behind all of it is a world that was pagan before it was Christian, Germanic before it was English, and oral before it was written down.

The world of this age

Political life

Roman rule in Britain came to an end in the early fifth century, when the last troops were withdrawn to defend the empire elsewhere. The towns and roads they left behind slowly decayed, and the Romanised Britons were open to attack. Into that gap came settlers from across the North Sea. The historian Bede, writing in 731, says they came from three peoples: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Modern archaeology suggests the picture was messier than Bede's neat division, but the broad fact holds. By the sixth century, much of lowland Britain was in Germanic hands, and the British were pushed west into Wales and Cornwall and north into Strathclyde.

The newcomers did not build one kingdom. They built many small ones, which fought, absorbed each other and shifted borders constantly. Later writers called the main group of them the Heptarchy, the "seven kingdoms": Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. The name is a convenient simplification, not an exact political fact, because the number of kingdoms rose and fell over time.

Power moved around. In the seventh century Northumbria was strongest, and it was there that the great age of monastic learning took place. In the eighth century Mercia took the lead, above all under King Offa, who ruled from 757 to 796 and built the long earthwork along the Welsh border that still carries his name. Then came the Vikings, and the balance changed again.

Norse raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, and the raids soon turned into invasion and settlement. By the 870s only Wessex was holding out. Its king, Alfred the Great, who ruled from 871 to 899, fought the Danish army to a standstill, made a treaty with their leader Guthrum, and accepted a divided England: the north and east became the Danelaw, under Danish law and custom, while Wessex and its allies held the south and west. Alfred's children and grandchildren pushed the frontier back north, and in 927 his grandson Æthelstan became the first king to rule all of England.

That unity did not last quietly. Fresh Danish attacks came in the reign of Æthelred, who ruled from 978 to 1016 and bought peace with heavy payments of silver. In 1016 the Danish king Cnut took the English throne and ruled until 1035. The line of Wessex returned with Edward the Confessor in 1042, and when Edward died childless in January 1066 three men claimed the crown. By the end of that year the Norman duke William had won it at Hastings.

Social life

Anglo-Saxon society was built on loyalty between a lord and the men who fought for him. The lord gave his followers food, shelter, weapons, rings and gold; in return they gave him service in war and, if it came to it, their lives. This bond is usually called the comitatus, a Latin word taken from the Roman historian Tacitus, who described the same custom among the Germanic tribes of his own day. It is the single most important social fact behind Old English heroic poetry.

The centre of this world was the hall. The hall was where men ate, drank, slept and received gifts; it was warm, lit and loud, and outside it lay cold, darkness and danger. In the hall the scop, the court poet, recited verse to the sound of a harp, praising the lord, remembering old battles and telling stories of heroes long dead. A good lord was a "ring-giver". A generous hall was a sign of a healthy kingdom.

Outside the hall, society ran on kinship. If a man was killed, his family had two choices: take revenge, or accept payment. That payment was called wergild, literally "man-price", and the amount was fixed by law according to the dead man's rank. The system was meant to stop feuds, and often it did; but the poetry is full of feuds that payment could not end. The worst thing that could happen to a man was not death but exile — to lose his lord, his hall and his kin, and to wander alone. Several of the finest Old English poems are spoken by exactly such a man.

Women in this world appear in the poetry in a few clear roles: the queen who carries the cup around the hall and holds the company together, the "peace-weaver" married into a rival family to end a feud, and the mourner who has lost everything. Law codes and wills show that Anglo-Saxon women could own and leave property. At the bottom of society were slaves, who could be bought and sold, and whose numbers rose after every war.

Economic life

This was a farming world. Most people lived in small settlements, grew barley, wheat, oats and beans, and kept cattle, sheep and pigs. Land was measured in hides, a unit based roughly on what would support one household. Wealth was counted in land, livestock, slaves and worked metal rather than in cash.

Trade existed but was limited. Coastal trading settlements grew up at places like Hamwic near Southampton and Lundenwic outside the old Roman walls of London, handling wine, pottery, querns and glass from the continent. Silver coins were struck from the seventh century onwards, first small ones now known as sceattas, later the penny, which became the standard coin of England.

Monasteries were not only centres of prayer. They were large landowners, employers and storehouses of treasure, and that is exactly why the Vikings attacked them. Later, the English crown raised enormous sums in silver to buy off Danish armies, a tax that came to be known as Danegeld. The quantity of English coin found in Scandinavian hoards shows how much wealth left the country this way.

Religion

The settlers brought their own gods with them: Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frig, whose names survive in Wednesday, Thursday, Tuesday and Friday. Almost nothing of their religious poetry survives, because the people who could write were Christian and had no interest in preserving it. What we have instead are traces: charms, references to fate, a few names in genealogies.

Christianity came from two directions. In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine to Kent, where King Æthelberht allowed him to preach and later accepted baptism; Canterbury became the centre of the Roman mission. From the north came Irish monks, above all Aidan, who founded Lindisfarne in 635 at the invitation of the Northumbrian king Oswald. The two traditions differed on small but visible points, especially the method of calculating Easter. The matter was settled at the Synod of Whitby in 664, where the Northumbrian king chose Roman practice.

Conversion brought the Latin alphabet, parchment, books and schools. Within two generations Northumbria had produced one of the finest scholars in Europe, Bede of Jarrow, who died in 735 and whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People remains the main source for the whole early period. Learning spread outward: Aldhelm in Wessex, and later Alcuin of York, who left England to run the palace school of Charlemagne.

The Viking wars broke much of this. Alfred complained that by his time there were very few men south of the Humber who could understand their service books in Latin. Recovery came in the tenth century with the Benedictine Reform, led by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald, who restored monastic discipline, rebuilt libraries and set a common rule for English monasteries in the document known as the Regularis Concordia. Almost every surviving Old English manuscript of literary value was copied in the hundred years after that reform.

Important points to remember

• Roman troops left Britain in the early fifth century; Germanic settlement followed.
• Bede names the settlers as Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
• The "Heptarchy" is a later shorthand for the main kingdoms, not an exact count.
• Northumbria led in the seventh century, Mercia in the eighth, Wessex from the ninth.
• Lindisfarne was raided in 793; the Danelaw followed Alfred's treaty with Guthrum.
• Æthelstan became the first king of all England in 927.
• Society rested on the lord–retainer bond (comitatus), the hall and the kin-group.
• Wergild was the fixed payment for a killing; exile was the worst punishment.
• Augustine's mission reached Kent in 597; the Synod of Whitby met in 664.
• The tenth-century Benedictine Reform produced most surviving manuscripts.

Literature in this age

The language

Old English is a Germanic language, closely related to Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German, and more distantly to Old Norse. It is not simply "early English" in the way that Shakespeare's English is early modern English. It is a different stage of the language, and a reader of modern English cannot pick it up and understand it.

The main difference is grammar. Old English was inflected: the ending of a word, not its position in the sentence, showed whether it was subject or object. Nouns had gender and case; adjectives changed to agree with them; verbs had strong and weak forms. Word order was therefore far freer than it is today, which gave poets room to arrange their lines for sound and stress.

The vocabulary was almost entirely Germanic. Where modern English borrows a word, Old English usually built one out of parts it already had. Learning was bōccræft, "book-craft"; a monastery might be a mynster; the body was a bānhūs, a "bone-house". Loanwords did come in — Latin words through the Church, Norse words such as lagu (law) and the pronouns they, them, their through Danish settlement — but the core of the language stayed native.

There were four main dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon. Most of the earliest material was written in the northern dialects, but almost everything that survives was copied later in late West Saxon, the written standard of Wessex in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This is why a poem that may have been composed in Northumbria in the eighth century now appears in a West Saxon dress.

Writing came in two systems. The oldest is the runic alphabet, the futhorc, cut into wood, bone, stone and metal, and used for short inscriptions rather than long texts. After the conversion, scribes used the Latin alphabet with four extra letters: þ (thorn) and ð (eth) for th, æ (ash) for the vowel in cat, and ƿ (wynn) for w.

How the writing survived

Nearly all Old English poetry sits in four manuscripts, all written around the year 1000, and none of them prepared as a complete or official collection.

The Beowulf Manuscript, also called the Nowell Codex, is now bound in the volume Cotton Vitellius A.xv in the British Library. Along with Beowulf it contains the fragmentary poem Judith and three prose texts. In 1731 a fire at Ashburnham House damaged the Cotton collection, and the edges of the Beowulf leaves were burnt and later crumbled; some words are now readable only in eighteenth-century transcripts.

The Exeter Book was given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric, who died in 1072, and his list describes it as a large English book of poetry. It is the single richest collection: the elegies, the riddles, wisdom poetry and two of Cynewulf's signed poems. It was also used as a cutting board and a beer mat at some point in its life, and the damage shows.

The Vercelli Book is in the cathedral library of Vercelli in northern Italy, probably left there by an English traveller on the pilgrim road to Rome. It contains homilies in prose together with The Dream of the Rood, Andreas, Elene and other religious poems.

The Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11) holds four long biblical poems and is illustrated with line drawings. It was once called the "Cædmon Manuscript" because early scholars assumed Cædmon wrote the poems in it; that attribution is no longer accepted.

Two problems follow from this. The first is loss: the poems we have are a small and random sample, and we have no idea what proportion of the whole they represent. The second is dating. A manuscript copied in about 1000 may contain a poem composed two or three centuries earlier, and there is usually no way to prove when. This single fact lies behind most of the long-running arguments in the subject.

Poetry

Old English poetry does not rhyme and does not count syllables. Its line is built on alliteration and stress. Each line has four main stresses and is broken in the middle by a pause, the caesura. The first stressed sound of the second half-line sets the pattern, and one or both stressed sounds in the first half-line must match it. The effect is heavy, regular and percussive, well suited to being spoken aloud in a hall.

Three habits of style follow from this verse form. The first is the kenning, a compressed metaphorical compound used in place of a plain noun: the sea is the hronrād, "whale-road"; the body is the "bone-house"; a ship is the "wave-floater". The second is variation, the practice of naming the same person or thing several times in different ways across successive half-lines, which lets the poet keep the alliteration going while turning the subject round in the light. The third is litotes or understatement, saying far less than is meant: a poet who tells us that a hero's enemies "had no cause for joy" means that they were destroyed.

These features also point to an oral background. The verse is full of repeated phrases and set formulas, the kind of ready-made building blocks a reciting poet needs. How far the surviving poems were actually composed in performance, and how far they were written compositions imitating that manner, is still argued about.

The heroic poetry is the oldest layer in feeling, even where the manuscripts are late. Beowulf, 3,182 lines long, is the only complete Germanic heroic epic in any language. It is set not in England but in Scandinavia: the Geatish warrior Beowulf sails to Denmark, cleanses King Hrothgar's hall Heorot of the monster Grendel, kills Grendel's mother in her underwater lair, returns home, rules fifty years, and dies killing a dragon. The poem is Christian in its voice but heathen in its material, and that tension runs all through it.

Other heroic poems survive in pieces. The Battle of Maldon describes a real defeat of 991, in which the ealdorman Byrhtnoth let a Viking force cross a causeway to fight on equal terms and was killed; its closing speeches are the clearest statement in English of the duty to die beside one's lord. The Battle of Brunanburh, on Æthelstan's victory of 937, is preserved inside the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Widsith is the imagined travel-list of a wandering poet; Waldere and The Fight at Finnsburh are fragments of longer stories from Germanic legend.

Religious poetry begins, by tradition, with Cædmon. Bede tells the story: Cædmon was an unlettered herdsman at the monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hild who fled the hall when the harp came round because he could not sing. One night a voice in a dream told him to sing of creation, and he woke able to make verse. The nine-line Cædmon's Hymn that Bede records is the earliest English poem we can date and name, from the later seventh century, and its importance is that it takes the old heroic diction and turns it to Christian use: God is addressed as a prince and a guardian, in the language of the hall.

The Junius Manuscript carries that project further in Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan, which retell scripture in heroic terms, so that Moses leads a war-band and Satan speaks like a defeated lord. Part of Genesis, known as Genesis B, is a translation from an Old Saxon original and gives Satan a long and striking speech of rebellion.

Cynewulf is the only Old English poet besides Cædmon whose name we know, and we know it only because he wove the runic letters of his name into the closing lines of four poems: Juliana and Christ II in the Exeter Book, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles in the Vercelli Book. Nothing certain is known about his life. His subjects are saints, the Cross and the Church, and his manner is more deliberate and more scholarly than the older heroic verse.

The finest religious poem is The Dream of the Rood, in the Vercelli Book. A dreamer sees a cross, shifting between jewelled glory and running blood, and the cross itself begins to speak. It describes the crucifixion as a warrior's ordeal in which it was forced to take part, holding the young hero who climbed upon it. Part of the same poem, in runes, is carved on the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, which is far older than the manuscript — direct evidence that at least one surviving poem was in circulation centuries before it was copied.

The group usually called the elegies is the part of this literature that speaks most directly to modern readers. The Wanderer is spoken by a man who has lost his lord and his companions and travels the sea alone, asking where the horse and the rider and the giver of treasure have gone. The Seafarer sets the hardship of the winter sea against the comfort of life on land and turns at last to the thought of a heavenly home. The Ruin looks at a broken Roman city, probably Bath, and imagines the men who built it. The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer are spoken by women separated from the men they love, and both are difficult, compressed and unexplained. Deor runs through a series of unhappy figures from Germanic legend with the refrain that their trouble passed, and so may this.

Finally there are the riddles — about ninety-five of them in the Exeter Book — in which an everyday object speaks and dares the reader to name it. Some are learned, some are plain, and several are openly rude. They matter because they show ordinary Anglo-Saxon life from the inside: the plough, the bellows, the horn, the bookworm that eats words without becoming any wiser. Alongside them sits a body of wisdom verse, the Maxims, and a set of metrical charms for toothache, swarming bees and barren fields that carry clear traces of pre-Christian practice.

Prose

Old English prose developed later than the poetry, and its history is much easier to date, because most of it was written for a known purpose by a known person.

The earliest prose documents are laws. The code of Æthelberht of Kent, issued in the early seventh century, is the oldest surviving document written in English, though it comes down to us only in a twelfth-century copy. Law codes continued through the whole period and are a main source for social history.

The decisive moment is the reign of Alfred. Alfred believed that the collapse of learning was a punishment and a practical disaster, and he set out to repair it by having "the books most needful for all men to know" turned into English. The programme produced English versions of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty Psalms, and in his circle, versions of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Orosius's world history. Alfred's preface to the Pastoral Care, describing the ruin of learning and his plan to restore it, is one of the first pieces of personal prose in English. How much of this translation Alfred did with his own hand is now debated.

From his reign also comes the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun around 890 and then copied to several monasteries, where separate scribes continued it independently. It is not one book but a family of manuscripts, and it is the first continuous historical record kept in a European vernacular. One copy, the Peterborough Chronicle, was still being written in 1154, almost a century after the Conquest, and its later entries show the English language visibly changing into Middle English.

The second great age of prose came with the Benedictine Reform. Ælfric of Eynsham, who lived from about 955 to about 1010, is the finest prose writer of the period: his Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints are clear, careful and ordered, and he wrote a Latin grammar and a classroom Colloquy in which a ploughman, a shepherd, a fisherman and a monk describe their work. Ælfric's prose often falls into a loose rhythmical and alliterative pattern, a kind of middle ground between prose and verse.

His contemporary Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who died in 1023, wrote in a hotter style. His Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, the "Sermon of the Wolf to the English", was delivered in 1014 during the worst of the Danish attacks, and it tells the English that the disasters falling on them are the payment for their own crimes. It is the most powerful piece of rhetoric in Old English.

Beyond homilies, there was practical and scientific writing: medical handbooks such as Bald's Leechbook, works on time-reckoning, and the West Saxon translation of the Gospels. Glosses — word-by-word English translations written between the lines of Latin manuscripts, as in the Lindisfarne Gospels — are not literature, but they preserve a great deal of early vocabulary.

Writers and works

Key terms

• Old English / Anglo-Saxon — the English language and its literature from roughly 450 to 1066; a heavily inflected West Germanic language.
• Alliterative verse — the standard Old English line: four stresses, a central pause, and matching initial sounds linking the halves.
• Caesura — the pause in the middle of the line, dividing it into two half-lines.
• Kenning — a compressed metaphorical compound used in place of a plain noun, such as "whale-road" for the sea.
• Variation — naming the same thing several times in different words across successive half-lines.
• Litotes — deliberate understatement, saying much less than is meant.
• Formula — a repeated ready-made phrase that fits the metre, typical of oral composition.
• Scop — the poet attached to a lord's hall, who recited verse to the harp.
• Comitatus — the war-band bond between a lord and his retainers: gifts and protection in exchange for service and loyalty.
• Wergild — the fixed money value of a man's life, payable to his kin to prevent a feud.
• Elegy — in this period, a short reflective poem on loss, exile and the passing of all earthly things.
• Ubi sunt — the "where are they now?" pattern of questions about people and things that have vanished, as in The Wanderer.
• Gnomic or wisdom verse — poetry made of general statements about how the world works, as in the Maxims.
• Futhorc — the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, named after its first letters.
• Codex — a manuscript book of bound leaves, as opposed to a scroll.
• Gloss — a translation of single words written above or beside a Latin text.
• Homily — a sermon explaining a passage of scripture for a congregation.
• Hagiography — writing about the lives of saints.
• Danelaw — the area of northern and eastern England under Danish law after Alfred's treaty with Guthrum.
• Danegeld — the tax raised in silver to buy off Danish armies.

Criticism and scholarship

Old English was forgotten after the Conquest and had to be rediscovered. In the sixteenth century, during the religious controversies of the Reformation, Archbishop Matthew Parker and scholars around him hunted out Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to show that the early English Church had been independent of Rome. The antiquary Laurence Nowell owned the Beowulf manuscript, which is why it is also called the Nowell Codex, and in 1705 Humfrey Wanley's catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts made the surviving material visible to scholars for the first time.

Beowulf itself was not printed until 1815, when the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin published it with a Latin translation. His two transcripts, made before the burnt manuscript crumbled further, still preserve readings now lost from the original.

The nineteenth century treated the poetry mainly as evidence — for language, for Germanic history, for folklore. That attitude survived into the influential work of W. P. Ker, whose Epic and Romance (1897) and The Dark Ages (1904) praised the dignity of the verse but complained that Beowulf had put trivial monsters at its centre and pushed the serious human material to the edges. R. W. Chambers, in Beowulf: An Introduction (1921), assembled the historical and legendary background on a scale that has never been replaced, and Friedrich Klaeber's edition of 1922 became the standard working text for most of a century.

The decisive change came in 1936, with the British Academy lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Its argument was that the critics had the poem upside down. The monsters are not a childish distraction from the history; they are the poem's subject. By setting his hero against Grendel and the dragon rather than against men, the poet raised a local quarrel into a statement about mortality itself, and the poem should be read first as a poem, an elegy on man's short life and certain defeat, and only afterwards as a historical document. After this lecture, Old English poetry was studied as literature.

Other lines of enquiry followed. In 1951 Dorothy Whitelock, in The Audience of Beowulf, argued for a Christian and reasonably learned audience rather than a pagan one. In 1953 Francis P. Magoun applied the oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord for Homer and Serbo-Croatian song to Old English verse, and set off a long debate about whether the surviving poems were composed in performance or in writing. Archaeology joined in: the ship burial excavated at Sutton Hoo in 1939, with its helmet, sword, shield and gold, showed that the treasure-filled world of the poetry was a real one.

Later scholarship has moved in several directions at once: close study of style, as in Fred C. Robinson's Beowulf and the Appositive Style (1985); fresh work on dating and on the manuscripts themselves; the recovery of women's writing and women's roles; and a steady stream of translations, of which Seamus Heaney's Beowulf of 1999 did most to bring the poem back to general readers.

Important points to remember

• Almost all Old English poetry survives in four manuscripts written around 1000: the Beowulf Manuscript, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book and the Junius Manuscript.
• The verse line uses alliteration and four stresses, not rhyme or syllable count.
• Kenning, variation and litotes are its three characteristic devices.
• Beowulf is 3,182 lines long and is set in Scandinavia, not in England.
• Cædmon and Cynewulf are the only Old English poets whose names are known.
• Cynewulf signed four poems with runes: Juliana, Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles.
• The elegies — The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer — are in the Exeter Book.
• Part of The Dream of the Rood is carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross.
• Alfred's translation programme and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle founded English prose.
• Ælfric and Wulfstan are the major prose writers of the late period.
• The 1936 British Academy lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" turned the poem into a literary subject.

How the age ends

The end is usually dated to 1066, and as a political date that works. Harold Godwinson was killed at Hastings in October of that year, the English aristocracy was replaced within a generation, and French became the language of the court, the law and the new ruling class. Latin kept its hold on the Church and on learning. English was left as the speech of people who did not write books.

But literature does not stop on a date. English went on being written for a long time after the Conquest. Scribes copied homilies and saints' lives in the old language and the old spellings well into the twelfth century, and one monastery, Peterborough, kept adding entries to its copy of the Chronicle until 1154. Those last entries are worth looking at closely, because in them the language is visibly coming apart: the old endings are weakening, word order is hardening into something more familiar, and French words are beginning to appear. The Chronicle stops being Old English somewhere in the middle of its own final pages.

What died was not the language but the tradition that supported it. Without royal and monastic patronage, the standard written form of West Saxon lost its authority, and English broke up again into regional dialects that each wrote as they spoke. The alliterative line went underground; it never disappeared entirely, and it surfaced again strongly in the fourteenth century in poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman. The vocabulary of the hall and the war-band faded as the society that used it was replaced.

When English returned as a literary language in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was a different instrument: lightly inflected, open to French and Latin borrowing, and comfortable with rhyme. The next age had begun.

Quick revision — 50 points

1. Old English literature covers roughly 450 to 1066.
2. The language is also called Anglo-Saxon and belongs to the West Germanic family.
3. Roman troops left Britain in the early fifth century.
4. Bede names the settlers as Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
5. "Heptarchy" is a later term for the main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
6. Offa of Mercia ruled 757–796 and built Offa's Dyke.
7. Augustine's mission reached Kent in 597, sent by Pope Gregory the Great.
8. Aidan founded Lindisfarne in 635.
9. The Synod of Whitby in 664 settled the dating of Easter in favour of Roman practice.
10. Bede died in 735; his Ecclesiastical History was completed in 731 and written in Latin.
11. The Viking raid on Lindisfarne took place in 793.
12. Alfred the Great ruled Wessex from 871 to 899.
13. The Danelaw followed Alfred's treaty with the Danish leader Guthrum.
14. Æthelstan became the first king of all England in 927.
15. The Battle of Brunanburh was fought in 937; a poem on it stands in the Chronicle.
16. The Battle of Maldon was fought in 991; Byrhtnoth was the English leader.
17. Cnut ruled England from 1016 to 1035.
18. The Norman Conquest took place in 1066.
19. Old English had four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon.
20. Late West Saxon is the dialect of nearly all surviving manuscripts.
21. Old English used the letters þ (thorn), ð (eth), æ (ash) and ƿ (wynn).
22. The runic alphabet is called the futhorc.
23. The verse line has four stresses, a caesura, and alliteration, not rhyme.
24. A kenning is a compressed metaphorical compound such as "whale-road" for the sea.
25. Variation repeats the same subject in different words across half-lines.
26. Litotes is deliberate understatement.
27. The scop was the hall poet; the comitatus was the lord–retainer bond.
28. Wergild was the fixed compensation paid for a killing.
29. Four manuscripts hold nearly all the poetry, all written around 1000.
30. The Beowulf Manuscript is also called the Nowell Codex (Cotton Vitellius A.xv).
31. The Cotton library fire of 1731 damaged the Beowulf manuscript.
32. The Exeter Book was given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric, who died in 1072.
33. The Vercelli Book survives in a cathedral library in northern Italy.
34. The Junius Manuscript holds Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan.
35. Beowulf runs to 3,182 lines and is set in Scandinavia.
36. Its monsters are Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon; the hall is Heorot.
37. Judith, an incomplete poem, shares the Beowulf manuscript.
38. Cædmon was a herdsman at Whitby under the Abbess Hild; his Hymn has nine lines.
39. Cynewulf signed Juliana, Christ II, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles in runes.
40. The Dream of the Rood is in the Vercelli Book; the Cross speaks in it.
41. Part of that poem is carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross.
42. The main elegies are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer.
43. The Exeter Book also contains about ninety-five riddles.
44. The earliest English prose document is the law code of Æthelberht of Kent.
45. Alfred's translations include Pastoral Care, Boethius, Augustine's Soliloquies and Psalms 1–50.
46. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle began around 890 and the Peterborough copy runs to 1154.
47. Ælfric of Eynsham wrote the Catholic Homilies, Lives of Saints, a Grammar and the Colloquy.
48. Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos was delivered in 1014.
49. Beowulf was first printed in 1815 by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin.
50. The 1936 British Academy lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" argued that the monsters are central, not a distraction.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Old English so hard to read if it is English? Because it is an inflected language. Meaning was carried by word endings rather than by word order, nouns had grammatical gender, and the vocabulary was almost entirely Germanic, with very few of the French and Latin words that fill modern English. A modern reader needs to learn it in the way they would learn German, not simply read it slowly.

Who wrote Beowulf, and when? Nobody knows. The poem is anonymous and survives in a single manuscript copied around the year 1000. Scholars have argued for dates of composition anywhere from the eighth to the early eleventh century, using evidence from language, metre and history, and none of the arguments has settled the question.

Is Old English poetry pagan or Christian? The surviving poems were all written down by Christians, and most are openly Christian in subject. But the heroic material they use — fate, feud, the hall, the war-band — comes from the older pagan society, and poems such as Beowulf hold the two together without fully reconciling them. There is no surviving Old English poem that is purely pagan.

What is the difference between a kenning and an ordinary metaphor? A kenning is a fixed compound noun, usually two elements joined together, that replaces a simple word: the sea becomes the "whale-road", the body the "bone-house". It is shorter and more formulaic than a metaphor, and it was part of the poet's standing stock of material, reused from poem to poem.

Which manuscripts should a student know by name? Four: the Beowulf Manuscript or Nowell Codex, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book and the Junius Manuscript. Knowing which poems sit in which book covers most of the ground, because almost all the surviving poetry is in these four volumes.

Did Old English literature end immediately in 1066? No. French and Latin took over the written culture of the ruling class, but English texts went on being copied for about a century after the Conquest, and the Peterborough copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued until 1154. Its final entries show the language already changing into Middle English.

Sources

• Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning).
• Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell).
• Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. edn (London: Penguin Classics).

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English