Anglo Saxon Poetry And Prose

Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Prose

Historical background

English erature begins with the arrival of the English (Angles) and Saxons and Jutes from Germany and Denmark (The Germanic invaders set up many small kingdoms and fought among themselves for 250 years (600-850 A.D.)

Danes attacked in the late 9th century and took over all north and central England. (An area called the Danelaw). Alfred the Great (871-899) of the Kingdom of Wessex (="West Saxons") stopped them from taking all of it.

In the middle of the 11th Century, the country was united under an Anglo-Saxon king.

Just after that happened, in 1066, Normans (French-speakers from Normandy) conquered England at the Battle of Hastings, ending the Anglo-Saxon period. King Harold was killed, and William, Duke of Normandy became William I, "the Conqueror," King of England.

Types of Anglo-Saxon literature

Anglo-Saxon Poetry

• Oral poetry largely lost to us, except where it has been preserved in later manuscripts.

• It comprised heroic poems (Beowulf), war epics, celebrating the battles of the Anglo-Saxons (The Battle of Brunanburgh, The Battle of Maldon), secular elegiac and lyrical poems (Widsith, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor’s Lament, The Ruin – characterized by a mood of heroic melancholy and fatalism, and imbued (naplněný) with wild, somber imagination), and “folk literature” (charms-zaříkadla, riddles-hádanky, proverbs, runic poems – connected with daily life, belief in supernatural creatures – ghosts, evil powers, demons…)

• After Christianity had taken roots in England, monasteries became centres of culture. Two names of Christian poets are known: Cædmon—whose story is told by the Venerable Bede, who also records a few lines of his poetry—is the earliest known English poet. Although the body of his work has been lost, the school of Cædmon is responsible for poetic narrative versions of biblical stories, the most dramatic of which is probably Genesis B.Cynewulf, a later poet, signed the poems Elene, Juliana, and The Fates of the Apostles; no more is known of him. The finest poem of the school of Cynewulf is The Dream of the Rood, the first known example of the dream vision, a genre later popular in Middle English literature. First legends – Judith, Andreas

• No rhyme, and no strict metre.

• Each line is divided into two half-lines by a break or CAESURA

• Each half-line contains two stressed words or syllables and a variable number of unstressed syllables

• Alliterationis used to bind the half-lines together. Alliterating words either begin with the same consonant OR begin with any vowel.

• special poetic vocabulary

• KENNINGsare compound words that are like riddles, such as "bone-chamber" (body) or "heaven’s candle" (sun).

• similar topics – deal with war, nature the man has to fight with (storm, sea)

• exclamations, repetitions, sense of melancholy

Prose

Prose is straightforward and influenced by Church Latin models.

The first prose writer was the Venerable Bede, a 7th century scholar who wrote the Ecclesiastical History in Latin.

The most influential prose writer was Alfred the Great who translated Bede into Anglo-Saxon, because hardly anyone could read Latin, encouraged the keeping of records of events,  had the Bible translated into Anglo-Saxon.

Didactic, devotional, and informative prosewas written (The Wonders of the East, Lettre from Alexander to Aristotle), and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, probably begun in Alfred’s time as an historical record, continued for over three centuries. Two preeminent Old English prose writers were Ælfric, (abbot) and his contemporary Wulfstan, Archbishop of York. Their sermons (written in the late 10th or early 11th cent.) set a standard for homiletics.