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Due to conquests and colonialism through the centuries, it is not unusual for languages and cultures to be influenced by other, foreign languages and cultures. The modern English language, for example, owes many of its words to Old Norse and Latin, debts dating from contacts made during the Middle Ages. Verbal Encounters is a collection of papers on the cultural and linguistic exchange in Old Norse, Old English, and medieval Latin literature written in honour of Roberta Frank, former University Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. The essays feature new scholarship in the field, on topics such as the integral position of Anglo-Latin within Anglo-Saxon culture and literature, constructions of feminine strength and effectiveness in Anglo-Saxon literature, the rise of Latin-based learning in twelfth-century Iceland, medieval Icelandic religious poetry, and the conversion to Christianity in medieval Scandinavia. The essays in Verbal Encounters are not merely a fitting tribute to Roberta Frank, but also strong contributions to current scholarship on medieval literature and culture.
In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet’s workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their membership in a single community of taste, a traditional stylistic ecology that did serious political and historical work. Each chapter seeks the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. The passage of time has worn away most of the circumstantial details that literar...
A seminal collection of studies on the date of Beowulf, now back in print, that overturned previous scholarship and raised much new information.
This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.
The question of whether or not our decisions and efforts make a difference in an uncertain and uncontrollable world had enormous significance for writers in Anglo-Saxon England. Striving with Grace looks at seven authors who wrote either in Latin or Old English, and the ways in which they sought to resolve this fundamental question. For Anglo-Saxon England, as for so much of the medieval West, the problem of individual will was complicated by a widespread theistic tradition that influenced writers, thinkers, and their hypotheses. Aaron J Kleist examines the many factors that produced strikingly different, though often complementary, explanations of free will in early England. Having first es...
As one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field, Thomas D. Hill has made an indelible mark on the study of Old English literature. In celebration of his distinguished career, the editors of Source of Wisdom have assembled a wide-ranging collection of nineteen original essays on Old English poetry and prose as well as early medieval Latin, touching upon many of Hill's specific research interests. Among the topics examined in this volume are the Christian-Latin sources of Old English texts, including religious and 'sapiential' poetry, and prose translations of Latin writings. Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Wife's Lament are treated, throughout, to thematic, textual, stylistic, lexical, and source analysis. Prose writers of the period such as King Alfred and Wærferth, as well as medieval Latin writers such as Bede and Pseudo-Methodius are also discussed. As an added feature, the volume includes a bibliography of publications by Thomas D. Hill. Source of Wisdom is, ultimately, a contribution to the understanding of medieval English literature and the textual traditions that contributed to its development.
The drottkvett was a form of Old Norse skaldic poetry composed to glorify a chieftain's deeds or to lament his death. Kari Ellen Gade explores the structural peculiarities of ninth- and tenth-century drottkvett poetry and suggests a solution to the mystery of the origins of the drottkvett and its eventual demise in the fourteenth century.
The Anglo-Saxon world continues to be a source of fascination in modern culture. Its manifestations in a variety of media are here examined.
This collection makes a new, profound and far-reaching intervention into the rich yet little-explored terrain between Latin scholastic theory and vernacular literature. Written by a multidisciplinary team of leading international authors, the chapters honour and advance Alastair Minnis's field-defining scholarship. A wealth of expert essays refract the nuances of theory through the medium of authoritative Latin and vernacular medieval texts, providing fresh interpretative treatment to known canonical works while also bringing unknown materials to light.
A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation.