Old English literature (or Anglo-Saxon literature) encompasses literature written
in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period from the 7th
century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. A large number of
manuscripts remain from the Anglo-Saxon period, with most written during the last 300 years, in both Latin and the vernacular. In the Old English Period, there are about 400
surviving manuscripts. Anglo-Saxon literature has gone through different
periods of research—in the 19th
and early 20th centuries the focus was on the Germanic roots of English. Likewise, King Alfred the Great (849–899), wanting to restore English culture, lamented the poor state of Latin education. Research in
the 20th century has focused on dating the manuscripts (19th-century scholars tended
to date them older); locating where the manuscripts were created — there were seven major scriptoria from which they originate: Winchester, Exeter, Worcester, Abingdon, Durham, and two Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St. Augustine’s Abbey; and identifying the regional dialects used:
Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish,
West Saxon (the last being the main dialect).The Anglo-Saxons left behind no poetic rules or explicit
system; everything we know about the poetry of the period is based on modern
analysis.
The first widely accepted theory was
constructed by Eduard Sievers (1885). The theory of John C. Pope (1942), which uses musical notation to track the verse patterns,
has been accepted in some quarters, and is hotly debated. The most popular and
well-known understanding of Old English poetry continues to be
Sievers’ alliterative verse. Roughly, Old English verse lines are divided in half by a pause; this pause is termed a “caesura”. Each half-line has two stressed syllables. The first stressed syllable of the second half-line should alliterate with one or both of the stressed syllables of the first half-line (thus the stressed
syllables of the first half-line could also alliterate with each other). The second stressed
syllable of the second half-line does not alliterate with either of those of the first half.
The division of early medieval written prose
works into categories of “Christian” and “secular”, as below, is for convenience’s sake only, for literacy in Anglo-Saxon. Old English prose first appears in the 9th century, and continues to be recorded through the 12th
century as the last
generation of scribes, trained as boys in the standardised West Saxon before the Conquest, died as old men. The Normans who conquered England were originally members of the same stock as the ‘Danes’ who had harried and conquered it in the preceding centuries. The study
of the literature of the period is further complicated by the division of
English into dialects. Old English literature (or Anglo-Saxon literature) encompasses literature written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period from the 7th
century to the Norman
Conquest of 1066.
The Junius Manuscripts also known as Caedmon manuscripts. A great writer
like Shakespeare or Chaucer is generally said to be “not of an age, but of all ages.” Chaucer’s age-like most historical
ages-was an age of transition. This transition implies a shift from the
medieval to the modern times, the emergence of the English nation from the “dark ages” to the age of enlightenment. The period
between 1337 and 1453 is marked by a long succession of skirmishes between France and England, which are collectively known as the “Hundred Years War”. It was obviously natural for the conflict to have
engendered among the English a strong feeling of national solidarity and
patriotic fervour.
The severest attack of this dread epidemic
came in 1348. It was called “the Black
Death” because
black, knotty boils appeared on the bodies of the hopeless victims. The
movement launched by Wyclif and his followers in the age of Chaucer
was an adumbration of the Reformation which was to come in the sixteenth century to wean England from
the papal influence. Chaucer own poetry was influenced by the Italian writer Boccaccio (1313-75) and to a lesser extent, Petrarch (1304-74). The frameworks of Boccaccio’s Decameron and of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are almost similar. Before William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer was the preeminent English poet, and he remains in the top tier
of the English canon. He also was the most significant poet to
write in Middle English. Chaucer’s first published work was “The Book of the Duchess”, a poem of over 1,300 lines, supposed to be an elegy for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, addressed to her widower, the Duke.
Chaucer first appears in public records in 1357 as a member of the house of
Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster. In Troilus and Criseyde, this 8,000-line rime-royal poem recounts the love story of Troilus, son of the Trojan king Priam, and Criseyde, widowed daughter of the deserter priest Calkas, against the background of the Trojan War. His works included Parliament of Foules,
a poem of 699 lines. Medieval religious drama existed primarily, then,
to give religious instruction, establish faith, and encourage piety.
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