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Old English Shorter Poems
Series: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
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Format: Hardback
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Ideal for readers interested in Anglo-Saxon literature, medieval poetry, and historical cultural insights.
Old English Shorter Poems offers tantalizing insights into the Anglo-Saxon mental landscape. These poems and charms find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. Wisdom also emerges as folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf.
Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and
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Description
The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalising insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey.
The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. "Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide," reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature's indifference to human suffering.
Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith.
This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.
Series: Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780674053069
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 28 April 2014
Country: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Contributors:
- Edited and translated by Robert E. Bjork
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 133.0mm
Height: 203.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 320
About the Author
A Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Robert E. Bjork is Foundation Professor of English and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.
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