Old English prose and poetry is the vernacular literature written before 1066. In poems such as The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf we encounter the heroic ethos presented in the powerful medium of alliterative verse. Moving on to poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer and shorter pieces such as the Riddles the sense of a complex worldview marked by flux and fluidity becomes strongly felt. In the prose we can get a sense of writers experimenting with the vernacular in order to express historical fact and detail as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, rhetorical persuasion as in Wulfstan's sermons, or sophisticated theology written for secular readers as in the case of some of Aelfric's work.
We will begin by contextualising the literature within the period up to (but not necessarily stopping) at 1066 before moving on to read some prose extracts. We'll read these in translation, but with the opportunity to see how the language can be made to fit the meaning. Halfway through the course we will turn out attention to the poetry and spend some time considering its versification before moving on to examples from poems such as The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, the Riddles and extracts from Beowulf. No prior knowledge of Old English is required for this course.