Page 10 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 1: The Anglo-Saxon Literature and the Norman French Period

types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in Notes
all of the older Germanic languages. Two poetic figures commonly found in Old English poetry
are the kenning, an often formulaic phrase that describes one thing in terms of another (e.g. in
Beowulf, the sea is called the whale’s road) and litotes, a dramatic understatement employed by
the author for ironic effect.
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.
Old English poetry was an oral craft, and our understanding of it in written form is incomplete; for
example, we know that the poet (referred to as the scop) could be accompanied by a harp, and there
may be other accompaniment traditions of which we are not aware.

Did u know? Poetry represents the smallest amount of the surviving Old English text, but
Anglo-Saxon culture had a rich tradition of oral storytelling, of which little has
survived in written form.

1.3 Old English Prose

The amount of surviving Old English prose is much greater than the amount of poetry. Of the
surviving prose, the majority consists of sermons and translations of religious works that were
composed in Latin. 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
England was largely the province of monks, nuns, and ecclesiastics (or of those laypeople to whom
they had taught the skills of reading and writing Latin and/or Old English). 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.

Task Write a short note on Anglo-Saxon Literature.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. A large number of manuscripts remain from the Anglo-saxon period, with most written
during the 300 years, in both .................... and the vernacular.
2. Old English poetry Falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic
and the .................... .
3. The First widely accepted theory was constructed by .................... .
4. Old English verse lines are divided in half by a pause; this pause is termed a .................... .
5. The amount of surviving old English prose is much greater than the amount of .................... .

1.4 The Norman French Period

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 ancestors of both were bands of
Baltic and North Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a little
farther back the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic family, of the Anglo-Saxons

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