Anglo-Saxon Literature – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Dream of the Rood’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry

‘The Dream of the Rood’ is one of the gems of Anglo-Saxon poetry. ‘Rood’ is an Old English word for ‘Cross’, and poem tells of a pious man’s encounter with a talking crucifix, which is a novel idea for a poem, to say the least. ‘The Dream of the Rood’ is thus the first great Christian dream-vision poem in English literature, a precursor to the fourteenth-century Pearl and Langland’s Piers Plowman among many other later works.

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Seafarer’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry

‘The Seafarer’ is one of the earliest poems in English literature. Its ‘plot’ can be summarised easily enough: an elderly sailor speaks to us about his alienation from the world. The 124-line poem is often considered an elegy, since it appears to be spoken by an old man looking back on his life and preparing for death.

The Anglo-Saxon Waste Land: The Anonymous Poem ‘The Ruin’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry

It’s a sobering thought that all of the Anglo-Saxon poetry that has survived is found in just four manuscripts which escaped the ravages of time, the pillaging of the Vikings, and the censorship of the Church: the Cotton manuscript (which is our sole source for the long heroic narrative poem Beowulf), the Vercelli book, a collection of manuscripts of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Exeter Book.

History Written by the Victims: ‘The Battle of Maldon’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry

The Battle of the Blackwater was real and not just something that happened in Game of Thrones. It’s an odd fact that the first great poem written in English about a real battle is about a resounding defeat for the English. For ‘English’ here we need to think ‘Anglo-Saxon’, but then we have to go back nearly a century before the Norman invasion, to the year 991, and the Battle of Maldon to find the inspiration for English literature’s first great battle-poem.

10 Works of Anglo-Saxon Literature Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What are the finest works of Anglo-Saxon literature? We’ve restricted our choices to works of literature written in Anglo-Saxon or Old English, so that rules out Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, which, as the title suggests, was written in Latin. But there’s a wealth of great literature written in Old English, as the following pick of ten of the best testifies (we hope).