5AAEB004 Old English Poems and Modern British Poetry
LEVEL/SEMESTER TAUGHT
CONVENOR/TEACHER:
2nd year module, band 1 medieval, taught
semester 2
TBC
TEACHING ARRANGEMENTS: One 2-hour seminar weekly
MODULE VALUE:
15 credits
ASSESSMENT:
1 translation and commentary of 1,500 words
(25% of final mark), due mid-semester (1 March)
1 essay of 2,500 words (75% of final mark), details
to be released by required deadlines on KEATS
PRE-REQUISITE REQUIREMENT: In order to take this module, you must have
taken 5AAEB005, Cultural Encounters:
Language and Literature in Anglo-Saxon
England.
MODULE OUTLINE
Old English poems have been regularly translated or reworked into newer forms of
English poetry and prose since at least the eighteenth century. This module offers a
chance to explore some of this new Old English poetry. We will look at Modern
British translations of Old English poems from the era of Ezra Pound to that of more
recent poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century, including Edwin Morgan,
Eavan Bolan, Fiona Sampson, Seamus Heaney, Chris McCully, Maureen Duffy,
Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue. What does Old English poetry offer
modern and contemporary poets? To answer this question we must first look at the
literary and cultural meanings of the poet and the poetic voice in the early Middle
Ages. This was a period of transition from oral modes of communication to written
ones; from the voice as spoken to the voice as written. But modes of communication
and questions of form are not simply historical issues relevant only to the early
medieval period. Modern British poetry offers a similar opportunity to think about
modes and forms of lyric expression in contemporary print, digital, visual and aural
media.
The lyric voices expressed by short Old English poems can be understood in various
ways: as embodied and gendered, as fragmented, partial and performed. These lyric
poems travel along pathways of desire and difference, of religion and of sexuality, of
subjectification and objectification, and of place and meaning. And they are
quintessentially anonymous. How do modern British poets, English, Scottish,
American and Irish, address the challenges of working with these Old English
poems? In order to explore this question, we will concentrate on two genres: the
shorter Old English lyrics, or so-called elegies, and the Old English riddles, both
included in a single Anglo-Saxon manuscript, The Exeter Book, from the tenth
century. We will start by translating into good modern English selected examples
from these genres, but we will also explore how Modern British poetry encounters
these old works and how we might think of this engagement critically.
Topics for discussion and analysis include: the relation between the voice and the
poem; form and media; translation and poetry, authenticity and originality; the
sounds of modern and old English poems; questions of place, manuscript and
edition. You are encouraged to identify your own ‘new’ Old English poems and to
produce your own translations for discussion as we work collectively through this
material.
Advance preparation for this module would include reading Kevin Crossley Holland’s
The Exeter Book Riddles (repr. 1996) and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems
in Translation, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (2011).
Core Texts Studied
All Old English poems (a selection of riddles and short poems or elegies from the
Exeter Book) will be translated from Richard Marsden’s The Cambridge Old English
Reader (2004 or later). Also required is a standard anthology of Old English
literature in translation such as Kevin Crossley Holland’s The Anglo-Saxon World or
S. J. Bradley’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry, together with The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon
Poems in Translation, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto. Crossley Holland’s The
Exeter Book Riddles (Penguin Classics, revised ed., 1993, repr. London: Enitharmon
Press, 2008) is also invaluable, as is R. K. Gordon’s translations into prose of AngloSaxon Poetry (1976). Richard Hamer’s A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (1970), with
its facing pages of Old English and modern English, has also been recently reissued
(London: Faber and Faber, 2015).
Each week we will explore a critical topic or topics, and we will also translate
the assigned poems and Modern British poetry as relevant. Please come to
class having already prepared in draft your translation and ideas for
discussion.
Weekly responsibility for leading discussion and translation will be assigned
in the first class. Modern British poems will be supplied by handout and on
KEATS where possible.
KEATS: Material will be updated and posted on KEATS on a regular basis:
remember to check there before coming to class.
Week 1 Voice, Subject, Body, Text
What are the shorter Old English poems? How might we begin to read and
understand these poems? This class introduces a few key critical concepts with
which we can begin to explore the shorter Old English poems and that we will
develop throughout the course.
Translation Old English Riddles (Marsden, Riddles 35b, swan; Riddle 35c, onion):
Modern British translations by Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (1990) and Chris
McCully, Old English Poems and Riddles (2008) as well as Crossley-Holland
Week 2 Seeing, Speaking, Hearing, Riddling
How does a riddle speak? What is the relationship between seeing, hearing and
riddling? Please prepare for this discussion by reading through the Old English
Exeter Book Riddles in translation (the full collection is translated by Kevin Crossley
Holland (The Exeter Book Riddles) and also by Craig Williamson (A Feast of
Creatures). Other anthologies include: S. A. J. Bradley (Anglo-Saxon Poetry), Kevin
Crossley-Holland (The Anglo-Saxon World) and R. K. Gordon (Anglo-Saxon Poetry)
Translation Old English Riddles cont. (Marsden, Riddle 35 a, shield; Riddle 35 e,
bookworm).
Modern British translations by Edwin Morgan, together with select examples from
The Word Hoard.
Week 3 Re-reading and Re-writing the Riddles
This class explores the project of how we read and translate the Old English riddles.
How do the riddles make us speak and in whose or which language? How do we
translate and interpret them? Please prepare for discussion by selecting at least 2
riddles, other than those in Marsden, for discussion, together with at least 2 modern
British examples from the genre of riddling (examples might include those from
Maureen Duffy, Environmental Studies of 2013, as well as those by Crossley Holland
and Chris McCully.
Week 4 The Place of the Text: Manuscript to Edition
In this class we will examine the place of the Old English Riddles and the shorter Old
English poems, or elegies, in The Exeter Book manuscript and in various,
postmedieval, edited forms. It will be important for you to look at editions other than
those by Marsden for this discussion: examples would be other student-oriented
texts, such as B. Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, ed. A Guide to Old English as well
as scholarly editions, such as T. P. Dunning and A. J. Bliss, eds., The Wanderer.
You can also explore how modern British poetry is presented, published, and
explored, using the example of The Word Exchange as your example.
Translation The Wanderer (Marsden 38, lines 1-29)
Week 5 Locating the Self: The Wanderer and the Old English Elegies.
How does the group of poems known as the Old English Elegies create and make
use of concepts of voice and subjectivity? Please read all the Old English elegies in
translation in preparation for this class. Who speaks? Where? When? How?
Translation The Wanderer, lines 29-77
Modern British translations by Greg Delanty (in Word Exchange);Jane Holland (in
Camper Van Blues, 2010) Bernard O’Donoghue (in Farmers Cross, 2011) and Edwin
Morgan (in Collected Poems, 1990)
Week 6 The Wanderer and The Seafarer
The two poems of The Wanderer and The Seafarer are often put together in the
critical literature. In what ways do these poems speak to one another? In what ways
do they differ? What kinds of cultural knowledge do these poems expect of us?
Which critical discussions have you found most useful or, indeed, least helpful? This
class offers an opportunity to discuss in detail both poems, so prepare for discussion
by rereading the poems carefully, exploring and by exploring some of the critical
literature about them.
Translation The Wanderer, lines 77-end
Modern British translations by Ezra Pound’s The Seafarer (1912), Mary Jo Salter,
The Seafarer (in Word Exchange), and Caroline Bergvall, Drift (2013)
Week 7 Gender and Genre
In this class we will consider the relationship between gender and genre in the Old
English elegies, concentrating on the (apparently) female-voiced lyrics of The Wife’s
Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, together with The Husband’s Message. How, if at
all, does the gender of the speaking voice or voices of a poem impact on its genre?
Translation The Wife’s Lament (Marsden 40, lines 1-28)
Modern British translation by Eavan Bolan (Word Exchange, also included in A
Woman Without a Country, 2014)
Week 8 Women, Men and Other Things that speak
Continuing the discussion of the preceding class, in this class we will engage more
widely with issues of gender and voice, both in the Old English elegies but also
bringing back into the discussion the Exeter Book riddles and their use of
personification, voice and gender. In order to prepare for this class, therefore,
consider again at least one female-voiced elegy, one male-voiced elegy and one
riddle that makes use of voice and/or gender.
Modern British versions of Wulf and Eadwacer by Paul Muldoon (Word Exchange),
Bernard O’Donoghue (The Weakness, 1991), and Fiona Sampson (Folding the Real,
2001).
Translation The Wife’s Lament, lines 28-end.
Week 9 Poem and place revisited.
Central to critical discussion of the Old English elegies is the idea of exile, of being
out of place, whether exile is chosen or imposed. These concepts, both scripturally
and socially informed, are particularly relevant to The Wanderer and The Seafarer
but they also inform, differently, The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message and
Wulf and Eadwacer. Place and its relation to time are similarly important in two other
poems, Deor and The Ruin. This class, therefore, is an opportunity to consider in
detail the many different ways in which the idea of place and being out of place is
important to our understanding of the Old English elegies, then, and now, in its
contemporary Modern British iterations.
Translation Deor
Modern British translations of Deor by Simon Armitage, Maureen Duffy and Seamus
Heaney
Week 10 Essay consultations
Supplementary Bibliography
In addition to the assigned reading above, the following works will be essential
reading; others will be assigned as relevant:
Bergvall, Caroline, Drift (Brooklyn and Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2014)
Delanty, Greg and Michael Matto, eds. The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in
Translation, with Foreword by Seamus Heaney (Norton: New York and
London, 2011
Duffy, Maureen, Environmental Studies (London: Enitharmon Press, 2013)
Greenfield, Stanley B. and Daniel G. Calder, eds. A New Critical History of Old
English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
Godden, Malcolm and Michael Lapidge, eds.The Cambridge Companion to Old
English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; rev. 2nd
ed, 2013)
Jones, Chris, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
----------------, ‘Old English after 1066’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English
Literature, 2nd ed, pp. 313-29
Klinck, Anne L., The Old English Elegies (McGill: McGill University Press, 1992)
Lees, Clare and Gillian Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in
Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2001;
repr with new preface Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009)
Lees, Clare A., ed, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2013)
Morgan, Edwin, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996)
McCully, Chris, Old English Poems and Riddles (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008)
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
-----------------------------------, ed. Shorter Old English Poems: Basic Readings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994)
Pasternak, Carol Braun, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,1995)
Thornberry, Emily V, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014
Williamson, Craig, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1977)