Handouts of Anglo Saxon Literature
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE
The Middle Ages is like no other period in terms of the time span it covers. Caedmon's Hymn, the earliest English poem to survive as a text, belongs to the latter part of the VII century. The morality play, Everyman, is dated "after 1485" and probably belongs to the early-XVI century. In addition, for the Middle Ages, there is no one central movement or event to organize a historical approach to the period. When did "English Literature" begin? Any answer to that question must be problematic, for the very concept of English literature is a construction of literary history, a concept that changed over time. There are no "English" characters in Beowulf, and English scholars and authors had no knowledge of the poem before it was discovered and edited in the XIX century. Although written in the language called "Anglo-Saxon," the poem was claimed by Danish and German scholars as their earliest national epic before it came to be thought of as an "Old English" poem. One of the results of the Norman Conquest was that the structure and vocabulary of the English language changed to such an extent that Chaucer, even if he had come across a manuscript of Old English poetry, would have experienced far more difficulty construing the language than with medieval Latin, French, or Italian. If a King Arthur had actually lived, he would have spoken a Celtic language possibly still intelligible to native speakers of Middle Welsh but not to Middle English speakers. Old English literature encompasses literature written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon), from the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period in both Latin and the vernacular, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research. Among the most important
The Middle Ages is like no other period in terms of the time span it covers. Caedmon's Hymn, the earliest English poem to survive as a text, belongs to the latter part of the VII century. The morality play, Everyman, is dated "after 1485" and probably belongs to the early-XVI century. In addition, for the Middle Ages, there is no one central movement or event to organize a historical approach to the period. When did "English Literature" begin? Any answer to that question must be problematic, for the very concept of English literature is a construction of literary history, a concept that changed over time. There are no "English" characters in Beowulf, and English scholars and authors had no knowledge of the poem before it was discovered and edited in the XIX century. Although written in the language called "Anglo-Saxon," the poem was claimed by Danish and German scholars as their earliest national epic before it came to be thought of as an "Old English" poem. One of the results of the Norman Conquest was that the structure and vocabulary of the English language changed to such an extent that Chaucer, even if he had come across a manuscript of Old English poetry, would have experienced far more difficulty construing the language than with medieval Latin, French, or Italian. If a King Arthur had actually lived, he would have spoken a Celtic language possibly still intelligible to native speakers of Middle Welsh but not to Middle English speakers. Old English literature encompasses literature written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon), from the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period in both Latin and the vernacular, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research. Among the most important