Andy Orchard - Böcker

Compiled by an unknown scribe in Iceland around 1270, and based on sources dating back centuries earlier, these mythological and heroic poems tell of gods and mortals from an ancient era: the giant-slaying Thor, the doomed Völsung family, the Hel-ride of Brynhild and the cruelty of Atli the Hun. Eclectic, incomplete and fragmented, these verses nevertheless retain their stark beauty and their power to enthrall, opening a window on to the thoughts, beliefs and hopes of the Vikings and their world.

Heathen gods are hard to find in Old English literature. Most Anglo-Saxon writers had no interest in them, and scholars today prefer to concentrate on the Christian civilization for which the Anglo-Saxons were so famous. Richard North offers an interesting view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to an orgiastic figure known as Ingui, whom Bede called 'god of this age'. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in a highly imaginative treatment of poems such as Deor and The Dream of the Rood. Other gods such as Woden are considered with reference to Odin and his family in Old Norse-Icelandic mythology. In conclusion, it is argued that the cult of Ingui was defeated only when the ideology of the god Woden was sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon church. The book will interest students interested in Old English, Old Norse-Icelandic and Germanic literatures, Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology.

This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons - the animals, diseases, landscapes, seas and weather with which they had to contend. She argues that poetic descriptions of these elements were not a reflection of the existing physical conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues: the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation and the power of writing to control information. Examples of contemporary literature in other languages are used to provide a sense of Old English poetry's particular approach, which incorporated elements from Germanic, Christian and classical sources. The result of this approach was not a consistent cosmological scheme but a rather contradictory vision which reveals much about how the Anglo-Saxons viewed themselves.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 2001 book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

This 1996 book provides a study and critical edition of the corpus of hymns sung by monks and canons in their services in England before the Norman Conquest. It assembles textual evidence, some of it hitherto unpublished, based on all extant manuscripts. Of these, an eleventh-century Latin manuscript known as the 'Durham Hymnal', with its accompanying Old English interlinear gloss, provides the core of the edition and its base manuscript. An introduction and commentary include descriptions of the manuscripts concerned and discussions of the sources, liturgical use, and music of the hymns, as well as the phonology and vocabulary of the Old English gloss. The text of the hymns is accompanied by a translation of the Latin into modern English prose.

The early medieval Vulgate Bible had no fixed textual form - multiple copying resulted in a multitude of forms. This 1995 book tackles questions about the transmission of the Vulgate Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. By tracing the history of the text in the surviving Latin manuscripts we can illuminate monastic and intellectual history. Following an introduction which explains the wider continental history in which the dissemination of the Latin scriptures occurred, Richard Marsden goes on to analyse twenty surviving manuscripts including the Codex Amiatinus, one of the greatest English books and the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible. The book provides a comprehensive listing and collation of surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the Old Testament, and it also establishes textual history as a dimension of wider Anglo-Saxon history.

This book explores ideas of community and the relationship of individuals to communities widely evident in Old English poetry. It pays particular attention to the context in which major poetic manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period were received, a time when concerns about community appear to have been of special urgency. The book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in this period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts. Magennis analyses a wide range of poems and examines the imagery on which they draw, concentrating particularly on depictions of hall (including feasting and drinking), stronghold, city and landscape. In a poetry in which communal structures are typically associated with male ideals of warriorship and fellowship, the position and treatment of women is also shown to merit close consideration.

This is an extended study of the Old Testament poems of the Junius collection as a group. The circumstances surrounding their composition and transmission are mysterious: none is ascribed to a named author and none situated even relatively within the development of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry. This book seeks to breach this critical impasse by allowing the biblical content of the Junius poems to tell its own story. Paul G. Remley compares them with genuine early medieval texts that are most likely to have circulated in Anglo-Saxon centres, and sets out the full range of variants. He offers engaging exercises in hermeneutic and reader-response criticism. The introductory chapter reviews five centuries of Anglo-Saxon history. All citations of Old English, Latin, and Greek texts are accompanied by modern English translations, making the book accessible to general readers as well as specialists.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury has been described as 'the first English man of letters'. He was the first Germanic author to compose extensively in Latin metrical verse, and his Latin works were amongst the most influential in Anglo-Saxon England. Aldhelm can also be considered the best-read of Anglo-Saxon poets, in both senses of the phrase: he read most and was most read. In this first book-length study of Aldhelm's poetic art Andy Orchard traces the sources and models for Aldhelm's idiosyncratic style, as well as the nature and extent of his influence on later Anglo-Latin verse. Aldhelm's innovations in Latin verse technique are emphasized, in particular his special debt to the specific techniques of Old English vernacular verse.

This 1999 book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. Reginald Dodwell was an eminent art historian and former Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. In this, his last book, he notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence. He presents evidence for dating the archetype of the Terence manuscripts to the mid-third century, and argues persuasively that their gestures reflect actual stage conventions. He identifies a repertory of eighteen Terentian gestures whose meaning can be ascertained from the dramatic contexts in which they occur, and conducts a detailed examination of the use of the gestures in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The book, which is extensively illustrated, illuminates our understanding of the vigour of late Anglo-Saxon art and its ability to absorb and transpose continental influence.

Peter Clemoes brings a lifetime's close study of Anglo-Saxon texts to this appreciation of Old English poetry, with an alternative interpretation which relates the poetry to both the entire Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and the structures of its society. Clemoes proposes a dynamic principle of Old English poetry, very different from the common notion of formulas slotted into poems for stylistic variation. In extended discussions of particular poems and images as well as of changes in language, he shows how the poetic medium became a vehicle for increasing transformation to Christian literacy and to that religion's conceptions of the natural world, morality, and individuality. Carefully thought out and elegantly written, this book is also accessible to students: its numerous quotations are accompanied by modern English translations.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury has been described as 'the first English man of letters'. He was the first Germanic author to compose extensively in Latin metrical verse, and his Latin works were amongst the most influential in Anglo-Saxon England. Aldhelm can also be considered the best-read of Anglo-Saxon poets, in both senses of the phrase: he read most and was most read. In this first book-length study of Aldhelm's poetic art Andy Orchard traces the sources and models for Aldhelm's idiosyncratic style, as well as the nature and extent of his influence on later Anglo-Latin verse. Aldhelm's innovations in Latin verse technique are emphasized, in particular his special debt to the specific techniques of Old English vernacular verse.

This 1996 book provides a study and critical edition of the corpus of hymns sung by monks and canons in their services in England before the Norman Conquest. It assembles textual evidence, some of it hitherto unpublished, based on all extant manuscripts. Of these, an eleventh-century Latin manuscript known as the 'Durham Hymnal', with its accompanying Old English interlinear gloss, provides the core of the edition and its base manuscript. An introduction and commentary include descriptions of the manuscripts concerned and discussions of the sources, liturgical use, and music of the hymns, as well as the phonology and vocabulary of the Old English gloss. The text of the hymns is accompanied by a translation of the Latin into modern English prose.

The early medieval Vulgate Bible had no fixed textual form - multiple copying resulted in a multitude of forms. This 1995 book tackles questions about the transmission of the Vulgate Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. By tracing the history of the text in the surviving Latin manuscripts we can illuminate monastic and intellectual history. Following an introduction which explains the wider continental history in which the dissemination of the Latin scriptures occurred, Richard Marsden goes on to analyse twenty surviving manuscripts including the Codex Amiatinus, one of the greatest English books and the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible. The book provides a comprehensive listing and collation of surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the Old Testament, and it also establishes textual history as a dimension of wider Anglo-Saxon history.

The cult of the Virgin Mary is associated by most medievalists with the twelfth and succeeding centuries. This book, however, provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cult in England from c. 700 to the Conquest. Interest in and devotion to Mary flourished in the late seventh and eighth centuries and, especially, in the period of the Benedictine reform from the mid-tenth century onwards. In this latter period Mary, as patron saint of almost all of the reformed houses, was the most important saint of the monastic movement. Dr Clayton describes and illustrates the development of Marian devotion and doctrine from the early church to the Carolingians, by discussing Anglo-Saxon feasts of the Virgin, liturgical texts, prayers, monastic dedications, art and vernacular poetry and prose. This is a topic which has never before been examined in any detail but has significant bearing on the history of church liturgy and Anglo-Saxon literature. The book will appeal to Anglo-Saxonists with a special interest in literature, art history and theology.

Though best known today for his Old English homilies, the Anglo-Saxon scholar 'lfric also composed a Latin 'letter' to his fellow monks at Eynsham (Oxfordshire) containing a detailed outline of their daily and seasonal round of prayer and other duties. The document offers a rare glimpse of what ordinary monks in Anglo-Saxon England were expected to know and do. This 1999 book contains an edition of the Latin letters a textual commentary, and a complete English translation of the work. Dr Jones also provides substantial introductory chapters which establish the exceptional importance of the Eynsham letter for our understanding of late Anglo-Saxon monasticism and liturgy. The book will interest students of early medieval culture, monasticism and Church history.

Even the Venerable Bede knew little about the two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms described in this book. In the sixth and seventh centuries the pagan peoples of the Hwicce and Magonsaetan occupied the frontier from Stratford-upon-Avon as far as the Welsh kingdoms west of Offa's Dyke. They retained their own kings, aristocracy and independent monasteries into the eighth century. Using archaeological, place-name and historical sources, Dr Sims-Williams describes the early conversion to Christianity of these people, the origins of the dioceses of Worcester and Hereford, and the precocious growth of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Drawing on many neglected documents he reveals a wide range of Continental, Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences on the church and shows that the monasteries were as varied in character as the Northumbrian foundations described by Bede.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 2001 book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

What offers over seven hundred witty enigmas in several languages? Answer: The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Riddles, wordplay, and inscrutable utterances have been at the heart of Western literature for many centuries. Often brief and always delightful, medieval riddles provide insights into the extraordinary and the everyday, connecting the learned and the ribald, the lay and the devout, and the familiar and the imported. Many solutions involve domestic life, including “butter churn” and “chickens.” Others like “the harrowing of hell” or “the Pleiades” appeal to an educated elite. Still others, like “the one-eyed seller of garlic,” are too absurd to solve: that is part of the game. Riddles are not simply lighthearted amusement. They invite philosophical questions about language and knowledge.Most riddles in this volume are translated from Old English and Latin, but it also includes some from Old Norse–Icelandic. The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition assembles, for the first time ever, an astonishing array of riddles composed before 1200 CE that continue to entertain and puzzle.

Monsters and the monstrous, whether from the remote pagan past or the new world of Christian Latin learning, haunted the Anglo-Saxon imagination in a variety of ways. In this series of detailed studies, Andy Orchard demonstrates the changing range of Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the monstrous by reconsidering the monsters of Beowulf against the background of early medieval and patristic teratology and with reference to specific Anglo-Saxon texts.The immediate manuscript context of the monsters in Beowulf is analysed, shedding light on the poet's treatment of the theme of the monstrous and its integration into his work, and a series of parallel discussions consider a range of medieval treatments of the same theme in a variety of analogous texts (all provided with translation), in Latin, Old English, Middle Irish, and Old Icelandic.The twin themes of pride and prodigies are suggested by tracing changing attitudes towards the concept of pride and establishing a close link between the proud pagan warriors depicted in Christian tradition and the monsters they fight, and with whom they become increasingly identified.An appendix contains new editions and translations (some for the first time in English) of the Liber Monstrorum, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and The Wonders of the East.Originally published in 1995 by Boydell & Brewer.

The late tenth-century Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII) contains one of the earliest surviving collections of homilies and poetry in the English language. The manuscript's combination of poetry and homiletic prose has generated intense scholarly debate, and there is no consensus concerning the original purpose of the compiler.New Readings in the Vercelli Book addresses central questions concerning the manuscript's intended use, mode of compilation, and purpose, and offers a variety of approaches on such topics as orthography, style, genre, theme, and source-study. The contributors include some of the foremost Vercelli experts, as well as the two most recent editors of the homilies. The remarkable essays in this volume offer the first sustained literary analysis of both the poetry and prose texts of the Vercelli Book, providing important new perspectives on a dynamic and valuable historical document.

A complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. "A generous, energetic, engaging work". JOSEPHINE BLOOMFIELD, OHIO UNIVERSITY.Beowulf is the best known and most closely studied literary work surviving from Anglo-Saxon England, and the modern reader is faced with a bewildering number and variety of interpretations about such basic matters as the date, provenance, and significance of the poem. A Critical Companion to Beowulf addresses these and other issues, reviewing and synthesising previous scholarship, as well as offering fresh perspectives. After an initial introduction to the poem, attention is focused on such matters as the manuscript context and approaches to dating the poem, before a lengthy discussion of the particular style, diction, and structure of this most idiosyncratic of Old English texts. The background to the poem is considered not simply with respect to historical and legendary material, but also in the context of myth and fable. The specific roles of selected individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed, and in a chapter on the degree of piety and Latin-derived erudition implied by the text consideration is given to the original intended audience and perceived purpose of the poem. A final chapter describes therange of critical approaches which have been applied to the poem in the past, and points towards directions for future study.ANDY ORCHARD is Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford.

The forty-fifth volume of Anglo-Saxon England focusses on various aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture and history from the seventh to the seventeenth century. In the field of Old English literature, contributions examine a ninth-century homily fragment, The Dream of the Rood, The Seafarer, and the Old English translation of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae. A contribution which explores references to the senses in a wide range of vernacular texts is complemented by another which reconsiders the iconography of the Fuller Brooch. The network of fortifications recorded in the Burghal Hidage is re-interpreted here as a product of political developments in the later 870s; and a new edition of the 'Ely memoranda' reminds us that the religious houses of the tenth and eleventh centuries functioned also as major agricultural estates. Finally, the contribution of seventeenth-century antiquaries to the development of Anglo-Saxon studies is remembered in a study of an early Anglo-Saxon Grammar.

The forty-seventh volume of Anglo-Saxon England begins with a record of the eighteenth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and ends with a fourth supplement to the Hand-list of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions. Other articles in this volume cover a diverse range of subjects, including Skaldic art in Cnut's court, alliteration in Old English poetry, the northern world of an Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi and the Germanic context of Beowulf. Religious matters are given particular consideration in this volume: new light is shed on the lost St Margaret's crux nigra, and on Anglo-Breton contact between the tenth and twelfth centuries through an examination of St Kenelm and St Melor. Also included are an account of Archbishop Wulfstan's forgery of the 'laws of Edward and Guthrum', and an edition of the four sermons attributed to Candidus Witto. Each article is preceded by a short abstract.