John D. Niles - Böcker

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literatureReinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studiesAddresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and themeEmbraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literatureReinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studiesAddresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and themeEmbraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

The first comprehensive edition and translation of Old English writings on health and healing in more than 150 years.Unlike elsewhere in Europe, vernacular writings on health and healing had a major place in early medieval England. These texts—unique local remedies and translations of late antique Latin treatises—offer insights into the history of science and medicine, social history, scribal practices, and culture. Some cures resemble ones still used today; others are linguistically extravagant, prescribing ambitious healing practices. Alongside recipes for everyday ailments such as headaches are unparalleled procedures for preventing infant mortality, restoring lost cattle, warding off elf-shot, or remedying the effects of flying venom.Medical Writings from Early Medieval England presents the first comprehensive edition and translation from Old English of these works in more than 150 years. Volume I includes The Old English Herbal, Remedies from Animals, Lacnunga, the Peri Didaxeon, and a compendium of miscellaneous texts.

Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is one of the landmarks of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories-from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines-for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past.In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique.That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.

The papers in this volume contribute to a more precise assessment of the interconnections between England and Scandinavia during the period from the establishment of the Danelaw to the Norman Conquest. The essays fall into three groups of concern: history, myth, and the language of poetry. Contents: Introduction: The Vikings and England; The Viking Policy of Ethelred the Unready; The Viking Policy of Ethelred: A Response; Ethelred II, Olaf Tryggvason, and the Conversion of Norway; Norse Mythology and Northumbria: Methodological Notes; Norse Mythology and Northumbria: A Response; Did Anglo-Saxon Audiences Have a Skaldic Tooth?; Skaldic Technique in Brunanburh; and Maldon As It Really Was. Co-published with the Old English Colloquium.

The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is a landmark of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition and offers both a rapid survey of trends in the study of Beowulf and a more sustained exploration of selected problems. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of its contents followed by a chronology of the most important books and articles on the particular topic it treats. The book has been written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, from non-specialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf, to scholars at work on their own research, and students of Old English. This is a volume in the acclaimed series Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies, and will prove an indispensable guide for many years to come. The acclaimed and comprehensive 1988 edition of Beowulf edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton is also available in the series.

The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth centuryTells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutionsCombines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon pastReveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional libertiesIncludes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth centuryTells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutionsCombines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon pastReveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional libertiesIncludes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

Born in 1928 in a tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Duncan Williamson (d. 2007) eventually came to be recognized as one of the foremost storytellers in Scotland and the world. Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller is based on more than a hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews undertaken with him in the 1980s. Williamson tells of his birth and upbringing in the west of Scotland, his family background as one of Scotland’s seminomadic travelling people, his varied work experiences after setting out from home at about age fifteen, and the challenges he later faced while raising a family of his own, living on the road for half the year.The recordings on which the book is based were made by John D. Niles, who was then an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Niles has transcribed selections from his field tapes with scrupulous accuracy, arranging them alongside commentary, photos, and other scholarly aids, making this priceless self-portrait of a brilliant storyteller available to the public. The result is a delight to read. It is also a mine of information concerning a vanished way of life and the place of singing and storytelling in Traveller culture. In chapters that feature many colorful anecdotes and that mirror the spontaneity of oral delivery, readers learn much about how Williamson and other members of his persecuted minority had the resourcefulness to make a living on the outskirts of society, owning very little in the way of material goods but sustained by a rich oral heritage.

Born in 1928 in a tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Duncan Williamson (d. 2007) eventually came to be recognized as one of the foremost storytellers in Scotland and the world. Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller is based on more than a hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews undertaken with him in the 1980s. Williamson tells of his birth and upbringing in the west of Scotland, his family background as one of Scotland’s seminomadic travelling people, his varied work experiences after setting out from home at about age fifteen, and the challenges he later faced while raising a family of his own, living on the road for half the year.The recordings on which the book is based were made by John D. Niles, who was then an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Niles has transcribed selections from his field tapes with scrupulous accuracy, arranging them alongside commentary, photos, and other scholarly aids, making this priceless self-portrait of a brilliant storyteller available to the public. The result is a delight to read. It is also a mine of information concerning a vanished way of life and the place of singing and storytelling in Traveller culture. In chapters that feature many colorful anecdotes and that mirror the spontaneity of oral delivery, readers learn much about how Williamson and other members of his persecuted minority had the resourcefulness to make a living on the outskirts of society, owning very little in the way of material goods but sustained by a rich oral heritage.

This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as ‘The Exeter Book’.  Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text, published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed’n 2006), has re-named the manuscript ‘The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry’.  The book gives us intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all of the poems of the Anthology.God’s Exiles and English Verse is the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral instruction.Part One, consisting of three chapters, introduces certain of the book’s main themes, addresses matters of date, authorship, audience, and the like, and evaluates hypotheses that have been put forth concerning the origins of the Exeter Anthology in the south of England during the period of the Benedictine Reform.Part Two, the main body of the book, begins with a long chapter, divided into seven sections, that introduces the contents of the Exeter Anthology poem by poem in a more systematic fashion than before, with attention to the overall organization of the Anthology and certain factors in it that have a unifying function. The five shorter chapters that follow are devoted to topics of special interest, including the volume’s possible use as a guide to vernacular poetic techniques, its underlying worldview, its reliance on certain thematically significant keywords, and its intertextual versus intratextual relations. The riddles, especially those of a sexual content, receive attention in a chapter of their own.In addition, there is a translation of the popular poem The Wanderer into modern English prose, a folio-by-folio listing of the contents of the Exeter Anthology, and a listing of a number of the poems of the Anthology with notes on their genre, according to Latin generic terms familiar to educated Anglo-Saxons.This book is the first of its kind - an integrative, book-length critical study of the Exeter Anthology.

This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as ‘The Exeter Book’.  Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text, published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed’n 2006), has re-named the manuscript ‘The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry’.  The book gives us intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all of the poems of the Anthology.God’s Exiles and English Verse is the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral instruction.Part One, consisting of three chapters, introduces certain of the book’s main themes, addresses matters of date, authorship, audience, and the like, and evaluates hypotheses that have been put forth concerning the origins of the Exeter Anthology in the south of England during the period of the Benedictine Reform.Part Two, the main body of the book, begins with a long chapter, divided into seven sections, that introduces the contents of the Exeter Anthology poem by poem in a more systematic fashion than before, with attention to the overall organization of the Anthology and certain factors in it that have a unifying function. The five shorter chapters that follow are devoted to topics of special interest, including the volume’s possible use as a guide to vernacular poetic techniques, its underlying worldview, its reliance on certain thematically significant keywords, and its intertextual versus intratextual relations. The riddles, especially those of a sexual content, receive attention in a chapter of their own.In addition, there is a translation of the popular poem The Wanderer into modern English prose, a folio-by-folio listing of the contents of the Exeter Anthology, and a listing of a number of the poems of the Anthology with notes on their genre, according to Latin generic terms familiar to educated Anglo-Saxons.This book is the first of its kind - an integrative, book-length critical study of the Exeter Anthology.