Seiichi Suzuki - Böcker

Extensive study of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon button brooches, looking at their design, origins and development.The Anglo-Saxon button brooch is a small disc brooch, about 2cm in diameter and decorated with a single human face mask, found mainly in southern England and occasionally in France; although many examples survive, its origins anddevelopment are not fully understood. This book offers a comprehensive study of its typology, genealogy and chronology. It investigates formal and structural design features, proposes a prototype- and statistics-based typology, and examines the physical, conceptual and geographical dimensions of the classification. Through an in-depth description of class-internal distinctions and class-external similarities, the author also explores the development of button brooches and reconstructs their genealogy or derivational history. He then situates the evolutionary trajectory of button brooches in a temporal framework, by linking them to other brooch types such as Jutlandic relief brooches and Saxon cast saucer brooches, and by taking account of associated grave goods as appropriate. A catalogue of the entire corpus of 209 button brooches and that of related objects is provided in the appendices; there are also over 200 plates and other illustrations, enabling the details to be carefully studied.SEIICHI SUZUKI is Professor of Old Germanic Studies, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan.

No detailed description available for "The Metrical Organization of Beowulf".

This book is a formal and functional study of the three distinct meters of Old Norse eddic poetry, fornyrðislag, málaháttr, and ljóðaháttr. It provides a systematic account of these archaic meters, both synchronic and diachronic, and from a comparative Germanic perspective; particularly concerned with Norse innovations in metrical practice, Suzuki explores how and why the three meters were shaped in West Scandinavia through divergent reorganization of the Common Germanic metrical system. The book constitutes the first comprehensive work on the meters of Old Norse eddic poetry in a single coherent framework; with thorough data presentation, detailed philological analysis, and sophisticated linguistic explanation, the book will be of enormous interest to Old Germanic philologists/linguists, medievalists, as well as metrists of all persuasions. A strong methodological advantage of this work is the extensive use of inferential statistical techniques for giving empirical support to specific analyses and claims being adduced. Another strength is a cognitive dimension, a (re)construction of a prototype-based model of the metrical system and its overall characterization as an integral part of the poetic knowledge that governed eddic poets' verse-making technique in general.

The Old English Genesis is the sole illustrated Anglo-Saxon poem. In full appreciation of this unique concurrent execution of visualization and versification in a single manuscript, this multidisciplinary work explores the pictorial (Vol. 1) and the metrical (Vol. 2) organization from both synchronic–structural and diachronic–comparative perspectives. Among the most significant findings of each volume are: The first twenty-two images in the Old English Genesis originated on the whole from the Touronian Bibles; and the underlying classical Old English and Old Saxon meters were interactively reshaped through mutual adaptation and recomposition aimed at their firm integration into a synthesized Old English Genesis. While each part is solidly embedded in the respective scholarly tradition and pursues its own disciplinary concerns and problematics, vigorous formal and cognitive reasoning and theorizing run commonly through both. By way of mutual corroboration and integration, the twin volumes eventually converge on the hypothesis that the earliest portion of the extant Old English Genesis (lines 1–966) derived from the corresponding episodes of an illustrated Touronian Old Saxon Genesis in both pictorial and metrical terms.