Divine creation becomes a model both for the fictional world set up by the poem and for the human process of poetic composition. Bede presents Cædmon’s Hymn as the very first instance of religious verse in Old English: because this poem refers to God the Creator, it blurs the line between divine and human, material and linguistic creations. . . . In Bede’s anecdote, an analogy connects Cædmon as a poet to God as a creator: for, just as the first material creation stimulates the future builder, similarly the cowherd provides a divinely inspired model for subsequent poets. 66

In the Old English poem Christ and Satan, Christ addresses the souls of the just whom he has freed from Hell, speaking of how Adam and Eve had children before the fall. There is a lacuna and a syntactically confused passage in this speech, and editors have emended the text in order to provide an approximately conventional account of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. Editors have generally assumed that the claim that Adam and Eve had children before the fall is a result of scribal error or authorial confusion, since children born before the fall would, by definition, be sinless. But belief in prelapsarian children of Adam and Eve is in fact affirmed in the Hiberno-Latin Reference Bible and in the Middle-Irish Duan in choicat cest', and was even current in Old and Middle Irish tales dealing with the Otherworld, which make explicit their sinless condition. Editors have assumed that the ideology of Christ and Satan is conventionally Augustinian' Christianity but there were other strands of Christian thought in the early Middle Ages in the British Isles and in Christ and Satan, the risen triumphant Jesus tells a strikingly unconventional account of the life of Adam and Eve before the fall.

“Hiberno-Latin literature” refers to Latin writings by native speakers of Irish, whether or not they were written in Ireland, and whether or not they differ linguistically from other medieval Latin texts. (An exception must be made for St. Patrick, a Briton by birth who spent most of his adult life in Ireland and wrote his surviving works there.) Hiberno-Latin literature in the earlier Middle Ages is virtually all of monastic or clerical authorship and predominantly on religious subjects. The tradition begins with the writings of the missionary Patrick in the 5th century and of the expatriate Columbanus in the late 5th to early 6th century; reaches a high point in the 7th century with some remarkably original but mostly anonymous or pseudonymous theological writings and poetry; shifts mainly to the Continent in the 8th and 9th centuries with the Irish peregrini, such as the poet-scholars Sedulius Scottus and Iohannes Scottus Eriugena; and declines over the course of the 10th through 12th centuries, though with a final flourish in the influential Visio Tnugdali by Marcus of Regensburg. In addition to texts of known Irish authorship, there are also those (especially in the category of biblical commentaries) for which Irish authorship has been postulated but also disputed, and others that occupy a marginal status as putatively “Insular” (or “Irish-influenced”). A further marginal category comprises Irish versions or revisions of non-Irish texts (for example, many liturgical texts). This entry will focus on Reference Works, General Overviews, Journals, Major Named Authors, Major Genres, Thematic Studies, Historical and Cultural Contexts, and Hiberno-Latin Language.

Eall-feala Ealde Sæge:Poetic Performance and "The Scop's Repertoire" in Old English Verse1 Paul Battles (bio) and Charles D. Wright (bio) Scenes depicting the recitation of verse, particularly in Beowulf, are among the most memorable and closely studied passages in Old English poetry. Beowulf repeatedly depicts the making and performance of poetry (Hill 2002), and it is the swutol sang scopes ("the clear song of the scop," Bwf 90a) that first draws the monster Grendel's attention to Heorot and sets in motion the major events of the first part of the poem.2 In Beowulf, the creation of new stories is inextricably linked with the recitation of ones already known, so that the poem "aligns itself with a poetics where transmission and composition are co-dependent, indivisible aspects of the same act" (Jones 2009:486). A different but equally famous depiction of the scop emerges in the Venerable Bede's account of Caedmon, wherein divine inspiration supersedes tradition as the source of poetic creativity. Of course, these and similar accounts concerning the making and performance of Old English verse cannot be taken as straightforward portraits of the Anglo-Saxon "singer of tales": after all, Hrothgar's scop is Danish and Bede's Christian poet is entirely ignorant of traditional song. Moreover, since Beowulf and other narratives depicting vernacular poets—such as Widsith and Deor—are fictional accounts set int he Migration Age, some critics have gone so far as to deny that they can tell us anything at all about the Anglo-Saxon scop (Frank 1993).3 Yet in the words of John D. Niles, such a position seems "to represent a veritable ecstasy of skepticism" (2003:37). Niles usefully characterizes oral poetry as both a living tradition in pre-Conquest England and also as a "cultural myth whose long process of construction was set in motion as soon as the first missionaries from Iona and Rome introduced the arts of writing to Britain in a systematic way" (38). Fictional portraits of the scop, then, combine elements of poetic practice with a deeply-felt nostalgia for an imagined ancestral past (see Trilling 2009). While not straightforwardly reflective of reality, neither are they completely divorced from it. Even fictional portraits of the making and performance of poetry can tell us much about Anglo-Saxon poetics. Several studies have shown that depictions of poetic performance throughout the corpus incorporate several recurrent thematic patterns supported by common lexemes; in turn, these patterns – traditional themes4—are the product of a tradition that has its roots in the oral recitation of verse. Among the Old English themes depicting the recitation of verse are "The Singer Looks at His Sources," (see Creed 1962; Renoir 1981); "Joy in the Hall," (see Opland 1976; Foley 1983) and the "Poet-patron" see Maring 2011). Like other commonplaces of "heroic" life5—such as feasting, fighting, and voyages by sea or land—in Old English poetry the performance of poetry is articulated through a nexus of conventional ideas, images, and verbal expressions. In this essay we identify and discuss a previously unrecognized theme relating to poetic performance, which we will call "The Scop's Repertoire." This theme, which stages or describes the making of verse, associates that process with three motifs: copiousness; orality; and antiquity. Copiousness references the performer's knowledge of many poems or songs, and implicitly or explicitly links this vast repertoire with the ability to skillfully and quickly weave new texts. Orality means that these texts take the form of spoken, not written, words; they are variously described as spoken tales, as poems, and/or as songs accompanied by instruments. Finally, antiquity adumbrates the power of tradition, characterizing either the texts known to the poet and/or their subject matter as ancient and therefore venerable. As we shall see, "The Scop's Repertoire" takes two forms: in one all three motifs are explicitly present; in the other, the motif of antiquity is absent or displaced. These two variants of "The Scop's Repertoire" articulate different models for what it is that poets do: in the tradition model, they accumulate a store of ancient songs, and learning these endows poets with the...

The Alphabet of Words ( AW ), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar ( D ) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D , and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript ( K ) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe ( Kr ). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet (“Audiuimus multos”: AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of “parenetic alphabet,” widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript ( P : BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K , and Kr , with variants from AM and P , together with a discussion of AW ’s genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW ’s lemmata and glosses on each letter.

In the Old English Genesis A, the poet describes how Lot's wife was turned into a sealtstān, adding that she must remain in that place until the Lord decides her fate at the Last Judgment:

The earliest previously known quotations from 6 Ezra are in the De excidio Britanniae by the British writer Gildas, who was writing probably between 530 and 545. Hitherto unrecognized quotations occur, however, in the Longer (“Interpolated”) Version of The Apocalypse of Thomas, which dates from the second half of the fifth century. A series of “woe oracles” added in the Longer Version freely adapts a sequence of verses from 6 Ezra and bears witness to a stage of transmission of 6 Ezra prior to the traditional division into two recensions (the so-called “French” and “Spanish” recensions). One of the oracles that borrows wording from 6 Ezra - a warning that those who marry in the endtimes will beget children into captivity and famine - has sometimes been regarded as reflecting Priscillianist encratism, but is instead a traditional prophetic element. An appendix to this article provides a semi-diplomatic edition of a recently discovered Longer Version of Thomas in an eighth-century Kassel manuscript.

Book Review| July 01 2012 The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. Edited and translated by Daniel Anlezark. Anglo-Saxon Texts, 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xii + 167. $95. Charles D. Wright Charles D. Wright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2012) 111 (3): 403–406. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.3.0403 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Charles D. Wright; The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 July 2012; 111 (3): 403–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.3.0403 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A group of half-lines in Cynewulf's poetry that take the form purh + demonstrative pronoun + adjective + gesceap/gesceaft constitutes a distinctively Cynewulfian realization of a more widespread formulaic system (x X gesceaft). Only Cynewulf substitutes (in two closely similar contexts) gesceap for gesceaft, and Cynewulf consistently uses both words to refer to a specific 'created thing' instead of to 'creation'. Within the system as a whole, the specific referent of gesceaft in the sense 'creation' (heaven, or earth, or all of creation) is often clarified by deixis, specifically in the type of demonstrative pronoun that modifies the word. Cynewulf's choice of the distal pronoun,bat likewise indicates that the apparently ambiguous referents of gesceap/gesceaft in Juliana 273b and 728a and Elene 789a are heavenly or unearthly things, and analysis of context as well as Christian-Latin analogues supports a specific identification of the referent in each case. While availing himself of an existing formulaic system, then, Cynewulf was innovative in its metrical realization as well as in its semantic application.