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This book argues for the importance of synoptically examining the whole range of same‐sex relations in the Anglo‐Saxon period, revisiting well‐known texts and issues (as well as material often considered marginal) from a radically different perspective. The introductory chapters first lay out the premises underlying the book and its critical context, then emphasise the need to avoid modern cultural assumptions about both male‐female and male‐male relationships, and underline the paramount place of homosocial bonds in Old English literature. Part II then investigates the construction of and attitudes to same‐sex acts and identities in ethnographic, penitential, and theological texts, ranging widely throughout the Old English corpus and drawing on Classical, Medieval Latin, and Old Norse material. Part III expands the focus to homosocial bonds in Old English literature in order to explore the range of associations for same‐sex intimacy and their representation in literary texts such as Genesis A, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. During the course of the book's argument, it uncovers several under‐researched issues and suggests fruitful approaches for their investigation. It concludes that, in omitting to ask certain questions of Anglo‐Saxon material, in being too willing to accept the status quo indicated by the extant corpus, in uncritically importing invisible (because normative) heterosexist assumptions in our reading, we risk misrepresenting the diversity and complexity that a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and sexuality suggests may be more genuinely characteristic of the period.

English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History traces the influence of Old Norse myth—stories about divine beings such as Odin, Thor, Baldr and Freyja—on poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Many major poets were inspired by this mythic material, especially the poetry of the Edda. Some, such as the Anglo-Saxon poet of Beowulf, or Walter Scott, used mythic references to set the scene of a distant but dramatic Northern past. Others, such as Thomas Gray, or Matthew Arnold, adapted actual Old Norse texts in ways which both responded to and formed the literary tastes of their own times. Still others, such as William Blake, or David Jones, reworked central mythic elements—valkyries weaving the fates of men, or the great World Tree on which Odin sacrificed himself—into their own poetry. This book shows how a surprising number of both major and minor poets in English reflect changing attitudes towards the pagan North. But poets have always recognized Old Norse myth as a vital part of the literary, cultural and historical legacy of the English-speaking world. This book also traces a parallel history of the gradual dissemination of Old Norse mythic texts, a crucial element in the reception history of Old Norse literature.

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and ‘invention’ of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on ‘early’ language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton’s apprehension of ‘deep time’ in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of ‘constant roots’ whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so aetiologically to legitimize, a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the ‘extinct’ philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. A wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of antiquarianism, philology, and Anglo-Saxon scholarship forms the evidential base that underpins the advancement of these two models for understanding the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry. New archival research and readings of unpublished papers by Tennyson, Whitman, and Morris is also presented here for the first time.

Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called ‘green’ terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world, puzzlement about how we relate to it, and anxiety about what we, as humans, are doing to it. So-called green or eco-criticism acknowledges this concern. This book reaches back and offers new readings of English texts, both known and unfamiliar, informed by eco-criticism. After considering general issues pertaining to green criticism, it moves on to a series of individual chapters arranged by theme (earth, trees, wilds, sea, gardens and fields) that provide individual close readings of selections from such familiar texts as Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Chaucer's Knight's and Franklin's Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Langland's Piers Plowman. These discussions are contextualized by considering them alongside hitherto marginalized texts such as lyrics, Patience and the romance Sir Orfeo. The result is a study that reinvigorates our customary reading of late Middle English literary texts while also allowing us to reflect upon the vibrant new school of eco-criticism itself.

Recognizing the dramatic changes in Old English studies over the past generation, this anthology gathers twenty-one outstanding contemporary critical writings on the prose and poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, from approximately the seventh through eleventh centuries. The chapters focus on texts most commonly read in introductory Old English courses while also engaging with larger issues of Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and scholarship. Their approaches vary widely, encompassing disciplines from linguistics to psychoanalysis. The Introduction to this book presents an overview of Old English studies, the history of the scholarship, and major critical themes in the field.

This book suggests that the Old English poem Beowulf was composed between the reigns of Kings Beornwulf (823-6) and Wiglaf (827-9 and 830-39) of Mercia, in the winter of 826-7, in the monastery of Breedon on the Hill in NW Leicestershire, by Abbot Eanmund (ruled 814x816-c.848). The premise seems clear enough in the Beowulf–Wiglaf sequence in the last fifth of Beowulf. With Old Norse analogues, Beowulf's kinship with Hygelac, friendship with Hrothgar, interest in Freawaru, later role as king and kinship with ‘Wiglaf’ are all argued to be the poet's invention, one fashioned partly on the model of Vergil's Aeneid, while the sequence of big names in the Geatish part of Beowulf, Offa of Angeln – Hygelac – Beowulf – Wiglaf, is taken to be a reference to leaders of Mercia: Offa – Cenwulf – Beornwulf – Wiglaf. Three tales from Viking mythology are presented as sources for morally defining moments in the poem. Beowulf's death and Wiglaf's uncrowned status at the end are used to date Beowulf to between 826, when Beornwulf died in battle, and 827, when the historical Wiglaf took over from an intermediary named Ludeca. It is concluded that Beowulf was Wiglaf's propaganda for succession, a requiem for Beornwulf from the man who wished to rule after him; that Wiglaf cast himself as his own ancestor; and that, in the words Eanmundes laf (‘Eanmund's legacy’, line 2611), nine lines after introducing Wiglaf (line 2602, head of Fitt XXXVI), the poet leaves us his signature.

This book is a study of commemorative skaldic verse from the Viking Age. It investigates how skaldic poets responded to the deaths of kings and the ways in which poetic commemoration functioned within the social and political communities of the early medieval court. Beginning with the early genealogical poem Ynglingatal, the book explores how the commemoration of a king's ancestors could be used to consolidate his political position and to provide a shared history for the community. It then examines the presentation of dead kings in poems Eiríksmál and Hákonarmál, showing how poets could re-cast their kings as characters of myth and legend in the afterlife. This is followed by an analysis of verse in which poets use their commemoration of one king to reinforce their relationship with his successor; it is shown that poetry could both help and hinder the integration of the poet into the retinue of a new king. Focusing then on the memorial poems composed for Kings Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson, as well as for the Jarls of the Orkney Islands, the book considers the tension between public and private expressions of grief. It explores the strategies used by poets to negotiate the tumultuous period that followed the death of a king, and to work through their own emotional responses to that loss. The book demonstrates that skaldic poets engaged with the deaths of rulers in a wide variety of ways, and that poetic commemoration was a particularly effective means not only of constructing a collective memory of the dead man, but also of consolidating the new social identity of the community he left behind.

This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.

Sanctity as literature in late medieval Britain explores how sanctity and questions of literariness are intertwined across a range of medieval genres. “Sanctity” as a theme and concept figures as a prominent indicator of the developments in the period, in which authors began to challenge the predominant medieval dichotomy of either relying on the authority of previous authors when writing, or on experience. These developments are marked also by a rethinking of the intended and perceived effects of writings. Instead of looking for clues in religious practices in order to explain these changes, the literary practices themselves need to be scrutinised in detail, which provide evidence for a reinterpretation of both the writers’ and their topics’ traditional roles and purposes. The essays in the collection are based on a representative choice of texts from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, covering penitential literature, hagiographical compilations and individual legends as well as romance, debates, and mystical literature from medieval and early modern England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. For researchers and advanced students of medieval literature and culture, the collection offers new insights into one of the central concepts of the late medieval period by considering sanctity first and foremost from the perspective of its literariness and literary potential.

Njáls saga is acknowledged as the greatest of the Icelandic sagas, and it rightly deserves acclaim as one of the great masterpieces of all time. The author’s reading reveals not only the saga’s sublime artistry, but also its pragmatic and tough-minded analysis of the complex tactics and strategies that inform feud and law. Unforgettable fully-rounded characters abound—their motives, their inner lives subtly revealed by a narrator who describes motive and psychology in a way that mirrors how we understand them in our own lives: not by magical access into a person’s head, but by close observation of what they do, says, and how and when they do or say it. Nothing previously written even approaches the nuances of thought and action that the author shows to be right there in the text. His book makes the law accessible, and demonstrates how the saga reveals the economic constraints that limit or finance conflict. The author’s writing style entertains as well as instructs.