Richard North offers a complete revision of our 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 a god known as Ingui. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in an imaginative and original treatment of poems such as "Deor" and "The Dream of the Rood."

This book is a study of the theology of the Trinity as expressed in the literature and art of the late Anglo-Saxon period. It examines the meaning of the representations of the Trinity in tenth- and eleventh-century English manuscripts and their relationship both to Anglo-Saxon theology and to earlier debates about the legitimacy of representations of the divine. The book's unifying theme is that of the image. It will be of interest to art historians, theologians and literary scholars alike.

This book explores the foundations of the intellectual renaissance in late-tenth-century England, including both the English Benedictine reform and the establishment by AEthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, of his influential school. The early stages of AEthelwold's scholarly career are explored and new light is shed on the role which King AEthelstan's cosmopolitan court played. Two widely influential Old English texts are definitively attributed to AEthelwold and his circle, which attest to the importance that the reformers attached to the vernacular.

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 and argues that the poetic descriptions were not a reflection of these conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues, such as 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.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualise the interim between death and Doomsday? In Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Dr. Kabir presents the first investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the "interim paradise" or paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She determines 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...

Though best known today for his Old English homilies, the Anglo-Saxon scholar AElfric also composed, in a "letter" to his fellow monks, a set of Latin liturgical instructions that offer a rare glimpse of what ordinary monks were expected to know and do. This book contains a new edition of the Latin text with a critical apparatus, and the only complete English translation. Commentary and substantial introductory chapters establish the letter's exceptional importance for our understanding of late Anglo-Saxon monasticism and liturgy.

This book offers an imaginative new way of understanding the relationship between syntax and meter in Old English verse. It challenges the view that Old English poetry is composed in loose syntax to compensate for the strict requirements of prosody, such as meter and alliteration. The author proposes a "prosodical" syntax to replace the syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application. She formulates three concise rules that apply to the entire Old English poetic corpus.

This 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. When Christianity was introduced into Anglo-Saxon England at the end of the sixth century, the practice of singing hymns in the liturgy of the Office was already well established. The hymnal that the missionaries brought with them was replaced during the Benedictine Reform in the tenth century by another body of hymns, itself introduced from the Continent. This edition assembles textual evidence of these early hymns, some of it hitherto...

This book discusses the attitudes toward Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance, and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributors, who are specialists in their respective fields from Britain and the United States, draw on works that have frequently been ignored or overlooked. They address topical issues such as nationalism, cultural identity, myth, gender and...

This book provides an edition, with a facing translation and detailed commentary, of the three apocryphal gospels of Mary written in Old English. The gospels, which deal with Mary's birth, childhood, death and assumption, are found in manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge, but have never been treated as a group before, and have been almost totally neglected by English scholars. An extensive introduction covers the origins and development of the apocrypha and their influence in Anglo-Saxon England.