2014
First Published
3.82
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages
Part of Series
The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalizing insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey. The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. "Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide," reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature's indifference to human suffering. Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith. This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.
Avg Rating
3.82
Number of Ratings
22
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Author
Robert E. Bjork
Author · 2 books
Robert E. Bjork is Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1983 and where he was Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) from 1994 to 2018. He earned his B.A. from Pomona College in 1971, his M.A. from UCLA in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1979, also from UCLA. He was named Foundation Professor of English in 2009. His primary research areas are Old English poetry, modern Swedish literature, and biomedical writing; he has published 18 books and 26 peer-reviewed articles. His and R. D. Fulk's and John D. Niles' Klaeber's Beowulf (the 4th edition of Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg) was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008. He is General Editor of the 4-volume The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, published in June, 2010, and his second volume of facing-page translations of Old English poems for Harvard University Press was published in the spring of 2014. He is currently working on a history of Scandinavian scholarship on Anglo-Saxon literature. He's past President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a recipient of an NEH senior fellowship and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association (United Kingdom), and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. In addition, he also serves on the editorial boards of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press), Mediaevistik: Internationale Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Mittelalterforschung (Peter Lang Verlag), and the University of Toronto Press' "Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Studies" series as well as on the International Advisory Boards of National Sun Yat-sen University Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Taiwan, and of the Medieval Centre, National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan.
