10 - Anglo-Saxon textual attitudes

Summary

Moððe word fræt. Me þþt þuhte

wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þþt wundor gefrægn,

þþt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,

þeof in þystro, þrymfþstne cwide

ond þþs strangan staþol. Stþlgiest ne wþs

wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.

(Riddle 47, The Exeter Book)

In the fifth century CE, the erstwhile colony of the Roman Empire known as Britain became home to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic tribes moving across continental Europe in what has been somewhat romantically characterised as the ‘Age of Migrations’. Pushing the Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants of Britain westward and northward, these tribes rapidly consolidated their hold over the island, which they soon termed engla-lond, ‘land of the Angles’ (and hence ‘England’). The Germanic dialects they brought with them developed into a language that they called englisc, ‘English’. Modern scholarship terms this language ‘Old English’ (in distinction from ‘Middle English’, which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066), or, sometimes, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, after the two major tribal groups, while ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ refers to England between the Saxon Advent and the Norman Conquest.

Anglo-Saxon England was one of the earliest European cultures to produce a substantial corpus of vernacular prose, alongside a flourishing monastic literacy in Latin and a robust tradition of vernacular poetry in the alliterative Germanic style. Much of this writing has survived in the dialect of Old English that philologists distinguish as ‘late West Saxon’. Both prose and poetry were used for narrative, hagiographic, exegetical and hortatory purposes.