Color in Old English Poetry

Extract

It is a somewhat singular fact that although students of our language and literature have been carefully gleaning their chosen fields and leaving scarcely any entirely new theme for investigation, there should remain practically untouched a subject of high interest and æsthetic importance,— I mean the use of color in poetry. To some extent the matter has attracted attention in the study of other literatures than ours. Critics often remark upon the brilliant color-sense of the Celtic poets and of the writers of the Old Norse sagas and poems. Gladstone devoted a long section of his Homeric Studies to the color-epithets in the Iliad and the Odyssey; and a German scholar, with characteristic thoroughness, has made an exhaustive study of the color-words in the entire body of the Latin and Greek classics. But an adequate investigation of the development of the color-sense in English poetry is yet to be written. I know of but one paper that treats the matter in any detail, and that paper is confessedly tentative and leaves the older periods untouched. As for color in Old English poetry, a few words by Professor March and a few more in a very rare paper by Dr. Sweet exhaust about all that has been said on the subject.