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1 - Old English and its afterlife

from I - AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Seth Lerer
Edited by
David Wallace
David Wallace
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

England has become the dwelling place of foreigners and the property of strangers.

william of malmesbury

Our forefathers could not build as we do …but their lives were examples to their flocks. We, neglecting men’s souls, care only to pile up stones.

wulfstan of worcester

The afterlife of Old English may be evoked in two remarkably disparate poems from the first fifty years of Norman rule. The first – the verses on the death of William the Conqueror from the Peterborough Chronicle entry of 1087 (known to modern scholars as The Rime of King William) – seems like a garbled attempt at rhyming poetry: a poem without regular metre, formalized lineation or coherent imagery. So far is it in language, diction and form from the lineage of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poems (from the finely nuanced Battle of Brunanburh of 937 to the looser verses on the deaths of Prince Alfred of 1036 and of King Edward of 1065), that this poem has rarely been considered part of the Old English canon. It was not edited by Krapp and Dobbie in their authoritative six-volume Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, and, when it has been critically considered at all, it has been dismissed as an example of the ‘rough and ready verse’ of popular encomium, arrestingly inept when compared to the rhetorical sweep and homiletic power of the prose account of William’s reign that contains it.

The second of these poems is the supple vernacular encomium urbis known as Durham. Perhaps composed to celebrate the translation of St Cuthbert’s remains to Durham Cathedral in 1104, this poem more than competently reproduces the traditional alliterative half-lines of Old English prosody. Its commanding use of interlace and ring structure, together with its own elaborate word plays, puns and final macaronic lines, makes Durham something of a paradox in Anglo-Saxon verse.

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The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , pp. 7 - 34
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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