Some works survive by a thread. The Beowulf manuscript is a good example of how tenuous our knowledge of the medieval past can be, as it survives in only one manuscript that was very nearly incinerated in the Cottonian fire of 1731. The chapter describes the knowledge that existed of the manuscript prior to that – virtually none – and the scholarly work done on it since then.

Medieval and modern accounts of old age are notable for the sheer abundance and diversity of the characteristics they identify. This chapter contemplates how contrasting qualities associated with old age actually connect in Old English poetry, dwelling particularly on the relationship between wisdom and sorrow, and introducing a new theoretical framework in the form of trauma theory. It points out the considerable presence of aged poets in the corpus, focusing particularly on Beowulf and Cynewulf’s epilogues. These texts stress that living into old age inevitably constitutes a kind of survival, one which involves witnessing destruction and terrible losses. The subsequently heightened intellectual, verbal, and creative capacity of the elderly sometimes resembles a kind of post-traumatic growth as understood within trauma theory. The parts of old age that are broadly positive (especially wisdom) and those that are negative (grief and loss) therefore emerge as inseparable.

Literary practice is a distinctive form of historical thinking and early medieval culture is an important component of literary creativity and innovation in the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter examines the opportunities early medieval English poetry afforded writers and scholars in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern writers in this period negotiated the medieval past in their work in different ways. Outright hostility sits alongside an awareness that thinking of the medieval is a necessary component of modern culture. To give a sense of this literary engagement, this chapter offers an account of Old English at the mid-century in relation to four profoundly different writers, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Gavin Bone (1907–1942), Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894–1983), and Angus Wilson (1913–1991). The work of these writers and scholars demonstrates that early medieval culture is part of a broader post-War inquiry into society, culture, sexuality, race and ethnocentrism.

The growth of origin narratives throughout a wide swath of literary and historical genres demonstrates their important role in constructing a particular vision of the present by linking it to a carefully constructed narrative of the past during the medieval period. It also underscores the intellectual connections that this book argues were widespread in the early medieval insular region. Such textual connections were not limited to the more comprehensive historical works which have formed the focus of this study. Local origin stories also drew on the same narrative patterns and motifs. The conclusion examines four brief dynastic origin legends that incorporate some of the themes explored in this book: the brief genealogical treatise of the Dál Riata known as Senchus Fer n-Alban / Míniugud Senchusa Fher n-Alban; the legendary piece of Uí Néill dynastic propaganda known as Echtra mac nEchach Muigmedóin; the legend of ancestral figure Cunedda and his sons expelling the Irish from Gwynedd which is embedded in the Historia Brittonum; and the story of legendary Danish ancestor Scyld Scefing from the opening lines of Beowulf. These narratives underscore the importance of movement within the corpus of insular origin material, even on a local level.

In “Wilderness,” Debbie Lee traces the conceptual origins of wilderness writing to the “wildēors” (self-willed land) of ancient and medieval texts like Beowulf and to Indigenous place-based language and storytelling such as that of the Nimiipuu. In addition to tracing a history of the “wilderness movement” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the writings of authors like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, Lee also suggests an alternative history of wilderness rooted in social and environmental justice and expressed in Black and Indigenous literatures. Using examples from the works of Barry Lopez, Evelyn White, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, and Cecil Giscombe, among many others, Lee demonstrates the diversity and range of wilderness literature, arguing that we should think of “wilderness movements” in the plural.

Seamus Heaney had a complex relationship with English poetry. While Heaney’s essays on the canon of English poetry have preoccupied critics, this chapter looks at the ways in which his poems engage with English places and poets, as settings and exemplars. It then shows how he presents himself as both inheritor of a tradition and critical outsider, especially in his translation of Beowulf, and argues that his example has been central to similar translation projects by younger generations of English poets, including Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. The chapter concludes by looking at the more global, cosmopolitan context Heaney envisages for his England-set later poems like ‘District and Circle’ and ‘Eelworks’.

Heaney’s translation work not only registered his engagement with literary history, and an evolving awareness of his position in the poetic world, but it was an intrinsic aspect of his poetics more generally. Specifically, Heaney spoke of how Frost’s notion of the ‘sound of sense’ lay at the root of both his poetry and his mode of ‘impure translation’. As a result, translational fidelity, for Heaney, privileged the uncovering of echoes that might capture and recreate the sound of the original text. This chapter charts how this conception of translation found expression in his renderings, in particular, of Sophocles, Dante, Virgil, Sweeney Astray and Beowulf. Focusing on the diverse dramas of fidelity these translations embody, this chapter explores how these texts assert his native soundscape’s ability to convey classics of world literature while, at the same time, they also defamiliarize and profitably disrupt Heaney’s domestic linguistic and cultural world.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.