Beowulf And Judith

Beowulf and Judith (1953) contains an extensive introduction to the texts of Beowulf and Judith, the full texts of the poems themselves, and comprehensive notes to the texts.

The two great epic-theme poems Beowulf and Judith, paired in the Beowulf Manuscript preserved in the British Museum, are here presented in a translation with a unique fidelity that restores the true Anglo-Saxon rhythmical line of five subtypes of four beat stress adhering scrupulously to the alliterative strictures of Anglo-Saxon verse and exploiting its epithetical style. This is a ground breaking piece of work in that it recreates the indispensable stylistic and esthetic effects of the original while attaining a natural modern idiom, something that had been thought impossible to achieve. The key insight in this book is the stated and demonstrated philosophy that alliteration and imagistic compound metaphors are a living, breathing part of our linguistic heritage and practice in Modern English today; but rendering the poems requires an intricate sensibility to Old English style in order to recreate the force that they had. The Old English text is included interlinearly with the translation to facilitate comparison and acquaintance with the original poems. Introductory essays discuss 1) the living tradition of alliteration and epithetical phrasing common to Anglo-Saxon poetry and Modern English idiom, and 2) the literary tradition and merit of the two poems. The book as a whole is a scholarly accomplishment which revivifies these two great works for the entire modern public.

The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of the most powerful imaginable army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith's heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays to discuss representations of Judith throughout the centuries. It transforms our understanding across a wide range of disciplines. The collection includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts unavailable in English, and Judith images and music.

In this series of detailed studies, Andy Orchard demonstrates the changing range of Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the monstrous by reconsidering the monsters of Beowulf against the background of early medieval and patristic teratology and with reference to specific Anglo-Saxon texts.

Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 35 include: Record of the twelfth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Bavarian-American Centre, University of Munich, 1-6 August 2005; Virgil the Grammarian and Bede: a preliminary study; Knowledge of whelk dyes and pigments in Anglo-Saxon England; The representation of the mind as an enclosure in Old English poetry; The origin of the numbered sections in Beowulf and in other Old English poems; An ethnic dating of Beowulf; Hrothgar's horses: feral or thoroughbred?; 'thelthryth of Ely in a lost calendar from Munich; Alfred's epistemological metaphors: eagan modes and scip modes; Bibliography for 2005.

This groundbreaking reader of Old English prose and verse has been extensively revised for the second edition.

"[The essays] focus on class and gender not only sheds new light on old texts but also stretches the boundaries of the critical modus operandi which is often applied to such literature." --Women's Studies Network (UK) Association Newsletter These dramatic new readings of Old and Middle English texts explore the rich theoretical territory at the intersection of class and gender, and highlight the interplay of the critic, methodology, and the medieval text.