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Larry Benson introduced the concept of "written-formulaic" to describe the status of some Anglo-Saxon poetry which, while demonstrably written, contains evidence of oral influences, including heavy reliance on formulas and themes. [25] Frequent oral-formulaic themes in Old English poetry include "Beasts of Battle" [26] and the "Cliff of Death ...
The poem refers to a group of people called the Wicinga cynn, which may be the earliest mention of the word "Viking" (lines 47, 59, 80). It closes with a brief comment on the importance and fame offered by poets like Widsith, with many pointed reminders of the munificent generosity offered to tale-singers by patrons "discerning of songs".
Roman pool (with associated modern superstructure) at Bath, England.The pool and Roman ruins may be the subject of the poem. "The Ruin of the Empire", or simply "The Ruin", is an elegy in Old English, written by an unknown author probably in the 8th or 9th century, and published in the 10th century in the Exeter Book, a large collection of poems and riddles. [1]
The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) is a six-volume edition intended at the time of its publication to encompass all known Old English poetry.Despite many subsequent editions of individual poems or collections, it has remained the standard reference work for scholarship in this field.
This poem has been criticized for being immature and "a garbled attempt at rhyming poetry: a poem without regular metre, formalized lineation or coherent imagery" (Lerer, 7). Many other scholars support this criticism. Professors George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie did not include the Rime in their six-volume Anglo Saxon Poetic Records.
The poems give a sense of the intellectual sophistication of Anglo-Saxon literary culture. They include numerous saints’ lives , gnomic verses , and wisdom poems , in addition to almost a hundred riddles , numerous smaller heroic poems , and a quantity of elegiac verse.
The Exeter Book riddles can be situated within a wider tradition of 'speaking objects' in Anglo-Saxon culture and have much in common with poems such as The Dream of the Rood and The Husband's Message and with artefacts such as the Alfred Jewel or the Brussels Cross, which endow inanimate things with first-person voices. [28]
The poem is a product of the period of declining vitality of the runic script in Anglo-Saxon England after the Christianization of the 7th century. A large body of scholarship has been devoted to the poem, mostly dedicated to its importance for runology but to a lesser extent also to the cultural lore embodied in its stanzas.