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Rather, the thematic similarity of the poem to The Wife's Lament, also found in the Exeter Book, has caused most modern scholars to place it, along with the Wife's Lament, solidly within the genre of the Frauenlied, or woman's song and, more broadly, in that of the Old English elegy. These two poems are also used as examples of the female voice ...
It has been proposed that this poem demonstrates the fundamental Anglo-Saxon belief that life is shaped by fate. [16] In The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (1975), Eric Stanley pointed out that Henry Sweet 's Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry in W. C. Hazlitt 's edition of Warton's History of English Poetry (1871), expresses a ...
The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book.It comprises 115 lines of alliterative verse.As is often the case with Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled.
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]
While Old English epic poetry may bear some resemblance to Ancient Greek epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the question of if and how Anglo-Saxon poetry was passed down through an oral tradition remains a subject of debate, and the question for any particular poem unlikely to be answered with perfect certainty.
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.
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 poem is also considered by some to be a riddle poem. A riddle poem contains a lesson told in cultural context which would be understandable or relates to the reader, and was a very popular genre of poetry of the time period. Gnomic wisdom is also a characteristic of a riddle poem, and is present in the poem's closing sentiment (lines 52-53).