The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study
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Book Overview
Bringing together some of the most important poetic texts of the Anglo-Saxon period, Anne Klinck presents the poems both as discrete entities and as members of an elegiac group, all inspired by the sense of separation from one's desire that is at the heart of elegiac poetry in Old English. Klinck analyses the poems' manuscript context in the Exeter Book - along with their possible dates and dialectal provenance, and the main critical problems they raise - and presents the texts with detailed textual notes and an apparatus criticus of editorial variants. She then examines the elegiac genre in Old English: its features, origins, and affinities (giving examples of analogous elegies in Latin, Norse, and Early Welsh, with both text and translation). Klinck includes a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary listing all word-forms to be found in the elegies.
The nine elegies have all been edited separately between 1933 and 1983. Klinck builds on the extensive previous scholarship in the field and also draws on recently available materials - notably the microfiche Concordances, the first letters of the new Old English Dictionary, and Bruce Mitchell's Old English Syntax - to make new suggestions about problematic words and passages. Going beyond an exploration of the literary potential of individual poems, Klinck examines them as separate manifestations of a common generic impulse: she moves from palaeographical and philological detail to broader literary and cultural considerations and, finally, to a definition of Old English elegy.Customer Reviews
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