Blackwell’s Guides to Criticism series offers students privileged access to and careful guidance through those writings that have most conditioned the historic current of discussion and debate as it now informs contemporary scholarship.

Early historic responses are represented by appropriate excerpts and described in an introductory narrative chapter. Thereafter, materials are represented thematically in extracts from important books or journal articles according to their continuing critical value and relevance in the classroom. Critical approaches are treated as tools to advance the pursuit of reading and study and each volume seeks to enhance the enjoyment of literature and to widen the reader’s critical repertoire.

Published volumes

In a broad sense of the term, the criticism of Old English literature (from Greek kritikē ‘the critical art’) began when certain pioneering English scholars of the sixteenth century published the first printed editions of works dating from the Anglo-Saxon period, accompanying those editions with remarks of their own so as to facilitate the reader’s understanding. If those scholars gave a spin to the texts they edited, something similar can be said of the transmission of knowledge in general since the beginnings of time.

In the more narrow sense in which the term is used today, the criticism of Old English literature can be said to have begun in the first half of the nineteenth century, when men of letters including the English scholar William Conybeare, the Danish poet, scholar, and clergyman N.F.S. Grundtvig, and the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote appreciative commentaries on Old English poetic texts, calling attention to the aesthetic merits of those texts or, at times, noting what they believed to be their formal or stylistic defects. These writers, together with others of this general period, also translated Old English poems or passages into one or another of the modern languages, another form of homage and critique.

Not until the mid-twentieth century did the criticism of Old English literature come into its own. What is perhaps most striking about the criticism that had been undertaken up to that time is its invisibility, when compared with the criticism of literature of more recent date. When René Wellek brought out his multi-volume History of Modern Criticism in the years 1955–1992, for example, the fifth and sixth volumes of that work, published in 1986 and titled respectively English Criticism 1900–1950 and American Criticism 1900–1950, included not a single notice of the criticism of Old English literature. It is as if this literature did not exist as a subject of critical inquiry. ¹ Perhaps this conspicuous blank in what is otherwise a commendable set of volumes resulted from spot-blindness on the part of its author, who could not be expected to have covered all topics; but perhaps it also tells us something about the place of Old English in the field of literary studies up to the mid-twentieth century.

This place was clearly a marginal one. While study of the Old English language had long been valued as a branch of philology and historical linguistics, and while Anglo-Saxon historical studies were being pursued with vigour (particularly in the United Kingdom), the criticism of Old English literature tended to be viewed as something like a contradiction in terms. The great tradition of English literature was widely – and, in a sense, correctly – thought to have begun with Chaucer, Malory, and other writers of the late medieval era, not with the Anglo-Saxons, for the relation of Old English literature to the poetry and prose of later periods was hard to discern. Twentieth-century literary critics therefore tended to direct their gaze to the period extending from Chaucer onwards while leaving Anglo-Saxon studies to the philologists and historians.

Such prejudices began early and have died hard. To cite just one example, the first incumbent of the Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of London, appointed in 1828, was the Reverend Thomas Dale, an evangelical clergyman. Dale’s view of Old English literature was coloured by his desire to inculcate high moral character among his students. In 1845 he wrote: ²

The most complete poetical production extant in this language is the romance of Beowulf, a kind of Saxon Iliad, which has recently been edited by an accomplished Saxon scholar [by John Mitchell Kemble, in 1833 and 1835–37], and is further remarkable as being the earliest composition of an heroic kind in any vernacular language of Europe. It is characterized by the usual strain of Saxon sentiment, representing the drunken carousal as the chief of joys, and courage in the field as the first of duties, and with scarcely a recognition of the existence of a second sex. If to be poetical is to be imaginative, man is never likely to become so till he has learned to write on woman. The Saxons never learnt this […]. The reason of this may be sought in nature; they who delight in bloodshed will ever be the few, and they who degrade intelligence by intoxication will rarely be the many […]. And where is love without woman, and what is poetry without love?

What the Reverend Dale refers to in this address as ‘the few’ – those who ‘delight in bloodshed’ – are those who attribute much value to works like Beowulf. ‘The many’ are those who, like himself and his right-minded students, appreciate the beauties, subtleties, and moral qualities of the literature of later eras. While ‘the few’ will degrade their intelligence through scenes of carousal and carnage, ‘the many’ will admire writings that feature love and romance.

A binary opposition is thus confirmed that has been influential ever since, though rarely voiced so bluntly as here. One of its implications is that no texts dating from the Anglo-Saxon period can qualify as poetry worthy of that name, since poetry by its nature consists of writings that have to do with complex ideas and refined sentiments. Subsequent studies in departments of English, once such departments gained a secure place in modern universities, were thus long defined by a split between the many scholars and teachers who cultivated the English literary tradition from Chaucer on, and those who dealt with the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons. Scholars on one side of this divide tended to emphasize the courtly dimension of their subjects; on the other side, the heroic.

One of the aims of the present book is to undermine this false binary opposition. This is not difficult to do given the actual sophistication of a good deal of Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as the high quality of recent research into that sector of the past. A complementary aim is to call attention to the critical controversies that have emerged as the literature of that early period has been made subject to exacting scrutiny.

The critical selections that are featured at the end of Chapters 2–11 focus not just on individual literary texts, but also on such related topics as early medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as questions of style, genre, gender, and theme. Efforts have been made, as well, to acknowledge the ways that the criticism of Old English literature is implicated in historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, and art history, among other disciplines. All the same, some lines had to be drawn if only for reasons of space. The full interdisciplinary scope of Anglo-Saxon studies is thus only partly made clear, even though I would be the first to argue that an openness to the perspectives offered by a wide range of disciplines is a prerequisite to sound research in this field. It is my hope that readers whose interest is sparked by anything in these pages will undertake more sustained research on their own, using the present book as a point of departure.

One selection, the essay by Joshua Byron Smith on Borges in Chapter 11, was commissioned for the present volume some few years ago, and I am grateful to the author for his patience in awaiting its eventual appearance in print. Another essay, a classic one by the Swiss scholar Ernst Leisi on the semantics of material wealth in Beowulf, appears here in Chapter 5 in English translation for the first time. These essays, as well as certain others, are presented in their entirety. If certain other essays featured in the volume are republished only in part, this is solely because of constraints of space.

Quotations of Old English poetic texts cited in the main body of the book are drawn from the collective edition The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) with the exception of Beowulf, which is quoted from Klaeber’s Beowulf. When the authors of the reprinted critical selections observe a different practice, then those passages are left as is. The same is generally true of the bibliographical apparatus used by those authors, though minor adjustments have been made for the sake of clarity or consistency. Likewise, for the sake of greater clarity, a comma has been added to the title of the excerpted essay by M.B. Parkes.

In the reprinted readings, the authors’ original notes are printed as footnotes. Where I have added explanatory notes, they too are supplied at the foot of the page, cued to the main text by superscript letters rather than numbers. Editorial comments are set off by paired square brackets. Deletions are marked by an ellipsis of three periods, normally set between square brackets.

A number of libraries have provided invaluable assistance while I have researched this book. I wish to express my particular gratitude to the staff at the research libraries of the University of Cambridge, the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. In addition, an appointment as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2004–9) enabled me to research the book among colleagues who stimulated my thinking about the place of Anglo-Saxon studies within a wider world of thought and letters. Ancillary funding was provided by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund (WARF) through the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

My editors at Wiley Blackwell have been unfailingly helpful from start to finish, and their patience and sound advice have meant much to me. I am also grateful to a number of anonymous specialist readers, including those persons who evaluated the original book proposal as well as two reviewers of its penultimate draft. I regret that constraints of space have prevented me from adopting all of their constructive suggestions, though most have been incorporated into the book. As for the infelicities, errors, and shortcomings that remain, they are my own responsibility. I shall be happy to receive emailed notice of any corrections that should be made (email: jdniles@wisc.edu).

Thanks are due to the following presses and journals for permission to reprint copyrighted material.

• Brepols Publishers, Belgium, for an excerpt from Joyce Hill, ‘Learning Latin in Anglo-Saxon England: Traditions, Texts and Techniques’, which appeared in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout, 2003), 7–29.
• Cambridge University Press, for an excerpt from M.B. Parkes, ‘The Palaeography of the Parker Manuscript of the Chronicle, Laws, and Sedulius, and Historiography at Winchester in the Late Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, ASE 5 (1976): 149–71.
• De Gruyter Press (Berlin), publishers of the journal Anglia, for permission to publish an English translation of Ernst Leisi’s essay ‘Gold und Manneswert im Beowulf’, which first appeared in Anglia 71 (1952): 259–73.
• The editors and publishers of English Studies, for an excerpt from Hugh Magennis, ‘Images of Laughter in Old English Poetry, with Particular Reference to the Hleahtor Wera of The Seafarer’, ES 73 (1992): 193–204.
• The editors and publishers of Neophilologus, for J.R. Hall, ‘Perspective and Wordplay in the Old English Rune Poem’, Neoph 61 (1977): 453–60.
• Oxford University Press, for an excerpt from Malcolm Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, which appeared in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad (Oxford, 1994), 130–62.
• Slavica Publishers, Inc., for Donald K. Fry, ‘The Memory of Cædmon’, which appeared in Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, OH, 1981), 282–93.
• The University of Chicago Press, for L.M.C. Weston, ‘Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms’, MPh 92 (1995): 279–93.
• The University of Toronto Press, for Edward B. Irving, Jr, ‘Crucifixion Witnessed, or Dramatic Interaction in The Dream of the Rood ’, which appeared in Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature, ed. Phyllis R. Brown et al. (Toronto, 1986), 101–13.