Old English Prose - University of Oxford

TitleDescriptionOld English ProseTopics include the first attempts at prose in the English language, ’short stories’,historical texts, legal documents, as well as such writers as Alfred the Great, andAelfric of Eynsham.Stuart LeePresenter(s)Recording http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish/lee04-medium-audio.mp3Keywords old english, runes, middle earth, medieval, anglo-saxon, Q321, Q310, 1Part of series An Introduction to Old EnglishContributor Today is on English prose and so last week we did poetry, today we are going to do proseand I wanted to make some key points. We are going to do a bit of history again just round offthe kind of story. It’s a bit of a mantra but look at things like authorship, performance, audienceanalysis, prose, prose style, its development and look at some texts as we go through it.So first of all what is prose, which is a fairly standard question, this may be the type of thing yougot asked at your interview. Some definitions, unstructured formal language closely connectedwith the rhythms of everyday speech. The form of written language that is not organised accordingto formal patterns of verse. Matter of fact, common place, dull or you don’t know.So shall we have what we did in the first lecture, so a couple of minutes just chat to your neighbourthere and see what you think is the answer.Basically if you had been asked that at interview we would have accepted any of the first three,the fourth one we wouldn’t have accepted of course because they are actual definitions of prosewhich you will find in the Oxford English Dictionary. We will have a look a bit more in a second.Matter of fact, common place, dull is unfortunately a thing you associate with prose, particularlyin this period because some of the prose text you may have come across you think “Well whaton earth am I reading this for, this is not literature this is just dull, dull, dull” and I am going tohopefully show you otherwise.Moliere came up with probably the best definition, “All which is not prose is verse and all whichis not verse is prose” which would not have gotten him into Oxford but what he did of course,there was the famous I think from the, the Small Bourgeois , whatever the play is called, for morethan forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it which is that first definition thatprose kind of follows the way we speak and it is pretty much like that as we will see.So some common characteristics about prose and the types of things you will come across in OldEnglish. It’s very factual so it’s trying to be, convey facts so therefore it has to be quite clear andsimple. Explain or record things, so this is emerging out of the oral culture into a literate one. Youneed standard vocabulary because if you are trying to explain something to someone they have gotto know what you are talking about. Fairly regular syntax, we spoke about syntax before, wordorder and easy to translate. It’s not like poetry, it’s not that web that you come across, it’s a loteasier.So let’s show you some prose. On the handout, don’t worry if you haven’t got it, there is a couplemore bits, we will have a look at one of them but this is from a writer, Aelfric who I will speakhttp://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 1

Old English Proseabout a bit in a second. Just to show you how it follows, so here is the old English and here is themodern English from De Temporibus and he is trying to explain natural events.So here he is trying to explain thunder or þunor so [[“þunor cumf of harten ondof warten” thunder comes from heat and from water. The sky soyour luft, tooth thona warten 0:03:14]] draws the moisture to it from below[[neolden anda harten oefen 0:03:19]] and the heat from above.So he is trying to walk through it and if you see the old English words and the modern Englishyou would say they pretty much follow each other, it trots along quite nicely. And it’s a lovelydefinition of thunder and when they are gathered, the heat and the moisture within the cloud thenthey contest between themselves and with an awful noise and fire bursts out through lightening.The hater the summer the more thunder and lightning in the air, which is pretty much as it wasand a lot better than my mum who told me it was God moving his furniture around when I was akid.Okay so now no modern English but I think you could probably again similar theme, talking aboutsomething, this is on your handout. Again he is trying to explain something so now remember, weread it out, listen to it you might understand it. Rainus, rains, cumeth of, and I’ve told you whatthat means, zara, so comes from the sky, exactly as in Lufthansa. Sail the sky licketh, licks anddraws up waten, water yes, from Sheffield you might say water, of aelra, earth, they do apparently,from all the earth and tharasea, and the sea and, yegadareth, gathers into shurum, showers andwhen she which is the sea is of course a she, nama nara abaren, so may not more, abaren, bearexactly, then theof, thealf, hi aduna, then it all falls down.Which again is a great, pretty accurate isn’t it? It’s recognised, I can’t remember the term but themoisture is absorbed from the earth, drawn into the clouds and then at some point it will all comedown into rain and the cycle goes on. And he was trying to explain rain to the Anglo Saxons andhe does a pretty good job of it.On your handout which I won’t go through, the top bit you can try that because there is amanuscript, then there is the text and it’s the coming of Hengist and Horsa to England, well itwasn’t England, they were coming to Britain in any case.Okay so how does old English prose compare with poetry in sentence and key things?Well first of all we have titles of prose, so a lot of the text you will come across when you seethe title in Mitchell and Robinson that is the title that the Anglo Saxons had given to it. We haveauthors, we know some people who wrote prose. We know a fair bit about them, we don’t havemany but we do know a few. We have dates; pretty much we can tie some of the text to the authorsbut the Anglo Saxon Chronicle well it can’t have been written a year before the event took placeso we can start dating these things as well. We have lots and lots of prose, more than you wouldprobably ever want to know about but there is a lot of prose out there compared with rememberfour manuscripts of poetry.In poetry only one copy as far, usually there is a few exceptions. In prose you often get multiplecopies of the same text. Indeed for example the Anglo Saxon chronicle I think there is sevencopies. I might have that figure wrong as I just said their numerous copies survive but it doesthrow up same, similar questions about authorship, audience performance and style and someunique ones as well which we are going to tackle.Another little discussion thing for you to keep you awake. Do you agree or disagree with thatstatement? You can sit on the fence if you wish so have a bit of a chat to yourselves and see howmany Russian formalists we’ve got in here.Alright that will do. So let’s do a show of hands here, just see how many new historicists, so howmany would agree with that statement? I think the majority of you.2 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml

Stuart LeeSo how many would disagree? Hang on in there. Okay and probably you should all put yourhands up and go “It depends on the text of course.”Fair enough, the thing which we tend to do in medieval studies though which is kind of ironicin a sense is that we do focus on the context of the text, we are constantly trying to build up thecontext and in the case of poetry we don’t know too much. But in the case of prose we do. Butwhat you may have, you may have a piece of literature and you just can’t date it, you have no ideaof the author and the context. But then you start placing it in scenarios, well if it was written inthis century it might have meant this, whereas if it was written in this century it might have meantsomething completely different. And that is the joy of this period whereas of course if you read aDickens text you know exactly when it was written and what he was writing about because thereare books and books and books written on this stuff.So let’s give you a bit of history. Now as you all know I am sure there are several key importantdates in English or British history. 1939 whatever, 1966 winning the World Cup but of courseclearly as you know the most important date in English history is 878AD. Now for the one or twoof you who didn’t do history at school and don’t know why 878AD is the most important event inEnglish history I shall tell you.Just to fill in the story we know the Anglo Saxons arrived sometime in the 5th century, theyconquered and expanded in the 6th generally from east to west, started forming these kingdoms.Augustine arriving in 597 bringing back Christianity to England because of course it was herebefore and in the north the Irish monks were bringing Christianity of their flavour etc.In the general scheme of things if you want to simply remember in the 7th century in Northumbria.The Northumbrian Kingdom is the dominant one, there are multiple kingdoms, then power shiftsto the Mercian Kingdom which does extend as far as London under a King called Offa who youremember built a dyke etc. etc.And then something cataclysmic happens in Anglo Saxon history and it is important for thedevelopment of prose, namely these guys appeared, the Vikings. And we move into what wecall the Viking age, 200 years pretty much of uninterrupted to a certain degree slaughter, mayhem,conquest etc. And it wasn’t just the Anglo Saxons who were on the receiving end of this, everyonewas, all the way through Europe, they even got as far possibly as India.However, the Vikings have a major effect on all kinds of things, they are given a bad press, thereare horrible stories associated with the Vikings, one of the most gruesome ones, so I will tell youit is there their ritual of the spread eagle whereby they used to hack through the ribcage of thevictim who was still alive and rip it open like wings of a bird and then display their entrails.By that time I suspect they were probably dead, but it was a bit of give and take, this is probablynot true but it is worth showing up just because it’s nice. What you are seeing there is possibly anexample, probably not of Daneskin which is where the Anglo Saxons used to skin the Danes aliveand leave their skin hanging on a door.So not particularly nice thing to do and you are in the city of course where there was the firstattempted genocide in England whereby the Danes were slaughtered on St. Brice’s Day massacreand burnt alive after Ethelred’s dictat that all Danes living in England should be slaughtered. Soit wasn’t a particularly nice time.However, for our purposes by the end of the 9th century there was a bit of a pickle because most ofthose kingdoms that you see there had been conquered or brought to more or less subservience bythe Vikings. Vikings didn’t just raid they eventually came and settled with one exception. Holdingout down there, in fact you could even say the entire fate of the English nation rested for one shortperiod in a marsh in Somerset. Which indeed it did, because basically the one Kingdom that washolding out right at the end was Wessex, led by a particular gentleman. Him, Alfred the Great.Now Alfred the Great deserves his name as we shall see. He was King of Wessex and the reasonwhy 878AD is so important is that although he is reduced pretty much to scratching an existencehttp://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 3

Old English Prosewith a handful of followers, in 878 he rallies his troops, comes back, defeats the Vikings, kickstheir arses, sues for peace and starts the re-conquest of England. And if it hadn’t been for him wewould all have been saying “God yule” on Friday because we would all be Danish.He did not deserve what you are about to see, which is the only filmed version, not contemporary,of Alfred’s life and this is a 1969 film starring David Hemmings which I will show you the clip ofthe battle of Eddington but it starts with Hemmings rallying his troops, if you think you would berallied by this.Anyway not a good film, in fact an appalling film and the only film attempt at Alfred the Great,one of the great heroes of British history and he suffers that. However the only interesting thingabout the film is that it was made in 1969 and it was at the height of Vietnam War so what you arebasically seeing is an anti war film so culturally it is quite interesting, but that is about it.So Alfred the Great and his sons and grandsons lead a re-conquest of England we get, underhis initial victory we get this line where England is divided into what we call the Dane law inEngland that’s why you can do place names and we see loads of places in this area named afterScandinavian subjects. More in here in English but everyone breaks the treaty and gradually whathappens is the Anglo Saxons push them back all the way up to here and eventually conquer all ofEngland again. So that I think it’s his descendent Athelstan you could actually say is probably thefirst King of England, he rules over the entire English nation. The borders are formed which havestuck ever since give or take a few miles. He even gets the subservience of the Scottish Kings aswell so he is the first King of all of Britain and pretty much that is the oldest kingdom we have inEurope.But Alfred’s legacy, for our purposes. Once the Vikings have slaughtered everything, destroyedeverything, he starts to reconstruct, he is a genius this guy, he starts to build monasteries and hereally takes an interest in learning. In a text called the Preface to the Pastoral Care he says “Allthe people who could speak Latin, could understand it, are all dead. Now all the monasteries havegone we have got to sort this one out, we have got to get revitalised learning in England” and hepretty much sets out all the books he thinks should be written, but most importantly in English.He says “Everything should be written in English because that’s what my people speak andunderstand, not Latin.” So English becomes the language of the clergy and the court.So you will get translations from the Bible in English in Anglo Saxon, that period. None of thisheretical nonsense a few hundred years later. No, if you want people to understand what they aremeant to understand then why not put it in a language they actually speak? What a revolutionarythought.He himself translates or instigates translations of some major texts, you might come across thesethe most probably interesting, pastoral care is interesting, is that he translates the great medievalphilosophical book Beowulf Consolation of Philosophy which pretty much sets out medievalthinking for several hundred years. It was Beowulf who put this idea of the wheel of fate, thewheel of fortune that your life will get good and then it will get bad but it might turn again etc.etc. which comes through in the poetry.He provides history books, notably the Anglo Saxon Chronicle starts in Alfred’s reign, it goesback, it records stuff before that but that’s when it starts. He gets religious and philosophicalbooks set out such as Beowulf but there are others and he builds a fortification system, remodelsthe army and starts the Royal Navy. That’s why he is great.But if we think about this, apart from the fact that English has risen to the prominent language ofthe nation, that pretty much what he set out as a national curriculum for England which is a fairlyrevolutionary thought in the 9th century. These are the books he wants all his noblemen and theirchildren to read and understand because it will make them better people.Let’s finish the story off, as I said England is re-conquered throughout the tenth century by theHouse of Wessex, not the House of Fraser.4 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml

Old English Proseand Sunset on Sunday evening he is to compensate his lord 80 coins. So we know there was aservant lord relationship.If a husband sacrificed to the devil without his wife’s knowledge he is to forfeit all of his property.If a slave, we know there are slaves sacrificed to devils he is to compensate six shillings or beflogged. So we also know that there are slaves and there is witchcraft going on in the seventhcentury.Law codes are quite interesting.This, you think what on earth is this, this is what is called a charter and you may think, the eagleeyed say that is not old English because this is in fact Latin and that is Latin but the smaller textis actually old English here and charters pretty much defined a boundary of land. So it would sayyou start here, you go round here, here, here, here, you come back that’s the area of land and that’swhy we have the thing beating the bounds, they used to take the small children from the village,walk round the bounds at regation tide, beat them, so you didn’t actually beat as in walk, youbeat them physically so they would understand and that is how people remembered land charters.These things were written down and that was proof of ownership.So a charter, a good one from London, [[faerst aerst erist uptames 0:21:10]]first up the Thames after the old ditch to the cow ford, the bridge where the cows go across. Upandlang, tayoburnan, now burnan is a river or a stream so that is the Tyburn there isn’t a river,there is there, it’s underground in London now. To the wide army street, so it was the street wherethe Roman army used to walk along, to the old stock and sanctus, place of St. Andrews Churchand then along the hollow stream can anyone guess what that is in London?Holborn, exactly. And then along the streams by the land and by the stranda, a strand is a placebetween water and land and it is of course The Strand in London and you can follow that walk. It’san awful map I’m afraid but you can actually follow that walk and that was a bit of land holding.The most amusing thing is the cow ford, the place they used to get the cows to walk across thebridge is Buckingham Palace.Science, so they wrote books about science. The liver is extended on the right side as far as the pitof the belly; it has five lobes of lapidus to hold on the false ribs, it is the material of the blood, thehouse of nourishment of the blood. When there is digestion, the attenutation of meats they arriveat the liver and then they change hue etc. etc. Now I’m not a medic but that’s not a bad descriptionof a liver and at least it gives you the impression that they were interested in science.They were interested in travel, this is a travel book. If you are going on your holidays don’t gohere. There is a giant bloke with two heads who eats people or there are camels, what are theydoing with the camels here, the camels aren’t your problem, it’s the giant ants that are the size ofthe camels that are the problem.So you would read that book and look at the pictures and go “I don’t think I’ll be going there thissummer.”Science again, more science. Here is begins to tell about the nature of man, how he becomes manin his mother’s inside. First the man’s brain is formed, then in the sixth week the brain is coveredwith a membrane and the second month the veins are formed. Separate 365 shorter and longer,this is the formation of the foetus withinside the womb. So they had obviously observed this sothey picked this up from previous studies and they were interested.It does not say a stork comes along and drops it behind a bush, they were actually at this level ofunderstanding. They get it obviously slightly wrong because it turns into a mortal sickness in theabdomen most often on a Tuesday night.You might think this is silly, you might know which kind of a child a pregnant woman would givebirth to, if she walks slowly with hollow eyes she’ll give birth to a boy if she walks quickly andswollen eyes she will give birth to a girl.6 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml

Stuart LeeTake two plants in hand da, da, da, ask her to take whichever of the plants she wishes, if she takesa lily it will be a boy, a girl. If she frequently eats nuts or acorns or any fresh fruits then sometimesit happens that as a result the child is stupid. Again you will go to, I am sure you’ve heard thesestories “Oh you are going to have a boy, Oh you are going to have a girl” those things still goon and what they are saying there, they’ve worked out there is some link between the diet of themother and what the child might come out as.Superstition, if a man dreams that he sees an eagle sat on his head that means much honour, I likethe last one, if he sees bees carrying honey which prove to be earning of money from wealthypersons, so they are taking what you dream about and trying to apply some meaning to it. Ha, ha,ha stupid Anglo Saxons, no-one would do that in the 20th century, of course they do.Authorship. Prose does originate from literate culture therefore authorship is often at a time and aplace and usually by an individual and we know who these individuals are. My little trumpet men,I often play Led Zepplin at this time but I can’t do for copyright reasons. So some of the writersyou will come across.Beatfeth of Ramsey who writes a book on how to calculate Easter. Alfred the Great we havealready mentioned from the end of the 9th century. Wolfstan of York who writes sermons etc.these slides will all go up so don’t worry too much, he is the Archbishop of York.By far and away the most prolific writer is Aelfric [[?? 0:24:57]], he writes a giant corpusof texts and he is an absolutely fantastic writer living around the end of the 10th century down nearCerne Abbas, founder of the ancient abbey just up the road so he is buried up there somewhere.However anonymous, we still don’t know a vast chunk of who wrote them but we can makeguesses at it. I’ve included one text there because it was right towards the end of the period it’scalled ‘Apollonius of Tyre’ you may have heard of that title and it’s pretty much a novel. It’s justapproaching a novel so maybe they were moving into that.And then of course we have loads of people who just write in Latin, Anglo Saxons who werevery adept at writing in Latin, very [[gripping 0:25:38]] but it’s not that simple. Mainlybecause of these two chaps, these are the people who complicate things, don’t say “Ah” youmay think nice, you may think dinner, whatever. Anglo Saxon would look at those and thinkmanuscript because they are the things that we carve up and make into manuscripts, animal skin.Vellum is strictly calf skin, you might hear that term, usually if you can really get the good stuffit’s an unborn calf because it was really, really good.And one of the fields you might go into if you carry on this is studying manuscripts, studying thebook, [[?? 0:26:08]] of Palaeography. There are about 90 manuscripts surviving from theperiod and we know how they were made, there were lots of constructions and there is a lovelyriddle telling you how one is made. An enemy ended my life stripped me etc. etc. like that.We’ve seen manuscripts before, that was the ruin if you remember, so some of them are in prettybad state. This one is one we haven’t seen before, I don’t know if you can, anyone want to guesswhat it is?It is, well done. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle so you have a date down here, so this is an entry fora year, that’s why it says here in this year, it means here, in the margin in this year this is whathappened. What I like about this is that someone has gone through and underlined words at a laterdate and these are actually place names. Wintanchestra, Winchester and our very own Oxenforda,where someone has underlined it because they were they were trying to learn old English.If you didn’t know by the way Anglo Saxon Oxford, which means the bridge of the Oxen wasn’tvery big but it was here so you are talking about up by what is that, the Martyrs Memorial, downthere, down to St. Olav’s, that was pretty much the size of the city with some farms and settlementsaround.http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 7

Old English ProseBut manuscripts cause us a problem. In a manuscript culture no copy is the same because someoneis copying from something else so it is prized as is the authority of the source of the text butcopying itself is not degraded as it is in the print culture where we prize originality. There is atextural fixity in print which there isn’t in the manuscript so let me give you an example of that.Supposing we have an author, he writes his little book or his little thing, the scribes they make acopies from that, then those copies are then copied by other scribes and off these things go and ateach point the scribe can make errors. But more importantly at each point the scribe can say “Idon’t agree with that” and change it completely.So the idea that they could fit in or change text to suit their audience, their context etc. completelythrows the whole concept of authorship, they probably didn’t prize authorship as much as we dowhich is why Bath has said this about the death of the author. It emerges from the middle ages butit is not really there in the middle ages, well later middle ages it is.How was it, who were the audience and performance? Well I’ve tried to give a table here and Iwon’t go through it but these are a range of all the things you will come across in Anglo Saxonprose and if we just think of who they would have been interesting. Well obviously the richpeople, the noblemen, the administrators, the clergy would have been interested in key texts suchas homilies and sermons.The freemen, that is the people who aren’t slaves would have been interested in laws and chartersobviously. They might have been interested in oelic sermons they would have heard them and itwould have been a mixture. Sometimes you would have read a book in private, sometimes youwould have gone and heard this if you were a monk in a monastic office or at mass and sometimesat school because they did have a schooling system where they would educate people.It does develop so our early stuff, Anglo Saxon Chronicle 592 in this year there occurred a greatslaughter at Woburn’s barrier, barrow isn’t very complicated but towards the end Aflrich writing10th century the Holy Mother Mary fed that child and it grew just as other children do withoutany sins, it’s a much more complicated style of prose. And sometimes they don’t get it quite right;it’s a bit clumsy because you will come across what we call parataxis.I will give you some examples of that, the famous one is “I came, I saw, I conquered” but theAnglo Saxon would probably have said “I came and I saw and I conquered and then I did this andthen I did that and then I did this” and it kind of feels like a child writing for the first time. Butthey are learning.So example,” King Ethelred and his brother Alfred fought against the army at Merritown and theywere in two armies and there was a great slaughter on either side and their Bishop Hailman waskilled” and it trots on like that. The clause structure etc. they were learning it.They don’t get action very well, if you’ve done Cynwulf and Ceonhard in the Anglo SaxonChronicle it’s a bit complicated and Latin of course is a much more developed language for thesethings. So they struggle when they are translating from Latin to English.But they do do some good things. Rhetoric has become a buzz word now – hooray – thanks tothis man who has, as we will see is an advocate of rhetoric and obviously a student of rhetoric,mind you if they’d elected a beach ball compared with the previous guy we would all have beencelebrating.Rhetoric is the ability to convey a meaning and do it effectively to your audience, so we willpick not, this isn’t Obama, this is Martin Luther King and if you remember this famous speech“Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountainof Tennessee. Let freedom ring..“ you can see what he’s doing, he is repeating here and whenthis happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring, there is a lot of devices beingused here which we would class as rhetoric, rhetorical training and Obama did exactly this withhis inauguration speech. “When there was despair in the dustbowl and depression,” he’s used an8 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml

Stuart Leealliteration “across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a new deal, new jobs and anew sense of repetition, yes we can America. We have come so far, we have seen so much, buttherein so much” etc. He was using rhetorical and he continues to do it as Churchill did, as greatspeakers do.And the Anglo Saxons did this because they were trained in rhetoric at school so this is Wolfstannot quite as thrilling perhaps as Obama’s inauguration speech but it’s probably been read by morepeople. “There is eternal burning, grimly mingled and there is eternal terror, there is eternalpain and there is trial and tribulation and always continual misery. There is [[echebrinagrime emenched]] and there is [[echegreera]] there is [[echearcha]] and thereis [[sorgun and sargun]]” so he is using rhyme, again because he was delivering thisfrom a pulpit to make you listen, go “Oh” and it would get in. So this is rhetoric so you are gettingthis in prose as well.Lovely Edmund, someone mentioned they had done it so another development, this was Aelfricand Wolfstan, here we have St. Edmund, “Edmund the blessed King of the East Angles waswise and honorable blah, blah,” but if you look throughout the prose there is alliteration all theway through it. [[Aerdmansa, eardiga, earsing lukining. Wasnorter undwor.......0:32:57]]It’s written down, you probably would have read this but they are using ideas from poetry to makeit memorable and this is what we call rhythmical prose which Aelfric was great.How do you analyse prose? Think of the standard way I used to do but also think like an AngloSaxon. Again it comes from their training, there’s a little rhyme but I wouldn’t recognise youremember that but what it is showing you here is when they were writing a complicated prose, notthe law codes here, they had different levels. So there was a literal level, the letter , there was anallegorical level, there was a moral level what you should do and then there was a spiritual level,what you should be looking for and you will see Aelfric when he talks about a text from the Bible,he will then start dividing it up into those four and beginning to work on it.We call the moral level tropological by the way but don’t worry too much about that.The other thing is they were drawing on sources so what was the source text? And you can goaway and look this up, you can be reading Edmund, you will know that he copied that from anotherauthor, but they changed it, why did they change it? What was important? All these things comeinto play when you are analyzing prose. And what devices does the writer use, how advanced isthe prose, are we seeing things like rhythmical prose, are we seeing rhetorical devices? So it takesit to another level in a sense when you are analyzing this form of literature but as I said you arenot going to get it with the law codes.I’m rounding up, I’ve done quite well on time. This final quote here, it’s a bit naff of me basically,“Aelfric’s biblical translations are like a pool of water that people have dipped into from time totime as it suited their needs.” This is the sort of crass thing you write in a PhD thesis and indeedthis is what I wrote in my PhD thesis about twenty years ago on Aelfric’s biblical translations.Allow me the experience of wisdom over 20 years. Old English Prose is like a pool of water thatpeople have dipped into from time to time as it suited their needs.And what I am just trying to say here and what I was trying to say in Aelfric in a very bizarreand ham fisted way is that a lot of people dismiss prose because you want to read the Dream inthe Rood, you want to read The Wanderer you want to read Seafarer, you might want to readBeowulf, at least watch the film or whatever because that is poetry and poetry, hey poetry is good.And indeed poetry is the older form of literature; prose develops later as we have seen. But theprose is very, very good.Not only can it be entertaining like some of those things and quite amusing because it gives youlittle glimpses into their lives, but also it is being taken to a new level, it is being taken to quite anhttp://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml 9

Old English Proseadvanced level in terms of the devices they were using and it was beginning to show developmentas I said with Appolonius of Tyre into the novel. We already have short stories and then we aremoving into that perhaps that genre, that medium. And who knows what would have happened inthey hadn’t lost at Hastings, maybe that whole idea would have developed far quicker than it doesnow, moving to things like we get in Old Norse like the sagas.So in summary it begins with Alfred who was seeking to re-establish learning after the Vikings,this is prose that is and the Navy if you are interested. Most old English prose is coveringfactual documents but it’s varied, some of it’s nonsensical, some of it is undoubtedly literary,those sermons, those homilies, those saints lives, biblical translations are literary and then youadd the philosophical text like the consolation of philosophy etc.We do know about the authors or more about them, more authors certainly than the poetry. Weknow a fair bit about the audience because this fits into so many things we know about the monasticoffice and other things and therefore we know quite a bit about performance because these wereimportant documents.We still face issues of authorship as I’ve talked about the manuscript transmission which doesthrow up all kinds of problems, but it was well developed, it’s easy to read hopefully and easy totranslate. Is it any good? Yes, of course it is, go away and read it.So next week the final lecture it’s fifth week, you’ve got tons of essays to do so it’s kind of light,they probably all are light but anyway this is the bring the popcorn one. Welcome to medievalland, we are going to take you through the history of what happens to Anglo Saxon and OldEnglish after 1066. The re-use by later writers going way up into the 20th century. Portrayalsof the Anglo Saxons and we are going to find out what the contributions to Old English were byAlfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Leonard Bernstein. Thank you very much.c○ 2010 University of Oxford, Stuart LeeThis transcript is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. It can be reused and redistributed globallyprovided that it is used in a non-commercial way and the work is attributed to the licensors.If a person creates a new work based on the transcript, the new work must be distributedunder the same licence. Before reusing, adapting or redistributing, please read and complywith the full licence available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/10 http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/engfac/oldenglish-audio/rss20.xml