Anglo-norman period

Religious poetry seems to have flourished in northern England-Northumbria-throughout the eighth century, though most of it has survived only in West Saxon transcriptions of the late tenth century. Much of it consists of retellings of books and episodes from the Old Testament. There was a myth which says that Caedmon was originally an ignorant person who suddenly god divine intervention.

The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English. The verses known as Genesis, Exodus, Daniel , and Judith are much more than straightforward paraphrases of Scripture. Genesis , for example, opens with a grand justification of the propriety of praising the Lord of Hosts and moves to a lengthy, and non-Scriptural, account of the fall of the angels.

Much of the poem is framed around the idea. Military metaphors also run through Exodus which treats the struggle of the Jews and the Egyptians as an armed conflict in which the departing Jews triumph. Its apparent poetic sequel, Daniel , emphasizes the force of divine intervention in human affairs and perhaps reflects the prominent use of Old Testament stories of deliverance in the ceremonies and liturgies of Holy Week and Easter.

Judith , a fragmentary poem which survives in the Beowulf manuscript, has a valiant female warrior as its protagonist. Judith, the chaste defender of Israel, struggles as much against a monster of depravity in the form of the invader, Holofernes as does Beowulf against Grendel and his kin.

Anglo-saxon period in english literature pdf

In Andreas , a decidedly militant St Andrew journeys across the sea to rescue his fellow apostle St Matthew from imprisonment and, somewhat more extraordinarily, from the threat of being eaten by the anthropophagi of Mermedonia. According to Bede Caedmon became the founder of a school of Christian poetry and that he was the first to use the traditional metre diction for Christian religious poetry.

This period of Old English poetry is called "Caedmonian". All the old religious poems that were not assigned to Caedmon were invariably given to Cynewulf, the poet of the second phase of Old English Christian poetry. With Cynewulf, Anglo-Saxon religious poetry moves beyond biblical paraphrase into the didactic, the devotional, and the mystical.

All these poems possess both a high degree of literary craftsmanship and a note of mystical contemplation which sometimes rises to a high level of religious passion.