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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Didactic poetry, English (Old)'

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Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 1 August 2024

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1

Cavill, Paul. "Maxims in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11063/.

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The focus of the thesis is on maxims and gnomes in Old English poetry, but the occasional occurrence of these forms of expression in Old English prose and in other Old Germanic literature is also given attention, particularly in the earlier chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 are general, investigating a wide range of material to see how and why maxims were used, then to define the forms, and distinguish them from proverbs. The conclusions of these chapters are that maxims are ‘nomic’, they organise experience in a conventional, authoritative fashion. They are also ‘proverbial’ in the sense of being recognisable and repeatable, but they do not have the fixed form of proverbs. Chapters 4 to 7 are more specific in their focus, applying techniques from formulaic theory, paroemiology and the sociology of knowledge to the material so as to better understand how maxims are used in their contexts in the poems, and to appreciate the nature and function of the Maxims collections. The conclusions reached here are that the maxims in Beowulf 183b-88 are integral to the poem, that maxims in The Battle of Maldon show how the poet manipulated the social functions of the form for his own purposes, that there is virtually no paganism in Old English maxims, and that the Maxims poems outline and illustrate an Anglo-Saxon world view. The main contribution of the thesis is that it goes beyond traditional commentary in analysing the purpose and function of maxims. It does not merely focus on individual poems, but attempts to deal with a limited aspect of the Old English oral and literary tradition. The primary aim is to understand the general procedures of the poets in using maxims and compiling compendia of them, and then to apply insights gained from theoretical approaches to the specifics of poems.

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2

Brown, Raymond David. "Apo koinou in Old English poetry /." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487684245465626.

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Momma, H. "The composition of Old English poetry /." Cambridge [GB] : Cambridge university press, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb366995688.

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4

Larrington, Carolyne. "Old Icelandic and Old English wisdom poetry : gnomic themes and styles." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304642.

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5

Waller, Benjamin. "Metaphorical Space and Enclosure in Old English Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/17893.

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While the political and social spaces of Old English literature are fairly well understood, this project examines the conceptual spaces in Old English poetry. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a richly metaphorical understanding of the world, not merely in the sense of artistically ornamental metaphor, but in Lakoff and Johnson's sense of conceptual metaphor, which reflects the structures of thought through which a culture understands their world. Three domains exhibit developed systems of conceptual metaphor for the Anglo-Saxons: the self, death, and the world. First, the Anglo-Saxon self is composed of four distinct entities--body, mind, soul, and a life-force--which each behave independently as they compete for control in poems like The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Soul and Body. Second, death for the Anglo-Saxon is expressed through a number of metaphors involving the status or placement of the body: removal to a distant place; separation of the body and the soul; location down on or within the earth; and the loss of life as a possession. Predominance of a particular metaphor contributes to the effects of individual poems, from The Fates of the Apostles and Beowulf to The Battle of Maldon and The Wife's Lament. Third, the Anglo-Saxon world is a large structure like a building, with its three primary components--heaven, hell, and earth--each themselves presented as building-like structures. Old English poetry, including native versions of Genesis, reveal heaven to be a protective Anglo-Saxon hall, while hell is a cold prison. The earth, in poems like Christ II and Guthlac B, is either a wide plain or a comforting house. Christ I connects these worlds through gates, including Mary, characterized as a wall-door. Finally, the apocalyptic Christ III employs metaphorical spaces for all three conceptual domains treated in this study but dramatizes their breakdown even as it reveals spatial enclosure the overarching structure of metaphorical concepts in Old English poetry.

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Birkett, Thomas Eric. "Ráð Rétt Rúnar : reading the runes in Old English and Old Norse poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e7ea1359-fedc-43a5-848b-7842a943ce96.

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Responding to the common plea in medieval inscriptions to ráð rétt rúnar, to ‘interpret the runes correctly’, this thesis provides a series of contextual readings of the runic topos in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry. The first chapter looks at the use of runes in the Old English riddles, examining the connections between material riddles and certain strategies used in the Exeter Book, and suggesting that runes were associated with a self-referential and engaged form of reading. Chapter 2 seeks a rationale for the use of runic abbreviations in Old English manuscripts, and proposes a poetic association with unlocking and revealing, as represented in Bede’s story of Imma. Chapter 3 considers the use of runes for their ornamental value, using 'Solomon and Saturn I' and the rune poems as examples of texts which foreground the visual and material dimension of writing, whilst Chapter 4 compares the depiction of runes in the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda with epigraphical evidence from the Migration Age, seeking to dispel the idea that they reflect historical practice. The final chapter looks at the construction of a mythology of writing in the Edda, exploring the ways in which myth reflects the social impacts of literacy. Taken together these approaches highlight the importance of reading the runes in poetry as literary constructs, the script often functioning as a form of metawriting, used to explore the parameters of literacy, and to draw attention to the process of writing itself.

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7

Brigatti, Federico. "The Old English Judith : sources, analysis and context." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.340760.

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Sharma, Manish. "Movement and space as metaphor in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.620160.

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9

Cavell, Megan Colleen. "Representations of weaving and binding in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610453.

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10

Updegraff, Derek Kramer Johanna Ingrid. ""Fore ðære mærðe mod astige" two new perspectives on the Old English Gifts of men /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri--Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5623.

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The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 6, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Johanna Kramer. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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Pladek, Brittany. "Gewritu secgað "the sensible inscription" in Old English Riddle poetry /." Diss., Connect to the thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10066/1021.

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12

Bailey, Hannah McKendrick. "Misinterpretation and the meaning of signs in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:880a2482-9573-4142-be27-ec8c87cfa3fb.

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This thesis investigates how Old English poets understood the processes of signification and interpretation through analysis of depictions of poor interpreters and the use of 'sign terms' such as tacen and beacen in the longer Old English poems. The first chapter deals with the Beowulf Manuscript, the second and third chapters consider Elene and Andreas within the network of related poems found in the Vercelli Book and the begin- ning of the Exeter Book, the fourth chapter is on the Junius Manuscript, and the conclusion looks at the use of the 'bright sign' motif across all four major poetic codices. I suggest that there is a 'heroic sign-bearing interpreter' character-type which several of the poems utilize or ironically invert, and that poor interpretation is nearly always asso- ciated with hesitation, which often resembles acedia. I also argue that there is greater nuance in the poems' depictions of modes of understanding than has previously been acknowledged: Eve in Genesis B does not stand for the senses which subvert the mind, but rather models the limits of rational thought as a means of understanding God, and Elene does not depict a simple opposition of letter and spirit, but a threefold mental pro- cess of learning about the Cross with analogues in exegesis and Augustine's Trinity of the Soul. Finally, I argue that there is a 'bright sign' motif which functions within a brightness-sign-covenant concept cluster, whose evocation as a traditional poetic unit is not identical to the denotation and connotation of its constituent parts. These strands of inquiry taken together demonstrate how Old English poems invest signs with significance by tapping into a specifically poetic network of allusion.

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Garner, Lori Ann. "Oral tradition and genre in old and middle English poetry /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9974631.

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Rozga, Michele E. "The Old Biology Book." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/68.

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Coogle, Diana, and Diana Coogle. "As the Anglo-Saxon Sees the World: Meditations on Old English Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12352.

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It is a pity that Old English poetry is not more widely known, not only because it is beautiful and powerful but because to read it is to experience a different way of thinking. It is also a pity - or opportunity - that many first-year Old English students express a "love-hate" relationship with the language. Therefore, it is worth trying to discover what there is in the poetry to interest the general educated public and create enthusiasts among undergraduates. The multitudinous answers, found herein, have one over-riding answer: the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking. Old English poetry opens a door into a dim past by disclosing, in puzzle-piece hints, that epistemological world, which becomes more fascinating the more one pokes around in it. This dissertation seeks to give the beginning student and the reader from the general educated public a chance to wander in this landscape where, generally, only scholars tread.

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16

Persson, Karl Arthur Erik. "Job, Ecclesiastes, and the mechanics of wisdom in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45993.

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This dissertation raises and answers, as far as possible within its scope, the following question: “What does Old English wisdom literature have to do with Biblical wisdom literature?” Critics have analyzed Old English wisdom with regard to a variety of analogous wisdom cultures; Carolyne Larrington (A Store of Common Sense) studies Old Norse analogues, Susan Deskis (Beowulf and the Medieval Proverb Tradition) situates Beowulf’s wisdom in relation to broader medieval proverb culture, and Charles Dunn and Morton Bloomfield (The Role of the Poet in Early Societies) situate Old English wisdom amidst a variety of international wisdom writings. But though Biblical wisdom was demonstrably available to Anglo-Saxon readers, and though critics generally assume certain parallels between Old English and Biblical wisdom, none has undertaken a detailed study of these parallels or their role as a precondition for the development of the Old English wisdom tradition. Limiting itself to the discussion of two Biblical wisdom texts, Job and Ecclesiastes, this dissertation undertakes the beginnings of such a study, orienting interpretation of these books via contemporaneous reception by figures such as Gregory the Great (Moralia in Job, Werferth’s Old English translation of the Dialogues), Jerome (Commentarius in Ecclesiasten), Ælfric (“Dominica I in Mense Septembri Quando Legitur Job”), and Alcuin (Commentarius Super Ecclesiasten). It then traces parallels between the Jobean and Ecclesiastean traditions and various instances of Old English wisdom. These instances include wisdom in heroic, hagiographic, and riddling poetry, including Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Guthlac A & B, the Exeter riddles, and Solomon and Saturn I; they also include typical exemplars of the Old English wisdom canon, including Solomon and Saturn II, Maxims I & II, The Fortunes of Men, Precepts, Vainglory, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer.

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Jarvis, Fiona Mary Patricia Alcibiadette. "A study of the theme of exile in old English poetry." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.308203.

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DeVito, Angela Ann. "Gendered speech in Old English narrative poetry: A comprehensive word list." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280305.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to create a word list of male and female speech in those Old English narrative poems which contain dialogue, to use as a reference in determining what, if any, differences existed between the way male Anglo-Saxon poets constructed speech for their male and female characters. Using a specifically designed computer program and an on-line text of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I electronically tagged those lines assigned to male characters, and then those assigned to female speakers, to generate two separate word lists. I eliminated all immortal speech (God, angels, demons), and all proper nouns as not germane to a study of male and female speech patterns. After I created the raw word lists, I parsed each individual word, and placed it under the appropriate headword. I further classified nouns, adjectives and pronouns according to case and number, and verbs according to person, number, tense and mood. In addition to the word lists, the dissertation includes a critical introduction, and a brief analysis of differences between male and female speech patterns in selected poems.

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19

Soper, Harriet Clementine. "A count of days : the life course in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/277493.

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This thesis investigates the representation of the human life course in Old English poetry. It attends to constructions of the lifespan as a durational unit, as well as the ‘stages’ or discrete age-related experiences which together form patterns for life development, shared across a diverse range of texts. Throughout this study, the importance of close-reading is emphasised; the bulk of the analysis is concerned with issues of style, lexis and narrative. By these means, it becomes possible to perceive how concepts of the human life course shade into other networks of meaning: these include ideas of ensoulment and embodiment, life experiences of non-human entities, wider narrative patterns which impact representations of life progression, mechanisms and hierarchies of social role and communal existence, and systems of memory collection and the nurturing of ‘wisdom’. The introductory chapter addresses various possible modes of ‘life course’ structuring, in both Anglo-Saxon writings and modern scholarly traditions. Latin and Old English vocabularies of ageing are summarised and an overview is given of previous scholarship attendant on the Anglo-Saxon material. The following three chapters of the thesis then assess representations of different parts of the life course in different groups of texts. The second chapter is concerned with depictions of early life in the Exeter Book Riddles; it contends that these texts have been unduly passed over in discussions of ageing in Old English, seemingly due to their (mostly) non-human subjects. The third chapter addresses the treatment of early and late adulthood in the verse holy lives Andreas, Guthlac A, Juliana and Judith: it is in this chapter that concepts of the life course most clearly intersect with issues of social organisation. The fourth chapter is concerned with the characterisation of old age in Beowulf and Cynewulf’s epilogue to Elene, alongside other texts; the concept of ‘wisdom’ acquired through experience is closely scrutinised, and the verbal and poetic elements of good judgment are elucidated. This thesis concludes that Old English poetry presents human ageing in a manner which encompasses a diverse range of experiences and interrelates with a multitude of wider conceptual frameworks. As such, the texts do not subscribe neatly to an ‘ages of man’ idea. Nonetheless, attention paid to the patterns of human ageing which do emerge from the poems can facilitate more sensitive and productive readings of the texts themselves. The thesis closes with some examples of passages which may be newly interpreted and appreciated in the light of how the life course is conceived across the Old English poetic corpus.

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Dewa, Roberta Jean. "The Old English elegies : coherence, genre, and the semantics of syntax." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364448.

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21

Watson, Katherine. "The genius and construction of our Saxon poetry: old and middle English verse." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2010. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29224.

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Today, 'Anglo-Saxon origins, even in the educated or culturally Iiterate mind, remain a blank: nothing happened before 1066' 1. T. A. Shippey makes the point that the Anglo-Saxon world 'has no presence at all in modern life' ,2 particularly in contrast to the powerful presence of both the Viking World and the Arthurian one.3 England failed to retain or develop a flag, anthem, national symbology, etc., even in an era of violent European nationalism'.4 Why did England fail to develop an origin myth? Shippey suggests that England 'forfeited' its national identity in the nineteenth century, when 'the developing and potentially powerful image of Anglo-Saxon origins was sacrificed', and 'Englishness became an unwelcome political stance within the ''three kingdoms" of Britain and Ireland, as tending to exclude the non-English among Queen Victoria's subjects'; while 'the "invention" of Scottish, Welsh and lrish tradition was encouraged as compensation for progressive loss of independence and erosion of the Celtic anguages' .5 Walter Scott and many others 'created an image of co-operative British history which played a major part in reconciling contemporary Britons to British politics and the English language' .6 My aim is to examine this phenomenon in relation to England's literature, specifically its poetry. The forfeiture of Anglo-Saxon origins is apparent in the history of English poetry today, but the genesis of this history is located not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth, in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry. The present work examines the mechanisms which led to the omission of Old English poetry from Warton's History, and how this omission has affected the way we think about the origins of English poetry today. Specifically, it is still widely held that English poetry began with Chaucer, and that there was a gap in poetry produced in England, between the 'Saxon' poetry produced by the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest, and the 'English' poetry which emerged - transformed by French prosody- two centuries or so after the Conquest. For this reason, the particular focus of the present work will be on poetry produced during the late Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English periods, and how the prosody of that poetry has been theorised, both in the early nineteenth century, when it was first noticed, and today. As David Matthews has explained, the idea of Middle English was not invented until the 1870s, and 'even when scholars began agreeing' that there was a middle between Saxon and English, 'they did not agree on where exactly it occurred'. In these 'conditions of uncertainty', he argues, 'different ideologies could stake different claims' .7 Although Matthews refers to the question of where the English language began, the same conditions of uncertainty applied to literature, and the question of where English poetry began has still not been resolved unanimously today. This 'diversity' of texts is still troubling to theorists today. For instance, it is still widely held that the Anglo-Saxons did not use rhyme. (This issue is a major focus of Part 3.) The thesis of this work is that Old English verse did not die: there is no discontinuity of verse forms occurring at the time of the Norman Conquest. The dissertation presents a substantial reconsideration of a classic controversy, providing fresh perspective, in a context of reception histories relating to national and cultural identity, and with particular focus on developing ideas about prosody in medieval English verse. It presents Old and Middle English verse texts in a new way, collecting in appendices a comprehensive set of verse pieces from both periods which combine the use of alliteration and rhyme. The approach taken focuses on the reception of early English verse and offers an analytical account of critical opinion across three centuries, tracking primary material and providing historical analysis of how critical views developed and influenced each other over a long period. There is an examination of the commonly held view that there is a break in the tradition of English poetry at the end of the Old English period and that when English poetry resumes, after a gap of a couple of centuries, its poetic forms are derived from French rather than earlier English models. In particular Old English poetry has been seen as based solely on alliteration and Middle English poetry on rhyme. An obvious problem with this view is the existence of a substantial body of alliterative poetry in the later Middle English period which has obvious similarities to Old English alliterative poetry. The processes by which the notion of a discontinuity between Old and Middle English poetry developed are explained, in particular how a tendency to ignore rhyme in Old English and explain away alliteration in Middle English has contributed to the development of this notion. Part 1 traces the beginnings of commentary about Old English verse in the eighteenth century, when the understanding of Old English verse was uncertain and it was generally taken to be Danish in character, amounting to a refusal to regard it as English at all. The most influential text of the period, Warton's History of English Poetry, set the beginnings of English poetry at the Conquest. Part 2 focuses on the growing understanding of Old English and Middle English verse in the early nineteenth century, characterised particularly by conflict between the scholars involved, and argues that the work of the influential antiquarian Thomas Wright recapitulated and fostered the old eighteenth-century position. However, the main work of the dissertation is carried out in Part 3, which presents criticisms of the persistence in the twentieth century of the model of discontinuity and the idea of the 'death' of English verse at the hands of the Normans. It is shown that rhyme was present in Old English poetry and that the alliterative poetry of the Middle English period follows from an Old English tradition; and a case is made that Lawman should not be seen as a man who had lost the secret of Old English verse. lt is further demonstrated that even the key figure, J.P. Oakden, who began by assuming the death of alliterative verse, had to acknowledge ultimately that native English alliterative fom1s did not die. Since it is the thesis of this dissertation that there is no significant boundary between Old and Middle English verse, the terms 'Old English' and 'Middle English' become problematic. In general I have used the term 'Old English' as it is generally used, to refer to the body of vernacular verse produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest, but the terms 'Saxon' and' Anglo-Saxon' sometimes refer to verse produced up until the thirteenth century.

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Thayer, James Dyas. "Altered identities : time and transformation in Beowulf /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3055717.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-213). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3055717.

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Tyler, Elizabeth M. "The collocation of words for treasure in Old English verse." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6e4807b8-5372-4fc7-86a4-598d1fd76b72.

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This thesis uses a study of the collocation of words for treasure to address the question of the relationship between the conventionality and originality of Old English verse. Collocation will be defined as the tendency for words to appear together. Such a definition allows for the examination of patterns of repetition beyond the half-line while also including the half-line formula thereby including stylistic features which have been considered, negatively, as constraints and restrictions on the freedom of the Old English poet, as well as other stylistic features which have been considered positively, as evidence of the rhetorical skill of the Old English poet. Rather than restrict the number of poems which I study, I have chosen to restrict the number of words to five words (mađm, hord, gestreon, sinc and frætwe) for treasure. This restriction allows for a wide spectrum of Old English verse to be examined since the words appear widely throughout the corpus. I hope thus to avoid the tendency common in scholarship to study not the whole of Old English poetry but to focus on Beowulf and verse at one time thought to be at least partly heroic. With few exceptions, the study of the style of Old English verse has largely ignored meaning. The restriction of this study to five words will allow for comments on stylistic features to be drawn with reference not only to the needs of verse form but with careful attention to the subtlety of the semantic fields of the words involved. In Chapter One, I review past scholarship on the lexis and style of Old English Verse with particular emphasis on the question of conventionality and originality. Chapter Two examines the place of treasure in Old English verse. Chapter Three focuses on the semantic analysis of the five words for treasure. I devote attention to the referents of each word and also include an account of such semantic aspects as nuance, connotation and themes associated with each word. Chapter Four consists of a study of the lexical collocations associated with each of these five words for treasure. Chapter Five considers the implications of the collocations of words for treasure for the conventionality and originality of the style and lexis of Old English verse. The conclusion attempts to comment on the style and quality of individual Old English poems. Lexical collocation is an aspect of lexis and style which has been largely ignored and which offers a new vantage point from which to consider Old English poetics further.

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Esser, Carolin Maud. "Naming the divine : designations for the Christian God in old English poetry." Thesis, University of York, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.434102.

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Hawkins, Emma B. "Gender, Power, and Language in Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278983/.

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Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals were depicted with masculine-coded language affiliated with honor, mastery, aggression, victory, bravery, independence, martial prowess, assertiveness, physical strength, verbal acuteness, firmness or hardness, and respect from others. Conversely, the powerless were described with non-masculine or feminine-coded language suggesting dishonor, subservience, passivity, defeat, cowardice, dependence, defenselessness, lack of volition, softness or indecisiveness, and lack of respect from others. Once attained, neither status was permanent; women and men trafficked back and forth between the two. Depending upon the circumstances, members of both sexes could experience reversals of fortunes which would necessitate moving from one category to the other, on more than one occasion in a lifetime.

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Bowman, Joy. "NEW YEAR, OLD BLUES." UKnowledge, 2017. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/64.

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This collection aims through the use of folktale and familial history to investigate the bounds of gender and memory against a rural Appalachian landscape. The work utilizes superstition, myth, and the commonplace to search the shadows for the forbidden and unspoken, in an attempt to redefine and reconcile personal dissonance through an observational and at times, voyeuristic lens.

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LaPadula, Brent. "A life both public and private : expressions of individuality in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/40834/.

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By looking at a representative sample of Old English poetry, this thesis questions the long-held notion that the individual, or personal-self, was not a reality in the western world until the Renaissance. This research makes use of a variety of recent and past methodological approaches to the self, so that we may apply these theories to a study of the individual in Old English literature, and by extension Anglo-Saxon culture more generally. The four-chapter layout showcases how we may approach and answer the question of self in a variety of Old English verse—from elegies and didactic religious, to the heroic. Each study is unique yet complements that which preceeds and follows it, so as to highlight how the study of self is really an inquiry of only seemingly disparate concepts. The outcome of this analysis demonstrates that the individual, or personal self-concept in Anglo-Saxon England was a reality, and consequently challenges past beliefs that the individual is a relatively modern notion. Thus opening the dialogue once more, my research ultimately asks how we may proceed with the question of self in different contexts, historical eras, and eclectic methodological avenues of inquiry, that we may further develop our understanding of one of the most important and ancient questions in humankind’s story.

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Ward, Mary Elizabeth. "Forests of thought and fields of perception : landscape and community in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8674/.

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Old English poetry is centred on the concept of community and the importance of belonging. Landscape was a component of any community since, during the period when Old English poetry was being composed and written down, the landscape was a far more important constituent of daily life than it is for the majority of people today. Landscape dictated the places that could be settled, as well as the placing of the paths, fords, and bridges that joined them; it controlled boundaries, occupations, and trading routes. In the poetry of the period landscape, as part of the fabric of community, is the arbiter of whether each element of a community is in its proper place and relationship to the others. It is the means of explaining how a community is constructed, policed, and empowered. Erring communities can be corrected or threats averted through the medium of landscape which also positions communities in place and time. Landscape is presented as the cause of dissension in heaven, the consequent creation of hell, and the key to comprehension of the fundamental difference between them. The linguistic landscapes of Old English poetry are a functional component of the meaning inherent in the narratives.

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Bodie, Gary John. "A new kind of Beowulf : text, translation and technology /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1453174591&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-254). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Creedon-Carey, Una A. "“The Whole Vexed Question”: Seamus Heaney, Old English and Language Troubles." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1432295982.

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Herbison, David Ivan Currie. "The legacy of Christian epic : a study of Old English biblical and hagiographical poetry." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.394463.

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Prozesky, Maria L. C. "Reading the English epic changing noetics from Beowulf to the Morte d'Arthur /." Pretoria : [s.n.], 2005. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-02282007-172136/.

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Richardson, Rebecca M. "A silent savior the inapproachability of Christ in the Dream of the rood /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/6679.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.
Title from Graduate School website. The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

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Turner, Kandy M. (Kandy Morrow). "A Study of "The Rhyming Poem": Text, Interpretation, and Christian Context." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331700/.

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The purpose of the research presented here is to discover the central concept of "The Rhyming Poem," an Old English Christian work known only from a 10th-century manuscript, and to establish the poem's natural place in the body of Old English poetry. Existing critical literature shows little agreement about the poem's origin, vocabulary, plot, or first-person narrator, and no single translation has satisfactorily captured a sense of the poem's unity or of the purposeful vision behind it. The examination of text and context here shows that the Old English poet has created a unified vision in which religious teachings are artistically related through imagery and form. He worked in response to a particular set of conditions in early Church history, employing both pagan and Christian details to convey a message of the superiority of Christianity to idol-worship and, as well, of the validity of the Augustinian position on Original Sin over that of the heretical Pelagians.

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North, John Richard James. "Words in context : an investigation into the meanings of Early English words by comparison of vocabulary and narrative themes in Old English and Old Norse poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.254524.

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Hodge, Anita Obermeier. "Handmaidens of God : the female figures Judith, Juliana, and Elene in Old English heroic poetry /." View online, 1985. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211130497875.pdf.

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Abdalla, Laila. "The dialectical adversary : the satanic character and imagery in Anglo-Saxon poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59563.

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This thesis examines the positive role of evil in select Old English Poetry, namely The Junius Book, "Guthlac", "Vainglory", "The Whale", "Juliana", "Judith" and "Beowulf". Using a background of Augustan and Boethian thought, each adversarial character is discussed with regard to role and imagery, but specifically in relationship to the protagonist. Evil plays a surprisingly positive role when it offers the protagonist the opportunity to defeat it. The protagonists' honour at the poem's conclusion is necessarily defined by the extent of resisting the antagonists. The hero must fight evil on two levels: the temporal in humans and the metaphysical in Satan. The thesis examines the various levels of victory and indeed failure they achieve, and concludes that of all the heroes only Juliana is completely successful. Although evil itself cannot be defined as "good", this thesis discovers that in its relationship with the human hero, it can indeed give rise to goodness.

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Williams, David. "Beowulf the poet : a deconstruction of narratives." Thesis, Bangor University, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.367308.

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Gordon, Sharon Rosamunde. "Representations of feminist and lesbian consciousness and the use of subversive strategies in selected poetry of Isabella Jane Blagden (1817-1873)." Thesis, Edinburgh Napier University, 2016. http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/453489.

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The purpose of this study is to recover and revise the contribution made to women's writing by the English minor novelist and poet, Isabella Jane Blagden (1817-1873), who was the centrifugal force of an influential literary and artistic milieu in Italy, in the mid-nineteenth-century. Key figures in the group were the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and the American writer, Henry James. This study is a revisionist critique which questions the prevailing masculine discourse and conventions which oppressed women in terms of their sexual, political and economicfreedom. This, therefore, fits into the Victorian phenomenon of women poets finding their own space and expression against patriarchal norms. My focus on Blagden's poetry, with its scope for liminal/subliminal suggestiveness, enables an explorationof her subversive and transgressive feminist-lesbian poetics. Recent contributions from feminist and lesbian theorists and critics, are examined in order to establish a feminist-lesbian interpretation of gender, sexuality, subversion and transgression. A secondary consideration is Blagden's role in the aesthetic consciousness of others and her apparent inspirational position at the centre of the creative groups of intellectual emigrės in her circle. While most of her friends and acquaintances had a public persona, Blagden did not, and her work has received little discussion anddebate. In order to ensure her significance as a feminist-lesbian poet and Muse, this study will focus on her contribution to nineteenth-century women's poetry. As a contribution to literary scholarship my aim is to bring Blagden in from the margins asa poet of non-canonical status, to one whose status is placed firmly within the continuous literary tradition of radical feminist-lesbian women writers in the nineteenth century.

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Azhar, Hadeel Jamal. "Marginalisation vs. emancipation : the (New) Woman Question in Dollie Radford's diary and poetry." Thesis, Edinburgh Napier University, 2016. http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/452895.

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This thesis sheds light on Dollie Radford as one of the talented women writers whose work is still insufficiently acknowledged by contemporary studies because of the lack of extant information about her life. LeeAnne Richardson, Ruth Livesey, and Emily Harrington are three of only a handful of scholars who have discussed in any detail Radford's role as a poet, socialist, and activist who was surrounded by key figures in the history of English literature and culture, such as William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Eleanor Marx, and Olive Schreiner. Despite being identified by Victorian reviewers as a “domestic” woman poet, all contemporary scholars who have hitherto considered Radford pinpoint her “radical” thoughts and engagement with the New Woman. Building on arguments by Radford's contemporary scholars, my argument highlights Radford's role as a Victorian feminist who sought, through her poetry, to challenge patriarchal attitudes and defy social conventions which imprisoned women of her generation. While the first two chapters of this thesis provide a contextual background of women's rights and women's poetry in the Victorian era, the four remaining chapters explore how Radford's personal conflict as an ignored married woman and unsupported writer might have influenced her empathetic portrayal of marginalised figures, such as prostitutes, the working classes, women writers, and homosexuals. Simultaneously, the chapters highlight the subversive meanings obscured by Radford's use of evocative and aesthetic language. The majority of the poems, letters, and diary entries included here are unpublished and have not yet been considered by contemporary critics. Thus, this research adds to the existing body of knowledge, offering a new approach to Radford's life and poetry in relation to aspects concerning women in Victorian and Edwardian England. By continuously interrogating Radford's choice of metaphors and images in contrast with those depicted by other Victorian poets, I aim to establish Radford as a significant fin-se-siècle woman poet whose poetry embraces a literary tradition which questions negative gendered attitudes biased against passionate women writers.

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Woeber, Catherine. "A study of Christ and his saints as representatives of the values of Christian heroism in Old English poetry." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21143.

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Bibliography: pages 71-72.
This dissertation investigates the concept of Christian heroism as it appears in a number of Old English poems, through a study of the figure of the miles Christi. These poems present a specific Christian heroism which, though couched in terms culled from Germanic heroism, nevertheless exists in its own right and is quite different from it. Christ and his saints are seen as heroes in themselves (Christian servants obedient to the will of God) rather than as heroic warriors as they are usually regarded (Germanic heroes fighting for a Christian cause). They are leaders and heroes in the sense of servants, and not only like kings and warriors of the Germanic code. A study of some poems from the Cynewulf canon shows that the poets understood Christian heroism to mean more than brave battling for the cause of good; in essence, it is complete submission to the will of God.

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Kramer, Emily Marie. "Wandering: Dreams, Memory, and Language in Poetry." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1525179650285217.

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Åström, Berit. "The Politics of Tradition : Examining the History of the Old English Poems The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer." Doctoral thesis, Umeå University, Modern Languages, 2002. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-60.

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Old English literary studies is a fascinating field of research which spans many various approaches including philology and linguistics as well as literary and cultural theories. The field is characterised by a certain conservatism, what in this thesis is referred to as tradition. This thesis examines the scholarship on The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, projecting its cumbersome affinities with tradition as a conservative force as well as the resistance against it. The investigation focuses mainly on two aspects of scholarly research: the emergence of a professional identity among Anglo-Saxonist scholars and their choice of either a metaphoric or metonymic approach to the material. A final chapter studies the concomitant changes within Old English feminist studies. The thesis also summarises the approaches to points of ambiguity in the poems, and provides a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on the two texts.

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Niven, Alex F. "Basil Bunting's late modernism : from Pound to poetic community." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6d887a6-0e63-440d-9959-0791168bce5b.

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This study examines Basil Bunting's development as a poet from his meeting with Ezra Pound in Paris in 1923, through his collaborations with Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and other members of the Objectivist circle in the 1930s, up to his meeting with Allen Ginsberg and Tom Pickard in 1960s Britain against a backdrop of social activism and modernist revival. In particular, it seeks to query the critical commonplace that Bunting was a sceptic interested solely in the autotelic form of poetry, and to argue that his revival at the time of the long poem Briggflatts in the sixties should be read historically - as a case study that shows the Poundian tradition of praxis and orality acquiring a newly communitarian, leftist emphasis in the context of post-war Anglo-American poetry. The study draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and letters held at the Basil Bunting Archive, Durham University, the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (Austin), and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Pastorello, Elisa Gianna. "Female Elegiac Characters in the Exeter Book: A critical edition, with a critical history and a variorum commentary of 'Wulf and Eadwacer', 'The Wife's Lament' and 'The Husband's Message'." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Padova, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11577/3422128.

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Among the variety of genres and themes found in the Exeter Book – Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3501, Exeter – Wulf and Eadwacer (fols. 100v-101r), The Wife’s Lament (fols. 115r-115v) and The Husband’s Message (fols. 123r-123v) stand out for their similarity in content and form, all of them being poetical laments dealing with the separation of lovers. What makes these texts peculiar, however, is their having women as protagonists, and, in the case of Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament, their being spoken by those female protagonists. Since Benjamin Thorpe’s editio princeps of the MS. in 1842, the above-mentioned poems have been edited and largely commented upon in editions of the whole Exeter Book and in single studies, but never in the combination proposed in the present work. The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical edition taking into account all the readings proposed up to now – both in editions and in critical studies –, and a comprehensive history of the criticism on the texts in the form of a systematic classification of all the commentaries on the poems. The latter is completed by a variorum commentary, in which different interpretations and translations of crucial words and phrases are given in detail. This kind of work on the three poems in question has never been carried out, and it is needed for two reasons. Firstly, many scholars from the 1960s onwards have faced the poems without taking into account early editions and commentaries, with the result that a number of interpretations have been presented as original although they were not. Secondly, the criticism on these texts has accumulated so much that it has become necessary to operate a clear distinction between what the poems actually tell, and what critics tell about them or want them to tell.
Nella varietà di temi e generi che caratterizzano l’Exeter Book – Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3501, Exeter – Wulf and Eadwacer (fol. 100v-101r), The Wife’s Lament (fol. 115r-115v) and The Husband’s Message (fol. 123r-123v) si distinguono in quanto poesie elegiache le cui protagoniste sono figure femminili che soffrono per la lontananza dei rispettivi amati. Nel caso di Wulf and Eadwacer e The Wife’s Lament, le voci narranti appartengono alle protagoniste stesse. A causa di queste peculiarità, i testi in questione sono stati oggetto di innumerevoli edizioni e studi critici, singolarmente o in combinazione con altre elegie antico-inglesi, fin dai tempi dell’editio princeps del manoscritto, pubblicata da Benjamin Thorpe nel 1842. Questa tesi propone un’edizione critica che raccoglie le tre poesie assieme per la prima volta, e che tiene conto, nell’apparato critico, degli emendamenti proposti dai precedenti editori (dal 1842 fino ad oggi). Presenta, inoltre, una storia della critica e dell’interpretazione dei testi in oggetto, nella quale si riassumono le letture che di essi sono state date e le loro possibili relazioni con altri testi e generi letterari. Questo lavoro ha lo scopo di fare chiarezza nella complessa storia editoriale e interpretativa delle poesie, che è necessaria per separare ciò che i testi in questione realmente dicono da ciò che editori e studiosi vedono in essi – a volte intervenendo su parole o versi anche pesantemente pur di dimostrare la validità delle loro teorie.

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Hopkins, Stephen Chase Evans. "Solving the Old English Exodus: An Active Problem Solving Approach to the Poem." Miami University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=muhonors1303488106.

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Shaull, Erin Marie Szydloski. "Paternal Legacy in Early English Texts." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1448913159.

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Cavanaugh, D. "The verb and particle collation in Old English poetry : A descriptive analysis on the basis of syntax, metrical segmentation and stress." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371607.

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49

Montague, Tara Bookataub. "Narrating battle in the early medieval Germanic poetic tradition /." view abstract or download file of text, 2006. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3211224.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-314). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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50

Nelson, Nancy Susan. "Heroism and Failure in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: the Ideal and the Real within the Comitatus." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1989. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332044/.

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This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary to the view that Anglo-Saxon literature idealized the culture, the poets presented a reasonably realistic picture of their age. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry celebrates ideals of behavior which, even when they can be attained, are not successful in the real world of political life.

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