Students are invited to learn about the oral nature of early poetry.

Literature. What is it?

Literature literally "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter) as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary, or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much of, if not all, the world texts can be oral as well and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, plus other forms of oral poetry, and folktale.

Nations can have literatures, as can corporations, philosophical schools or historical periods. Popular belief commonly holds that the literature of a nation, for example, comprises the collection of texts which make it a whole nation. The Hebrew Bible, Persian Shahnama, the Indian Mahabharata, Ramayana and Thirukural, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Constitution of the United States, all fall within this definition of a kind of literature.

The oral tradition.

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY

Features of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

• Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, 4-stress/line with medial caesura (pause)
• presumably oral origins, oral poetry retained in memory and passed on from generation to generation
• formulaic poetry, traditional formulas (stock phrases and expressions), recycled, adapted, and used in the crafting of new poems
• interlace designs, interweaving of motifs, images, formulas; poetic design reminiscent ofinterlacing patterns Anglo-Saxon art
• use of kennings, metaphorical word compounds, e.g. hronrad (whale-road) = ocean
• Caedmon's Hymn ("Hymn of Creation", c. 670) (images:| large | small |
• one of the oldest poetic works in English
• Caedmon was attached to the monastery at Whitby
• text of the poem preserved in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731)
• presumably Caedmon was illiterate, poem might be therefore example of oral-formulaic poetry

The Dream of the Rood

• preserved in Vercelli Book (c. 1000)
• portions of the text in runic inscription on Ruthwell Cross (8th c.)
• dream vision
• prosopopeia, speaking tree
• mixture of cultural and religious traditions: Christian, Germanic, Celtic
   

The Wanderer

• preseved in Exeter Book (c. 1000)
• elegy, elegiac mood
• themes of loss, loneliness, exile
• ubi sunt ("where are they?") motif
• transitoriness of earthly things
• idea of comfort and rest in God