Università Roma Tre

Old English Elegiac Poetry: The Wanderer

The course aims at giving students the ability to translate and discuss critically Old English poetic texts and to relate them to their cultural and linguistic context. The Wanderer and other elegiac passages from different texts will be analyzed considering the main features of Old English poetry, that is style, Biblical influences, symbolism, peculiarities of poetic language and of manuscript transmission.

- B. Mitchell - F. C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English, Blackwell, Oxford 2008;
or: The Wanderer, R. F. Leslie (ed.), Manchester University Press, Manchester 1966.

- F. C. Robinson, Old English, in B. Murdoch - M. Read (edd.), Early Germanic Literature and Culture, Camden House, Rochester-New York 2004, PP. 205-233.

A selection of chapters from:

- M. Godden-M. Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991.
- M. Amodio, The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
- A.M. Luiselli Fadda, Tradizioni manoscritte e critica del testo nel Medioevo germanico, Laterza, Bari-Roma 2010 (Part I).
- R. Lass, Old English: a Historical Linguistic Companion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993.

Further material will be given at the beginning of the course.

Students are advised to attend classes. Those who cannot attend them are requested to contact the teacher at the beginning of the course.