Università Roma Tre

The Old English Elegies
The course will focus on the analysis of some of the most interesting texts in Old English poetry. The term ‘elegy’ has been applied by scholars to a number of Old English poems found in the Exeter Book (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, The Ruin, The Riming Poem, Resignation). These texts are focused on the mental and emotional state of individual narrators, and specifically on the deep psychological introspection displayed in the representation of their suffering as a result of being forced into isolation, alienation, and exile. The poems will be analyzed and critically discussed from a literary, linguistic and philological perspective, taking into account the manuscript mode of transmission, the peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon production and the influences derived from the Continent.
Particular attention will be paid to stylistic and morphosyntactic features, vocabulary, as well as to the ways in which Anglo-Saxon poets link the desolation of the landscape to the elegiac protagonists' condition of loneliness and pain.

Texts
A.L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study, Montreal, McGill–Queens University Press 2001.
B.J. Muir (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter Ms 3501, Exeter, University of Exeter Press 2000.
G. P. Krapp – E. Dobbie (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records,III, New York-London, Columbia University Press, 1936 (https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/index.htm).