Biographia Britannica literaria; or, biography of literary characters of Great Britain and Ireland. Anglo-Saxon period / arranged in chronological order.

  • Thomas Wright
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographia Britannica literaria; or, biography of literary characters of Great Britain and Ireland. Anglo-Saxon period / arranged in chronological order. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/582 (page 7)
    In their passage from one minstrel to another, these poems underwent successive changes; and, since, like the religion taught by the priests, the poetry belonged to the whole class, without being known severally as the work of this or that individual, it happens that all the Anglo-Saxon national poetry is anonymous. In like manner, the ques- tion as to the authors of most of the poetry of the early Grecian cycles was among the Greeks themselves a matter of great uncertainty. The practice of singing detached pieces also accounts for the fragments of larger poems which are still found in manuscripts; the famous Exeter manuscript is chiefly made up of such pieces. Beowulf bears internal evidence of having passed through many hands in its way from the age of paganism in which it was certainly moulded, up to that when among min- strels who held a better religion, it received the various adventitious traits of Christianity which we now find in it. ‘The “ Traveller’s Song” seems to have been preserved as a kind of nomenclature of geography ; and, as might be expected, it is full of interpolations, by the addition of the names of countries, of which the knowledge was brought in by the Christian writers. : 4, The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was neither modu- lated according to foot-measure, like that of the Greeks and Romans, nor written with rhymes, like that of many modern languages. Its chief and universal characteristic was a very regular alliteration, so arranged that, in every couplet, there should be two principal words in the first of Finnesburh,’’ was found by the former, as he says, ina MS. of semi-Saxon Homilies in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth. It has since been sought there more than once, but without success. Perhaps it was the leaf pasted down in the binding of some MS. which belonged to a very different subject; and, if this be the case, it is certainly very desirable that it should be found, as, by separating it from the cover, more might possibly be discovered than Hickes was aware of.