The poetry that survives from the Anglo-Saxon period of medieval history is relatively meager in quantity compared to the numerous homilies, recipes, writes, law codes, and liturgical materials that remain, and yet this poetic corpus is overwhelmed by the lasting image of the most famous monument to Old English heroic cultures, Beowulf. While its 3,182 lines of alliterative verse do constitute the most substantial and arguably the deepest single contribution of Old English poets to the history of poetry, its position has dwarfed the many other poems of value and spirit from the period, verse which takes as its subject not monsters and dragons, heroes and worldly glory, but themes more familiar to our own modern poets’ offerings, although the form taken is different. Spiritual unrest, the desire for peace in a troubled world, the terrors of an uncertain future, and the need for steadfastness despite the times: all these are the concern of the thirty poems collected from approximately thirty manuscripts and presented in the first volume of Old English Shorter Poems, most ably edited and translated by Christopher A. Jones for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Series.
Anthony Adams
The Medieval Review
