Wisdom and Lyric contains many poems built—for modern readers at least—around mysteries: the elegies’ nameless narrators; the catalogues hinting at classificatory modes as strange as those in Borges’ “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”; the metrical charms’ practical supernaturalism. Readers drawn to these texts will likely relish the invitation to struggle with some unknowns.
Though brief, Bjork’s introduction consistently and admirably strives to balance accounts of the work these poems may have done for the Anglo-Saxons with commentary on their more universal qualities—linking, for instance, the metrical charms with contemporary research on the medical efficacy of patients’ belief. Together, the introduction and notes provide an appealing case for sympathetic attention to even the strangest of these Old English texts, and—just as important—a way to read them with this sympathy.
Emily V. Thornbury
The Medieval Review
