What Seamus Heaney Did to Beowulf : An Essay on Translation and Transmutation of English Identity
Heaney’s Beowulf provides us with a great deal which other translations do not: a poetic fluency rendered in Modern English, a skilled understanding of linguistic choices, and most importantly, a consciousness of the translative act which negotiates fluidly between modern perspectives and Anglo Saxon artistry.
Impregnable friendship : locating desire in the middle English ‘Amis and Amiloun’
Scholarship on Amis and Amiloun has generally been divided into two critical schools. The majority of critics have read the work as an exemplar of perfect friendship, overlooking (or ignoring) any trace of homoeroticism, citing the possibility itself as anachronistic, or explaining away its presence by offering historical or theoretical justification for intimacy among medieval men.
Lexical imposition Old Norse vocabulary in Scottish Gaelic
Although few specifics are known about the historical daily patterns of interaction between ON speakers and Gaelic speakers in the Highlands and Western/Hebrides Islands of what is present-day Scotland, it is clear neverthe- less that the groups lived more or less side by side in that region over a period of several centuries.
The case for a West Saxon minuscule
Julian Brown’s famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles.
Beowulf Is Not God Cyning
By understanding the etymology of the Old English cyning, and by recognizing the poet’s use of Scyld as the model for a good king, we can see that each of the three uses of the phrase ‘Þæt wæs god cyning’ has a different meaning…
Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis
The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists.
Listening for the Vikings: Some Evidence from Etymology
The Vikings left behind several kinds of evidence during their stay in Anglo-Saxon England. Richard Dance notes that ‘one crucial aspect is the etymological.’
Visualization in Medieval Alchemy
Therefore, rather than attempting to establish an exhaustive inventory of visual forms in medieval alchemy or a premature synthesis, the purpose of this article is to sketch major trends in visualization and to exemplify them by their earliest appearance so far known.
Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum
The broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction.
Old English and the lexicography of Old High German
In this lecture I will focus on how Old English affected the early German written record and on the difficulties of its lexicographical description.
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Until recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language.
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Time and again the Beowulf poet’s choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found.
The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick: From Ireland to Dante and Beyond
“Yes by Saint Patrick …. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.
The first documented evidence of a Jewish presence in Slovenia dates from the 13th century, when Yiddish- and Italian-speaking Jews migrated south from Austria to Maribor and Celje, and east from Italy into Ljubljana. This is a good three centuries after the first mention of Jews in the Austrian lands.
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
How do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
The linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism.
Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Bernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin.
Celtic Search Talk III: Irish Classical Studies and the Irish History of Troy
This was part of a series of papers given at the University of Toronto in competition for a position in the Celtic Studies department. This paper focused on the reception of literature and the reception of the classics in medieval Ireland.
The Old English Rune Poem – Semantics, Structure, and Symmetry
The later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England.
The British Kingdom of Lindsey
The first piece of evidence which offers support for the above contention comes from the kingdom-name ‘Lindsey’ itself. Two forms of this name exist in Anglo-Saxon sources, reflecting two different Old English suffixes:6 Lindissi (later Lindesse, as used by Bede and the earliest manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)7 and Lindesig…
The Scandinavian element beyond the Danelaw
The present paper concentrates on the Scandinavian element present in Eng- lish in the area beyond the Danelaw, i.e. in the West Midlands and Southern parts of the country.
The Development of Predicative Possession in Slavic Languages
As an active language, Early Proto-Indo-European (Pre-Indo-Euro- pean) had no category of syntactic transitivity (Subject-Object relation), which is the central characteristic of nominative (accusative) languages, and no verb ‘have’.
A Christological reading of The Ruin
We should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings.