This set of two CD-Roms is comprised of readings in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) by Stephen Pollington of texts and lessons found in the audiotape First Steps in Old English.CD 1 Tracks include: 1. Deor. 2. Beowulf - The Funeral of Scyld Scefing. 3. The Arrival of the English - Bede. 4. Two Extracts from the Laws of King Ine. 5. The Danes' Harrying - Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Entry AD997. 6. Durham 7. The Ordeal 8. Charm Against a Dwarf 9. Charm Against Wens 10. Charm Against Waterelf Sickness 11. The Nine Herbs Charm 12. Leechdoms 13. Beowulf's Greeting 14. The Battle of Brunanburh 15. The Wanderer. CD 2: Learning Old English - includes Reading Exercises, A Guide to Pronunciation, Conversational Old English.
From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / And a tempting truth hidden in her heart," to the trust of Noah who builds "a sea-floater, a wave-walking / Ocean-home with rooms for all creatures," the world of the Anglo-Saxon poets is a place of harshness, beauty, and wonder. Now for the first time, the entire Old English poetic corpus—including poems and fragments discovered only within the past fifty years—is rendered into modern strong-stress, alliterative verse in a masterful translation by Craig Williamson. Accompanied by an introduction by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on the literary scope and vision of these timeless poems and Williamson's own introductions to the individual works and his essay on translating Old English poetry, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead-hall, to share a herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation or a people's sorrow at the death of a beloved king, to be present at the clash of battle or to puzzle over the sacred and profane answers to riddles posed over a thousand years ago. This is poetry as stunning in its vitality as it is true to its sources. Were Williamson's idiom not so modern, we might think that the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing once more.
Unique and beautiful, Beowulf brings to life a society of violence and honor, fierce warriors and bloody battles, deadly monsters and famous swords. Written by an unknown poet in about the eighth century, this masterpiece of Anglo-Saxton literature transforms legends, myth, history, and ancient songs into the richly colored tale of the hero Beowulf, the loathsome man-eater Grendel, his vengeful water-hag mother, and a treasure-hoarding dragon. The earliest surviving epic poem in any modern European language. Beowulf is a stirring portrait of a heroic world–somber, vast, and magnificent.
"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.
Anglo–Saxon poetry is esteemed for its subtle artistry and for its wealth of insights into the artistic, social and spiritual preoccupations of the formative first centuries of English literature. This anthology of prose translations covers most of the poetry surviving in the four major codices and in various other manuscripts. A well–received feature is the grouping by codex to emphasize the great importance of manuscript context in interpreting the poems. The full contents of the Exeter Book are represented, summarized where not translated, to facilitate appreciation of a complete Anglo-Saxon book. The introduction discusses the nature of the legacy, the poet's role, chronology, and especially of translations attempt a style acceptable to the modern ear yet close enough to aid parallel study of the old English text. A check–list of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry enhances the practical usefulness of the volume. The whole thus adds up to a substantial and now widely–cited survey of the Anglo–Saxon poetic achievement.
Anglo-saxon poetry was circulated orally in a preliterate society, and gathered at last into books over some six centuries before the Norman Conquest ended English independence. Against the odds some of these books survive today. This anthology of prose translations covers most of the surviving poetry, revealing a tradition which is outstanding among early medieval literatures for its sophisticated exploration of the human condition in a mutable, finite, but wonderfully diverse and meaning-filled world.
Poetry is a joyful art form, but how do you teach students to joyfully read, analyze, and write poems? In Text Structures from Poetry, Grades 4-12, award-winning educator Gretchen Bernabei teams up with noted poet Laura Van Prooyen to light the path. Centered around 50 classroom-proven lesson and poem pairs, the mentor texts represent a broad range of voices in contemporary poetry and the canon. These unique and engaging lessons show educators how to "pop the hood" on a poem to discover what makes it work, using text structures to unlock the engine of a poem. This method enables educators to engage students in reading and re-reading a poem closely, to identify how the parts of the poem relate to each other to create movement, and to leverage what they have learned to write their own evocative poems. Each of the 50 lessons includes a mentor poem that serves as an excellent model for young writers, a diagram that illustrates the text structure of the poem, and several inspiring examples of student poems written to emulate the mentor poem. Easy-to-use instructional resources enhance instructor and student understanding and include: Teaching notes for unlocking the text structure of a poem and the engine that makes it work. Tips for exploring rhyme scheme, meter, and fixed forms. Instructional sequences that vary the ways students can read and write poems and other prose forms. Ideas for revising and publishing student poems. A "Meet the Contemporary Authors" section that includes fascinating messages from the contemporary poets. Teach your students to learn about poetry using the magic of poems themselves and lead the way to a rewarding love of poetry for teachers and students alike.
A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature. This second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.
