Exeter Book

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Exeter Book

The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. [1] It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry, along with the Vercelli Book in Vercelli, Italy, the Nowell Codex in the British Library, and the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The book was donated to what is now the Exeter Cathedral library by Leofric, [2] the first bishop of Exeter, in 1072. It is believed originally to have contained 130 [3] or 131 leaves, of which the first 7 [3] or 8 have been replaced with other leaves; the original first 8 leaves are lost.[ citation needed ] The Exeter Book is the largest and perhaps oldest [3] [4] known manuscript of Old English literature, [2] [5] [6] [7] containing about a sixth of the Old English poetry that has survived. [2] [8]

Contents

In 2016, UNESCO recognized the book as "the foundation volume of English literature, one of the world's principal cultural artefacts". [9] [10] [11]

History

The Exeter Book is generally acknowledged to be one of the great works of the English Benedictine revival of the tenth century; the precise dates that it was written and compiled are unknown, although proposed dates range from 960 to 990. [14] This period saw a rise in monastic activity and productivity under the renewed influence of Benedictine principles and standards. At the opening of the period, Dunstan's importance to the Church and to the English kingdom was established, culminating in his appointment to the Archbishopric at Canterbury under Edgar of England and leading to the monastic reformation by which this era was characterised. Dunstan died in 998, and by the period's close, England under Æthelred faced an increasingly determined Scandinavian incursion, to which it would eventually succumb.

The Exeter Book's heritage becomes traceable from the death of Leofric, bishop of Exeter, in 1072. [15] Among the possessions which he bequeathed in his will to the then-impoverished monastery at Exeter (the precursor to the later cathedral) is one famously described as i mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoð-wisan geworht: "one large English book on various subjects, composed in verse form". [16] This book has been widely identified by scholars as the Exeter Codex. [16] [17]

Leofric's bequest, however, took place at least three generations after the book was written, and it has generally been assumed that it had originated elsewhere. [8] According to Patrick Conner, the original scribe who wrote the text probably did not write it as a single volume, but rather three separate manuscript booklets which were later compiled into the Exeter Book codex. [5] There are a number of missing gatherings and pages. [3] Some marginalia were added to the manuscript by the antiquarians Laurence Nowell in the sixteenth century and George Hickes in the seventeenth. [18]

Contents

Aside from eight leaves added to the codex after it was written, the Exeter Book consists entirely of poetry. However, unlike the Junius manuscript, which is dedicated to biblically inspired works, the Exeter Book is noted for the unmatched diversity of genres among its contents, as well as their generally high level of poetic quality. [12]

The poems give a sense of the intellectual sophistication of Anglo-Saxon literary culture. They include numerous saints’ lives, gnomic verses, and wisdom poems, in addition to almost a hundred riddles, numerous smaller heroic poems, and a quantity of elegiac verse. The moving elegies and enigmatic riddles are the most famous of the Exeter Book texts. [11] The elegies primarily explore the themes of alienation, loss, the passage of time, desolation, and death, and deal with subjects including the sorrows of exile, the ruination of the past, and the long separation of lovers. Through them we encounter lonely seafarers, banished wanderers, and mournful lovers. [6] [11] The riddles, by contrast, explore the fabric of the world through the prism of the everyday. (See the sections on 'Riddles' and 'Elegies' below.) The Exeter manuscript is also important because it contains two poems signed by the poet Cynewulf, who is one of only twelve Old English poets known to us by name. [11]

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica , "the arrangement of the poems appears to be haphazard, and the book is believed to be copied from an earlier collection". [6] However, whether (or the extent to which) the Exeter Book is a deliberately crafted anthology of related poems or a miscellany of unrelated poems is a matter of debate, as some degree of order has been found in the organisation of its contents. [3]

None of the poems is given a title in the manuscript, and there is often no obvious indicator of where one text ends and the next begins, other than a plain initial. Consequently, the titles given to the poems in the Exeter Book are those that editors have established over the years, and very often a given poem will be known by several titles. [12] The following is one listing of poems found in the book (titles may vary depending on source): [3] [13] [19]

Riddles

Among the other texts in the Exeter Book, there are over ninety riddles, written in the conventional alliterative style of Old English poetry. Their topics, which range from the religious to the mundane, are represented in an oblique and elliptical manner, challenging the reader to deduce what they are about. Some of the riddles are double entendres, setting out entirely innocent subject matter in language filled with bawdy connotations, such as Riddle 25 below.

Two Exeter Book riddles are presented below, with Modern English translations alongside the Old English originals. Proposed answers to the riddles are included below the text.

Riddle 25

Answer: an onion

Riddle 26

Answer: a Bible

Elegies

The Exeter Book contains the Old English poems known as the "elegies": "The Wanderer" (fol. 76b - fol. 78a); "The Seafarer" (fol. 81b - fol. 83a); "The Riming Poem" fol. 94a - fol. 95b); "Deor" (fol. 100a - fol. 100b), "Wulf and Eadwacer" (fol. 100b - fol. 101a); "The Wife's Lament" (fol. 115a - fol. 115b); "The Husband's Message" (fol. 123a - 123b); and "The Ruin" (fol. 123b - fol. 124b).

The term "elegy" can be confusing due to its application to a diverse range of poems and poetic genres from different cultures and time periods. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines elegy (in the poetic sense) as a poem either composed in the elegiac metre of Greek and Roman lyric poets, expressing "personal sentiments on a range of subjects, including epigrams, laments, [and] love", or "a poem in another language based on or influenced by this" [20] – hence, from this latter definition, the application of the term "elegy" to the Old English poems, which are not elegiac in their metre. More broadly, the term "elegy" has also been widened by some to include "any serious meditative poem", [21] a definition which would include the Exeter Book elegies. Providing a synthesis of the strictly metrical definition and the broader definition based on subject matter, Anne Klinck argues in The Old English Elegies that "genre should be conceived [...] as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific meter or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose – more crudely, subject and audience)". [22]

Editions and translations

Included here are facsimiles, editions, and translations that include a significant proportion of texts from the Exeter Book.

Facsimiles

Editions: Old English text only

Editions: Old English text and translation

Editions: Translations only

See also

Related Research Articles

Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.

Leofric was a medieval Bishop of Exeter. Probably a native of Cornwall, he was educated on the continent. At the time Edward the Confessor was in exile before his succession to the English throne, Leofric joined his service and returned to England with him. After he became king, Edward rewarded Leofric with lands. Although a 12th-century source claims Leofric held the office of chancellor, modern historians agree he never did so.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elegy</span> Poem of serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead

An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Junius manuscript</span> Tenth century illustrated manuscript in the collections of the Bodleian Library

The Junius manuscript is one of the four major codices of Old English literature. Written in the 10th century, it contains poetry dealing with Biblical subjects in Old English, the vernacular language of Anglo-Saxon England. Modern editors have determined that the manuscript is made of four poems, to which they have given the titles Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. The identity of their author is unknown. For a long time, scholars believed them to be the work of Cædmon, accordingly calling the book the Cædmon manuscript. This theory has been discarded due to the significant differences between the poems.

<i>Wulf and Eadwacer</i> Old English poem

"Wulf and Eadwacer" is an Old English poem of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and as a song or ballad with refrain. The poem is narrated in the first person, most likely by female speaker. Because the audience is given so little information about her situation, some scholars argue the story was well-known, and that the unnamed speaker corresponds, for example, to Signý or that the characters Wulf and Eadwacer correspond to Theoderic the Great and his rival Odoacer. The poem's only extant text is found at folios 100v-101r in the tenth-century Exeter Book, alongside certain other texts to which it possesses qualitative similarities.

<i>The Wanderer</i> (Old English poem) Old English poem

The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It comprises 115 lines of alliterative verse. As is often the case with Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled.

The Seafarer is an Old English poem giving a first-person account of a man alone on the sea. The poem consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". It is recorded only at folios 81 verso – 83 recto of the tenth-century Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It has most often, though not always, been categorised as an elegy, a poetic genre commonly assigned to a particular group of Old English poems that reflect on spiritual and earthly melancholy.

"The Wife's Lament" or "The Wife's Complaint" is an Old English poem of 53 lines found on folio 115 of the Exeter Book and generally treated as an elegy in the manner of the German frauenlied, or "women's song". The poem has been relatively well preserved and requires few if any emendations to enable an initial reading. Thematically, the poem is primarily concerned with the evocation of the grief of the female speaker and with the representation of her state of despair. The tribulations she suffers leading to her state of lamentation, however, are cryptically described and have been subject to many interpretations. Indeed, Professor Stephen Ramsay has said, "the 'correct' interpretation of "The Wife's Lament" is one of the more hotly debated subjects in medieval studies."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vercelli Book</span> Manuscript Old English poetic codex

The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Ruin</span> Old English poem, probably 8-9th century

"The Ruin of the Empire", or simply "The Ruin", is an elegy in Old English, written by an unknown author probably in the 8th or 9th century, and published in the 10th century in the Exeter Book, a large collection of poems and riddles. The poem evokes the former glory of an unnamed ruined ancient city that some scholars have identified with modern Bath, juxtaposing the grand, lively past with the decaying present.

"The Husband's Message" is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long and found only on folio 123 of the Exeter Book. The poem is cast as the private address of an unknown first-person speaker to a wife, challenging the reader to discover the speaker's identity and the nature of the conversation, the mystery of which is enhanced by a burn-hole at the beginning of the poem.

Christ III is an anonymous Old English religious poem which forms the last part of Christ, a poetic triad found at the beginning of the Exeter Book. Christ III is found on fols. 20b–32a and constitutes lines 867–1664 of Christ in Krapp and Dobbie's Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition. The poem is concerned with the Second Coming of Christ (parousia) and the Last Judgment.

"The Fortunes of Men", also "The Fates of Men" or "The Fates of Mortals", is the title given to an Old English gnomic poem of 98 lines in the Exeter Book, fols. 87a–88b.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anglo-Saxon riddles</span> Part of Anglo-Saxon literature

Anglo-Saxon riddles are a significant genre of Anglo-Saxon literature. The riddle was a major, prestigious literary form in early medieval England, and riddles were written both in Latin and Old English verse. The pre-eminent composer of Latin riddles in early medieval England was Aldhelm, while the Old English verse riddles found in the tenth-century Exeter Book include some of the most famous Old English poems.

De creatura is an 83-line Latin polystichic poem by the seventh- to eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poet Aldhelm and an important text among Anglo-Saxon riddles. The poem seeks to express the wondrous diversity of creation, usually by drawing vivid contrasts between different natural phenomena, one of which is usually physically higher and more magnificent, and one of which is usually physically lower and more mundane.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exeter Book Riddles</span>

The Exeter Book riddles are a fragmentary collection of verse riddles in Old English found in the later tenth-century anthology of Old English poetry known as the Exeter Book. Today standing at around ninety-four, the Exeter Book riddles account for almost all the riddles attested in Old English, and a major component of the otherwise mostly Latin corpus of riddles from early medieval England.

Exeter Book Riddle 30 is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Since the suggestion of F. A. Blackburn in 1901, its solution has been agreed to be the Old English word bēam, understood both in its primary sense 'tree' but also in its secondary sense 'cross'.

Exeter Book Riddle 44 is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is accepted to be 'key'. However, the description evokes a penis; as such, Riddle 44 is noted as one of a small group of Old English riddles that engage in sexual double entendre, and thus provides rare evidence for Anglo-Saxon attitudes to sexuality.

Exeter Book Riddle 12 is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book. Its solution is accepted to be 'ox/ox-hide'. The riddle has been described as 'rather a cause celebre in the realm of Old English poetic scholarship, thanks to the combination of its apparently sensational, and salacious, subject matter with critical issues of class, sex, and gender'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exeter Book Riddle 26</span> Old English riddle

Exeter Book Riddle 26 is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book.

References

  1. ↑ Fell, Christine (2007). "Perceptions of Transience". In Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 172–89. ISBN   978-0-521-37794-2.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Johnson, Keith (2016). "7.1 Manuscript collections". The History of Early English. Taylor & Francis. ISBN   9781317636069.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Shippey, Tom (2017). The Complete Old English Poems. Translated by Williamson, Craig. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp.  x-xi, 299-302. ISBN   978-0-8122-9321-0.
  4. 1 2 "The Exeter Book". Exeter Cathedral.
  5. 1 2 3 Conner, Patrick W. (2015). "The Structure of the Exeter Book Codex". In Richards, Mary P. (ed.). Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings. Routledge. pp. 301–302. ISBN   978-1-317-75890-7.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Exeter Book at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  7. ↑ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Exeter Book". Encyclopædia Britannica. 10. (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 67.
  8. 1 2 3 Gameson, Richard (December 1996). "The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry". Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge University Press. 25: 135–185. doi:10.1017/S0263675100001988. ISSN   1474-0532. S2CID   162992373.
  9. ↑ Flood, Alison (22 June 2016). "Unesco lists Exeter Book among 'world's principal cultural artefacts'". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 June 2016.
  10. ↑ "'Outstanding' Old English poetry book granted Unesco status". BBC News. 21 June 2016.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Exeter Book". The British Library.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Conner, Patrick W. (2019). "The Exeter Book". Oxford Bibliographies Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780195396584-0094.
  13. 1 2 Treharne, Elaine; Pulsiano, Phillip (2017). "An Introduction to the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Vernacular Literature". A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (PDF). Wiley Blackwell. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1002/9781405165303.ch1. ISBN   9781405165303.
  14. ↑ [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [11] [12] [13]
  15. ↑ Förster, Max (1933). "The Donations of Leofric to Exeter". In Chambers, Forster and Flower (ed.). The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry.
  16. 1 2 Alexander, Michael (2008). "Introduction". The First Poems in English. London: Penguin Books. p. xvii. ISBN   9780140433784.
  17. ↑ [2] [3] [8] [11] [12]
  18. ↑ Muir, Bernard J., ed. (2000). The Exeter anthology of Old English poetry: an edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501 (2nd ed.). Exeter: University of Exeter Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN   0-85989-630-7.
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 Based on Muir’s (1994) counting:
  20. ↑ "elegy, n.", OED Online, Oxford University Press, retrieved 20 March 2022
  21. ↑ The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Second ed.). Broadview Press. 2011. p. 51. ISBN   9781554810482.
  22. ↑ Klinck, Anne L. (1992). The Old English Elegies. McGill-Queen's Press. p. 224.
  23. ↑ Mackie, W. S. (William Souter)., Gollancz, I., Mackie, W. S. (William Souter)., Gollancz, I. (18951934). The Exeter book: an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry presented to Exeter Cathedral by Loefric, first bishop of Exeter (1050-1071), and still in possession of the dean and chapter. London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society, by K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
Bibliography


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