Anglo-Saxon Literature

Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe; and it is a consequence of this that its relations with Latin literature have been the close...

The material of an early Literature is, above all, to be sought in written Books and documents. But, besides these, there are other available sources, which may be called in one...

For many a petty king ere Arthur came ruled in this isle, and ever waging war each upon other, wasted all the land; and still from time to time the heathen host swarm'd over sea...

The Saxon conquest of Britain was certainly, on the whole, a destructive one, and it has been justly contrasted with the Frankish conquest of Gaul; where the conquerors quickly...

While Canterbury was so important a seminary of learning, there was, in the Anglian region of Northumbria, a development of religious and intellectual life which makes it natura...

We have now seen something of a culture that was introduced from abroad, and guided by foreign models. But our people had a native gift of song, and a tradition of poetic lore,...

"No other Germanic nation has bequeathed to us out of its earliest experience so rich a treasure of original legal documents as the Anglo-Saxon nation has." Such is the sentence...

Of the historical writings that remain from the Anglian period--namely, those of Æddi and Bede, we have already spoken; the subject of the present chapter will be the Saxon Chro...

Around the great name of Alfred many attributes have gathered and clustered, some of which are true, some exaggerated, some impossible. It is quite unhistorical that Alfred divi...

Alfred died in 901. From this to the Norman Conquest there are 165 years, and the middle of this period is characterised by the works of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon prose-writers.

Between the Primary and the Secondary Poetry we must acknowledge a wide borderland of transition. Some poetical works lying in this interval we have already found occasion to no...

The first of these chapters took a brief survey of the literature that preceded and elevated the Anglo-Saxon literature: this concluding chapter must be still briefer in sketchi...