Old English Literature - Reception of Old English

Reception of Old English

Old English literature did not disappear in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. Many sermons and works continued to be read and used in part or whole up through the 14th century, and were further catalogued and organised. During the Reformation, when monastic libraries were dispersed, the manuscripts were collected by antiquarians and scholars. These included Laurence Nowell, Matthew Parker, Robert Bruce Cotton and Humfrey Wanley. In the 17th century there began a tradition of Old English literature dictionaries and references. The first was William Somner's Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (1659). Lexicographer Joseph Bosworth began a dictionary in the 19th century which was completed by Thomas Northcote Toller in 1898 called An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which was updated by Alistair Campbell in 1972.

Because Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down, nineteenth-century scholars searching for the roots of European "national culture" (see Romantic Nationalism) took special interest in studying Anglo-Saxon literature, and Old English became a regular part of university curriculum. Since WWII there has been increasing interest in the manuscripts themselves—Neil Ker, a paleographer, published the groundbreaking Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon in 1957, and by 1980 nearly all Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts were in print. J.R.R. Tolkien is credited with creating a movement to look at Old English as a subject of literary theory in his seminal lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936).

Old English literature has had an influence on modern literature. Some of the best-known translations include William Morris' translation of Beowulf and Ezra Pound's translation of The Seafarer. The influence of the poetry can be seen in modern poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. Tolkien adapted the subject matter and terminology of heroic poetry for works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

More recently other notable poets such as Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov and U. A. Fanthorpe have all shown an interest in Old English poetry, continuing the visible influence it has had on modern poets. In 1987 Denise Levertov published a translation of Caedmon's Hymn under her title "Caedmon" in the collection Breathing the Water. This was then followed by Seamus Heaney's version of the poem "Whitby-sur-Moyola" in his The Spirit Level (1996) Paul Muldoon's "Caedmon's Hymn" in his Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and U. A. Fanthorpe's "Caedmon's Song" in her Queuing for the Sun (2003). These translations differ greatly from one another, just as Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (1999) deviates from earlier, similar projects. Heaney uses Irish diction across Beowulf to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem, foregrounding his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render (the poem) ever more 'willable forward/again and again and again.'"