Daniel Donoghue

This Norton Critical Edition includes:* Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's poetic translation of the great Anglo-Saxon epic--winner of the Whitbread Prize--along with his translator's introduction.* Detailed explanatory annotations and an introduction to Old English language and prosody by Daniel Donoghue.* More than two dozen visuals, including, new to the Second Edition, a fine selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard.* A rich array of Anglo-Saxon and early northern civilization materials, providing student readers with Beowulf's cultural and historical context.* Nine critical interpretations, three of them new to the Second Edition.* A glossary of personal names and a selected bibliography.About the SeriesRead by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

A Verse Translation - Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism

Beowulf

The scribes of early medieval England wrote out their vernacular poems using a format that looks primitive to our eyes because it lacks the familiar visual cues of verse lineation, marks of punctuation, and capital letters. The paradox is that scribes had those tools at their disposal, which they deployed in other kinds of writing, but when it came to their vernacular poems they turned to a sparser presentation. How could they afford to be so indifferent? The answer lies in the expertise that Anglo-Saxon readers brought to the task. From a lifelong immersion in a tradition of oral poetics they acquired a sophisticated yet intuitive understanding of verse conventions, such that when their eyes scanned the lines written out margin-to-margin, they could pinpoint with ease such features as alliteration, metrical units, and clause boundaries, because those features are interwoven in the poetic text itself. Such holistic reading practices find a surprising source of support in present-day eye-movement studies, which track the complex choreography between eye and brain and show, for example, how the minimal punctuation in manuscripts snaps into focus when viewed as part of a comprehensive system. How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems uncovers a sophisticated collaboration between scribes and the earliest readers of poems like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. In addressing a basic question that no previous study has adequately answered, it pursues an ambitious synthesis of a number of fields usually kept separate: oral theory, paleography, syntax, and prosody. To these philological topics Daniel Donoghue adds insights from the growing field of cognitive psychology. According to Donoghue, the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. For them reading was both a matter of technical proficiency and a social practice.

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems

Larry Dean Benson

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In this poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious green warrior. In a struggle to uphold his oath along this quest, Gawain demonstrates chivalry, loyalty, and honor. This new verse translation of the most popular and enduring fourteenth century romance to survive to the present offers students an accessible way of approaching the literature of medieval England without losing the flavor of the original writing. The language of Sir Gawain presents considerable problems to present-day readers as it is written in the West Midlands dialect before English became standardized. With a foreword by David Donoghue, the close verse translation includes facing pages of the original fourteenth-century text and its modern translation. Medieval European Studies Series, Volume 13

A Close Verse Translation

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This book investigates who Lady Godiva was, how the story of her naked horseback ride through Coventry arose, and how the whole Godiva legend has evolved from the thirteenth century through to the present day. Traces the erotic myth of Lady Godiva back to its medieval origins. Based on scholarly research but written to be accessible to general readers. Combines history, literature, art and folklore. Focuses on the twin themes of voyeurism and medievalism. Contributes to our understanding of cultural history, medievalism and the history of sexuality.

Daniel Donoghue

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