The Old English Elegies

Bringing together some of the most important poetic texts of the Anglo-Saxon period, Anne Klinck presents the poems both as discrete entities and as members of an elegiac group, all inspired by the sense of separation from one's desire that is at the heart of elegiac poetry in Old English. Klinck analyses the poems' manuscript context in the Exeter Book - along with their possible dates and dialectal provenance, and the main critical problems they raise - and presents the texts with detailed textual notes and an apparatus criticus of editorial variants. She then examines the elegiac genre in Old English: its features, origins, and affinities (giving examples of analogous elegies in Latin, Norse, and Early Welsh, with both text and translation). Klinck includes a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary listing all word-forms to be found in the elegies.