as careful records of local events not otherwise noted.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides important records of
history, as well as of the shifts in English linguistics.
Moreover, the Chronicles are an important step in estab-
lishing the presence of the VERNACULAR, as well as in the
development of historiography.
FURTHER READING
Bredehoft, Thomas A. Textual Histories: Readings in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001.
Savage, Anne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. New York: Barnes
& Noble, 2000.
ANGLO-SAXON POETRY The fi rst poetry
in English was written in a form of the language usu-
ally referred to as Old English, sometimes referred to
as Anglo-Saxon. Old English was spoken in England
for centuries and is represented by a large body of lit-
erature. Though prose works account for the great
majority of that literature, a substantial amount of Old
English poetry survives as well. The earliest datable
piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry is “CÆDMON’S HYMN,” a
nine-line Christian poem of praise to God, which can
be dated to around 670 C.E. The end of the Anglo-
Saxon period is traditionally placed at 1066, the date
of the NORMAN CONQUEST of England, but Anglo-Saxon
poems continued to be written well into the early years
of the 12th century.
Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon poetry is limited to
the works that have survived in manuscript form. It is,
of course, impossible to know how much Anglo-Saxon
poetry may have been written and lost, and how much
may have been circulated orally and never written
down, but approximately 30,000 lines of Old English
poetry remain, 10 percent of which are found in one
poem, the EPIC BEOWULF. Most of the major Anglo-
Saxon poems are found in four manuscripts, which are
usually referred to as the EXETER BOOK (Exeter Cathe-
dral Chapter Library MS 3501), the Vercelli Book (Ver-
celli Cathedral Library, MS CXVII), the Junius
manuscript (Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11),
and the Nowell Codex (London British Library, MS
COTTON VITELLIUS A.XV). Although most Anglo-Saxon
poetry is anonymous, a few named authors are known.
Cædmon, the seventh-century author of “Cædmon’s
Hymn,” is described by the Venerable Bede as the
author of many Christian poems, though only the one
poem apparently remains. An eighth-century poet by
the name of CYNEWULF has been identifi ed as the author
of four poems: Juliana and Christ II, which are found in
the Exeter Book, and Elene and Fates of the Apostles, in
the Vercelli Book. ALFRED THE GREAT is believed to be
the author of a poetic paraphrase of BOETHIUS’s The
CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY, usually referred to as METERS
OF BOETHIUS, and the METRICAL PREFACE TO PASTORAL
CARE. The Anglo-Latin author ALDHELM is described in
medieval sources as having written poetry in Anglo-
Saxon, but none of his works have survived.
Each line of Anglo-Saxon verse is usually divided
into two HALF-LINEs, separated by a pause, or CAESURA.
Each half-line contains two accented syllables and a
varying number of unaccented syllables. The principal
formal element in the verse is ALLITERATION, which gen-
erally is used to link the two half-lines together. Stylis-
tically, Anglo-Saxon poetry makes use of many of the
same devices found in later poems, including meta-
phor, simile, and APOSTROPHE. Two techniques are par-
ticularly common in Anglo-Saxon poetry: KENNINGs
(compound words) and variation (renaming the same
person or object multiple times in one passage of the
poem, using a different word or phrase each time; also
known as epithesis).
Although Anglo-Saxon poetry deals with a relatively
wide range of subjects, scholars have traditionally
divided the corpus into a few broad categories. Secular
heroic poems, such as Beowulf, account for a fairly small
portion of Anglo-Saxon poetry overall, though the gen-
eral popularity of this type of verse has garnered it a
disproportionate level of attention from readers and
scholars. Religious poems, especially hagiographies
(saints’ lives) are much more common in Anglo-Saxon
verse, though at times the lines between secular and
religious do become blurred. Some Anglo-Saxon poems,
for example, recount the lives or deeds of important fi g-
ures in biblical or church history, but they do so using
some of the conventions and language developed in
secular heroic verse and are the forerunners of ROMANCE.
As a further example, the two Old English poems on
the life of the seventh-century martyr St. Guthlac (often
referred to as Guthlac A and Guthlac B) found in the26 ANGLO-SAXON POETRY