Long ago, when hardly anyone knew how to read or write, people recited stories by heart. They sat around the hearth at night, telling of heroes and monsters, great battles fought, and fortunes made and lost. On feast days, they passed the harp around the room so that everyone could sing a poem. But when the harp reached Caedmon, his thoughts dried up. He opened his mouth and nothing at all came out. It was embarrassing. No wonder he hated poetry. A quiet man who loved tending his cows, Caedmon couldn't recite poetry because he thought he had no stories to tell. Then after one especially upsetting experience, Caedmon stormed home, fell asleep in the barn, and began to dream. That night, everything changed for Caedmon . . . With jovial, heartwarming illustrations and beautifully illuminated letters, this tale is based on the true story of Caedmon, the seventh-century cowherd who became known as the first English poet.

Accompanying CD-ROM, intended for closer research, supplements the text of the print volume with colour digital facsimiles and interactive tools only possible in the electronic medium -- p. [i].

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman’s startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse. Shaped by Oberman’s scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. “Wulf and Eadwacer,” a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as “On Trans” draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.

This book throws light on the debate about the 'orality' or 'literacy' of Old English verse, whether it was transmitted orally or written down.

The Junius Manuscript