Old English poetry was meant to be declaimed aloud before an audience, the poet, or Scop, being both a creative and a performing artist. Accompanied by harp he would entertain the guests of his patron with tales of past deeds, battles of old and the prowess of his lord's ancestors. In this manner was history kept alive for the Anglo-Saxons.
The scop had to be a master of his art, being able to recite thousands of lines from memory (the epic Beowulf alone has 3182 lines) and no doubt poor performances would mean ridicule for the scop and the withdrawal of patronage. This is not to mean that the scop worked purely from memory as there is evidence that the swift composition of fitting verse was also the mark of a skilled man. After Beowulf has slain the monster Grendel and is returning triumphantly to Heorot with his companions we are told that...
| "From time to time, the tried-in-battle their gray steeds set to gallop amain, and ran a race when the road seemed fair. From time to time, a thane of the king, who had made many vaunts, and was mindful of verses, stored with sagas and songs of old, bound word to word in well-knit rime, welded his lay; this warrior soon of Beowulf's quest right cleverly sang, and artfully added an excellent tale, in well-ranged words, of the warlike deeds he had heard in saga of Sigemund." |
These few lines demonstrate clearly the scop's skill in maintaining a large store of verse, his ability to construct new material at need and also the intertwining of tales which must surely have already been known to his audience.
Old English poetry was very formulaic, with the same patterns being re-used with variations time and again. Additionally, alliteration and stress were used in the place of rhyme, which can sound strange but powerful to the modern ear. Another striking feature of Old English poetry was the use of many metaphors or kennings for common subjects: The sea could be referred to as the 'whale's way', 'gannet's bath', 'swan's riding' and so on.
Unfortunately, being an almost purely oral tradition, only about 30,000 lines of Old English poetry remain for us to enjoy today. The little that does remain, however, deserves to be heard rather than just read. On this group of pages we offer a collection of Old English verse read by Steve Pollington, the editor of Wiðowinde. The animated delivery gives a good idea of how the original might have sounded in a Saxon mead hall over a thousand years ago.
There are two pages associated with each reading, one in Old English and one Modern English translation - only the Old English pages have audio associated with them. To hear the readings you will first need to download and install the RealAudio Player v3 from the RealAudio home site. Once you have this software installed, just click on any of the illuminated capitals to hear the reading of that verse.
The Old English pages have been further enhanced by setting the typeface to either 'Times OE' for a Macintosh platform, or 'Junius' for any other.
'Junius' is one of the Old English fonts made by Peter Baker at the University of Virginia. It is recommended that MS Windows users download and install the available fonts, they are too beautiful to miss!
'Times OE' is a Macintosh font made by Cathy Ball of Georgetown Universty. Anyone who needs a font containing Old English characters for use both in printing and on the WWW should download this font.
For those without either the 'Junius' or 'Times OE' fonts, or a browser which supports typefaces, the text should appear in the default font for their browser. If you experience problems please let me know.
All of the readings presented here are taken from the audio cassette 'Ærgeweorc' ('Work of Olden Times') published by Anglo-Saxon Books in parallel with Steve Pollington's 'First Steps in Old English' language course. The cassette comprises 15 varied readings and costs £6.90p including post and packing. I wish to thank both Tony Linsell at Anglo-Saxon Books and Steve Pollington for the early release of this material for use on the Gesiðas web site.
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