Old English

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the powerful and influential corpus of Old English literature. We will read a wide variety of texts: short poems such as The Wonderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament and the passionate religious poem The Dream of The Rood; chronicles such as The Battle Of Maldon Against The Vikings, The Old Testament, Exodus and Bede's Conversion Of The English; and selections from the greatest of all English epics, Beowulf. Readings will be in Old English, and the first few weeks of the course will be devoted to mastering Old English prosody, vocabulary, and grammar (as well as a crash course on the early history of the English language). During the last few weeks we may read modern criticism of Old English poetry, or we will consider the modern poetic reception of Old English literature and explore theories and problems of translation, reading translations of Old English poems by Yeats, Auden, Tolkien, and Heaney. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.