Anglo-Saxon Trend

Old English:

Old English literature encompasses literature written in Old English also call Anglo-Saxon, during 600 year Anglo-Saxon period of England, from the mid 5^th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible Translation, legal works, chronicles, riddles and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significance corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Romans:

• Conquered the Celts in 55bc, left in early 5^th C.
• Were civilized and developed.

Germanic Tribes:

• Saxons, angles, jutes, Scandinavians, picts, scots.
• Were barbaric and uncivilized.

Trends of that age:

• The praise of the heroic acts of warriors.
• The adventures and travels of the sea-people
• Hebrew
• It was oral. Music and poetry went side by side. (Lays were composed. Lay is a poem that was written to be sung usually telling a story.)
• It was alliterative and accented.
• Literature was written in runic system. With system of lines.
• The literature is not found in whole, it was in fragments and parts.
• It contained no mention of women, only men related because it had courage, loyalty, bravery’s incidents in it. The strong tribal system had no place for women in it.
• Mostly the literature was composed in epic form.
• It is anonymous in nature; writers are not know, Nature of the work is important, not the name.
• It was full of riddles and compound words. Different words were adopted to denote to one thing e.g ship = dragon of the sea. The old English had almost a hundred words for warrior, and about 25 for ship. It is the diversity of the language.