Characteristics of Old English

Introduction:

Old English is an old form of the English language that was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. An Examination of the words in an Old English dictionary shows that about 85 percent of them are no longer in use.

            The English Language has undergone so many changes that one cannot read Old English without special study. Following are some important characteristics of Old English.

Spelling and Pronunciation:

            Spellings and Pronunciation of Old English words commonly differs somewhat from that of their modern equivalents. In Old English the vowels were different from that of Modern English. Old English had six simple vowels, spelled a, æ, i, o, u and y, and probably a seventh, spelled ie. It also had two diphthongs; ea and eo. Each of these sounds came in short and long versions.

Long vowels are always marked with macrons (e.g. ā) in modern editions and also in some scholarly editions. However, vowels are never so marked in Old English manuscripts. Long vowels in particular have undergone considerable modification. The Old English word stān is the same word as Modern English stone. Some other examples are: rāp—rope, bāt — boat.

Other vowels have also undergone some changes for example; changes in fōt (foot), cēne (keen), metan (mete), but the identity of these words with their modern descendants is still readily apparent.

            There was a difference of spellings in Old English as compared to Modern English. Old English made use of two characters to represent the sound of th: Þ and ð, as in the words wiÞ (with) or ðā (then). Old English represented the sounds of sh by sc, as in scēap (sheep) or scēotan (shoot), and the sound of k by c, as in cynn (kin) or nacod (naked).

Vocabulary:

The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Germanic. A large part of this vocabulary, moreover has disappeared from the language. When the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the higher classes, much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was displaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin. Many of these words were inherited by English together with some other Indo-European languages from the same common source.

Old English   New English      Latin          Russian

modor            mother              mater          мать

niht                night                 nox            ночь

neowe            new                   novus        новый

beran              bear                  ferre           брать

Some words were inherited by English and other Germanic languages from the same common Germanic source.

Old English    New English German

eorQe             earth              Erde

land               land               Land

Grammar:

            One of the important feature of the Old English that distinguishes it from Modern English is of its grammar. Inflectional languages falls into two classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one which indicates the relation of words is a sentence largely my means of inflections while the languages which make extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English is an analytic language and Old English is a synthetic language. Old English resembles Modern German in its grammar. Old English inflections can be illustrated as below:

• The Noun:

              The inflection of the Old English noun indicates distinctions of number (singular and plural) and case. There are four main grammatical cases in Old English, known by the Latin terms; Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. The Nominative is used for the Subject, the Accusative is used for the Direct Object, the Genitive is used to express possession and the Dative is used for the Indirect Object. Old English nouns had grammatical gender, singular and plural number, and were also classified as "strong" or "weak" according to the distinctness of their inflectional endings.

Example:

            Singular

Nominative                 stān                  gief-u                hunt-a
Accusative                  stān                  gief-e                hunt-an
Genitive                      stān-es             gief-e                hunt-an
Dative                                     stān-e               gief-e                hunt-an

Plural

Nominative                 stān-as             gief-a                hunt-an
Accusative                  stān-as             gief-a                hunt-an
Genitive                      stān-a               gief-a                hunt-ena
Dative                         stān-um            gief-um hunt-um

It can be seen from these examples that the inflection of the noun was much more elaborate in Old English than it is today.

• Grammatical Gender:

                       The gender of Old English is not dependent upon considerations of sex. Old English nouns belong to one of three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. stān is masculine, cwēn ‘queen’ is feminine and wīf ‘wife’ is a neuter.

• The Adjective:

                      One of the features that distinguish Germanic languages is the use of two sets of declension for adjectives; one the strong declension used with nouns when not accompanied by a definite article or similar word and the other the weak declension, used when the noun is preceded by such a word. Same is the case with the Old English for example we have in Old English gōd mann (good man) and sē gōda mann (the good man). We can have another example; the good kings, as opposed to Good kings, or the kings are good.

• The Definite Article:

                     Old English possessed a fully inflected definite article just as in German Language which is its sister language of today. Following is an example of the definite article in Old English:

                                              Masculine         Feminine         Neutral

Nominative                               sē                      sēo                 ðæt

The ordinary meaning of sē, sēo, ðæt is ‘the’, the word is really a demonstrative pronoun and survives in the Modern English demonstrative that.

• The Personal Pronoun:

                    In Old English Personal pronouns had first, second and third person forms; singular, dual, and plural numbers and were declined according to the standard cases i.e. nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative.

Singular                                Nominative       Accusative      Genitive          Dative

1st person                              ic                        mē                    mīn                   mē

2nd person                             þū                       þē                    þīn                    þē

3rd person masculine.             hē                       hine                  his                    him

3rd person feminine.               hēo                     hīe                    hire                   hire

3rd person neutral.                 hit                       hit                     his                    him

In the nominative case, the Old English forms are; ic ("I"), þū ("you" singular), hē ("he"), hēo ("she"), hit ("it"), we ("we"), gē ("you" plural), hie ("they"). Old English not only shows having tendency in distinctive forms for practically all genders, persons and cases but also in preserving in addition to the ordinary two numbers, singular and plural and a set of forms for two people or two things – the dual number for example in the nominative case, “wit” (we two).

·        The Verb:

               Old English verbs have only two tenses: present and past. The present tense was also used for the future, while the past perfect was signalled by the past tense with the adverb ǣr ‘formerly’: Ic lufode ‘I loved’, Ic lufode ǣr ‘I had loved’. However, Old English verbs also have three moods: the Indicative, used for statements of fact (I love him), the Imperative, used for commands (Love me!), and the Subjunctive, used for hypothetical statements (If I loved you) and reported speech (He said he loved me).

            A peculiar feature of the Germanic Languages was the division of the verb into two great classes, the weak and the strong, often known in Modern English as regular and irregular verbs, the weak verbs are those that require 'ed' at the end but the vowel remain same, and strong verbs are those in which vowel is changed or modified. Example of weak verb is walk, walked, walked and the example of strong verb is sing, sang, sung.

• Self-explaining Compounds:

                    These are the compound words that are formed by combining two individual words having individual meanings, to form one new word, such as, railroad, steamboat and drying room etc. in Old English many words were formed on this pattern, Such as word lēohtfæt meaning lamp (lēoht=light + fæt = vessel). Similarly medu-heall(mead-hall), dægred(dawn). As a result of this pattern old English seemed to never have been at a loss for a word.

• Prefixes and Suffixes:

                        A part of the flexibility of the Old English vocabulary comes from the generous use made of prefixes and suffixes to form new words from old words or to modify or extend the root idea. In this respect it also resembles modern German. Some examples of Suffixes are –ig, –full, –lēas, –lice, –nes and –ung. Some adjective suffixes are: –sum (wynsum) and –wis (rihtwis).

            Some prefixes that are frequently used in Old English are; ā_, be_, for_, fore_, ge_, mis_, of_, ofer_, etc. Thus with the help of prefix, the verb 'settan'(to set) can become 'āsettan'(place), besettan(appoint) etc.

Conclusion:

            Old English Language has many differences as compared to the Modern English Language. The main differences which we noticed between Old and Modern English concern spelling and pronunciation, the vocabulary and the grammar.

Romantic Prose

Introduction:

In the eighteenth century a change had taken place in the prose style. Many eighteenth century prose-writers dependent on the assumptions about the suitability of various prose styles for various purposes for which they shared with the relatively small but the sophisticated public. Writers in the Romantic Period were rather more concerned with subject matter and emotional expression than with appropriate style. They wrote for an ever-increasing audience which was less homogenous in its interest and education than that of their predecessors. The autobiographical exploitation of personality manifests itself in a great variety of ways among writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it is symptomatic of a significant change in the relation between the writer and the society. There was an indication of a growing distrust of the sharp distinction between matter and manner which was made in the eighteenth century. In the Romantic Period the tendency was for the writer to draw on his own personality either as illuminating case history or as a gesture of defiance of showmanship or ‘alienation’ rather than to objectify it in terms of a cause or a system. The growth of the familiar essay, with its highly personal, often whimsical, flaunting of the writer’s tastes, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies, represents another aspect of the Romantic exploitation of personality.

Non-fictional

Charles Lamb (1775-1834):

Charles Lamb was an English prose writer. Charles is a subtler and more interesting writer than his influence might lead one to suspect. He is not the cultivated gentleman of leisure relaxing in easy chat due to the circumstances of his personal life were harsh and even tragic. He never married and devoted himself to care of his sister, Mary Lamb, who was a subject to mental fits. Charles Lamb was in large measure self-educated and his views on life and letters were worked out with an almost desperate geniality in order to preserve and develop a relish for the color and individuality of experience which for him was the only alternative to despair.

Important Works:

• His sentimentality can be seen at its strongest in his early work “A Tale of Rosamund Gray” (1798). It was a melodramatic story of a girl ruined by a villain. Charles Lamb rejected the rational and Utopian systems so popular in his youth and cultivated a mixture of restrained hedonism and humane feeling which appears in his essays in his appreciation of certain physical pleasures.
• Lamb was essentially a Londoner. His Essays of Elia (1820-23) and Last Essays of Elia (1833), artfully artless in their personal, conversational tone, show his interest in curious persons and places, his relish of the color and variety of London life and characters. In these Essays he talks intimately to the reader about himself, his own personality, his quaint whims and experiences, and cheerful and heroic struggle which he made against misfortunes.
• The work for children which he produced together with his sister Mary in an effort to provide something less crudely moralizing than the children’s literature of the period include the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) and The Adventures of Ulysses (1808). Lamb shared with many writers of his generation a feeling for childhood, but this was not enough to make him a great children’s writer.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830):

William Hazlitt, the son of an Irish Unitarian clergyman, was born in Maidstone, Kent, on 10th April, 1778. His father was a friend of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. As a result of supporting the American Revolution, Rev. Hazlitt and his family were forced to leave Kent and live in Ireland. The family returned to England in 1787 and settled at Wem in Shropshire. At the age of fifteen William was sent to be trained for the ministry at New Unitarian College at Hackney in London. In 1797 Hazlitt lost his desire to become a Unitarian minister and left the college. At first Hazlitt attempted to become a portrait painter but after a lack of success he turned to writing. William Hazlitt is a more vigorous and less mannered essayist than Lamb. He was an independent spirit who maintained his radicalism throughout his life. In his judgment of others he was always downright and frank, and never cared for its effect on them. During the time when England was engaged in a bitter struggle against Napoleon, Hazlitt worshipped him as a hero, and he came in conflict with the government. His friend left him one by one on account of his aggressive nature, and at the time of his death only Lamb stood by him.

Important works:

·        Hazlitt wrote many volumes of essays, of which the most effective is The Spirit of the age (1825) in which he gives critical portraits of a number of his famous contemporaries. This was the work which only Hazlitt could undertake because he was outspoken and fearless in the expression of his opinion.

·        Representative of his critical style is Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), which contains subjective, often panegyrical commentary on such individual characters as Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet. This work introduces Hazlitt's concept of "gusto," a term he used to refer to qualities of passion and energy that he considered necessary to great art. Hazlitt felt that Shakespeare's sonnets lacked gusto and judged them as passionless and unengaging despite the "desperate cant of modern criticism."

·        In addition to literature, Hazlitt also focused on drama and art in his critical essays, many of which are collected in A View of the English Stage (1818) and Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (1824).

·        The many and varied familiar essays that Hazlitt wrote for magazine publication and collected in the volumes of The Round Table, Table-Talk (1821-22), and The Plain Speaker (1826) are usually considered his finest works.

·        His characteristics energy and enthusiasm are exhibited in his three collections of lectures, On the English Poets (1818), On the English Comic Writers (1819), and On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820).

Thomas De Qunicey (1785-1859):

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is one of the greatest English prose writers. He shared the reaction of his day against the severer classicism of the eighteenth century, preferring rather the ornate manner of Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne and their contemporaries. The specialty of his life consists in describing incidents of purely personal interest in language suited to their magnitude as they appear in the eyes of the writer. The reader is irresistibly attracted by the splendour of his style which combines the best elements of prose and poetry. The defects of his style are that he digresses too much and often stops in the midst of a fine paragraph to talk about some trivial thing by way of jest. But in spite of these defects his prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in the English Language. He was a highly intellectual writer and his interests were very wide. Mostly he wrote in the form of articles for journals and he dealt with all sorts of subjects; about himself and his friends, life in general, art, literature, philosophy and religion.

Important works:

·        His autobiographical Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (1821) tells the story of his early life, which was unusual enough, and goes on to recount the dreams, some magnificent and some terrifying, which were stimulated in him by his taking of opium, a habit he first indulged in when quite younger in order to alleviate neuralgia and in which he persisted intermittently throughout his life.

·        Suspiria de Profundis (1845) was his other autobiographical work which reveals his interest in his own psychology and show an attitude to the significance of dreams and an awareness of the different levels of consciousness that are surprisingly modern.

·        De Quincey published his expanded version of the Confessions in 1856, but this version is considered obscure and stylized.

·        His numerous essays, which initially appeared in periodicals in the Lake District, London, and Edinburgh, treat a large variety of issues, both parochial and international: Britain's imperial conflicts in Asia and northern Africa, criminal violence, theological history, Enlightenment philosophy, as well as numerous more explicitly literary reviews. Among these literary essays, De Quincey's essay on William Shakespeare, “On the Knocking on the Door in Macbeth,” has received acclaim as an outstanding piece of psychological criticism, and his critique of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is considered a brilliant analysis of the poet's creative process.

·        In addition, De Quincey published essays that sketched personal portraits of other Romantic authors; his reminiscences of his interactions with Coleridge and Wordsworth offer largely sympathetic insights into their literary circle.

Fictional:

Jane Austen (1775-1817):

Jane Fitzwilliam Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry, has earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. Amongst scholars and critics, Austen's realism and biting social commentary have cemented her historical importance as a writer. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. She first gave the novel its modern character through the treatment of everyday life. During Austen's lifetime her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired mainly by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a far wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical.

Important works:

·        From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer.

·        She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

·        Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Like those of Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, her works are concerned with moral issues.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851):

Mary Shelley was daughter of writer and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher/novelist William Godwin, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend of Lord Byron. Mary Shelley was educated at home, where she met her father’s literary friends, including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who admired her father for his philosophical beliefs. Mary eloped to France with Percy when she was only 16. Their first child, a daughter died in Venice, Italy, few years later. They returned to England, where their son William was born. They only married in 1816 after Percy’s first wife committed suicide.            

            She also edited and promoted the works of her husband. Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for Frankenstein. Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories.

Important works:

·        Mary Shelley’s first novel, Frankenstein (1817) was published when she was 21. In the style of a sinister gothic novel which was popular at that time, the story deals with the ambitious young scientist who wanted to be the creator of life, the horrors that follow his experiment and his destruction by the monster he creates. Frankenstein was immediately successful.

• After Percy’s death in 1822, Mary Shelley returned to England. Her second novel, Valperga (1823) was published when she was 26.
• Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837).
• She also edited and promoted the works of her husband was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works.

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.

Anglo Saxon secular literature

 Secular Literature:

1. Heroic
• Epic poems (waldhere, Finnisburh, Beowulf)
• Minstrel poems (Widsith, Deor’s Lament)

2. Elegies
• Secular (The Wanderer, The Sea-Farer, The Ruins.)
• Love Elegies (The husband’s Complaint, The Wife’s Message, Wulf and Edwacer)
3. War Poems (The battle of Maldon, Brununberh)

4. Riddles

Detail:

1.    Heroic

Epic poems:

Epic Poems are long, serious poems that tells the story of a heroic figure.

·        Waldhere:

It is about King Waldhere. 60 lines. It is the story of Waldere (Walter) and Hildegyth who fall in love and steal treasure from the court of Attila, where they were held hostage. Waldere and Hildegyth are sought out by two men, Guthhere, who is the king of the Burgundians, and Hagena. These two men are after the treasure that Waldere and Hildegyth possess. The poem is about the conflict that is about to take place between the two parties. The first portion is a speech given by Hildegyth trying to motivate Waldere for his upcoming fight. The second fragment consists mainly of Waldere challenging and taunting Guthhere, daring Guthhere to strip Waldere‘s armor from his shoulders.

·       Finnisburh:

It is an Anglo Saxon poem composed in England. There are two major heroes in the battle of Finnishburh. Discovered in 1860. It is about the battle of |Finnisburh, also about crossing the passage of a lake. It is a fragmental poem.

·       Beowulf:

Most famous. 3182 lines. Found in 10^th c. written in 7^th or 8^th AD. It is about the ancestors or English race. Honor, wisdom, courage, loyalty of lords and warriors. This epic first time mentions women, Dannish princess in this epic. It is a long narrative poem handles traditional heroic idea. Depicts the culture and society of the heroic age. The heroic idealism, somber and fatalism are the characteristics of Angles Germania.

This epic poem describes the hero Beowulf marching with his fourteen warriors and arrive at the place of Heorot where he finds that he king of Heorot Hrothgar terrified by a monster called Grendel. Beowulf manages to kill Grendel and his monster-mother at his abode beneath a lake. After that he returns to his country and becomes the king there and rules his kingdom for fifty years. He dies of the wounds he got once during the combat fought with a dragon.

Minstrel poems

·       Widsith

Widsith is an Old English poem of 144 lines that appears to date from the 9th century, drawing on earlier oral traditions of Anglo-Saxon tale singing. The only text of the fragment is copied in the Exeter Book, a manuscript of Old English poetry compiled in the late 10th century containing approximately one sixth of all surviving Old English poetry. Widsith is an autobiographical record, In poem he is praising the king and their qualities such as bravery, kindness, hospitality, wisdom, courage etc.

·       Deor’s Lament:

"Deor" (or "The Lament of Deor") is an Old English poem, from the 10th century AD, preserved in the Exeter Book. The poem consists of the lament of the scop Deor, who lends his name to the poem, which was given no formal title. Modern scholars do not actually believe Deor to be the author of this poem. In the poem, Deor's lord has replaced him. Deor mentions various figures from Germanic mythology and reconciles his own troubles with the troubles these figures faced, ending each section with the refrain "that passed away, so may this." The poem consists of 42 alliterative lines.

2.     Elegies

a.   Secular

·       The Wanderer:

The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. The metre of the poem is of four-stress lines, divided between the second and third stresses by a caesura. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative metre. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord.

·       The Sea-Farer

The Seafarer is an Old English poem recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It contains 124 lines and has been commonly referred to as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing. It is told from the point of view of an old seafarer, who is reminiscing and evaluating his life as he has lived it.

·       The Ruins:

It is an interesting Anglo-Saxon poem with an elegiac tone. The theme of the poem is temporary of life. Poet gives the message that onw should look to God.” The Ruin" is an 8th-century Old English poem from the Exeter Book by an unknown author. The Exeter Book is a large book of mostly Christian verse, which contains about one-third of the extant Old English poems. The poem's subject is ancient Roman ruins, built of stone and having hot water, assumed to be the ruins of Aquae Sulis at modern Bath, Somerset, and the powerful fate (Weird or Wyrd) that has reduced to ruins a once-lively community and its sturdy stone buildings.

b.    Love Elegies

·       The husband’s Complaint:

The husband remind the wife of her earlier promises and tells her that he has been driven from her by a feud and bids her join him across the sea.

·       The Wife’s Message

Is considered as belonging to elegiac monologue. It is difficult to follow the precise situation the speaker is describing, but apparently the wife has been separate form her husband the central emotions comes through strongly, the love and longing for the absent husband.

·       Wulf and Edwacer

It is a dramatic monologue, existing only in a fragment of 19 lines in the Exeter book, which for all the obscurity of the situation described, express an intense romantic passion in way quite uncharacteristic of Anglo poetry as it came down to us. Wulf is the woman’s our lawed lover and Edwacer her hated husband, or atleast the man with whom, against her will, she is forced to live.

3.    War Poems:

·       The battle of Maldon

The battle of Maldon is the name given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating the real Battle of  Maldon of 991, at which the English failed to prevent a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost. All names of Kings and warriors are mentioned along with geographical features. The poem discusses the defeat.

·       Brununberh

Old English poem of 73 lines included in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle under the year 937. It relates the victory of the Saxon King Athelstan over the allied Norse, Scots, and Strathclyde Briton invaders under the leadershipof Olaf Guthfithson, King of Dublin, The poem is probably a panegyric composed of Athelstan to celebrate his victory. It counts the dead kings and earls on the battlefield and pictures the Nosemen slinking back to Dublin in their ships.

4.   Riddles:

The Exeter book contains early hundred Anglo saxon riddles. Some of which seem to have been translated from original composed in England. The riddles worked as encyclopedia of the era of the Anglo Saxons. The chief advantage of the riddle is that they give the daily life of Anglo saxon England and the folk beliefs of the time.

History of Short Story

Short story:

According to Literary critical terms a short story can be defined as:

“A prose narrative of shorter length than the novel that concentrates on a single theme.”

According to Britannica Encyclopedia:

“A short story is a brief fictional prose narrative. It usually presents a single significant episode or scene involving a limited number of characters. A short story concentrates on the creation of mood rather than the telling of a story.”

According to Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms a short story is defined as:

“A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own.”

Short story can also be defined as:

“A kind of story shorter than the novel or novelette, characteristically developing a single central theme and limited in scope and number of characters.”

            There is a common point in above definitions that the short story is a work of prose tale or fiction which is shorter in length but has a central theme. So these short stories are shorter in length but they do have a theme.

The aspects of a Short Story:

            A short story is similar to a novel in many aspects. The elements of a short story includes: plot, character, setting, theme, moral values.

            In short stories the plot is the sequence of events namely; the beginning, middle and end. Characters are people in the story; there could be major characters and minor characters. In short story the setting is the place and the time that where and when a story takes place. The theme is a general idea of what the story is about and the moral values are principles that convey important messages.

Characteristics of a Short Story:

• It is shorter in length and could be read usually in one sitting.
• The information offered in a short story is relevant to the tale being told.
• It is unlike a novel where a story can diverge from the main plot.
• It usually tries to leave behind a single impression or effect.
• As these stories are concise so, the writers depend on the reader bringing personal experiences and prior knowledge to the story.
• The authority of the narrator is questioned while writing a short story.
• In terms of language patterning of symbols, multiplicity of voices, indirect language, and stream of consciousness are the techniques which are followed by the modern writers.

Conflict as an important element:

            Conflict is the struggle between opposing forces in a short story. There could be an external conflict in which a character struggles against some outside force or there could be an internal conflict which exists within the mind of the character. The common applications in a conflict could be:

• Man vs man.
• Man vs self.
• Man vs nature.
• Man vs society.
• Man vs technology.
• Man vs fate.

Introduction to the history of short stories:

            As a form date back to the oral tradition of the tale, the written tales were written in the poetic form. We have an example of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and after that Boccaccio’s Decameron (1351-1353) often cited as the precursor of the short story form, as is the French translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1704).

            The first examples of tales that would help in the emerging process of a modern short story in the United States are Charles Brockden Brown's "Somnambulism" (1805), Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842).

The emphasis on short story starts from the early 19^th Century and it begins to emerge as a form in the Late 19^th Century. Early and mid 19^th century saw the rise of the short stories in America as Hawthorne and Poe were famous for their work of fiction with respect to short stories. Hawthorne was famous for his Twice Told Tales written in 1842 and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque written in 1836. These two set a standard for one branch of the short fiction.

Some important and early writers of short stories:

          There were some writers who pave the way towards short story writing. These writers wrote with conviction, technical brilliance and power of expression. Most famous of them are:

1. Edgar Allan Poe
2. Gogol and Turgenev
3. Robert Louis Stevenson
4. O’ Henry

1. Edgar Allan Poe:

            Edgar Poe was born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of actors Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (1787-1811) and David Poe (1784-1810). Poe was the first person to set down specific rules relating to the construction of a short story. These rules have been adopted almost universally. Poe’s own short stories show evidence of his critical paradigm, leading towards the surprise ending of O. Henry at the close of the nineteenth century.

            His important works regarding short stories are:

• "The Angel of the Odd" (1844)
• "The Black Cat" (1845)
• "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
• "The Island of the Fay" (1850)
• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)
• "The Purloined Letter" (1845)
• "Silence - A Fable" (1838)
• "The Spectacles" (1850)
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1850)

Edgar Allen Poe described certain rules for construction of a short story. According to him a short story must create one impression and is capable of being read in one session and every word must contribute to the total effect and the effect must be created immediately and then gradually developed throughout the story and when this effect reaches at a climax the story must end and only essential and important characters should be used to gain effect.

Poe is probably the most famous English short story writer of all time. Poe only wrote one complete novel in his lifetime, and it is not very well known, however his short stories are. His most famous stories are “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Poe has over 65 short stories to his name and he is also considered to have invented the detective genre.

2. Gogol and Turgenev:

In the 19th Century two Russian writers, Gogol and Turgenev, emphasised character rather than actions. Between them, they created realistic portrayals of human sufferings, passions and grief of everyday people. Gogol insisted that the short story must attempt to do one thing only, and must allow the plot to develop naturally without being forced into a conventional pattern.

3. Robert Louis Stevenson:

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 13 November 1850, the only child born to Margaret Isabella Balfour (1829-1897) and Thomas Stevenson (1818-1887), a civil engineer and pioneering designer of lighthouses.

Stevenson claimed that a short story should be written in three different ways that is you make a plot and fit the characters to it and then choose incidents to develop a character and at last he said that you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to realize and express it.

            His important works regarding short stories are:

• "A Lodging for the Night"  (1877)
• "Providence and the Guitar" (1878)                  
• "The Pavilion on the Links" (1880)
• "The Merry Men" (1882)                     
• "The Body Snatcher" (1884)    
• "Markheim" (1885)
• "The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story" (1887)

4. O’ Henry:

His real name was William Sydney Porter. He was born in Greenboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. He was a prolific American short story writer and a master of surprise endings. He wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. Typical for O. Henry’s stories is a twist of plot, which turns on ironic or coincidental circumstances.

            His important works regarding short stories are:

• "Girl" from 'Whirligigs'
• Brief Debut Of Tildy,  (from the Four Million collection)
• Cactus,  (from the collection Waifs and Strays)
• Caught (from the Cabbages and Kings collection)
• Confessions of a Humorist (from the collection Waifs and Strays)
• Gift Of The Magi (from the Four Million collection)

O. Henry is known for writing flash fiction with wit and a strange twist ending. His most well known story is “The Gift of the Magi” which is a story about a young poor couple who each sells their most precious object in order to buy a Christmas gift for their partner, but in doing so they end up making each others gift worthless. This story has been retold in many different forms over the years. The O. Henry Award was established in his honor, it is a very prestigious award given to outstanding short story writers. Two writers on this list have won this award.

     

Short Stories in 19^th century:

            In 19^th century short story writing challenges the conventions in terms of plot, narration, character and language.

            There was a strong demand for short stories in the late 19^th century and the print magazines and journals were in a need of such short stories.

The famous short story writers of this period include Boleslaw Prus and Anton Cehkov. “A legend of Old Egypt” (1888) was the famous work by Boleslaw Prus and “Ward No.6” (1892) was the famous work by Anton Cehkov.

In 1884, Brander Matthews published “The Philosophy of the Short-Story”. He as the First American professor of dramatic literature and he was the man who gave the name to this emerging genre in 1884 as “short story”.

In the nineteenth-century British magazine that popularized the dominant forms of the short story was Blackwood's and it encounters three types: the humorous-satirical story, the re-told legend, and the ghost story or tale of the supernatural and it was a narrative of curious events often with a foreign or colonial setting.

For the most part, the authors present their pieces as "sober accounts of actual if unusual happenings" (Harris 28). Because fiction was associated with pleasure rather than intellectual and improving content, the general denial of the fictional nature of a short story was a necessary antidote to the common prejudice against reading fiction. The editors of Victorian periodicals regarded their publications as socially improving, as vehicles for disseminating knowledge about culture, science, history, religion, and politics, so short story writers often attempted to suggest that their stories were reminiscences.

Harold Orel in The Victorian Short Story (1986) contends that in such mass periodicals as the Penny Magazine, the Saturday Magazine, and Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, the thrust was primarily educational, and that short stories were therefore "regarded as a useful sugaring"

H. E. Bates in The Modern Short Story, A Critical Survey (1942), feels that until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the genre languished in Great Britain, even while it flourished in America, because "no single writer applied to it a technique different from that of the novel".

Short stories in 20^th century:

            THE period between the Civil War in America and the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 may be termed in the history of prose fiction the Era of the Short Story. Everywhere, in France, in Russia, in England, in America, more and more the impressionistic prose tale of short, effective and the glimpse at a climactic instant came especially in the magazines to dominate fictional literature. The modern short story is only the latest fashion in story telling.

In 20^th century the demand for the quality short stories was so great and the money paid for writing short stories was so high. In earlier 20^th century some high profile magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker Scribner’s and Saturday Evening Post used to publish short stories in their each issue.

The period during the World War 2 was of great importance for short story writing in United States. The writers from New York published many works regarding short story writing. Shirley Jackson wrote, “The Lottery” which was published in 1948 and his story got a great response from the public. The other writers of the late 1940’s were John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Jean Stafford and Eudora Welty.

J.D. Salinger wrote “Nine Stories” in 1953 and tested with the point of view and voice. Flannery O’ Connor’ wrote “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in 1955.

In 1952, Life magazine published the short story of Ernest Hemingway named as “The Old Man and the Sea”.

In the 1960’s cultural and social identities starts playing an important role with respect to short story writing. Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen and James Baldwin are some prominent writers of that time. Some of the stories were about feminism and some were about African-American life.

In 1970 there was a rise of the post modern short story and the work of Donald Barthelme and John Barth were of prime importance. Stephen King who is one of the best novelists of all the time also started his career by publishing numerous short stories in Men’s Magazines of the Era in late 70s.

In 1980s, most notable works were of Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbi Ann Mason, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates who maintained significant influence in short story writing. John Gardner’s famous work, “The Art of Fiction” also appeared in 1983.

In 1990s the writers like Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, Tim O’Brien, Louise Erdrich, T. C. Boyle and David Foster Wallace were famous for their work in fiction.

In 21^st Century we saw the emergence of new young short story writers in the form of Jhumpa Lahiri, Karen Russell, Nathan Englander and the German-American bilingual writers like Paul Henri Campbell and Den Chao.

Difference between a short story and a novel:

A short story is an indivisible unit in which every sentence points to the single climax that fulfills the entire work. One moment in the story controls all the rest. But in a novel, that single climax is replaced by many smaller climaxes, by many side trips or pauses to explore.

Conclusion:

Short stories were popular entertainment since before the written word. Each culture had their favourites and ancient and modern writers crafted many classic tales. One can read a short story easily in a single sit and can understand the theme more easily instead of reading long  stories and novels.