Not offered in 1996. 106-224/324 Introductory Old English Language and Literature. 16.7 2nd and 3rd year Bernard Muir. Second semester Two 1.5-hour seminars per week. Students completing this subject:

• will have read Beowulf, the earliest surviving English epic;
• will have achieved a deeper understanding of the subtleties of Old English, enabling them to perceive rhetorical figures, formal structures and narrative strategies in medieval literature;
• will have an understanding of the perceived essential elements of Western epic and of how new works in the tradition draw upon and/or work against generic expectation;
• will have become familiar with the heroic ethos of the Anglo-Saxons, and have seen how extended narrative developed from an embryonic presence in earlier, shorter, (oral) literary forms (i. e. lays, panegyric, eulogy);
• will have studied the impact of Christianity on the traditional pagan Germanic heroic ethos;
• will have become acquainted with the rebirth of Anglo-Saxon studies in the 16th-17th centuries, and of the ideological crises which prompted the renewal of interest in the earliest English writers.

An advanced course in which the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf will be read in the original. Students will become acquainted with critical issues relating to the study of Medieval literature. Written work of up to 5,000 words. Wrenn C L Beowulf Rev W F Bolton Exeter U P