ph: TroveRete, Cheers dello scheletro
Leoðes Ende
Swa æt ende ealdspræc stilede,
ongann sunne gesencan niðer,
ofer eorðan ealle sceadwa
lange nu lægon. Se leod aras.
Hæleþ of healle ham onetton.
The song ends
So at the end, the old story (or: old speech) fell silent, and the sun began to sink down. Over earth all shadows now lay long. The King arose. The heroes all hurried home from the hall.
La fine del re
Così alla fine, si fece silente l’antico discorso,
il sole iniziò a calare,
sulla terra ogni ombra
giacque lunga. Il re si alzò.
Gli eroi dalla sala si affrettarono a casa.
Il canto ha termine
*
Posted: 25 Apr 2019 10:06 PM PDT
Old English poetry is a love it or leave it thing. I've never known anybody to go "it's okay". Some people who learn Old English — for other reasons — just go "meh" or actively hate it. But the people who love it really love it. I wouldn't say it's my favorite literature on earth (that would probably be Classical Persian), but it's definitely up there and there's something about it that makes me keep returning to this tiny handful of poems again and again.
I said tiny handful, and I do mean tiny. There are only about 350 poetic texts that survive from the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period. (Most of what survives is quite dense prose.) Even if some of them are quite long like Beowulf (3180 lines) or Andreas (1720), their number is tiny. I think I've read all of them at one point or another, many of them more than once. (Some of them are honestly pretty mediocre). But it's a strange obsession, and a strange feeling of connection. When I read Latin poetry, I don't suddenly get the urge to compose Vergilian hexameters. But my notes are full of Old English verse composed by yours truly whenever I'm going through one of my OE obsessive periods.
Leoðes Ende
Swa æt ende ealdspræc stilede,
ongann sunne gesencan niðer,
ofer eorðan ealle sceadwa
lange nu lægon. Se leod aras.
Hæleþ of healle ham onetton.
The Song Ends
So at the end, the old story (or: old speech) fell silent, and the sun began to sink down. Over earth all shadows now lay long. The King arose. The heroes all hurried home from the hall.
One thing I've noticed is that other languages don’t have such an enormous gap between their medieval and modern forms as English does. When modern Anglophones read Beowulf or the Exeter book, the English language grows foreign to itself in a very strange way.
*
