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Old English Poems and Riddles

These are metrical translations of some well-known Old English poems. The great elegies – ‘Wanderer’, ‘Seafarer’, ‘Deor’ - are included, as are poems still occasionally taught in universities (such as ‘The Battle of Maldon’), together with some riddles, a charm, and a piece of rhythmical prose. Some sections of ‘Beowulf’ are also included. Like the Horatian pastiches in ‘Polder’, the Old English translations rely on previous academic research, in this case some of the material explored theoretically in chapter 5 of the author’s ‘The Earliest English’ (2005), in which OE metrical constraints were cast in what are essentially optimality-theoretic terms. This shows that it is possible to make translations from and into a four-position half-line via a strict set of closure constraints. Only three of the pieces were published prior to the volume’s appearance: ‘Deor’, ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wife’s Lament’. An introduction explains how the author made these metrical translations, which again contribute to ongoing research into the complex questions regarding poetic metre in different languages.