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Created: 30th July 2003

The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry

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Compared to many national literatures, the body of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poetry is quite
small. Only four major original collections of verse have
survived1, along with two collections of
verse translations of Latin works2 and a scattering of parchment
leaves with whole or fragmentary poems preserved on them. Only
very few poems exist in more than one copy.

The Largest Book

The largest single collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry is
preserved in the manuscript catalogued by N. R. Ker3 as Exeter, Cathedral 3501, but
more commonly referred to simply as The
Exeter Book. The manuscript has been housed since 1072, if
not earlier, in the Library of Exeter Cathedral, now administered by the
University of Exeter. Part of a large collection of books
donated by Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, to his
new chapter, the manuscript is described in a list of
Leofric's donations as .i. mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum
ingum on leowisan geworht; 'one large English book about
various things made in the form of poetry.'

The entire book has been published in six more or less
complete editions, two German and four English4, and in a single facsimile
edition published in limited number under the direction of
Exeter Cathedral5. There have been numerous
studies of the manuscript as well as individual editions of
poems.

The Contents of the
Book

The Exeter Book is an amazingly varied collection,
from long narrative poems to brief, Zen-like riddles. There
are poems with women's voices (rare in medieval literature)
and poems that speak with the imagined voices of inanimate
objects. There are prayers, homilies, epigrams and
experimental works.

A Table of Contents

Modern scholars, beginning with Benjamin Thorpe in 1842,
have divided the text of The Exeter Book into what they
have seen as poems and have also provided titles for these
poems. Clearly, The Exeter Book is a collection of
poetry; the difficulty has been deciding where one poem ends
and another begins. There is now general agreement on most of
the divisions, and poem titles have generally become fixed by
Krapp and Dobbie's 1936 edition in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic
Records series. The following is a description of the
contents of The Exeter Book.

'Christ' - Usually divided into three parts based
on differences in style and subject matter. The first part
is a series of twelve 'Advent Lyrics', celebrations of the
Advent of Christ. It begins in mid-sentence due to damage to
the manuscript. The second part of 'Christ' is a description
of the Ascension of Christ after the Crucifixion. The third
section is a description of what the poet expects to occur
on the day of Judgement.

'Guthlac' - A verse life of the English hermit
Saint Guthlac. This piece is often divided into 'Guthlac A'
and 'Guthlac B'.

'Azarias' - A versification of the songs of the
three youths in the furnace from the Old Testament Book of
Daniel. This piece is short and fragmentary.

'The Phoenix' - An allegorical poem about the
legendary bird.

'Juliana' - A verse life of Saint Juliana, who
chose martyrdom rather than marriage to a Pagan.

'The Wanderer' - A brief, intense poem that
confronts head-on the problems of mortality, loss, and the
transitory nature of all things on earth. Considered to be
one of the truly great poems of world literature, it
contains a passage that was later paraphrased by Tolkien and put into the mouth of Rider of
Rohan:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom
maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon
seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga!
Eala
þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.

Where has gone the horse? Where
has gone the man? Where has gone the giver of treasure?

Where has gone the feasting place? Where be the
hall-joys?
Alas bright cup! Alas the armoured warrior!

Alas the Prince's glory! How the time has passed away,

grown dark under night-cover, as though it never were.

'The Gifts of Men' - A verse catalogue of the
various talents that God grants to people under Heaven.

'Precepts' - A collection of advice given by a
father to his son. This poem is often compared to Polonius'
'Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be' speech in
Hamlet.

'The Seafarer' - Often seen as a companion piece
to The Wanderer, The Seafarer uses many of the
same images to treat the same themes of mortality and
transience.

'Vainglory' - A condemnation of the foolish man
who sits content in the luxuries of urban life without
realising that all things must pass.

'Widsith' - A playful boasting poem told in the
voice of an impossibly well-travelled entertainer. It has
been much valued both for its poetic achievement and its
wide range of allusion to history and legend.

'The Fortunes of Men' - A verse catalogue of the
various nasty deaths that await people under Heaven.

'Maxims I' - A very infelicitously6 titled poem which has been
ill-served by title makers: the poem is also known as The
Exeter Book Gnomes. The poem is a collection of concise
bits of wisdom and banality, from 'God alone knows when
death will come,' to 'frost must freeze.'

'The Order of the World' - A verse argument that
the obvious order of the universe is a demonstration of the
nature of God.

'The Riming Poem' - A poem unique in the Old
English corpus in that there is a conscious attempt to use
rhyme as a poetic device. The poem uses many of the themes
used in The Wanderer and The Seafarer
apparently to treat similar themes, but the mad obsession
with rhyming tends to obscure the point.

'The Panther', 'The Whale', and 'The
Partridge' - The fragmentary remains of, or perhaps the
fragmentary unfinished start of a verse Bestiary - a type of
work common in the Middle Ages. A Bestiary is a collection
of descriptions of animals designed to demonstrate the
allegorical meanings of the various beasts. Tolkien's poem
'Fastitocalon' in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is
based on 'The Whale'.

'Soul and Body II' - A verse dialogue between the
Soul and the Body intended to contrast the wondrous purity
of the eternal Soul with the hideous putridity of the
transitory Body.

'Deor' - A poem which has much in common with
Widsith in its allusiveness through the voice of a fictional
poet persona. Deor is unusual in Old English poetry
in that it has a repeated refrain: 'that passed away; so may
this.'

'Wulf and Eadwacer' - A somewhat obscure poem that
seems to tell the story of a love triangle involving two men
and a woman, told from the woman's point of view. The poem
is at once fascinating and perplexing, leading critics to
numerous varied and sometimes contradictory interpretations.
The poem is well worth reading in a number of translations
in order to get an idea of the ambiguity in the
original.

'Riddles' - The Exeter Book contains almost
one hundred verse riddles. Riddles were very popular in
Medieval times, perhaps partly because a poem that had a
bawdy meaning on the surface could be justified by its
allegorical religious meaning. Many of the riddles may be
read with enjoyment as puerile ribaldry, but there is always
some deeper, sober, and ultimately quite boring alternative
meaning. Between Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's
Lament there is a block of some sixty riddles (critics
vary in their divisions of the riddles). Some of these
riddles were the direct inspiration for the Riddle Match
between Bilbo and Gollum in Tolkien's novel The Hobbit.

'The Wife's Lament' - Often treated beside 'Wulf
and Eadwacer', 'The Wife's Lament' is also told from a
woman's point of view, and it is also a love story. In this
case, the imagery familiar from 'The Wanderer' of exile and
solitude are turned to the purposes of a love lament with
startling results.

'The Judgement Day I' - A rather pedestrian and
brief treatment of the topic covered to much better (and
longer) effect in the third part of 'Christ' back at the
beginning of The Exeter Book.

'Resignation' - A rather dull sermon on the
virtues of accepting with humility the tribulations of this
world secure in the knowledge that a special place is
waiting in Heaven.

'The Descent into Hell' - A verse treatment of the
story in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus of Christ's
Harrowing of Hell during his three days dead.

'Alms-Giving' - Another bit of advice on how to
live a proper Christian life.

'Pharoah' - An obscure eight-line dialogue
concerning the size of Pharoah's army that was destroyed by
the un-parting of the Red Sea.

'The Lord's Prayer I' - A verse translation of the
Lord's Prayer. The manuscript is damaged at the beginning of
the poem:

...g fæder, þu þe on heofonum eardast,

geweorðad wuldres dreame. Sy þinum weorcum halgad

noma niþþa bearnum; þu eart nergend wera.
Cyme þin
rice wide, ond þin rædfæst willa
ræred under rodores
hrofe, eac þon on rumre foldan.
Syle us to dæge
domfæstne blæd,
hlaf userne, helpend wera,
þone
singalan, soðfæst meotod.
Ne læt usic costunga cnyssan
to swiðe,
ac þu us freodom gief, folca waldend,

from yfla gehwam, a to widan feore.

'Homiletic Fragment II' - A wonderful little
exhortation to faith.

'A Few More Riddles' - Two riddles separate
Homiletic Fragment I from 'The Husband's Message'.
The first is a duplicate of a riddle which was in the first
large block of riddles; the second seems to be a riddling
treatment of the process involved in making a medieval
writing instrument. The second riddle is an appropriate
introduction to the next poem, and, indeed, many critics see
the riddle as part of 'The Husband's Message'.

'The Husband's Message' - A very interesting poem
told in the voice of a message from a husband on a ship at
sea to his wife. That's right, the message itself is the
voice of the poem, describing how it was made and the
situations of the sender and the recipient.

'The Ruin' - A movingly beautiful poetic
description of a ruined city. The poem is accidently made
more complete and beautiful by the fact that time and
ill-use have damaged the manuscript quite badly at this
point, and so The Ruin has itself become an inspiring
and elusive ruin.

'The Rest of The Riddles' - The Exeter Book
closes with a final block of about forty riddles that are
progressively more fragmentary due to damage to the vellum
of the manuscript. The Exeter Book's last words are:

ic monigum sceal
wisdom cyþan; no þær
word sprecað
ænig ofer eorðan. þeah nu ælda bearn

londbuendra lastas mine
swiþe secað,ic swaþe
hwilum
mine bemiþe monna gehwylcum.

I must
make my wisdom known
to many. Nor is any word

spoken there on earth.
Though now land-dwellers,
sons of men
fiercely seek my tracks,
at times I
hide the swath I make
from each and every man.

1 The Beowulf Manuscript, The
Junius Manuscript, The Vercelli Book, and the
Exeter Book.
2 The Paris Psalter and the
metrical translations of the Latin verses from Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy.
3 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts
Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957),
p. 153.
4 Benjamin Thorpe, Codex
Exoniensis (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1842);
Christian W. M. Grein, Bibliothek der Angelsachsischen
Poesie (Gottingen, 1857-58); Richard P. Wulker,
Bibliothek der Angelsachsischen Poesie (Leipzig,
1881-98); Israel Gollancz, The Exeter Book , vol. I
(London: Early English Text Society, 1895), and vol. II, ed.
W. S. Mackie (1934); George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk
Dobbie, The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1936), Bernard J. Muir, The Exeter
Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 1994).
5 The Exeter Book of Old English
Poetry (London: Percy Lund, Humphries,
1933)
6 Infelicitous means unfortunate or
inappropriate.

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ENTRY DATA

Written and Researched
by:

anhaga

Edited by:

The h2g2
Editors

Referenced Entries:

The
Life and Works of JRR Tolkien

Anglo-Saxon
(Old English)

'The
Hobbit' by JRR Tolkien

Referenced Sites:

The Exeter Book

Library

Exeter Cathedral

Leofric

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the BBC is not responsible for the content of any
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