Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse

Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse re-examines the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition from the eighth to the eleventh centuries and reconsiders the significance of formulaic parallels and the nature of poetic authorship in Old English. Offering a new vision of much of Old English literary history, Thomas A. Bredehoft traces a tradition of 'literate-formulaic' composition in the period and contends that many phrases conventionally considered oral formulas are in fact borrowings or quotations. Hi