Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems ( Exodus , Andreas , Judith ) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia , an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica . This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts – especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts – yields a previously un