the anglo saxon world kevin crossley holland

The Law s o f Wihtred, Canute's Letter to the People o f Etogland, A Marriage Agreement, The W ill o f King Alfred, A Manumission and the letters from Pope Gregory I to Candidus, from Boniface to Fulrad, from Cuthbert to Lui, from Charlemagne to O ffa, and from Radbrod to King Æthelstan, from English Historial Documents, Volume I edited by Dorothy Whitelock © Eyre Methuen 1955, 1979 (Eyre and Spottiswoode(Oxford University Press, N ew York). B ald's Le ech book, Trial by Ordeal, A Grant o f Land at Crediton and Estate Memorandum: Duties and Perquisites from Anglo-Saxon Prose (Everyman's Library series) © Michael Swanton 1975 (J. T H E W O R L D ’S CLASSICS The Anglo-Saxon World An Anthology Edited and translated by KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND Oxford New York O X F O R D U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS 1984 O xford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0 X 2 6D P London Glasgow N ew York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia Oxford is a trade mark o f Oxford University Press Editorial matter, selection and translation o f poems © Kevin Crossley-Holland 1982. He is working on a substantial retelling of British Folk Tales.

His forceful retelling for children of Beow ulf, illustrated by Charles Keeping, has recently been published by the Oxford University Press. He is the author of a new version of The Norse M yths and his translations include The Battle o f Maldon and Other Old English Poems and The Exeter Book Riddles. K evin Crossley-H olland, Fellow in Writing at the W inchester School of Art, is a poet, translator, writer and regular broadcaster.

Through poems heroic, religious and elegiac, through the letters of kings and bishops, through laconic chronicles, travelogues and herbal prescriptions, and through voices renowned (Bede, Caedmon, Alfred and Ælfric) and anonymous, we come face to face with the remarkable people who have given to the English the basis of their language, the lie of their land, and many of their most deeply embedded charac teristics. O f all the superb bodies of literature surviving from these centuries - lyrical Welsh poetry, heroic tales and poems from Ireland, Icelandic sagas and eddaic poetry - the Anglo-Saxon is the most many-sided and magnificent.

The most sophisticated European culture during these cen turies was that of the Anglo-Saxons, the descendants of the Germanic tribesmen who swarmed into England during the fifth and sixth centuries, swept aside the existing Romano-British peoples, and divided the country into seven great kingdoms. THE W ORLD’S CLASSICS T H E AN GLO -SA X ON W O R LD N INE hundred years separate the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from the birth of the Renaissance.

The anglo saxon world kevin crossley holland