Anglo-Saxon

Anonymous (Old English)

c. 7th–11th century

The great majority of surviving Old English poetry is anonymous. It comes down to us almost entirely through four manuscripts copied around the late 10th and early 11th centuries — the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Nowell Codex (which also contains Beowulf) — plus a few poems preserved elsewhere, such as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

These poets, working in the alliterative, four-stress long line inherited from a common Germanic tradition, left behind elegies of exile and loss (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament), heroic fragments (The Battle of Maldon, The Fight at Finnsburg), riddles, saints' lives, and biblical paraphrase, alongside the single most revered poem of the corpus, The Dream of the Rood.

This entry gathers the many unsigned Old English poems in this archive — as distinct from Beowulf's anonymous poet, Cædmon, and the runically-signed Cynewulf — under one umbrella, in keeping with how they survive: unattributed, and copied by scribes who did not think to record whose voice they were preserving.

Major Works (24)

Andreas — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1910)
Andreas (Old English) — Heroic poem, c. 9th century (poet unknown)
Christ I — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1910)
Christ I (Old English) — Religious poem, c. 9th century (poet unknown)
Christ III — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1910)
Christ III (Old English) — Religious poem, c. 9th century (poet unknown)
Christ and Satan — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1916)
Christ and Satan (Old English) — Religious poem, c. 9th century (poet unknown)
Daniel — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1916)
Daniel (Old English) — Biblical epic, c. 8th-9th century (poet unknown)
Exodus — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1916)
Exodus (Old English) — Biblical epic, c. 8th century (poet unknown)
Fragments of Psalms (Old English) — Religious poem, c. 10th–11th century
Genesis — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1916)
Genesis (Old English) — Biblical epic, c. 8th-9th century (poet unknown)
Guthlac — translated by Charles W. Kennedy (1910)
Guthlac (Old English) — Saint's life, c. 8th-9th century (poet unknown)
Judith — translated by Cosette Faust Newton & Stith Thompson (1918)
Judith (Old English) — Heroic poem, c. 10th century
The Paris Psalter (Old English) — Psalter, c. 10th century
The Phoenix — translated by Cosette Faust Newton & Stith Thompson (1918)
The Phoenix (Old English) — Allegorical poem, c. 9th century
Solomon and Saturn — translated by J. M. Kemble, The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus (Ælfric Society, 1848)
Solomon and Saturn (Old English) — Dialogue poem, c. 10th century

Poems (313)

See Anonymous (Old English) in the full archive →