A Feast of Creatures : Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs

Williamson, Craig (Translated, with Introduction, Notes and Commentary by)

ISBN 10: 0859676722 / ISBN 13: 9780859676724

Published by Scolar Press, London, 1983

About this Item

Scholarly trade paperback binding is clean, tight, and square. The interior is clean except for previous owner's name on the front endpaper. The text is clean and unmarked. NOT ex-lib. A generally clean, tight copy. xii, 230pp.

Seller Inventory # 000703

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Feast of Creatures : Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs
• Publisher: Scolar Press, London
• Publication Date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0859676722
• ISBN 13: 9780859676724
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good+

About this title

Synopsis

In "A Feast of Creatures," Craig Williamson recasts nearly one hundred Old English riddles of the Exeter Book into a modern verse mode that yokes the cadences of Aelfric with the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins.Like the early English riddlers before him, Williamson gives voice to the nightingale, plow, ox, phallic onion, and storm-wind. In lean and taut language he offers us mead disguised as a mighty wrestler, the sword as a celibate thane, the silver wine-cup as a seductress, the horn transformed from head-warrior to ink-belly or battle-singer. In his notes and commentary he gives us possible and probable solutions, sources, and analogues, a shrewd sense of literary play, and traces the literary and cultural contexts in which each riddle may be viewed. In his introduction, Williamson traces for us the history of riddles and riddle scholarship.

About the Author

Craig Williamson is the Alfred H. and Peggi Bloom Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College. He is editor and translator of "Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.