A Feast of Creatures : AngloSaxon RiddleSongs. Signed 1st Edition

Craig Williamson Translation and Introduction

ISBN 10: 0812278437 / ISBN 13: 9780812278439

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press, USA, 1982

About this Item

1st Edition. Large 8vo. 248pp. Signed and dedicated by the author to front free endpaper. Very good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscription or marks of any kind, well held in joints and hinges, clean crisp corners and edges. Bound in Bright gilt lettered red cloth, together with original unclipped pictorial dustwrapper gently rubbed to foot and with 2 short chips to head. Of interest to medievalists, lovers of modern poetry, anthropologists and folklorists, linguists and philosophers, psychologists and anyone who remembers as a child the glory of riddles. The old riddles of The Exeter Book recast into modern poetry. A gem of a book.

Seller Inventory # 100147099

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Feast of Creatures : AngloSaxon RiddleSongs. Signed 1st Edition
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, USA
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812278437
• ISBN 13: 9780812278439
• Binding: HardBack
• Edition: First edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature

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.