English literature

English literature is the literature which is distinctly written in the English language, as opposed to differing languages. English literature includes literature composed in English bywriters not necessarily from England nor primarily English-speaking nations; for example,Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Thomas Pynchon is American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, andVladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world in countries originally colonized by the British.

Old English literature: 450–1100

Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England after the withdrawal of the Romans and "ending soon after the Norman Conquest" in 1066; that is, c. 1100–50.^[1] These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others.^[2] In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period.^[3]

Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed.^[4] Epic poems were thus very popular, and some, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably adapted from the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another.

Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity after their arrival in England.^[5] The most popular and well-known of Old English poetry is alliterative verse, which uses accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages.^[6]

The epic poem Beowulf, of 3182 alliterative lines, is the most famous work in Old English and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. The only surviving manuscript is the Nowell Codex, the precise date of which is debated, but most estimates place it close to the year 1000. Beowulf is the conventional title,^[7] and its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, who is commonly referred to as the "Beowulf poet",^[8] is dated between the 8th^[9][10] and the early 11th century.^[11] In the poem,Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (in Heorot) has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a burial mound, in Geatland.^[12]

Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, is the poem Judith, a retelling of the story found in the Latin Vulgate Bible's Book of Judith about the beheader of the Assyrian general Holofernes.^[13] The Old English Martyrology is aMercian collection of hagiographies. Ælfric of Eynsham was a prolific 10th-century writer of hagiographies and homilies.^[14]

Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: twelve are known by name from Medieval sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works with any certainty: Caedmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf. Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known.^[15] Cædmon's only known surviving work is Cædmon's Hymn, which probably dates from the late 7th century. TheHymn itself was composed between 658 and 680, recorded in the earlier part of the 8th century, and survives today in at least 14 verified manuscript copies.^[16] The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross andFranks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. The poem, The Dream of the Rood, was inscribed upon the Ruthwell Cross.^[17]

Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts, and a notable example is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of King Alfred's reign in the 9th century, and the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. Almost all of the material in theChronicle is in the form of annals by year, the earliest being dated at 60 BC (the annals' date for Caesar's invasions of Britain), and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin.^[18]

The poem Battle of Maldon also deals with history. This is the name given to a work, of uncertain date, celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost.

The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord.^[20]Another poem with a religious theme, The Seafarer is also recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts, and consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". In the past it has been frequently referred to as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing. Some scholars, however, have argued that the content of the poem also links it with Sapiential Books, or Wisdom Literature. In his account of the poem in the Cambridge Old English Reader, published in 2004, Richard Marsden writes, “It is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian […]” 

Classical antiquity was not forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England and several Old English poems are adaptations of late classicalphilosophical texts. The longest is King Alfred's (849–899) 9th-century translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. The Metres of Boethius are a series of Old English alliterative poems adapted from the Latin metra of the Consolation of Philosophy soon after Alfred's prose translation.