Seminar: Old English: Beowulf, Gawain, and Piers Plowman: Alliterative Poetry in Medieval Britain

3 units

Some of the greatest poems ever written in English Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman were composed in alliterative meter, which was the staple poetic form of Old English, was revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but became obsolete during the sixteenth century. This course will read alliterative poems: the three works listed in the title, and several others from Old and Middle English (and Middle Scots too); students may use specific translations (Heaney's Beowulf, Tolkien's Gawain, Donaldson's Piers) but are encouraged and expected to become familiar with the original language, style and sound of these poems. We shall study alliterative poetry historically as well as critically: who wrote it, and who read it? Why was it revived in later medieval England, and from what sources? Given the quality of the later works, why did the form die out? We shall think about historical memory and archive, reading communities and literary culture/s. So the course models questions about understanding (and imagining) the literary production of a distant past, and offers the intense and often unexpected pleasures of reading it.