Talk:Anglo-Saxon literature

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Stbalbach (talk • contribs • email)

Please note that the above tag should not imply that others may not make edits to the article without consultation with those listed in the tag. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:12, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

PLEASE NOTE: the official guidelines is on the template page, as determined by group consensus. --Stbalbach 06:51, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

This unicode stuff: what are the pros and cons? sjc

Well, the pros are that it's much more standard, and will hopefully render correctly on all modern browsers; whereas inserting the characters as they are in iso-8859-1 charset, which is what you did, is technically wrong (this charset isn't set to be the page's charset in the page's headers as returned by the wiki script) and won't work correctly with people who view the Web with some default encoding other than iso-8859-1. For instance, since I read/write a lot of Russian material on the web, I normally browser with the default encoding set to cyrillic, and I saw strange cyrillic characters instead of thorn and eth on the Old English poetry page.

Using unicode characters encoded as HTML entities also enables you to have many languages simultaneously on the page, not just latin characters with some diacritics, as in iso-8859-1.

The cons are that some browsers (I believe only very old ones by now, and perhaps some extremely light e.g. on PDAs) won't process and show HTML entities correctly.

Anybody wants to add to this?

--AV

I basically agree with this, although it's not correct to refer to HTML character entity references as "Unicode". æ, ð and þ have been around for a long time, so even fairly old browsers handle them correctly. I tried the page in the oldest browser I could find (Netscape 3.0) and it displayed fine. --Zundark, 2001 Oct 14

You're right that historically it's not correct to refer to entity refs as Unicode; however, in recent times, since the emerging of HTML 4.0, XML, XHTML etc. they are really viewed inside HTML and XHTML standards as convenient aliases of the numerical character references, and these directly reference Unicode. That's why I think it useful to consider, nowadays, things like ð to be aliases standing directly for the appropriate Unicode character. --AV

Well, it looks like we should be using Unicode throughout then. Anyone know where we can get a definitive list of them for pretty much any language we might need? It might be a useful page to have up here with links. sjc

They are not Unicode (although, as AV says, modern browsers will generally map them to Unicode). There's a complete list (for HTML4.01) at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html . Those in the first table should work even in fairly old browsers, but most of those in the other two tables are less well supported. Other characters can be obtained by using Unicode instead, and you can get a complete list of Unicode codes from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ by downloading the UnicodeData.txt file (plus the huge Unihan.txt file if you want Chinese-Japanese-Korean characters too). --Zundark, 2001 Oct 14

Thanks muchly. sjc

Please note also Unicode and HTML, and especially Wiki special characters. Hmmph, the Unicode and HTML page could be usefully extended with the official Unicode names for characters, not just numbers. --AV


My description will be simplistic, since we are discussing the matter from a purely practical point of view. Pieces of software in different (human) languages (e.g. Hebrew and English Windows) often do not agree upon the representation of computer characters (that do not belong to English alphabet, punctuation or digits). So, feeding Hebrew Windows a symbol which looks like a thorn in American Windows will not necessarily result in a thorn.

Using Unicode named entities is a way to bypass this restriction. By writing a name, you're no longer assuming that the software that was used to write the page agrees with the software displaying it. That assumption is often incorrect, since in the browser does not have enough information about the software used to author the text to figure out how it chose to encode some the symbols. With Unicode, however, you say explicitly to the web browser "give me a thorn". A good (HTML 4.0-compliant) browser then should look up the font table and try to display the symbol, no matter how it is represented internally.

The conclusion is that using Unicode is the only fully correct practice. It enables people from all over the world see the page correctly at the moment they arrive at it. Also, it is expandable so it allows using several alphabets over a single page. Unicode named entities are supported by most of the recent browsers (both IE and Netscape since Version 4). Although older browser might have problems with Unicode, any solution optimized for them will break a much bigger number of Unicode-compliant system that for some reason do not use the same encodings for some characters.

--Uriyan

Have you read 1066 And All That, Steve? There're some great parodies of Old English poetry there ;)

Sing a song of Saxons
In the Wapentake of Rye
Four an twenty eaoldormen
Too eaold to die ...

That's more like Middle English, I suppose, but they also have a great take on the Beowulf there. --AV

Certainly have, I just recently bought myself a new copy, the old one was falling apart. One of the great critical analyses of English history, and considerably more accurate than many serious takes on the subject. sjc

What of the use of inflection during old english? I know that Chaucers original works rhymed if you pronounce the 'e' at the end. -dgd

Old English was an inflected language: grammatical information was transmitted by endings/sound changes to words. But this is not significant within a rhyme scheme since this was entirely subsidiary to the significance of alliterative binding. Many Old English grammatical patterns: adjective & noun, subject & verb, etc naturally produce type A stress patterns when used with plural forms. Another grammatical pattern (genitive plural used as a noun) produces type D patterns. The stress patterns of Anglo-Saxon poetry are fundamentally formalised, but are representative of the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon speech. user:sjc


I think your fine explanation should be moved front and center!--dgd

I'm very much working on this article as in progress and there are other concepts which are paramount, vis-a-vis alliteration. I don't really want to clutter people's vista of OE poetry with the complications of inflected cases etc until I have the alliterative stuff and the importance of poetic language firmly established since these are fundamental, the inflection issue being merely a side-show to OE in general. user:sjc

I've made an article on alliterative verse that covers much of the same territory. Perhaps most of this article might be moved there, and "Old English poetry" changed in focus, away from the prosody of Old English verse, and towards the poetic corpus in Old English? -- IHCOYC 17:34 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I say, go for it. Matthew Woodcraft

[edit] Rename article

I would like to rename the article to Anglo-Saxon literature and expand on it, as Ihcoyc suggested in 2003. Old English poetry can still point here, or to Alliterative verse. Stbalbach 01:15, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] second only to Gothic?

Irish has the best claim to this accolade (see the vernacular literature article in Wikipedia for instance!, or if that is not good enough then several aerticles on vernacular/orality/literacy by Michael Richter of the University of Constanz) so I will remove it 195.92.168.174 01:02, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I wrote that sentence. But I didnt just make it up, its sourced to the Angus Cameron article (see references). The thing is we are talking "literature", the context of the article makes that clear, so obviously we are not talking ancient Norse runes markings accounting for how many gold pieces a king has. I looked at the vernacular literature article and its just a stub it says very little on this subject. So I looked at Irish literature and it says The Irish language has the oldest vernacular literature and poetry in that language represents a more or less unbroken tradition from the 6th century to the present day. Well thats odd since Anglo_Saxon goes back to the 4th century, certainly older than Irish, and Gothic is older than both. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but so far no ones been able too, it appears professor Angus is (still) correct. Stbalbach 04:14, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I am talking literature as well. Beware of self-satisfied claims concerning English literature, they often have their blind spot. For instance Southern claimed that to find a vernacular chronicle equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle you had to go to Russia. Not so. Ireland has annals beginning in Latin in the 6th century and becoming almost completely Irish by the 9th century. Seeing as you are now talking about something other than surviving texts then Irish too has been projected back into the 4th century by Jane Stevenson/Michael Richter. A little less certainty on your part is called for I think 195.92.168.175 14:30, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
Now for some citations. 'the dry-point Old Irish glosses in Codex Usserianus I date indeed to seventh century' in O quam gravis est scriptura: Early Irish lay society and written culture by Michael Richter, Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission/Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Texte und Überlinferung ed. Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter, page 29. 'literacy in both Latin and Irish had its beginnings in the fourth century at the latest' in The beginnings of literacy in Ireland by Jane Stevenson, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 89C, page 165. Your claim is not sustained so I will remove it 195.92.168.175 15:00, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Lead image

Since Stbalbach's admirable rewrite of this article last June, the article has featured this lovely image. However, on closer examination, I have come to the conclusion that this image is not apropiate for this page. The manuscript from which this image comes, BL Additional 33241, is not listed at List of illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, which to my certain knowledge contains every Anglo-Saxon manuscript which contains a miniature. The BL catalogue entry describes the text contained in this manuscript as:

"GESTA CNUTONIS"; printed by Duchesne (Historiæ Normannorum Scriptores) with the title "Emmæ Anglorum Reginæ, Richard I. Ducis Normannorum filiæ, Encomium."

Elsewhere on the BL site, the manuscript is given the title Encomium of Queen Emma, and described as being produced in "Normandy, mid 11th century".

Although S.D. Keynes, who set up the website from which this image was taken is a respected Anglo-Saxon historian, I believe that the identification of this manuscript as Anglo-Saxon is mistaken. Although I am not familiar with the text, its title "Gesta Cnutonis" or "Encomium Emmae Reginae" do not seem to indicate that it is written in Anglo-Saxon, nor is likely that a manuscript produced in Normandy was written in Anglo-Saxon. My best guess is that is a piece of Norman literature, which was produced as a propaganda piece by William of Normandy in the decades prior to the Norman invasion, since his relationship to Emma was the fig leaf behind which he claimed the throne of England. So, sadly, I would have to say that this image should be replaced Dsmdgold 23:24, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

That's great research. Lets replace it with something representative. I remember not being able to find a lot of choices, but perhaps was not looking at the right sources for pics. How about this one from the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, or the one allready uploaded? --Stbalbach 03:59, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Well the problem with the Benedictional, is that its text is in Latin, so it's not really Anglo-Saxon Literature (if and when I, or someone else, gets around to writing the article on Anglo-Saxon illumination, images from the Benedictional will feature prominently. Looking over the List of illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, I realize that I should have included the language of the primary text, but in any case the majority are in Latin. I think that the Caedmon manuscript illumination from later in the article is our best bet, right now. I'll spend the day rummaging around to see if I can find anything better. Dsmdgold 12:50, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I found a few usable images of manuscripts from the BL (see here), all from manuscripts with Anglo-Saxon translations. However, we also this image from the Peterborough Chronicle. Although the manuscript itself is post-conquest, I think this is our best choice for a lead image. It is attractive and it illustrates one of the major sources for the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, which is mentioned in the intro. Although the Peterborough Chronicle has Middle English portions, I believe this image is of a section in Anglo-Saxon. If there is no objection, I will make the change early next week. (Or someone else can be bold and do it before then.) Dsmdgold 16:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes I agree the Peterborough is more representative for literature. I'll do it, feel free to change the caption text. --Stbalbach 17:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
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