Judith (poem)

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Judith is an Old English poetic Biblical paraphrase retelling the legend of the beheading of Holofernes, an Assyrian military leader, by the eponymous heroine, as recorded in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith.

Only one copy of the poem survives, following Beowulf in Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The text is damaged, with 348 verses preserved; the opening of the work has certainly been lost, and some scholars have argued that material is also missing from the end. It is written in alliterative verse.

As with most Anglo-Saxon poetry, the work is anonymous and hard to date. It is usually assigned to the late 10th or early 11th century.

[edit] Editions

• Mark Griffith, University of Exeter Press, 1997, ISBN 0-85989-568-8
• Judith, on-line edition translated by Albert S. Cook (late 1800's).

[edit] See also

• Judith (homily), the other major Anglo-Saxon retelling of the story.