This thesis is the result of a decision to extend the approach used by me when examining Irish burial practices, to a review of the archaeological and documentary record for burial practices and associated phenomena in the transitional period from late/post-Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. The study considers burial rites; the method of disposal of physical remains, the position and orientation of bodies, and burial structures and enclosures: grave-goods are only referred to when they are pertinent to a particular line of argument. My intention is to draw together the various aspects of burial of the Iron Age, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon periods in order to look at the overall picture. Occasionally this may mean stating the obvious, but by noting and plotting distributions of various burial traits first in the Iron Age and Romano-British periods, and then comparing these traits with the Anglo-Saxon period some revealing results can be obtained. It was important to begin with the Iron Age since some minority practices current in the early Anglo-Saxon period had a continuous history from the pre-Roman period. They are of importance in demonstrating the continuities that existed alongside major changes. [continued in text ...]

This thesis investigates the representation of the human life course in Old English poetry. It attends to constructions of the lifespan as a durational unit, as well as the ‘stages’ or discrete age-related experiences which together form patterns for life development, shared across a diverse range of texts. Throughout this study, the importance of close-reading is emphasised; the bulk of the analysis is concerned with issues of style, lexis and narrative. By these means, it becomes possible to perceive how concepts of the human life course shade into other networks of meaning: these include ideas of ensoulment and embodiment, life experiences of non-human entities, wider narrative patterns which impact representations of life progression, mechanisms and hierarchies of social role and communal existence, and systems of memory collection and the nurturing of ‘wisdom’. The introductory chapter addresses various possible modes of ‘life course’ structuring, in both Anglo-Saxon writings and modern scholarly traditions. Latin and Old English vocabularies of ageing are summarised and an overview is given of previous scholarship attendant on the Anglo-Saxon material. The following three chapters of the thesis then assess representations of different parts of the life course in different groups of texts. The second chapter is concerned with depictions of early life in the Exeter Book Riddles; it contends that these texts have been unduly passed over in discussions of ageing in Old English, seemingly due to their (mostly) non-human subjects. The third chapter addresses the treatment of early and late adulthood in the verse holy lives Andreas, Guthlac A, Juliana and Judith: it is in this chapter that concepts of the life course most clearly intersect with issues of social organisation. The fourth chapter is concerned with the characterisation of old age in Beowulf and Cynewulf’s epilogue to Elene, alongside other texts; the concept of ‘wisdom’ acquired through experience is closely scrutinised, and the verbal and poetic elements of good judgment are elucidated. This thesis concludes that Old English poetry presents human ageing in a manner which encompasses a diverse range of experiences and interrelates with a multitude of wider conceptual frameworks. As such, the texts do not subscribe neatly to an ‘ages of man’ idea. Nonetheless, attention paid to the patterns of human ageing which do emerge from the poems can facilitate more sensitive and productive readings of the texts themselves. The thesis closes with some examples of passages which may be newly interpreted and appreciated in the light of how the life course is conceived across the Old English poetic corpus.

L'écriture créative est aujourd'hui une composante importante du systèrl1e littéraire angle-saxon. Reconnue en tant qu'activité artistique, elle l'est également, dans une certaine mesure, en tant que discipline universitaire, que des diplômes sanctionnent. En moyenne aujourd'hui, on recense environ deux cents programmes de Masters (M.F.A.) dans le monde, dont pas moins de quatre-vingt-quinze pour cent aux États-Unis. Cependant, quel est le statut de l'écriture créative ? Qu'est-ce que l'écriture créative en tant que discipline ? Si l'écriture est un vrai travail sur l'imaginaire, la langue, la pensée, elle est surtout le résultat d'un processus. Ainsi, pour refléter ce processus et dénouer les questionnements annoncés, cette recherche s'articule autour de trois axes principaux : penser l'identité du texte, la dialectique travail/plaisir et l'enseignabilité du processus de création littéraire. / Creative writing has become an important component of the Angle-Saxon literary system. Not only is it acknowledged as an artistic activity, but it is also recognized as a program in higher education. There are about two hundred creative writing Master of Fine Arts programs around the world, ninety-five per cent of which are concentrated in the United States of America. However, a lot of questions around the status of creative writing. as a subject remain unanswered-indeed, what is creative writing as a subject? While writing involves a great deal of imagination, a certain proficiency in language and some thinking kills, it is mainly a process: Thus, to reflect this inquiry, this research first explores the ontological reality of the text, before investigating the articulation of pleasure and work in the process of writing. The final focus is on creative writing in the Anglo-Saxon educational system, from high school to university.

Este trabalho consiste de uma tradução versificada de A Batalha de Maldon, poema anglo-saxão no metro tradicional, composto no século X-XI a respeito da batalha homônima entre dinamarqueses e anglo-saxões. Seu pressuposto fundamental é um estudo das abordagens de tradução aplicáveis à poesia germânica antiga para a produção de uma versão anotada em português, com a qual se procura reconstituir as características do poema antigo. Esta abordagem leva aos argumentos finais acerca desta possibilidade, em especial no que diz respeito à aliteração em português. / This work consists in a verse translation from the Anglo-saxon of The Battle of Maldon, old English poem written between the 10th and 11th centuries about the battle between Danes and Saxons. The main goal is the study of different translation theories which are related to the old Germanic poetic tradition as a mean to provide a Portuguese language annotated version where the poem\'s traits are reconstructed. This procedure leads to the final argument, on the possibility of achieving alliteration in Portuguese.

The origins of kingship have typically been accepted as a natural or inevitable development by scholars. The purpose of this thesis is to question that assumption. This work will re-examine the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingship through a coherent and systematic survey of the available and pertinent archaeological and historical sources, addressing them by type, by period and as their varying natures require. The thesis begins with the archaeological evidence. ‘Elite’ burials, such as Mound One, Sutton Hoo, will be ranked according to their probability of kingliness. This process will point to elite burial as being a regionally-specific, predominately-seventh-century, phenomenon of an ideologically-aware, sophisticated and established political institution. Consequently, elite burial cannot be seen as an indication of the origins of kingship, but can instead be interpreted as a development or experiment within kingship. Analysis of ‘elite’ settlements, such as Yeavering, and numismatic evidence, will lead to similar conclusions. Further, consideration of various other settlement types – former Roman military sites in Northern Britain, former Roman Towns, and enclosed settlements – will point to various potential origins of Anglo-Saxon kingship in the form of continuities with previous Roman, Romano-British or British power structures. The thesis will go on to consider the historical sources. Those of the fifth and sixth centuries, primarily Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, point to several factors of note. The cessation of formal imperial rule over Britain following c.410 effectively created a power vacuum. Various new sources of political power are observable attempting to fill this vacuum, one of which, ultimately, was kingship. Through analogy with contemporary British kingdoms, it is possible to suggest that this development of kingship in England may be placed in the early sixth, if not the fifth, centuries. This would make the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingship significantly earlier than typically thought. This kingship was characterised by the conduct of warfare, its dependence on personal relationships, and particularly by its varying degrees of status and differing manifestations of power covered by the term king. Further details will be added to this image through the narrative and documentary sources of the seventh and early eighth centuries. These predominately shed light on the subsequent development of kingship, particularly its growing association with Christianity. Indeed, the period around c.600 can be highlighted as one of notable change within Anglo-Saxon kingship. However, it is possible to point to the practice of food rents, tolls and the control of resources serving as an economic foundation for kingship, while legal intervention and claimed descent from gods also provide a potential basis of power. Several characteristics of seventh- and early-eighth-century kingship will also be highlighted as being relevant to its origins – the conduct of warfare and the exercise of over-kingship – relating to the general propensity for amalgamation through conquest. Other trajectories are also highlighted, specifically continuity from previous Roman and British entities and the development of ‘pop-up’ kingdoms. The overall result is one in which long-term amalgamation and short-term disintegration and re-constitution were equally in evidence, set against the wider context of broad regional continuities. Overall, therefore, the thesis will not fully resolve the issue of the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingship, but it does offer a means to re-frame discussion, explore the social and economic underpinnings of kingship and assess its primacy as an institution within early Anglo-Saxon England.

Background: Grammars of Old English held at least until the 1960s that word orderin Anglo-Saxon texts was essentially “free”, that is, determined entirely or primarily by stylistic choice rather than syntactic rules.  Although prose word order has been shown to be regular in several models, the same cannot be said of poetry.  This study uses Nils-Lennart Johannesson’s Old English syntax model, operating within the Government and Binding framework, to establish whether the phrase structure of The Wanderer can fit into this model as it stands, and if not, whether a reasonably small number of additional parameters can be established in order to establish whether “free” word order is in evidence, or whether the word order of Old English poetry is regular in the same way as prose. Results: A full clause analysis showed that the majority of the clauses fit Johannesson’s model.  For those which did not, two modifications are recommended: non-compulsory movement of main verbs in main clauses from I to C; and the splitting and rightwards extraposition of the second part of coordinated NPs in which the first coordinated element is “light” and the second “heavy”.  This leaves a small number of clauses featuring constructions which do not occur frequently enough in the text to allow rules to be induced to explain them.  These must therefore be deemed irregular.  Conclusions:  While much of The Wanderer has been shown to be syntactically regular, some constructions could not be fitted into the existing model without the introduction of special parameters to excuse them.  This paper is intended as a pilot study for a larger project which will incorporate the other poems in the heroic tradition with the hope of inducing a complete syntax for them.  One part of that investigation will be to include these infrequent constructions in The Wanderer, to find comparable constructions in other poems and categorise them within the corpus.

This thesis surveys the children's literary accounts of Anglo-Saxon history and literature that have been written since the mid-nineteenth century. Authors of different ages emphasize different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture as societal need for and interpretation of the past change. In studying these changes, I show not only why children's authors would choose to depict the Saxons in their writing, but why medievalists would want to study the resulting literature. My second chapter looks at children's historical fiction and nonfiction, charting the trends which appear in the literature written between 1850 and the present day. I survey the changes made in authors' representations of Anglo-Saxon England as children's publication trends have changed. I show how these changes are closely related to the changes made in popular conceptions of the past. My third chapter discusses the way in which children's retellings of Beowulf have placed the poem into a less culturally-dependent, more universal setting as they have separated the tale from its linguistic and cultural heritage. Children's authors have gradually removed the poem's poetic and linguistic devices and other cultural elements from their retellings, instead favoring a more courtly medieval setting, or even a generic universal one. Children's literature is an important indicator of the societal values contemporary with its publication. Authors and publishers often write the literature to reflect their own ideologies and agendas more openly in children's literature than in other literature. As I show in this thesis, the attitudes toward Anglo-Saxon England which pervade children's literature of any age make it a particularly useful tool to those scholars interested in the study of popular reception of the Middle Ages.

Although Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey, presents itself as a didactic treatise, Brontë's work departs from many accepted Evangelical tropes in the portrayal of its moral protagonist. These departures create an exemplary figure whose flaws potentially subvert the novel's didactic purposes. The character of Agnes is not necessarily meant to be directly emulated, yet Brontë's governess is presented as a tool of moral instruction. The conflict between the novel's self-proclaimed didactic purpose and the form in which it presents that purpose raises a number of interpretive questions. I argue that many of these questions can be answered through the application of a hermeneutic presented in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana. Such a hermeneutic shifts the burden of interpretation away from the author and toward the reader in such a way that the moral figure becomes, not a standard to be emulated, but rather a test of the reader's personal spiritual maturity. This sign theory heavily influenced the works of medieval hagiographers such as Ælfric of Enysham, who depended on Augustine's sign theory to mediate some of the less-orthodox behaviors of saints such as Æthelthryth of Ely. I argue that by applying Augustine's hermeneutic and reading Agnes Grey in the context of these earlier didactic genres, the novel's potentially subversive qualities are not only neutralized, but become an important element of Evangelical instruction.

This thesis presents an osteoarchaeological analysis of juvenile mortality profiles questioning the speculations made by some archaeologists that the under-representation of infants from Anglo-Saxon and medieval burial populations could be due to the practice of infanticide in England during these periods. Morphological and metrical age estimation and sex assessment methods are used to determine the age-at-death and sex of 1275 children from fifty-three Anglo-Saxon and medieval sites located in southern England. The age and sex distribution of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval children under six-years-old are then compared with age-specific United Nations demographic statistics see to whether or not a normative mortality profile is presented by the archaeological populations. This study identified an abnormal age-at-death distribution for the early Anglo-Saxon perinatal individuals. Excess female mortality was observed for the perinatal individuals from all three periods; early Anglo-Saxon, late Anglo-Saxon and medieval, and for the neonatal and infant individuals from the early Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods. The results of this osteoarchaeological analysis are discussed in conjunction with a review of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval documentary evidence which examines the possible social and economic motives for infanticide. Whilst this analysis of the historical sources revealed laws and penitentiary warnings against the neglect and deliberate murder of infants, the late Anglo-Saxon and medieval documents provided little evidence to suggest the social devaluation of women that would support a hypothesis of preferential female infanticide. There are few surviving early Anglo-Saxon documents however, so the significance of the abnormal mortality profiles from this period is considered. / Arts and Humanities Research Council

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