Literary Works of Anglo-Saxon Literature

Anglo-Saxon literature (or Old English literature) encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5^th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and other literary works. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Some of the most important works from this period include the poem of Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in Britain, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of early English history, and the poem of Caedmon's Hymn from the 7^th century, one of the oldest surviving written texts in English.

Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent before 1000 A.D, is, nonetheless, scanty. In his supplementary article to 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, Dr. James Hulbert Writes:

In such historical conditions, an incalculable amount of the writings of the Anglo-Saxon period perished. What they contained, how important they were for an understanding of literature before the conquest, we have no means of knowing: the scant catalogs of monastic libraries do not help us, and there are no references in extant works to other compositions … How incomplete our materials are can be illustrated by the well-known fact that, with few and relatively unimportant exceptions, all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in four manuscripts.

Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down. As mentioned earlier, some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are Beowulf, an epic poem, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of early English history, and Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered to be the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Caedmon.

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