This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 edition. Excerpt: ... Within the cloister feebler men had sought Peace for the guilty soul's great agony, But the strong battle on and do not flee: Perhaps, to his deep spirit came the thought, In some still, twilight hour of musing brought, That proof of sorrow for the past is given Best by our love to man, our faith in Heaven: And in the tangled web of life he wrought Bright colours round that one dark spot of crime, And peace, through him, came to his troubled land, And men forgot, as onward passed the time, That there was blood upon that powerful hand; But did he, too, forget it?--there are things The world forgets that yet leave deadliest stings. lxii. The story of Edwy and Elfgiva is too well known to need repetition. Edwy, or Edwin, was but sixteen years old when he succeeded his uncle Edred, in 955, in the government of a kingdom that the priests were filling with discontent and distraction by violently introducing the rule of St. Benedict. The monkish chroniclers have painted Edwin's character in colours darkened by prejudice, but the more impartial Ethelwerd says that "he was much beloved, and that, on account of his great personal beauty, he was called Paukalus by the people." The times have changed since of a Kentish king Augustine humbly begged a ruined pile, And saw the moss-grown church with thankful smile, To thy dark day, poor Edwy, when the ring Given to thy bride was broken, as a thing Worthless and guilty, by a churchman's hand, And his proud words woke treason through thy land; And the vain curse had yet a poisoned sting That rankled in thy heart; till one short year Of love, and grief, and anguish, quenched thy life. Strange that mere words could cause such crushing fear, Or priestly ban wake men to deeds of strife; Nay, 't is not...

‘The Collected Works of Ann Hawkshaw’ brings together Hawkshaw’s four volumes of poetry and republishes them for the first time. Debbie Bark’s biography, introduction and notes highlight Hawkshaw’s most significant poems and propose connections with more canonical works alongside which her writing can be productively viewed. Hawkshaw’s writings have been largely neglected since the early twentieth century, but this new volume reaffirms their ability to offer an exceptional insight into the changing political and religious landscape of the Victorian period.

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.

Excerpt from Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History The Tomb of Ethelberga Angl o-saxon Patriots. Alfred the Great-. I The Child. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.