![]() Early English historians of all sorts (including me as a literary historian) are in the process of understanding and acknowledging how the idea of the “Anglo-Saxon” race has weaponized these texts and archives, and been used to justify openly white supremacist ideologies at the core of Anglo-American society. ![]() The racist and imperialist codes implied in the term have been convincingly argued by contemporary scholars, and I see no need that the field needs to be nostalgic or sentimental about retaining the term. In 2020, I finally was able to make some admin-level changes (things over my access level) to begin removing the term “Anglo-Saxon” from the site. There’s a lot out there, and it is of highly uneven quality, regardless of the credentials of the scholar doing the translating. One big job that I’d like to do is analyze and review extant translations of the poetry. There’s a surprising amount of argument involved with those kinds of things. They will probably be most involved with translation issues as well as justifying decisions I have made in the translations. But lately I’ve been writing a lot - gearing up for some articles I need to do - but these bigger, more substantial posts record my thoughts that occur to me as I work through the revisions. Previously these have been just notices of updates. What I’m doing these days will be mostly recorded as blog posts, found by following “News” in the menu under the title bar. In 2017, new work has slowed down, mostly because so much of what remains has already been done at least in first draft. I enjoy translating the poetry so much that I don’t anticipate stopping until I have rendered the entire corpus, including the Metres of Boethius (which is now complete), among other rarely translated poems. Since 2015, OENPP has moved beyond strictly narrative poetry, venturing into other genres of early English verse, including a complete translation of the Exeter Book riddles, the poems of contemplation (often called the “Elegies”), and wisdom poetry (like the enigmatic Solomon & Saturn and The Order of the World). ![]() In 2007, dissatisfied with commonly-available volumes of translation (mostly in prose), I set out to bring more of this staggeringly original archive to the attention of teachers of Old English texts, starting with the hagiographic romance of Andreas. The goal was to make high-quality, imaginatively rendered, readable verse translations available for no cost to the general public, all of them designed for instructors looking to extend the texts they can present to their students, in order to flesh out the picture of Old English culture taught in contemporary schools, at whatever level needed. ![]() There’s more to early English poetry than Beowulf-Īnd it is just as engaging, vital, and important to the classroom and scholar. Translations of almost 79% of all extant Old English poetry can be found here (that’s 23,662 lines out of about 30,000 extant lines). ![]()
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