Customer Reviews

A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Old English poetry is hard to translate for a variey of reasons. OE poetic style is very compact, very nominal and very dense.Accurate translations often seem wordy; "poetic" ones tend to miss a lot. This is the only book currently available ( as far as I know) which provides a selection of OE poems in a bilingual format. I have used this book in teaching; the translations are pretty good and the OE is right there for the curious. A good and very handy book.

My Old English class in college was the most laborious of them all especially as my textbook was stolen, which had an extensive glossary. This book helped smooth out the rough edges of my translations and just gave me a better sense of how to put the words together in some coherent form. It's a nice collection of the most well known OE verses and poems and should prove interesting to the non-student who is interested in very old poetry and etymology as well.

While my book arrived by the time it was stated I had ordered several items from different amazon sellers. All of these arrived a week earlier. When I contacted the seller twice there was no response, but to be fair I did tell them once I received the book, it was okay not to respond. However, other amazon sellers have gone above and beyond to make sure to communicate and send things out quickly. In fact this seller was in the same state as I was, but took longer than anyone else to get my order to me. Also they did not send an email confirmation of shipping date.