Old English Poems and Riddles

McCully Chris

Chris McCully brings Old English poetry to life with exhilarating immediacy. Here is the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the great elegies and epics, and a generous selection from "Beowulf". Other dimensions of Anglo-Saxon culture are represented in religious meditations, riddles, charms and rhythmical prose, all translated into metrical half-lines that capture the subtlety and pace of the originals.

The introduction explores the fascination this poetry has held for Chris McCully over many years, as a poet and a scholar. The translations are referenced to manuscripts and critical editions, making them a valuable resource for students and for all those keen to read more of the earliest English poetry. A bibliography and reading list, with a note on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and material in libraries and on the Internet, complete the book.

About the Author

Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. He worked as a full-time academic, specialising in the history of the English language and on English sound-structure as well as on verse and verse-form, at the University of Manchester (1985-2003) before deciding to spend more time on writing. From 2003-2013 he worked part-time at various universities in the Netherlands (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) while working on a number of different books for, among others, Carcanet, Cambridge University Press and The Medlar Press. His "Selected Poems" appeared from Carcanet in 2012, when he also gave the John Rylands Poetry Reading in Manchester with Michael Schmidt. Chris retains strong links with Manchester and with Carcanet: he remains chairman and co-director of the Modern Literary Archives programme at the John Rylands University Library. In 2013 Chris and his wife relocate to Colchester and the University of Essex, where Chris has accepted a part-time position in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies and where Monika will become a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the department of the same name. Chris's most recent prose work is a book on Irish sea-trout fishing ("Medlar", to appear, 2013). He is also undertaking a series of new poems about the Serengeti and its wildlife, is beginning a new, metrical translation of Beowulf and is busy writing a new set of essays which will in turn comprise "From the Last Sane Places on Earth", a book about travel, dislocation and writing (forthcoming from Carcanet).

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