The Old English Scatterlings: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records in Modern English Verse, Volume 6

The poems translated here, which were gathered together in the final volume of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records under the title The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, are the offspring of the scattering over the centuries of manuscript fragments, of engraved stones, of carved whale bone, of poetry inserted into prose manuscripts, and of bits of poetry that only are known to us because somebody, somewhere, sometime transcribed a manuscript now lost to us.

There is nothing "Minor" about these poems so randomly scattered by history and then haphazardly gathered into a single volume by a single editor in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Certainly some pieces are better as poetry - less "Minor" if not more "Major" - than others: I have a fondness for Thureth and for Maxims II; others may prefer the neo-Heroic mode of The Battle of Maldon or of some of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Poems; and the Metrical Charms will, of course, probably for all the wrong reasons, be favourites of the Neo-Pagan-Wiccan set.

Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, the editor of The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, confessed in the second sentence of his introduction to his edition that his choice of title was a matter of convenience rather than appropriateness. Siding with appropriateness, this volume of my translations of the Anglo-Saxon poems which are scattered outside the four large codices of Old English poems onto stone and whale bone, mingled with prose, or preserved as children of the scattered and lost in centuries-old transcriptions, I have chosen to title The Old English Scatterlings.