Description
These translations of Old English heroic poetry were first presented as the bones of a Master of Arts Honours thesis in English at the University of Canterbury in 1968. They are based mainly on texts found in Krapp and Dobbie’s monumental collection entitled The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, although
I have referred constantly to other annotated editions of most of the poems, and have revised my translations considerably since 1968.
I considered attaching the original Old English versions of all the poems but finally concluded that scholars would already be familiar with them and the non-specialist reader would derive little benefit from having them absent a knowledge of Old English. It therefore seemed sensible to me to insert just the original of The Fight at Finnsburg to give a taste of what Old English looked like in the hope that at least some appetites might be whetted to take the subject further.
For their scholarly help in solving the inevitable problems of translation from Old English, I am very grateful to Robin Barrett, Nick Doane, and the late Harry Orsman, emphasising that any shortcomings in my scholarship are entirely my own. For their far-reaching encouragement of my study of things medieval, I wish to record the contributions of Charles Spear and Gordon Troup. I am also very grateful to Nick Doane for his scholarly introduction, also written in 1968. Professor A. N. Doane taught at Victoria University of Wellington from 1965 to 1971. Since then he has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specialising in Anglo-Saxon studies. He retired in 2006. He is the general editor of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, an international project publishing complete facsimiles with new descriptions of all extant manuscripts containing any Old English writing.
