English Poetry Before Chaucer

Longman Literature in English Series

by Michael James Swanton, M.J. Swanton (Editor)

A new and completely revised edition of this authoritative work, intended to encourage personal appreciation and independent appraisal by students of English. This is a stimulating introduction to the poetry composed in an age that witnessed fundamental cultural developments: the emergence of the English from among the warring tribes of Europe, their conversion to Christianity, the development of feudalism and the chivalric myth, the military adventure of the Crusades, and the growth of a vigorous citizen class in the burgeoning towns of England.

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Michael James Swanton is a British polymath: historian, linguist, literary critic, translator, archaeological metallurgist and architectural historian specialising in Old English literature and the Anglo-Saxon period.

Born a Bow-bell Cockney in the opening days of World War II, Michael emerged from blitz-stricken London dockland wholly depressed. A disadvantaged, epileptic child, he was socially excluded and persistently bullied (see Keith Richards, Life, 2010, p. 55). He failed the selective 11+ exams but was educated at a series of South London state schools: Secondary Modern, Technical and Grammar; then student of the University of Durham (elected Chairman of the students' union, and of the Standing Congress of Northern Student Unions) and later student of Bath, gaining research degrees in both arts and science and a higher doctorate, D. Litt., Dunelm. He taught English at the University of Manchester, then Linguistics at the Universities of Giessen in Germany, and of Lausanne in Switzerland, and finally Medieval Studies at Exeter, where he also acted as the university's Public Orator for several years. During the 1960s–70s he was Honorary Editor of The Royal Archaeological Institute, and in 1971 founded the Exeter Medieval Texts & Studies series (seventy-five titles to date). Reckoned an authority on Anglo-Saxon England, he was elected Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. In retirement he remains Emeritus Professor of Medieval Studies at Exeter University. Now single, he lives in Devonshire writing creatively.

Wide-ranging personal published work includes translations of Beowulf, the Gesta Herewardi (a life of Hereward the Wake), Vitae duorum Offarum (The Lives of Two Offas), and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as books on early English literature, art, architecture, and archaeology.