Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Book of Verse From Langland to Kipling: Being a Supplement to the Golden Treasury
The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had some poetry of their own even before they quitted their homes in Low Germany. They had the Epic and the Lay, specimens of which survive in Beowulf and the F igbt at Finnsburgb. Left in heathendom they might have evolved a poetry of native myth and legend, like the Norse. But Christian missionaries from Rome soon brought them under the sway of an older civilization and a loftier religion; and thenceforth the anglo-saxon poets, though they could still sing at times of battle and adventure, devoted them selves in the main to humble paraphrase of the Bible story. All this, however, was in a tongue and idiom as strange to us as German, so that poetry written before the Conquest IS called anglo-saxon rather than English. Out of the welter that followed the Conquest a new nation emerged, with new habits of thought and speech, blended of anglo-saxon and N orman-f rench - in a word. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
