The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition. Vol. 6. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems

This volume, numbered Volume VI of the "Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records", contains the many verse texts, most of them short, which are scattered here and there in manuscripts not primarily devoted to Anglo-Saxon poetry. The title, "The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems", seems the most convenient one available, although a number of the poems, notably the "Battle of Maldon" and "Solomon and Saturn", are not "minor" in the ordinary sense of that word. As a general rule, only those poems have been admitted which are written in the regular alliterative verse; but the "Death oe Alfred", which has rime instead of alliteration, is included with the five other Chronicle poems, following the practice of earlier editors, and the metrical charms are printed in their entirety, though most of them are only partly in verse and their metrical structure is often far from regular. The only poem included here which has not previously been published is the "Seasons for Fasting", discovered not many years ago in a British Museum manuscript.