The Vercelli Book

The Vercelli Book, as the manuscript is generally titled, contains a good deal of prose homiletic material amongst which are dispersed six poems. These six pieces, translated here, have been modernly titled Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Soul and Body, Homiletic Fragment 1, The Dream of the Rood, and Elene. These six poems treat fairly conventional medieval Christian subjects, although there are some unconventional and particularly Old English aspects to those treatments. It is worthwhile to note and emphasize that Medieval Europe had a vast shared common stock of narratives of saints lives, biblical commentaries, conventional homiletic themes - in short, a shared body of symbolic language which was used and reused across political and linguistic boundaries. This shared heritage has been largely lost to the non-scholarly, non-specialist reader, and so, Old English poetry, particularly poetry such as the pieces in the Vercelli Book, walks in a landscape foreign to the modern reader. A poem such as Andreas, walking the mythical, cannibal Crimea, is perhaps more foreign to the modern reader than the tale of tortured Grendel lurking in the dark moors above Heorot. But that shared body of symbolic language lies behind both Beowulf and Andreas, behind both Grendel and the Myrmidonians.

Old English poetry survives in four great manuscript collections, in two Old English translations of Latin originals, and in a multitude of bits and pieces of manuscript and modern transcription of now-lost manuscripts. Virtually all that has survived of verse from the Old English period is contained in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, edited by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie in six volumes in the middle of the last century. These six volumes amount to something around 30,000 lines of verse, roughly equivalent to the number of hexameter lines in Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. The present volume is a translation of Volume 2 of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.