Paper

Length: 1800-2000 words

Due: Monday May 13, noon via email

Late Penalty: one +/- for every two days late (or part thereof!)

These topics are suggestions only. Please feel free to devise your own topic, but be sure to check it with me first. For bibliography, go to Modules and browse around, especially in the History/Literature page. You may also find the following helpful (all are under "Research Databases" from the BC Libraries' web page): 

International Medieval Bibliography Links to an external site.includes history, and has excellent medieval coverage. Bear in mind, though, that it still has large gaps; be sure to use the other databases below.

Iter Links to an external site. is another excellent medieval/Renaissance bibliography, though it is still under construction and has large gaps in it. Do consult it, though - they already have a lot on there.

MLA International Bibliography Links to an external site. lists books and articles on literature, language, linguistics, and folktales, and includes coverage from 1963 to the present.

Literature Online Links to an external site. - A fully searchable library of more than 330,000 works of English and American poetry, drama, and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies and key secondary sources. This is a good database that incorporates several others.

Academic OneFile Links to an external site. - Use this database to find information on: Astronomy, Religion, Law, History, Psychology, Humanities, Current Events, Sociology, Communications and the General Sciences. Note that this only goes back to 1980 and covers more fields with less depth in each. Get to it through the library homepage.

Suggested Topics:

1. Discuss one or two of the Exeter Book riddles that have an uncertain solution. There is a list of texts, translations, and solutions here Links to an external site. (look for the question marks!), and there are online editions of all of them (some of them hyperlinked to a glossary) on the University of Calgary OE Poetry page Links to an external site.. The blog The Riddle Ages Links to an external site. has lots of great commentary that might help you choose a riddle. The other book you should look at is Craig Wlliamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1977), which is on reserve at the O'Neill Library (PR1760 .W5).
2. Give some general background on women in Anglo-Saxon society, and then analyze the position of a particular woman, or of women in general, in an individual work. Some suggestions: Beowulf, The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer (the latter is a very short poem; see me for an edition with good notes).
3. Discuss the borrowing of Scandinavian vocabulary into the English language, which happened with successive waves of invasions. You might organize this by grouping the words and phrases into particular areas of meaning (military, landscape, social, etc.).
4. Describe the different phases of manuscript production in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Give some examples with illustrations, which are readily available in the main reference sources.
5. Discuss the main features of Anglo-Saxon clothing. How did these change over the centuries? What do they reflect about class differences? What are our main sources for this?
6. Select a passage of between 10 and 20 lines of any Old English work (prose or poetry) and analyze it carefully. [A good way to choose a work would be to browse through Elaine Treharne, ed., Old and Middle English, on reserve at O'Neill PR1120 .O39 2010]. Take account of meter (if it's poetry), sentence structure, and vocabulary. Any words for which a wide range of meaning seems possible should be researched in the available Old English dictionaries (see the Dictionaries page). When you have analyzed the passage carefully, write an essay discussing the way its meaning is constructed through meter, syntax, and vocabulary.
7. Trace the semantic and/or phonological development of an Old English word or words. These can be either words that didn't survive after the OE period, or ones that did. You can choose a single word if you think it's complex enough to fill up the space available. Alternatively, you can choose a group of semantically related words (terms for parents, words for anger, brass instruments, whatever!). Or, you can choose a word and some or all of its compounds (the Anglo-Saxons loved their compounds. Here are some research tools:

   (i) If you're thinking about semantically related terms, you should be aware of the OED's Historical Thesaurus. Go to BC Libraries > Research Databases > Oxford English Dictionary, log in, then click on Historical Thesaurus from the main page, or just click here Links to an external site.. Just browse around (beware - addictive!), though you should be aware that ultimately you'll need to find words that have an Old English origin.

   (ii) The best Old English dictionary is the Dictionary of Old English Links to an external site., which goes only up to h. You can browse all the words by letter using the left banners, and this is a great way to locate the compounds associated with a word. For example, if you're browsing through the letter d, you might come across the word dǣl ("part, share"), which has a number of compounds associated with it. Some of these will be visible in the left banner (daelere, dael-nimend, etc.); you will find second-element compounds by looking at the very bottom of the entry (east-dael, etc.). Dael is an example of a word that did survive into Modern English, and you'll know that because of the very handy link at the end of the DOE entry that says "OED2 deal n.1"; just click on that and it will take you straight to the OED online.

   (iii) For words that don't start with the letters a-g, use the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary,  Links to an external site.which is old, but good, and complete.

   (iv) If your word(s) survive(s) into Modern English, you can trace the developments in meaning by using the DOE, the OED, and the Middle English Dictionary Links to an external site.(MED). The interface is a little tricky here because of Middle English spelling variations. If you're having trouble finding a word, use the search hints on the main lookup page Links to an external site., and the link to further search hints Links to an external site.. Basically, if you're unsure about a vowel, or a beginning or ending of a word, you can use * as a wildcard search character. You'll get the hang of it. The good part is, if you're looking at a word in the DOE and it has a ME descendant, the DOE will list it at the bottom of the entry, with the correct spelling you should use to find it in the MED. NB when you are in a MED entry, be sure to click on "show quotations compact display" which, counter-intuitively, gives more information than "open display"!

   (v) The Oxford English Dictionary Links to an external site.. When you are in an OED entry, always be sure to click on "full entry" at the top and "show more" under forms and etymology.

   In the DOE, MED, and OED, you can click on the title of the work for each citation, and it will take you to a bibliographical citation for that work. You don't need to discuss every work in which your word appears, but it might be useful, as you're tracing its development, to know what kinds of works it appeared in, and perhaps to dig around a little bit so you get some more depth about the context in which the word is used. In some cases, this might involve tracking down the work to get the broader context of the quotation (i.e., beyond the line or two that will be in the dictionary).

   If (and only if!) you are linguistically-minded, you can work on the phonological changes the word underwent during the OE and subsequent periods. Otherwise, you can just focus on its semantic changes. Remember, though, that your word(s) must originate in Old English, whether or not they survived after the period.