My research interests lie mainly in Old English poetry, most particularly in Old English poetic language, register, alliteration, rank, metre, metrical-grammar, style and rhetoric. With the exceptions of my several contributions to the Fontes project and quite extensive work on Ælfric's Preface to Genesis (where the author's use and deployment of his multiple sources is particularly revealing), most of my publications have centred around two main (and to some extent related) questions facing students of the poetry:
1. What were the poets compelled to do by the rules of their prosody, what licence did they have and where, if at all, were they free to do as they chose? Probably my principal publication here is the two chapters in Godden and Irvine’s edition of The Old English Boethius: (Oxford, 2008): the text’s double translation of Boethius’s Metres first into prose and then verse permits unique insight into the operation and development of licence.
2. What are the particular literary merits of the poetry? Although some of the poetry displays overuse of apposition and structures which appear to us awkward or unclear (defects possibly of orality, or evidence of our ideological distance from the period), some of the poems’ qualities have been underestimated, or simply not described. My editions of Judith (Exeter, 1997) and The Battle of Maldon (Liverpool, 2024) were primarily motivated by a desire to show the high quality of OE poetry. The frequently expressed view that late OE poetry shows the tradition in general decline seems to me badly misplaced.
On the one hand, therefore, a good deal of what I do is empirical and linguistic or semantic; on the other, it involves a good deal of close reading of the poems and comparison of them. I work, I suppose, on the lang.-lit. border.
I have just completed an article, also on Maldon, for the Terasawa festschrift, out in 2027.
Old and Middle English literature; The history and use of the English language.
