Anglo-Saxon Bibliography

The OE period extends from the earliest records in the Germanic language known as Old English to the early twelfth century. The Norman Conquest in 1066 is often taken as the terminus ad quem, because that battle allowed the Norman-French-speaking William to take the English throne, and the subsequent political importance of French gave it the kind of importance it needed to bring about major linguistic changes in the language, so that by the thirteenth century, Old English had evolved into Middle English, bringing with it a new kind of literature. Harner [Literary Research Guide, 2nd ed., 1993] lists the following items which are basic to any literary work in the field:

  • I. Literary History of the Period:
    Greenfield, Stanley B., and Daniel G. Calder. A New Critical History of Old English Literature. With a Survey of the Anglo-Latin Background by Michael Lapidge. New York: New York UP, 1986. [1635]

  • II. Primary Bibliography:
    Greenfield, Stanley B., and Fred C. Robinson. A Bibliography of Publiscations on Old English Literature to the End of 1972. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980. [1670]

  • III. Supporting Bibliographies:
    1. "Old English Bibliography" [from 1969 - ] in Old English Newsletter annually [1665]
    2. "Bibliography for [1971 - ] in Anglo-Saxon England annually [1660]

  • IV. Narrative Reviews of Scholarship:
    1. "The Year's Work in Old English Studies, [1967 - ] in Old English Newsletter annually [1655]
      Year's Work in English Studies [330]

  • V. General Histories of the Period:
    1. Stenton, Frank. Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd. ed. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971.
    2. Campbell, James. The Anglo-Saxons, Oxford: Phaidon, 1982.

  • VI. Translations of the Poetry:
    1. Gordon, R. K. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1954
    2. Bradley, S. A. J. Anglo-Saxon poetry: an anthology of Old English poems in prose translation. London : Dent, 1982.

  • VII. E-discussion list:
  • ANSAX-L@WVNVM. Founded and "owned" by Patrick W. Conner in 1985, this is one of the oldest scholarly e-mail discussion lists in the humanities.
    There are now nearly 1200 members. Archived from earliest days on ANSAXDAT at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Gopher to Memorial University at St. John, Newfoundland, choose "Libraries and Electronic Publications," choose "Memorial University Library Catalogue," and follow the prompts from into the catalog; alternatively, choose "ANSAXDAT: Archive for the Anglo-Saxon Discussion List" and go from there. The latter choice is more definitively complete, because it's an automatic archive, but it was started only in April 1993. The former goes back to about 1987, but it has gaps, and has not been brought quite up to date.

  • VIII. Corpus in e-form:
    1. The complete corpus as prepared for the Dictionary of Old English project has been encoded in SGML, conformant with TEI standards, and is available from the Oxford Text Archive.
    2. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records have been encoded in HTML, however, and are available on the Internet.

  • IX. World-Wide Web Sites:
    Labyrinth Old English Pages Electronic Beowulf International Society of Anglo-Saxonists