Procopius’s Old English
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David Carlson
Abstract
By the middle of the sixth century, in Byzantine perspective, Britain had so long since ceased to be part of the empire of the Romans as to have become a kind of never-land, some part of the known world, but also the sort of place of which it was possible to credit the fabulous. Information was scarce. Nevertheless, the chief source for the sixth-century east-Roman regime in Constantinople, Procopius (c. 500 -565 CE), met a group of Anglo-Saxons c. 540, who were contemporaries of Beowulf’s king Hygelac; and Procopius may have learned from hoi Angiloi something about the Old English poetry, at a particularly important point in its formation, before the beginning of the conversion of the English to Christianity in 597 CE. Procopius’s English informants told him a tale (of the vengeful Anglo-Saxon bride of a Frisian basileos named Radigis) of a type consonant with later examples of Old English poetry; also, with an historical basis that coincides with the historical milieu to which the earliest Old English heroic poetry also refers, including Beowulf.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Siglenverzeichnis
- Mitteilung des Verlags
- Procopius’s Old English
- Erstlesungen und Korrekturen von Notarsnamen in den „Notarsunterschriften im byzantinischen Ägypten“
- Meletius Monachus on individuality: a ninth-century Byzantine medical reading of Porphyry’s Logic
- On Anatolios in the Geoponika: one author or three?
- … et l’âme créa le rêve. Le traité Sur les songes de Synésios de Cyrène
- Wer hat den Dyotheletismus erfunden?
- Again on the Historia Imperatorum – and on the Mantzikert Campaign
- La dynamique de la vie spirituelle chez saint Jean Climaque: un bref regard comparatif avec saint Grégoire de Nysse
- II. ABTEILUNG
- Totentafel
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Siglenverzeichnis
- Mitteilung des Verlags
- Procopius’s Old English
- Erstlesungen und Korrekturen von Notarsnamen in den „Notarsunterschriften im byzantinischen Ägypten“
- Meletius Monachus on individuality: a ninth-century Byzantine medical reading of Porphyry’s Logic
- On Anatolios in the Geoponika: one author or three?
- … et l’âme créa le rêve. Le traité Sur les songes de Synésios de Cyrène
- Wer hat den Dyotheletismus erfunden?
- Again on the Historia Imperatorum – and on the Mantzikert Campaign
- La dynamique de la vie spirituelle chez saint Jean Climaque: un bref regard comparatif avec saint Grégoire de Nysse
- II. ABTEILUNG
- Totentafel
