MATTI KILPIO, LEENA KAHLAS-TARKKA, JANE ROBERTS, and OLGA TIMOFEEVA (eds), Anglo-Saxons and the North: Essays Reflecting the Theme of the 10th Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Helsinki, August 2001.

Abstract

THIS well-produced book collects nine essays, covering a wide-range of topics including metrics, lexicography, material culture, and the history of medieval studies. The majority of the papers were first presented at the tenth biennial meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists held in Helsinki in August 2001, and more or less address the conference’s theme, the significant economic, social and literary contacts between England and Scandinavia during the early Middle Ages. In its thought-provoking comparison of Old English verse with the alliterative metres which oral poets continued to use in Finland and Estonia until the nineteenth century, Jonathan Roper’s ‘On Finnic and English Alliterative Metres’ is one of the strongest contributions to the volume. As might be expected, Roper addresses key issues relating to performance, but, more surprisingly also looks at metrical death, particularly emphasizing the role of linguistic change. Language change is likewise a key factor when Geoffrey Russom extends the word–foot theory he developed in his ‘Beowulf’ and Old Germanic Metre (1998) to the Norse forms fornyrðislag, ljóðaháttr, and máláhattr in his attempt to explain ‘Why There are Three Eddic Metres’. Language contact features prominently in Katrin Thier’s exhaustive ‘Ships and their Terminology between England and the North’, where she analyses both ON borrowings into English (scegð, ‘warship’ and floege, which only occurs glossing L nauicula in the Lindisfarne Gospels) and OE borrowings into Norse (bat, ‘boat’, replacing native beit).