Language of Old and Middle English Poetry

This book gives a linguistic overview of the first eight centuries of English poetry - years which produced such key works as Beowulf, Layaman''s Brut and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It begins with chapters on the social and literary context, before turning in more detail to subjects such as poetic diction, rhymed and alliterative verse, borrowed words, recurrent phrases, rhetoric and linguis...