Heaven, Hell andMiddangeard: The Presentation of the Universe in the Old EnglishGenesis A

• Authors: Jacek Olesiejko
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Since the times of Antiquity, people have looked up to the sky and developed various conceptions of Heaven and Hell. Already in the ancient Egypt people developed the tripartite conception of universe with earth placed between the Heaven inhabited by gods above and Hell below. The Old English poetic text of Genesis (MS Junius 11; compilation dated to the 10th century) presents the earthly paradise, Hell and Middangeard (or the middle earth). Both Genesis A and B that comprise the poem indeed show a single and consistent descriptions of cosmos. The overt consistency may well seem as interesting as the tradition that the poem draws upon as well as distorts. The universe found in the poem is a fusion of the Christian religious learning as well as Germanic tradition. The idea that marries Heaven, earth and Hell in the poetic sequence of OE Genesis is the concept of hall and anti-hall, city and anti-city. The aim of the following paper is to investigate the modes of this presentation of these parts of the universe by the analysis of the clusters of meaning that are associated with hall and city.

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 153-162

Dates

published

2009-01-01

online

2009-12-10

Contributors

author

Jacek Olesiejko

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

References

• Augustine 2003 The city of God. (Translated by Henry Bettenson.) London: Penguin Books.
• The Old Testament 1996 The Old Testament. King James' version. Everyman's Library: London
• Krapp, Philip (ed.) 1969 The Junius manuscript. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Battles, Paul 2002 "Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’", Anglo-Saxon England 29: 43-66.
• Fitter, Chris 2005 Poetry, space, landscape. Towards a new theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hume, Kathryn 1974 "The concept of the hall in Old English poetry", Anglo-Saxon England 3: 63-74.
• Magennis, Hugh 2006 Images of community in Old English poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Neville, Jeniffer 1999 Representation of the natural world in Old English poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wright, J. Edward 2000 The early history of Heaven. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10121-009-0010-9