"The Death of King Edgar" is an

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

poem commemorating the death of the English King Edgar, nicknamed "the Peaceful". The poem, a "song of mourning", is found in two of the manuscripts of the '' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle''.

Sources

Two of the manuscripts of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' contain the poem, in the annal for the year 975: the manuscript (also known as "The Worcester Chronicle") and the manuscript, also known as the "

Peterborough Chronicle The ''Peterborough Chronicle'' (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information abo ...

Content and style

The 37-line poem reads like a series of disasters that will befall the English people after the death of the king. According to Lois Bragg, it is divisible into six sections, the last four of which share the theme of disaster: # ll. 1–2, the death of King Edgar # ll. 13–15, the death of bishop Cyneweard of Glastonbury # ll. 16–23, the "breaking up of the monasteries" # ll. 24–28, the expulsion of an invader named Olsac # ll. 29–33a, a comet appears # ll. 33b–37, a famine. While the eighteenth-century historian Samuel Henry already noticed the poem, it is not generally praised for its beauty, and one nineteenth-century critic commented that "it exhibits the muse in the homeliest garb; nor does it contain sufficient of nature or feeling to redeem its rugged barbarity." For historians, the poem evidences an ongoing interest in historical writing in this period.Loyn 489.

References

Notes

Bibliography

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External links

* "The Second Death of Edgar" (975) is edited, annotated and linked to digital images of its manuscript pages, with translation, in the ''Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project'': https://oepoetryfacsimile.org Old English poems Bodleian Library collection British Library collections Works of unknown authorship {{poem-stub