Vercelli Book

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 2
1. Anglo-Saxon Literature 4
2. What is the Vercelli Book 6
3. The poems of Vercelli Book 9
SUMMARY 12
CONCLUSION 13
BIBLIOGRAPHY 14

1. Anglo-Saxon Literature
The poetry and prose of the Anglo-Saxons stands at the beginnings of English literature. Between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon literature played a key role in the emergence of an English nation and identity and in transforming the world of writing from a Latin one to a vernacular one. Its literature is simultaneously conservative and radically innovative. It preserved form, content and values from an ancient and oral poetic tradition predating the coming of Christianity.
Our first recorded speech begins with the songs of Widsith and Deor, which the Anglo-Saxons may have brought with them when they first conquered Britain. In Old English, few books were written; most of those were written in Latin, for religious purposes. Most of those that got written have disappeared. Four books of Old English poetry exist today. All seem to have been written about the year 1000.
...

2. What is the Vercelli Book

The first manuscript collection is called the Codex Vercellensis or the Vercelli Book, a mix of miscellaneous poetry and prose religious texts, written in the latter part of the X century and now kept under the index Codex CVII at the S. Eusebio Cathedral Library at Vercelli near Milan, Italy.
The presence of this code in Italy has been proved since the beginning of the late XII century. The manuscript has been preserved in the Capitular Library of Vercelli for centuries, but when, how and why it was brought from the British Isles to this part of northern Italy (Vercelli is a little city in between Milan and Turin, in the north-western region known as Piedmont) many centuries ago is still a subject of discussion.
One of the current conjectures is that the Vercelli Book was left in the XI century by a foreign visitor, probably an English pilgrim, who was grateful for the warm hospitality he had received in the little city during his pilgrimage to Rome.
...

3. The poems of Vercelli Book

The Vercelli Book contains 23 homilies (the Vercelli Homilies) in prose and poetic works following the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse:
• Andreas, a long religious epic poem of saints’ lives that has as its ultimate source an extant Greek prose narrative of the deeds of St. Andrew and St. Matthew, of 1,722 lines;
• Fates of the Apostles, a religious mnemonic poem by the poet Cynewulf;
• Address of the Soul to the Body (A Soul’s Address to its Body), a religious-didactic poem in the form of discourse;
• Elene, a long narrative poem of saints’ lives by the poet Cynewulf;
• The Dream of the Rood, a religious poem probably originally composed in the Northumbrian dialect in the late VII century or the first half of the VII centuries, judging by some lines of the poem inscribed in runic letters on the Ruthwell Cross, and completed later.
...

CONCLUSION
On the whole, it can be said that Anglo-Saxon writing shows language variation within the functional frames of the basic text categories, prose and poetry, and covers the public domains of social, cultural and political aspects of the Anglo-Saxon society. In the later period it is perhaps possible to speak about the rise of two basic stylistic systems in the frames of the functional varieties of the literary written form of later West Saxon.
It should also be stated that there are indications to the early development of functional varieties according to the domains of the language functioning, such as the language of jurisdiction or oratory style of the homilies.
The poems in Vercelli Book are even older than the manuscript itself: it seems that some of the texts were composed between 700 and 850, although it is impossible to be dogmatic about the date of compilation of the code and the period in which the literary texts it contains were composed.
...