How to Write an Anglo-Saxon Style Poem

Writing Anglo-Saxon poetry isn't like writing modern poetry.

Anglo-Saxon poems were originally part of an oral tradition and were rarely written down. They would be memorized and recited, often as part of the entertainments delivered at dinner time as Anglo-Saxon communities gathered in their communal halls. Sometimes, the people who recited them would travel from town to town, telling the same poem to earn food and board in each new place. Epic battles would be retold with monsters, heroes and magic providing exciting embellishments. The Anglo-Saxon poems we know today are the surviving fragments of that tradition. These fragments shape our understanding of their culture and poetry.

Things You'll Need

• Writing materials

Instructions

1. Choose a topic. Traditional Anglo-Saxon poems concentrated on the retelling of great battles and wars. To recreate the style, you must pick a similar subject, such as a modern war or something else you can write about dramatically. This could be an imaginary battle, a terrible crime and the ensuing police hunt or even a couple getting divorced. As long as there is the potential for drama and strong emotions, the subject will fit. It is also common to include a moral lesson in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

2. Use alliteration instead of meter and rhyme. Anglo-Saxon poetry used alliteration to provide beats and form a rhythm. Each line contains four beats with a pause after the second beat. Creating rhythm in this way means the poem won't sound like the modern kind of poetry we're used to, such as Shakespeare's sonnets or humorous limericks. There is no syllable counting or rhyming couplets, so although it may seem an odd way to write a poem, you will have more freedom over your choice of words.

3. Don't use too many similes. Similes do feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, but only rarely. The rapidity with which Anglo-Saxon poetry presents the reader with images prohibits the use of extensive amounts of similes. Instead, Anglo-Saxon poetry describes things briefly and simply.

4. Add kennings. Kennings are an indirect way of naming things, events or people. The sea, for example, may be referred to as "the pathless deep." In Beowulf, Grendel is the "man-devourer." Sometimes the kennings act like riddles, forcing the audience to work out what is meant. Some kennings appear to be well-used synonyms that would have been easily recognized.

References

• New World Encyclopedia: Anglo-Saxon Poetry
• 4ClassNotes.com: Anglo-Saxon

Resources

• Sacred Texts: The Complete Corpus Of Anglo-Saxon Poetry