This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts – especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts – yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.
Table of Content
Introduction: Powerful fragments: ruin, relics, spolia
1 Encyclopedic miniatures: combinatory powers of loot in the Exeter Riddles
2 Architecture of the past and the future: transformative potential of plunder in Exodus
3 Animated, animating: bringing stone, flesh, and text to life in Andreas
4 Zooming out, cutting through: resistance to incorporation in Judith
5 A hoard full of plunder: paradoxical materiality of loss in Beowulf
Afterword: Resistant material remnants in Old English and beyond
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Dr Anke Bernau is Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester
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