Birds of Creation in the Old English Exeter Book
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F21%3A10441125" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/21:10441125 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=qyBz6.OZBR" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=qyBz6.OZBR</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.120.4.0429" target="_blank" >10.5406/jenglgermphil.120.4.0429</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Birds of Creation in the Old English Exeter Book
Original language description
In Exeter Book Riddle 26 (“Gospel Book” or “Bible) the quill’s progress creates bird track, a siþade sweartlast, “dark-track traveled” (l. 11a). Because the poem describes the feather quill with the metaphor fugles wyn, “bird’s joy” (l. 7b), we can infer that the scribe writes with “the joy of a bird,” as if his or her rising and dipping hand, the lifting and resting arm were a wing. In these images, writing, copying, reading, and the mobility of birds conflate. The very tangible connection between the act of writing and bird’s flight could be one reason that birds were on the minds of insular writers, but the essential role of feathers in manuscript culture cannot fully explain the appeal of bird imagery to Old English poets, given the importance of oral-traditional rhetorical modes in their poetry. What made fuglas or fleogendan, “fowls, flying ones,” a vital part of the imaginative path taken by so many Old English poems? From riddle to elegy to scriptural translation, we cannot read for long without encountering feathers and talons. I argue here that, as a tool for meditating upon the created world, no other nonhuman creature in Old English poetry rivals them.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60205 - Literary theory
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
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Others
Publication year
2021
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
ISSN
0363-6941
e-ISSN
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Volume of the periodical
120
Issue of the periodical within the volume
4
Country of publishing house
US - UNITED STATES
Number of pages
36
Pages from-to
429-464
UT code for WoS article
000719631100001
EID of the result in the Scopus database
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