Keywords
Seventeenth-century OE Verse Composition
Universities and the Monarchy
Poems of the Junius Manuscript
Judith
Verse Analysis
How to Cite
Abstract
Edward Thwaites, who published an edition of the Old English Heptateuch in 1698 and was an important contributor/editor behind the scenes to George Hickes’s Antiquæ Literaturæ Septentrionalis [Thesaurus] Libri Duo (1703–5), is well known as one of the Oxford Saxonists, some of whom contributed their own attempts at Old English verse composition to commemorative exercises published by the University in support of the monarchy. Such collections of poetry, produced in considerable numbers by both Oxford and Cambridge universities from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries, comprised contributions mainly in Latin, but also in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Old English. One such neo-Old English contribution by Edward Thwaites has been overlooked, and the present essay reproduces it, with a translation, and considers its faults and merits as an attempt at Old English verse. In style it accords with the usage of the later poems in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle rather than that of the so-called Cædmonian poems.
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