An Overlooked Old English Verse Composition by Edward Thwaites (1671–1711) in Cædmonian Style
Year: 2026
Type: article
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.
Author: Peter Lucas
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7168991482