Description: Undergraduates frequently find the fine Old English poem JUDITH the most stimulating of the surviving texts from the Anglo-Saxon period. In the past thirty years it has attracted a wide range of literary criticism both in the UK and the US. Feminist critics of English literature have been particularly interested by the ways in which the poet has adapted the traditional masculine heroic ethos of Old English poetry to a story figuring a violently active female protagonist.Yet there is no available edition of Judith which is either comprehensive or up to date, or which at all explains how and why the poem is worthy of our attention. This new edition aims to fill this gap. It includes a full Introduction and commentary by the editor, plus a comprehensive glossary, bibliography and appendices.
Brief description:
Mark Griffith is Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature, New College, Oxford. His previous publications include Judith (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies, 2001).
Review Quotes: We have here a Judith edition for the twenty-first century, and fortunately it is a good one. This is a fine, full edition of a splendid Old English poem; and if Griffith had definitively solved every conceivable textual, critical, and literay historical problem, it would in a way be disappointing. As it is, we have a new edition of the poem to read and work with, and a new generation of students can read Judith with more enjoyment and much more scholarly confidence than they could before.-- "Speculum"