The Old English Exodus
The Old English Exodus | |
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Author | J.R.R. Tolkien |
Editor | Joan Turville-Petre |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Released | 28 January 1982 |
Format | Hardcover |
Pages | 95 |
ISBN | 0198111770 |
The Old English Exodus is a book collecting J.R.R. Tolkien's text and prose translation of the Old English poem Exodus, accompanied by a commentary which was organized from a series of Tolkien's lecture notes from the 1930-40s. The editor is Joan Turville-Petre.
This Exodus does not refer to the book in the Bible, but a 10th-century alliterative poem, it contains 590 lines. It re-tells the story of the Israelites' flight from Egyptian captivity and the Crossing of the Red Sea in the manner of a "heroic epic", similar in style to Beowulf.
The book was printed 3000 copies in 1982 (though dated 1981), so far has not been reprinted.
Contents[edit | edit source]
- Editor's Preface
- Select Bibliography
- Text
- Translation
- Commentary
- Index to Commentary
From the editor[edit | edit source]
The Old English Exodus is based on full notes for a series of lectures delivered to a special class in Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s; the notes were retouched in the following decade. It was never intended to be an edition, although the lecturer scrupulously drew up and edited text as basis of his commentary. It is an interpretation of the poem, designed to reconstruct the original (as far as that is possible), and to place it in the context of Old English poetry.
External links[edit | edit source]
- The Old English Exodus on Archive.org