"Thureth" (''Þūreð'', ) is the editorial name given to an eleven-line
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...
preserved only on folio 31v of British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. III, at the beginning of the text known as 'Claudius Pontifical I'. The poem speaks with the voice of this pontifical or benedictional, interceding on behalf of Thureth who the poem tells us had the book ornamented. As Ronalds and
Clunies Ross comment:
As far as we are aware, this is the only specifically identifiable book, aside from the generic book - or possibly Bible - of Riddle 24, that 'speaks' to us from the Anglo-Saxon period, albeit on another's behalf.
Text
As edited in the
Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) is a six-volume edition intended at the time of its publication to encompass all known Old English poetry. Despite many subsequent editions of individual poems or collections, it has remained the standard refere ...
series, the poem reads:
References
{{Old English poetry
External links
The poem "Thureth" is fully edited and annotated, with digital images of its manuscript pages, in the ''Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project'': https://oepoetryfacsimile.org/
Old English poetry