Abstract

This is the introduction to the author's translation into Spanish of seven of the poems commonly referred to as the Old English elegies. The text translated from the Anglo-Saxon Manuscript are: Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Laments, The Husband's Message, The Ruin, The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

The elegies, copied by an unknown scribe in Anglo-Saxon England in the late 10th century, constitute a light-filled legacy that contradicts the Renaissance portrait of the cultural void that followed the fall of Rome. This anthology takes us to a world of lords and warriors, of seabirds and Nordic seas, of wandering men and lonely women, along with memories of old myths.

Crossing and merging between the Germanic heroic world and the transcendent hopes or millennial fears of medieval Christianity, these elegies as melancholic as they are splendid are a literary monument of universal poetry. The present translation, unrelated to any simplifying paraphrase, rescues the formal and thematic complexity of these singular poems.

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