Wednesday, November 21, 2007

The Exeter Book is Complete at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

Dear compiler of the Exeter Book,

There are simply too many riddles. Please remove some.

Thank you.

I started posting recordings of the poems of the Exeter Book on June 25, and although I did have a short vacation in there, I've pretty much kept it up at approximately 100 lines per weekday for nearly five months. Today I finally posted Riddle 95, so the Exeter Book is done. You can download an mp3 of any of your favorite Exeter Book poems by going to Anglo-Saxon Aloud. [Update: I did a little checking as part of a back-up, and the entire Exeter Book is 7.6 hours of poetry, or more than twice as long as Beowulf. It takes 8 CDs to store it in regular aiff format. If I ever sell Anglo-Saxon Aloud, it looks like it will have to be about a 20-24 CD set. Maybe I'll just load the entire thing onto an iPod shuffle and sell it that way].

Later I'll probably post one more excerpt from Beowulf Aloud to celebrate what has been "Beowulf Week" on the internet.

Next: On to Judith (which should be done by the end of next week), and then the Paris Psalter. Any Psalm experts out there want to give me tips on the best ways to record the OE Psalms?

2 comments:

Dr. Virago said...

Ooh! Ooh! I'm so excited for Judith! I was *just* lamenting to students that you hadn't gotten to it yet because I really want to hear you read all those 'noisy' lines like "hloh ond hlydde hlynede ond dynede" and other ones like it. And we'll be just starting Judith after the break, so good timing! Yay!

Derek the Ænglican said...

Well, the Latin psalter would have been chanted antiphonally--with a pause at the metrum--presumably using tones like these.

How the OE psalms would have been sung is anybody's guess...