Worlds Made with Words: Old English Poems that Perform

This course concentrates on constitutive problems in OE literature: the "making" or "makers" of the OE poetry and its performers. How were these roles shaped and learned? How was performance depicted? What powers does a poem assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? When it stages a sensorium of sound and sight? We'll actively fabricate 21st-century approaches to how words made worlds in this early medieval poetic tradition.