Орта ғасырлық "Сент Эркенвальд" поэмасы туралы

St Erkenwald is a fourteenth century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s. It has sometimes been attributed, owing to the Cheshire/Shropshire/Staffordshire Dialect in which it is written, to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. St Erkenwald imagines an encounter in the seventh century between the historical Erkenwald, Bishop of London 675 to 693, and a corpse from an even earlier period, the period before the Roman conquest of Britain. The poem's themes revolve around the complex history of Britain and England, and the possibility in fourteenth century Christian thought of the salvation of virtuous pagans.

St Erkenwald survives in only one manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2250. The document was discovered in 1757 by Thomas Percy; the manuscript had been in the possession of Sir Humphrey Pitt of Balcony House, Shifnal, and Priorslee, Shropshire. Other important ancient literary materials narrowly avoided being burnt as kindling by household staff in the circumstances in which Percy was discovering this important cultural survival. This is a composite manuscript, created by binding together two pre existing manuscripts which were originally unrelated. One of the other texts in the part which contains St Erkenwald, copied by the same scribe, ends with a scribal colophon noting the year, 1477; since this note is by the same scribe, the copy of St Erkenwald therefore dates from in or around 1477, roughly a century after the poem's probable composition. The first line of the surviving copy of the poem begins with a rubricated large initial "A", and line 177 begins with a similar letter "T". Since this copy of the poem as a whole has 352 lines, the line 177 marks the beginning of its second half, and the marking of this point in the poem is probably intentional. Modern editions have therefore tended to reproduce the division. The rest of the related part of the manuscript contains many other works of a pious and devotional sort, including at least ten other stories about saints in Middle English verse (albeit rhyming verse rather than alliterative verse): although St Erkenwald has usually been edited or anthologised in isolation, the surviving copy appears to have been transmitted as part of a collection of saintly writings. The title of the poem in its manuscript copy is the Latin "De Erkenwaldo" ("About Erkenwald"); the poem's present day title, St Erkenwald, is a modern imposition.

The poem is written in alliterative verse. A typical line divides into two half lines, each containing two primary beats; the beats are usually the lexical stresses of open class words. The first three beats—that is, both beats of the first half line and the first beat of the second half line—normally alliterate together, while the fourth beat normally does not alliterate with the others. Sometimes the fourth beat may alliterate with the first three beats of the following line, possibly as a point of deliberate construction. Beat syllables which have no initial consonant and begin with any vowel (syllables with zero onset) alliterate with beat syllables beginning with any other vowel so that, for example, in the line "In Esex was Ser Erkenwolde || an abbay to visite" the "e " and "a " sounds alliterate together. All of these features of the poem's form are conventional for later fourteenth century alliterative verse.