The Death of King Edgar


"The Death of King Edgar" is an Old English poem commemorating the death of the English King Edgar, nicknamed "the Peaceful". The poem, a "song of mourning", is found in two of the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Content and style

The 37-line poem reads like a series of disasters that will befall the English people after the death of the king. According to Lois Bragg, it is divisible into six sections, the last four of which share the theme of disaster:
  1. ll. 1–2, the death of King Edgar
  2. ll. 13–15, the death of bishop Cyneweard of Glastonbury
  3. ll. 16–23, the "breaking up of the monasteries"
  4. ll. 24–28, the expulsion of an invader named Olsac
  5. ll. 29–33a, a comet appears
  6. ll. 33b–37, a famine.
While the eighteenth-century historian Samuel Henry already noticed the poem, it is not generally praised for its beauty, and one nineteenth-century critic commented that "it exhibits the muse in the homeliest garb; nor does it contain sufficient of nature or feeling to redeem its rugged barbarity." For historians, the poem evidences an ongoing interest in historical writing in this period.

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