Andreas: an edition

Andreas is a great adventure describing the voyage of St Andrew and his disciples to the pagan city of Mermedonia, the saint’s rescue of St Matthew from captivity there and his conversion of the town’s cannibal inhabitants to Christianity. This edition gives students as well as scholars an up-to-date text of the 1,722-line Anglo-Saxon poem and reconfirms its canonical merit as one of the longest and most important works in Old English literature. The introduction re-positions Andreas in the context of nearly six decades since the last edition, in which much progress has been made in palaeography, sources and analogues, language, metrics, literary criticism and archaeology. The argument is that the poet was Mercian, that in places he parodies Beowulf’s Danes and that his vision of the city is informed by King Alfred’s burghal ideology in his wars against the Vikings. Andreas is consequently dated to c. 890 and its authorship imputed to a Mercian chaplain in Winchester . The Old English text and Modern English translation are presented in a split-page format, allowing students to gain access to the poem in something close to its original form. The text is accompanied by a full set of supporting notes, and a glossary representing the translation, which follows the poem’s word order and style, allowing modern readers to feel the imagination, ideology and humour of the poet of Andreas.