The Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501) is a tenth-century, early medieval manuscript, which includes some of the most celebrated works of early English poetry. Traditional scholarly approaches to this material have argued for a resonance of this poetry within a monastic, Christian tradition. (Förster 1933, Orton 2016, Niles 2019). However, there has recently been a turn towards reconsidering Old English poetry in light of contemporary environmental concerns, and The Exeter Anthology in particular has often attracted scholarly interest along these lines (Estes 2017, Barajas 2021). The first-person voice of the riddle creature has proved especially fascinating for critics interested in nonhuman perspectives in early medieval literature (Paz 2017, Dale 2017). And simultaneously, poets and fiction writers such as Maria Dahvana Headley (The Mere Wife, 2018), Paul Kingsnorth (The Wake, 2014), and Miller Oberman (The Unstill Ones, 2017), have drawn on the Exeter Book to reimagine the present’s relationship with the past, while producing works that interrogate environmental concerns and an uncertain future. Core to both this creative and critical work is a larger, temporal question of how can the present look to the past to imagine a future?
For this project, I joined the discourse by producing my own creative and critical work. My project involved an analysis of Exeter poetry and inspired works such as The Wake through an Eco-critical lens. Then, drawing on the Exeter book — and informed by the critical work above — I produced a collection of Exeter-inspired fiction, poetry, and riddles that address questions of temporality and ecology in an era of climate change.
Author(s): Samuel Fouts, English Creative Writing and English Literature
Advisor(s): Patrick Murphy, English Department
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