Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / An Overlooked Old English Verse Composition by Edward Thwaites (1671–1711) in Cædmonian Style

An Overlooked Old English Verse Composition by Edward Thwaites (1671–1711) in Cædmonian Style

Paper · 2026 · Peter Lucas

Summary

Lucas brings to light a forgotten neo-Old English poem by the Oxford Saxonist Edward Thwaites. It was printed in 1695 in Oxford University's memorial volume for Queen Mary II, and no later scholarship had noticed it. The article reproduces the 36 half-line verses with a Modern English translation and adds brief philological notes. It then tests each verse against Old English metrical types in Bliss's notation and against attested lines from the Junius Manuscript poems. The main weakness is that Thwaites never joins half-lines into full lines through alliteration. This is unsurprising, because the role of alliteration was only spelled out in the early nineteenth century. Most verses still scan, and several are lifted directly from Genesis and Exodus. The poem claims to be "Cædmonian" in style, but its inflectional rhymes, paired synonyms and national-commemorative tone place it closer to the late poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The find adds to the record of early modern Old English scholarship and of verse composition as a test of language mastery.

Key points

  • Source: Pietas Universitatis Oxoniensis in Obitum … Reginæ Mariæ (1695), sig. 2G2r, under the title "Carmen Anglo-Saxonicum stylo Cædmoniano scriptum". It is Thwaites's only known piece of this kind.
  • Metre:
    • 29 of 36 verses (over 80%) can be scanned.
    • Three of these are the irregular Type 3A.
    • Required double alliteration is missing in verses 9, 10, 17 and 30.
  • Borrowed verses:
    • Direct matches include verse 27 = Genesis 1a, verse 11 = Genesis B 626, and verse 36 = Exodus 425a.
    • One verse matches Metres of Boethius 17.6.
    • These borrowings cluster toward the end of the poem.
  • Failed adaptations: Some adapted verses break scansion, for example by adding a superlative suffix or an extra syllable. Their word order often follows Modern English.
  • Ambiguity and style: Engla þreatum can be read as "angels" or "English", possibly as a deliberate double meaning. The poem's doublets and inflectional rhyme align it with Chronicle verse such as the Death of Edgar.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each composed verse is checked against an attested corpus to find its model, and the faults show up exactly where the writer adapted a model instead of copying it.
  • I2. Failing verses are diagnosed by the smallest change that would make them valid, such as reversing word order or swapping one element.
  • I3. A form that is grammatically ambiguous (genitive of "angels" vs "English") is kept open, and only the poem's context, with a possible double meaning, settles it.
  • I4. The positions of accurate verses are tracked across the text, revealing that quality rises toward the end.
  • I5. The poem's self-declared style label is tested against measurable features (rhyme, doublets, tone), and the evidence points to a different tradition.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): Generated sentences could be compared with attested patterns, with extra scrutiny on spans that edit a known template rather than reuse it.
  • I2 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could be framed as minimal edits that turn an ill-formed tree or frame into a well-formed one, and the edit itself would serve as the explanation.
  • I3 (frames): The prag stage could keep competing readings side by side and let the world of the text choose, rather than forcing one early.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation could report error rates by position in the document, exposing drift or warm-up effects that a single average score hides.
  • I5 (tree): When converting UD dialects, the conventions a treebank actually uses could be detected from construction-level features instead of trusting its stated scheme.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of CambridgeCambridge · United Kingdom243 works · 121,396 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksClassics · 116 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Peter Lucas. 2026. An Overlooked Old English Verse Composition by Edward Thwaites (1671–1711) in Cædmonian Style. SELIM 31.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.31.2026.115-22

@inproceedings{lucas2026overlooked,
  title = {{An Overlooked Old English Verse Composition by Edward Thwaites (1671–1711) in Cædmonian Style}},
  author = {Peter Lucas},
  booktitle = {SELIM 31},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.31.2026.115-22},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.31.2026.115-22}
}

References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Primary Sources Benson, Thomas. 1701. Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum Lexico Gul. Somneri magna parte aucius. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre for Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford. Hickes, George. 1689. Institutiones Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ, et Moeso-Gothicæ. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. Hickes, George, William Elstob, Sir Andrew Fountaine, Runólfur Jónsson, and Humfrey Wanley. 1703–5. Antiquæ Literaturæ Septentrionalis [Thesaurus] Libri Duo. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. Junius, Franciscus. 1655. Cædmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac præcipuarum Sacræ paginæ Historiarum, abhinc años M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonicè conscripta. Amsterdam: C. Cunrad. 7 My thanks to Richard Dance (Cambridge) and Mark Griffith (Oxford) for commenting on a draft of this article and to Rafael J. Pascual for some valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are my own. Rawson, Joseph, M. A., and Robert Smith. 1695. Poems on the Lamented Death of Her most excellent Majesty, Queen Mary. London: for Thomas Bennet et al. Somner, William. 1659. Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum. Oxford: William Hall for Daniel White (London). Thwaites, Edward. 1698. Heptateuchus, Liber Job, et Evangelium Nicodemi; anglosaxonice. Historiæ Judith fragmentum: dano-saxonice. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. Thwaites, Edward. 1708. Notæ in Anglo-Saxonum Nummos. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. Thwaites, Edward. 1711. Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica ex Hickesiano Linguarum Septentrionalium Thesauro excerpta. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. University of Oxford. 1695. Pietas Universitatis Oxoniensis in Obitum Augustissimæ & Desideratissimæ Reginæ Mariæ. ESTC R5564. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. University of Oxford. 1701. Exequiæ Desideratissimo Principi Gulielmo Glocestriæ Duci. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. University of Oxford. 1702. Pietas Universitatis Oxoniensis in Obitum Augustissimi Regis Gulielmi III. et Gratulatio in Exoptatissimam Serenissimæ Annæ Reginæ Inaugurationem. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre. Secondary Sources Aarsleff, Hans. (1967) 1979. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press. find
  2. Bliss, Alan J. 1962. The Metre of Beowulf. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  3. Bliss, Alan J., ed. 1995. The Scansion of Beowulf. Edited with a foreword by Peter J. Lucas. Old English Newsletter Subsidia 22. Kalamazoo, MI: Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies. find
  4. Burns, Rachel A. 2022. “Mind the Gap: Inter-Word Spacing and Metrical Organization in Old English Verse.” In Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre, edited by Rachel A. Burns and Rafael J. Pascual, 207–17. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. find
  5. Carter, Harry. 1975. A History of the Oxford University Press. Vol. 1, To the Year 1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  6. Conybeare, John J. 1814. “Inedited Fragment of Anglo-Saxon Poetry [The Grave].” Archaeologia 17: 173–75. find
  7. DOE = Cameron, Angus, Ashely Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healy, Roy Liuzza, Haruko Momma, Robert Getz, and Stephen Pelle, eds. 2024. Dictionary of Old English: A to Le Online. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project. https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/. ↗
  8. Fairer, David. 1986. “Anglo-Saxon Studies.” In The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, edited by Lucy S. Sutherland and Leslie G. Mitchell, 807–29. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  9. Lucas, Peter J., ed. (1655) 2000. Cædmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac Præcipuarum Sacræ Paginæ Historiarum. Early Studies in Germanic Philology 3. Amsterdam: Rodopi. find
  10. Lucas, Peter J. 2024a. Printing Anglo-Saxon from Parker to Hickes and Wanley, With a Catalogue of Early Printed Books containing Anglo-Saxon 1566–1705. Leiden: Brill. find
  11. Lucas, Peter J. 2024b. “Franciscus Junius and the Versification of Judith.” In Old English Poetry from Manuscript to Message, 171–204. Turnhout: Brepols. First published 1997. find
  12. Money, David K. 1998. The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  13. Murphy, Michael. 1982. “Scholars at Play: A Short History of Composing in Old English.” Old English Newsletter 15 (2): 26–36. find
  14. Pascual, Rafael J. 2022. “The Fall of the King and the Composition of Neo-Old English Verse.” In Old English Medievalism: Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, edited by Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck, and Oliver M. Traxel, 209–22. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer. ↗
  15. Prewer, Richard R. 1993. “Charles Bernard and Edward Thwaites: Two Scholars at an Amputation.” Journal of Medical Biography 1 (1993): 241–47. ↗
  16. Rask, Rasmus. 1817. Angelsaksisk Sproglære tilligemed en kort læsebog. Stockholm: Wisborgs for Hedman. find
  17. Ross, Margaret Clunies, and Amanda J. Collins. 2004. “Thwaites, Edward.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 61 vols., edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  18. Thorpe, Benjamin. 1830. A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis by Erasmus Rask. Copenhagen: S. L. Møller. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lucas-2026-overlooked-old-english-verse-composition/