Outline
The poem commonly known as Genesis B or The Later Genesis is embedded in another Old English poem called now Genesis A. Scholars once believed that the legendary first Old English poet Cǣdmon was responsible for not only the Genesis poems but also the entire Junius Manuscript. This theory has long since been disregarded (Weston Wyley 212). The separate existence of Genesis B (lines 235-851 of the Genesis A poem) was inferred in the 1870s by Eduard Sievers, who by philological and stylistic analysis showed convincingly that these lines were translated from an Old Saxon (continental low German) original. In 1894 his hypothesis was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of parts of the Old Saxon original in a manuscript in the Vatican: about two dozen lines of the Old Saxon text coincide almost word-for-word with part of Genesis B. Marsden entitles his transcription of Genesis B “Satan’s Challenge (Genesis B)”, effectively summarizing the poem’s general contents. Genesis A is a paraphase of the Vulgate Latin version of the Book of Genesis chapters 1 to 22, whereas Genesis B is a strikingly original and dramatic retelling of the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of Man.
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