Sources of the Old English Guthlac poems
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"The tenth century manuscript collection of Old English poetry called the Exeter Book preserves two Old English poems on the Anglo-Saxon saint, Guthlac. The poems are the fourth and fifth items in the collection, following immediately after Christ I, II, and III, poetic treatments of Christ's advent, His ascension, and the Last Judgment. The Guthlac poems have at various times been thought to be as many as five separate poems or as few as one, but the evidence of the manuscript itself indicates that the scribe, at least, considered them two distinct works. The beginning of the first poem on the saint, now conventionally called Guthlac A, is marked by a line of capitals on folio 32b, and the beginning of Guthlac B is marked similarly on folio 44b. When arranged in verse lines, Guthlac A becomes an 818 line poem, incomplete, however, because of a missing leaf between folios 37 and 38 (between lines 368 and 369 as edited by Krapp and Dobbie); Guthlac B is a poem of 560 lines, and it too is incomplete, missing a section at its end, the length of which is still a matter of speculation. Simply on the basis of their length, these two poems loom large in the corpus of Old English poetry, and they have the additional value of being the only preserved Old English poems on a native saint -- a Mercian hermit whose pious life bridged the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth centuries. It has also been proposed that Guthlac B is one further example of the work of Cynewulf, whose runic signature may have been contained within the missing conclusion of the poem."--Introduction.
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