- Home
- About the Faculty
- Introduction
- History
- Development Activities
- Our Research
- Externally Funded Projects
- Medieval
- Early Modern
- 18th Century
- Romantic period
- Victorian period
- 20th - 21st Century
- American Literature
- Postcolonial and world literatures
- Language and Linguistics
- Film and media
- Textual scholarship, bibliography, and book history
- Contemporary Writers at Oxford
- Travel Cultures
- Faculty Members
- Administrative Staff
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Research Centres and other Faculty Websites
- English Faculty Library
- Giving
- Prospective Undergraduates
- Prospective Graduates
- For Current Students & Staff
- News & Events
- Contact Us
Griffith, Dr Mark
Job Title: Official Tutorial Fellow & Senior Tutor
College: New
Period/ Subject: Medieval
Email address: mark.griffith@new.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
My research interests lie entirely in Old English poetry, most particularly in Old English poetic language, register, metre, metrical-grammar, style and rhetoric. With the exception of my contributions to the Fontes project and a little work on Ælfric, all my publications have centred around two main (and to some extent related) questions:
1. what were the poets compelled to do by the rules of their prosody, what licence did they have and where, if at all, were they free to do as they chose? Probably my principal publication here is my contribution to Godden and Irvine’s edition of The Old English Boethius: (Oxford 2008): the text’s double translation of Boethius’s Metres first into prose and then verse permits unique insight into the operation and development of licence.
2. what are the particular literary merits of the poetry? Although some of the poetry displays overuse of apposition and structures which appear to us awkward or unclear (defects possibly of orality, or evidence of our ideological distance from the period), some of the poems’ qualities have been underestimated, or simply not described. My edition of Judith (Exeter, 1997) was primarily motivated by a desire to show the high quality of its poetry.
On the one hand, therefore, a good deal of what I do is empirical and linguistic or semantic; on the other, it involves a good deal of close reading of the poems and comparison of them. I operate, I suppose, on the lang.-lit. border.
I have just completed articles on the register of the divine voice in Genesis A and on the nature and development of rank in the poetry. With Jane Toswell of the University of Western Ontario I am working on an edition of The OE Metrical Psalms; a preliminary contract has been signed with Univ. of Arizona Press.
Teaching Areas:
Old and Middle English literature; The history and use of the English language.
Recent Publications:
Sections on ‘prose to verse’ and ‘prosody’ in the new OUP 2 vol. edition of the OE Boethius (ed. M.Godden and S.Irvine). Publication date April 2009.
Other Information:
Back to Faculty Members