The Columbia History of British Poetry

W.H. Auden reported being "spellbound" by his first experience of Old English: "This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish."

The vision of the world enshrined in the mythological poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is generally dark: stories of deceit, cruelty, captivity, war, disease, corruption; then, suddenly, momentarily, God's hand is revealed and the world is washed in light.

The poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, both in Latin and the vernacular, reveals a pervasive fondness for riddles, for making the clear obscure, for elucidating by obfuscation.