Judith is an Old English narrative poem describing the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, it is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in the Book of Judith, a story still present in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian bibles but considered apocryphal by Protestants. There is one other extant version in Old English; Ælfric of Eynsham, the late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer, wrote a homily (in prose) of the tale.
___Nowell_Codex_q.jpg)
>>>PUT SHARE BUTTONS HERE<<<
👉 Judith (poem) in the context of Nowell Codex
The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Old English poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf. In addition to this, it contains first a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher, then the more complete texts Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and, after Beowulf, a poetic translation of Judith. Due to the fame of Beowulf, the Nowell Codex is also sometimes known simply as the Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript is located within the British Library with the rest of the Cotton collection.
In this Dossier
Judith (poem) in the context of Symbel
Symbel (OE) and sumbl (ON) are Germanic terms for "feast, banquet".
Accounts of the symbel are preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (lines 489–675 and 1491–1500), Dream of the Rood (line 141) and Judith (line 15), Old Saxon Heliand (line 3339), and the Old Norse Lokasenna (stanza 8) as well as other Eddic and Saga texts, such as in the Heimskringla account of the funeral ale held by King Sweyn, or in the Fagrskinna.