Through poems heroic, religious and elegiac, through the letters of kings and bishops, through laconic chronicles, travelogues and herbal prescriptions, and through voices renowned (Bede, Caedmon, Alfred and Ælfric) and anonymous, we come face to face with the remarkable people who have given to the English the basis of their language, the lie of their land, and many of their most deeply embedded charac teristics. O f all the superb bodies of literature surviving from these centuries - lyrical Welsh poetry, heroic tales and poems from Ireland, Icelandic sagas and eddaic poetry - the Anglo-Saxon is the most many-sided and magnificent. The most sophisticated European culture during these cen turies was that of the Anglo-Saxons, the descendants of the Germanic tribesmen who swarmed into England during the fifth and sixth centuries, swept aside the existing Romano-British peoples, and divided the country into seven great kingdoms. T H E AN GLO -SA X ON W O R LD N INE hundred years separate the decline and fall of the Roman Empire from the birth of the Renaissance.
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