The mid-5th century AD saw the peak of the migration period – the great migration of barbarian tribes towards southern and western Europe. Groups of Germanic peoples inhabiting what is now Denmark, northern Germany, and eastern Netherlands – the Jutes, Angles and Saxons – crossed the North Sea and invade the British Isles, pushing the Celtic Britons to Cornwall and Wales. Contrary to their barbarian origins, the invaders brought with them sophisticated material culture, beliefs (similar to Nordic ones) and orature – spoken literature, which would later become the basis of Old English (pre-Norman) literature. The elegiac poems, riddles and wisdom literature created at that time reveal the spirituality and sensitivity of medieval people, far from the stereotype of the Dark Ages.
Download files
Citation rules
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holders of the submitted text are the Author and the Publisher. The Reader is granted the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
No. 2(12) (2025)
Published: 2025-11-21
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski