| Previous attempts to describe Old English gnomic wisdom poetry have shown that identification of the genre has been, at best, problematic. It appears that part of the difficulty has been that the criteria employed for identification have been, perhaps, too narrow in scope through focusing on single identifiers such as theme, use of aphorism, or use of the verbs biþ or sceal. This thesis creates a prototype which contains specific criteria by employing analysis of theme, identification of types of aphorism, structural evaluation of individual gnomes, and application of text typology. These analyses show that Old English gnomic wisdom poetry is not dependent on theme, contains gnomes at the beginning and ends of the poems which serve as a frame for the rest of the wisdom, avoids use of axioms, and uses a descriptive superordinal and expository subordinal text type. |