Abstract

In the middle of the Exeter Book, following The Gifts of Men and preceding The Seafarer, there is a 94-line poem usually known as Precepts that purports to record the advice given by a wise father to his beloved son on ten different occasions. Precepts has occasioned as little scholarly discussion as any poem in the Old English canon; where the work is mentioned, it is usually described as an “uninspired admonition” full of “platitudinous advice” and written by a poet “who wrote zealously but not too well.” This “determinedly humdrum” writer, we are told, gives us “the raw material of poetry rather than poetry itself.” In terms of genre, Precepts is most frequently included among the minor homiletic or “miscellaneous minor” poems, and as recently as 1977 we find the poem classified with “the debris or spoil heaps of the monastic tradition.”