The Dark Ages: A Brilliant History of Medieval Literature from the Heroic Sagas of Iceland to the Love Songs of Provence.

New York, NY New American Library: Mentor , 1958. Paperback First Edition Thus (1958), so stated. Very Good in Wraps: shows indications of careful use: light wear to extremities and the upper corner tip has chipped off, exposing the upper corner of the text pages and the first few of them show a faint crease at the upper corner tip; a faint crease near the lower corner of the front panel and a price has been neatly blocked out to the upper corner of same; the expected tanning to the text pages, due to aging; the binding is square and secure; the text is clean. Free of creases to the backstrip. Free of any underlining, hi-lighting or marginalia or marks in the text. Free of any ownership names, dates, addresses, notations, inscriptions, stamps, plates, or labels. A handsome copy, structurally sound and tightly bound, showing several minor imperfections. Bright and clean despite its age. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 12mo. (7.1 x 4.25 x 0.65 inches). 236 pages. Foreward by Anne Fremantle. Language: English. Weight: 6.1 ounces. Mass Market Paperback. William Paton Ker, FBA (usually referred to as W. P. Ker) born 1855 – died 1923), was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.. He was appointed to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1879. He became Professor of English Literature and History at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff, in 1883, and moved to University College London as Quain Professor in 1889. However he retained his links with Oxford and was there almost every week during the 1910s, and available to keen students there. He was later the Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1920 until his death in 1923. He is referred to repeatedly in J. R. R. Tolkien's essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". W. H. Auden's discovery of Ker was a turning point: "... what good angel lured me into Blackwell's one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost."[