The imagined landscape of the Anglo-Saxons
is based on and derived from the reality of
daily life and the ordinary landscape features
that surrounded them. The Old English poetic
corpus imaginatively develops the woodland of
that landscape so that the woodlands of the
mind are of as many different types and used
in as many different ways as the woodlands in
the landscapes of reality. The wooded landscape
of the poetic imagination has a duality about
it that mirrors the duality of woodlands in the
everyday life of the Anglo-Saxons. In actuality
woodland was both a precious resource and
a place of danger, in the poetry it is both an
unremarkable feature of the landscape setting
and a powerful image for the conveyance of
abstract concepts.