This book investigates the practice of mixing writing systems while composing a literary text. Through assessment of highly distinct writing contexts, it explores how the choice of script, in its own right, plays a fascinating role as a prominent narrative feature. The book’s primary focus is on the context of Old English and the ‘signed’ Cynewulf poems as examples of vernacular verse transcribed in the Latin alphabet, but which also employ textual runes. However, the book challenges the confines of conventional medievalist scholarship by presenting a parallel perspective shift analysis of the same phenomenon as witnessed in the radically different cultural environment of Modern Japanese and in the globally bestselling fiction of a contemporary writer, Haruki Murakami. Through a comparative focus on people and on reception, the author breaks the problematic seal on early English studies and invites medieval texts to join in an intrinsically interdisciplinary conversation.

This book investigates the practice of mixing writing systems while composing a literary text. Through assessment of highly distinct writing contexts, it explores how the choice of script, in its own right, plays a fascinating role as a prominent narrative feature. The book’s primary focus is on the context of Old English and the ‘signed’ Cynewulf poems as examples of vernacular verse transcribed in the Latin alphabet, but which also employ textual runes. However, the book challenges the confines of conventional medievalist scholarship by presenting a parallel perspective shift analysis of the same phenomenon as witnessed in the radically different cultural environment of Modern Japanese and in the globally bestselling fiction of a contemporary writer, Haruki Murakami. Through a comparative focus on people and on reception, the author breaks the problematic seal on early English studies and invites medieval texts to join in an intrinsically interdisciplinary conversation.