The most important formal aspects of Anglo-Saxons poetry were stress and allitteration. Each line was divided into two halves by a break or caesura and had four stresses; allitteration, which is a repetition of the same initial consonant sound, was used to link the two halves of a line.

Anglo-Saxon poetry was extremely musical and the scop sang it accompanying himself on the harp. However, stress and allitteration were used to help the bard and the audience to memorize the poem.

Other two important features of this kind of poetry are stock sentences or formulas and kennings. A stock sentence was a conventional expression, a commonplace, which was easy to remember because of its frequency; a kenning was a sort of riddle, such as :

beaga brytta = the ring giver, that is “the king”

sinces brytta = the treasure giver, that is “the king”

As it is evident from the above examples, a single kenning could originate a large number of variations, so many words were available to express ideas of frequent occurrence in Old English poetry but we can’t think they are synonyms because each word stressed a different aspect of the thing described.

An other typical feature of Anglo-Saxon literature was the riddle, a linguistic guessing game, whose intention was to mystify or mislead. Riddles describe familiar things in an unfamiliar way, they are generally in the first person, the speaker being the solution personified. Many of them are still without solution.

Anglo-Saxon prose was not so popular as poetry; it was the product of scholarship and was mostly linked to the knowledge of Latin; the greatest impulse to prose writing was given by King Alfred.