A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature 0888449038, 9780888449030

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Publications o f the Dictionary o f Old English 3

A C ollection o f Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature by ERIC GERALD STANLEY

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Stanley, Eric Gerald A Collection of papers with emphasis on Old English literature (Publications of the Dictionary of Old English, ISSN 0826-8134 ; 3) Includes index. ISBN 0-88844-903-8 1. Anglo-Saxon literature —History and criticism. 2. Beowulf. I. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. II. Title. III. Series. PR176.S83 1987

829’.09

C87-093386-8

Cover illustration redrawn from Harley Psalter at Psalm 119 (London, British Library, MS. Harley 603, fol. 64 r)

© 1987 by Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 59 Queen’s Park Crescent East Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2C4 Printed in Canada Distributed outside North America by E.J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands (Brill ISBN 90 04 08315 4)

To the Dictionary o f Old English and to the memory o f its founder, ANGUS CAMERON

Contents Preface

xi

Abbreviations

xv

1. SURVEYS OF OLD ENGLISH STUDIES, THEIR HISTORY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 1- ‘The Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of Anglo-Saxon Records in Prose and Verse: A New Bibliography’ ASE 9 (1981) 223-62

3

2. ‘The Continental Contribution to the Study of Anglo-Saxon Writings up to and Including that of the Grimms ’ Towards a History o f English Studies in Europe, ed. Thomas Finkenstaedt and Gertrud Scholtes, Augsburger I- und I- Schriften 21 (Augsburg 1983) 9-38 3. ‘Sharon Turner’s First Published Reference to Beowulf ’ N&Q 220 (1975) 3-4

49

75

4. ‘The Bibliography of Old English: The Past’ Old English Newsletter, Subsidia 8 (1982), The Bibliography o f Old English ed. Stanley B. Greenfield, 3-9

76

5. ‘Translation from Old English: “The Garbaging War-Hawk” , or, The Literal Materials from Which the Reader Can Re-create the Poem’ Acts o f Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700-1600. Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor o f E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Oklahoma 1982) 67-101

83

II. OLD ENGLISH TEXTS IN VERSE AND PROSE 6. ‘The Oldest English Poetry Now E xtan t’ Poetica (Tokyo) 2 (1974) 1-24

115

7. ‘B eo w u lf Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E. G. Stanley (London 1966) 104-40

139

8. ‘The Narrative Art of Beowulf ’ Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Peter Foote, Andreas Haarder, and Preben Meulengracht Sorensen (Odense University Press 1979)58-81

170

viii Contents

9. ‘Hæþenra Hyht in B eo w u lf Studies in Old English Literature in Honor o f Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon 1963) 136 -51 192

10. ‘The Date of Beowulf: Some Doubts and No Conclusions’ The Dating o f Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase, Toronto Old English Series 6 (Toronto 1981) 197-211 11

209

. ‘Did Beowulf Commit Feaxfeng Against Grendel’s M other?’ N&Q 221 (1976) 339-40

232

12. ‘Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation o f The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent’s Prayer' Anglia 73 (1956) 413-66

13. ‘The Germanic “Heroic Lay” of Finnesburg’

234

281

14. ‘Two Old English Poetic Phrases Insufficiently Understood for Literary Criticism: þinggehegan and seonoþgehegan' Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. Daniel G. Calder (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1979) 67-90

298

15. ‘Geoweorþa: “Once Held in High Esteem” ’ J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London 1979) 99-119

318

16. ‘How the Elbing Deprives the Vistula of Its Name and Converts It to the Elbing’s Own Use in “Vistula-Mouth” ’ N&Q 222 (1977) 2-11

336

17. ‘The Judgement o f the Damned, from Corpus Christi College Cam­ bridge 201 and Other Manuscripts, and the Definition of Old Eng­ lish Verse ’ Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion o f his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge 1985) 363-91

352

III. INSCRIPTIONS 18. ‘The Ruthwell Cross Inscription: Some Linguistic and Literary Implications of Paul Meyvaert’s Paper “An Apocalypse Panel on the Ruthwell Cross” ’

384

19. ‘The Late Saxon Disc-Brooch from Sutton (Isle of Ely): Its Verse Inscription ’

400

Contents

IV. KING ALFRED 20. ‘The Word Alfredian ’ N&Q 204 (1959) 111-12 21

409

. ‘The Glorification of Alfred King of Wessex (from the publication of Sir John Spelman’s Life, 1678 and 1709, to the publication of Re inhold Pauli’s, 1851)’ Poetica (Tokyo) 12 (1981) 103-33

Index

410

442

Preface My thanks are due to Peter Godman, my colleague at Pembroke College, Ox­ ford, for suggesting to me that I should bring out in a volume my published papers on Old English literature not all o f which are in readily accessible jour­ nals and symposia, and to Roberta Frank, o f the University of Toronto, for her active part in arranging the publication o f the volume, and for accepting into it some unpublished papers. It is a vanity to hope to be read, and an even greater vanity for a writer to reread his own writings, some of them in my case now more than thirty years old: alas, it is not wholly a pleasure. Misprints leap out from too many pages; inconsistencies are found to be common; there are errors o f fact, not all of them revealed only by subsequent work in the subject. I have corrected in this reprinting all the original misprints I have noticed; and I have corrected inaccurate references. Minor stylistic improvements have been made, especial­ ly where the original seemed unclear. No uniformity has, however, been im­ posed on these papers which made their first appearance in a wide range of publications in several countries. A few cross-references have been introduced; and where new scholarship has had the result of making unacceptable some statements o f mine I have drawn attention to the new work in a way which will, I hope, be clearly seen as additions o f 1985. The page-numbers o f the original are given in the margins o f the reprint to facilitate reference, if anyone should wish to look up the original. Instead of trying to make major changes I give in this preface a brief ac­ count o f the directions in which I think the papers should now be changed — it is a kind of review, a Selbstanzeige — and in the light of which the papers (which I refer to by number, assigned to them in the table o f contents and in the book itself) are to be read. I. Surveys o f Old English Studies, Their History and Bibliography. Paper 1 ostensibly, 2 and 5 less immediately, and 21 only distantly, were the result of an invitation to write a review-article on A Bibliography o f Publica­ tions on Old English Literature by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson it opens up the highway of Old English scholarship from the beginnings in the sixteenth century to 1972. My articles often pursue byways which Greenfield and Robinson, whose purpose, marvellously well achieved, it was to present a work of reference for current scholarship, could only have followed at the risk o f losing their way. In the review-article itself, paper 1, I should have made clearer that their listings organized under about six thousand numbers

xii A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on OE Literature

include tens of thousands of publications, not just six thousand. Paper 2 was read at a conference concerned with the history o f the teaching o f English in the universities of the continent. The detailed bibliography ap­ pended to it may, I hope, lead others to fill in the many gaps in my reading o f such out-of-the-way material. Continental scholarship concerned with the voyage to the mouth of the Vistula by King Alfred’s contemporary, Wulfstan, has been used extensively in paper 16, and paper 2 does not include every­ thing in 16. Paper 4 is a slightly abridged version o f a paper read at a meeting of the Old English Division of the Modern Languages Association of America at their Convention in December 1981, and in his foreword Stanley B. Green­ field, who chaired the session, says of the three o f us who read short papers: ‘Although the authors have added some footnotes, they have not felt obligat­ ed to change the orality of their originals’, and that may serve to excuse the tone of my paper. Several more translations o f Beowulf have appeared since I sent off paper 5 for the volume in honour o f E. Talbot Donaldson. II. Old English Texts in Verse and Prose. Paper 6 developed from a draft first read at Ábo Akademi in 1968. It did not have the comparison with Shadwell then. Perhaps that comparison serves only to annoy: it is meant to instruct. For us Old English literature is hard to assess. How highly should we regard the pieces of Old English poetry which we like or which we find inter­ esting? Is Shadwell’s drivel better or worse than the Franks Casket inscription? In paper 7 I ask the questions: Is Cowley’s Davideis better or worse as poetry than Andreas; can Beowulf stand comparison with Paradise Lost? In paper 8 I ask: Is what looks like incoherence in the narrative o f Beowulf to be com­ pared with the strange discontinuity o f the Shakespearean Pericles? Much o f this section o f the volume is about Beowulf In gloomy mood I still think that what I say in paper 9 about the hopelessness at the heart of the poem is right, though I acknowledge that I may have made too much o f connotations of individual, often rare words to achieve my dark interpretation. As regards the dating of Beowulf to which I give no firm answer in paper 10, nothing better illustrates the limits of Anglo-Saxon scholarship than that dates o f com­ position within so wide a range as from the age o f Offa to the age of Cnut should still find advocates, and though I tend to align myself with those who assume a date in the half-century around A.D. 900 I know that proof eludes us. Paper 12 is in the greatest need of revision, whenever it deals with Resigna­ tion (which I renamed ‘The Penitent’s Prayer’), for A. J. Bliss and A. J. Frantzen (‘The Integrity of Resignation ’, RES n.s. 27 [1976] 385-402) have demonstrated that we are dealing with two unrelated poetic fragments, the first a prayer and the second the complaint of a man who has undergone

Preface xiii

suffering in the world. What I say about the incoherence of Resignation there­ fore falls to the ground. A further deficiency o f this paper is, that I spoke too laxly about ‘The Penitential Tradition’; here too A.J. Frantzen, in his recent The Literature o f Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (Rutgers University Press, 1982) provides a corrective. Paper 12 may nevertheless be found of some use still in its survey o f Old English poetic diction. In papers 11 and especially 14 I try to indicate how difficult it is for us to gain certainty about the meaning o f individual words and phrases used in Old English literature. When AngloSaxonists in the course of the last sixty years or so shook ourselves free from the fetters of Germanic Philology —felt to be burdensome most by those who seem to carry the least burden in that branch of erudition —we soon began to indulge our fancy in a form of speculation dependent on a degree of de­ tailed understanding o f the language for which we lack the knowledge. Paper 13 was read in 1983 to audiences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Toronto. Paper 15 may seem to range more widely than is strictly requisite for the demonstration of an imperfect pun o f which too much has been made in Old English phonology: the paper was written to honour the memory o f Professor J.R.R. Tolkien whose wideranging seminars I attended as an undergraduate. Paper 16 arose from my continual correction o f beginners o f Old English when translating a phrase in an elementary text; I hoped to eradicate an error of translation, and traced its long history which has a long bibliography. Paper 17 has recently been pub­ lished in a festschrift for Professor Peter Clemoes. The form as it appears in the Clemoes volume is, as a result of insistence on copy-editorial ‘styling’, not exactly as I wished to have it, not even its title; and where there are differ­ ences, the paper in the present volume is as I prefer it. III. Inscriptions. Papers 18 and 19 have not been published before. Paper 18 was read to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences at its 1202nd Meeting in March 1985, and again, a few days later, at the University of Toronto in the presence o f Mr Paul Meyvaert himself. Paper 19 was read at the University o f North Carolina at Chapel Hill in March 1985. IV. King Alfred. Paper 20 is about the history in Modern English of the word Alfredian; it was written in the process o f supplying quotations for Robert Burchfield’s new Supplement o f OED, which includes an earlier quo­ tation than I have in my paper, Ælfredian used by J.J. Conybeare in 1826. Paper 21 is about English literature after the end o f the Middle Ages, but it has an Anglo-Saxon subject as its theme, Alfred the Great as venerated from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, and it extends into French and German writings.

xiv A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on OE Literature

Lastly I wish to thank the publishers (and editors) of the journals and sym­ posia in which these papers originally appeared for allowing them to be repub­ lished in this volume: for 1, The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press; for 2, Universität Augsburg and Professors Thomas Finkenstaedt and Konrad Schröder; for 3, 11, 16, and 20, The Delegates of the Oxford University Press, the publishers of Notes and Queries and The Review o f English Studies; for 4, The Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies o f the State University of New York at Binghamton; for 5, Pilgrim Books, Norman (Oklahoma); for 6, Sanseido Co. Ltd, Tokyo; for 7, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, London; for 8, Odense University Press; for 9, University of Oregon Press; for 10, Univer­ sity of Toronto Press; for 12, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen; for 14, Univer­ sity of California Press; for 15, Cornell University Press; and for 21, Shubun International Co. Ltd, Tokyo. May 1985

E.G.S.

Abbreviations

The following are the principal abbreviations used. Because of the varying house-style of the articles the use of full stops and capitalization is not uniform. The use of italics is also not consistent.

AAe AF A SE ASNSL ASPR

Archaeologia Aeliam Anglistische Forschungen Anglo-Saxon England Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. G.P. Krapp and E.V.K. Dobbie (1931-53) Assmann B. Assmann (ed.), Angelsächsische Homilien und Heiligen­ leben, in Grein, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, III (1889), and repr. (1964) with a new introd. by P. Clemoes BG(D)DSL, BG(d)dSL, Beiträge Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur BLC British Library Catalogue Bosworth-Toller, Bosworth-Toller Supplement J. Bosworth and T.N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1882-98); Supplement (1908-21); A. Campbell, Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda to the Supplement (1972) CCCC Corpus Christi College, Cambridge CE College English DNB Dictiomry o f National Biography E&S Essays and Studies by Members o f the English Association EEMF Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile EETS Early English Text Society EGS English and Germanic Studies EHR English Historical Review Eng English e.s. extra series ES, ESs English Studies fn. footnote GKW Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke Grein Bibliothek C.W.M. Grein (ed.), Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie ( 1 st edn 1857-8); 2nd edn, ed. R.P. Wülker and B. Assmann (1881-98);

xvi A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on OE Literature

C.W.M. Grein, R.P. Wülker, and H. Hecht (eds), Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa (1872-1933), reprinted with new supplements to some volumes (1964-8) Grein-Köhler C .W. M. Grein, Sprachschatz der angelsächsischen Dichter ( 1 st edn 1861-4), revised by J. Köhler (1912-14) Hoops Beowulfstudien J. Hoops, Beowulf Studien, AF 74 (1932) JEGP Journal o f English and Germanic Philology MÆ Medium Ævum MArc Medieval Archaeology ME Middle English MED Middle English Dictionary MLA Modern Language Association of America MLN Modern Language Notes MnE, ModE Modern English n .,n n . note, notes N&Q Notes and Queries n.d. no date of publication given NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen n.p. no place of publication given n. s. new series OE Old English OED The Oxford English Dictionary OFris Old Frisian OHG Old High German Olcel Old Icelandic o. s. original series OS Old Saxon PBA Proceedings o f the British Academy PQ Philological Quarterly PMLA Publications o f the Modern Language Association o f America QF Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Culturgeschichte der germanischen Völker RES Review o f English Studies RS Rolls Series s.a. sub anno SB VS Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research Sisam Studies K. Sisam, Studies in the History o f Old English Literature (1953)

Abbreviations xvii

s.n. Spec STC

Stud Suppl. s.v. s.vv. TPS v.d. Wing Wülker

sub nomine Speculum A Short-Title Catalogue o f Books... 14 75-1640, ed. A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave (1926); 2nd edn ed. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and K .F. Pantzer (1976-86) Studies Supplement sub voce, sub verbo sub verbis Transactions o f the Philological Society various dates D. Wing (ed.), Short-Title Catalogue o f Books... 1641-1700 (1945-51 Index, ed. P.G. Morrison (1955); 2nd edn 1972 — R.P. Wülker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885). Cf. Grein Bibliothek, above.

y,

A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature

1

223

The Scholarly Recovery o f the Significance o f Anglo-Saxon Records in Prose and Verse : A New Bibliography

The new bibliography by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson of the entire body o f publications on Old English literature1 provides the occasion for reviewing not so much the bibliography itself as the subject it covers.2 This article is, of course, not a brief history of Anglo-Saxon studies from the ' dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign to the 1970s. It is a highly selective exemplification of some o f the changing aims and achievements o f scholars when they went to the vernacular records in prose and verse that survive from Anglo-Saxon times. As regards the bibliography itself, I should say at the outset that I have become in some degree a committed party to it because the authors and their publishers generously granted me access to the uncorrected page proofs to give me more time to write this article. I was therefore able to let the authors have corrections and augmentations such as I found. It will be obvious at once to any user o f this new bibliography that it is excellent as a tool o f scholarship because it aims to comprehend our subject in its entirety in so far as our subject is understood to be literary. It goes to the end of 1972; more recent scholarship can easily be found in one of the periodical bibliographies, such as those in The Year’s Work in English Studies 224 (since 1921 [14]), The Annual Bibliography o f English Language and Litera1 A Bibliography o f Publications on Old English Literature from the Beginnings to the End o f 1972, by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson using the collections of E.E. Ericson (Toronto and Buffalo; Toronto University Press, 1980), xxii + 432 pp. Published in Great Britain by Manchester University Press, 1980. 2 Throughout this article every reference to an item in the new bibliography will in­ clude, immediately after the date and within square brackets, the number assigned to it there. Because I presume that every Anglo-Saxonist will in future have access to the new bibliography and in order to save space, references will be brief, except when an item is not in the bibliography. Though the frequency with which the numbers with­ in square brackets appear may perhaps be regarded as some indication of the com­ prehensiveness o f the new bibliography, that many of the items referred to by me have no such number must not be interpreted as (by implication) adverse criticism of the bibliography: the field 1 review is not identical with that of the bibliography. This article is the review article referred to in the brief notification that the new bibliography by Greenfield and Robinson would appear shortly (ASE 7 (1978), 269).

4 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

ture (since 1921 [13] ), Old English Newsletter (since 1967 [43] ) and, of course Anglo-Saxon England itself (since 1971 [50] ). The new bibliography can be said, and the authors claim, to be following in the steps of R. P. Wülker’s Grundriss o f 1885 [5 ], but with less comment than Wiilker provided. Wülker himself made good use of John Petheram’s Historical Sketch of 1840 [807], not a listing but a highly readable and ac­ curate book, praised by Wülker (p. 60) in comparison with J. M. Kemble’s ‘letter’ in F. Michel’s Bibliothèque anglo-saxonne (1837 [805] ). Like all these surveys and like most bibliographical works comprehending Anglo-Saxon studies, including, for example, The New Cambridge Bibliography o f English Literature 1 (1974 [29] ) and ‘A List o f Books Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary’,3 the new bibliography is without bibliographical refinement, though a few useful details are quite often provided. This is essentially a clas­ sified finding-list with more than six thousand items,4 the earliest John Bale’s Illustrium maioris Britanniae Scriptorum ... Summarium (1548 [1] ). Bibliography o f palaeographical works Regrettably perhaps, the listing o f palaeographical works is not designed to include in their entirety publications relevant to Anglo-Saxon studies. Library catalogues are not all included even when they describe or list manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon;5 and surveys as well as individual items, even with plates showing manuscript pages o f Old English, are not fully covered. O f course, easy access to essential information, but far short of entirety, is to be had through N. R. Ker’s Catalogue (1957 [126] ) and its supplement in ASE 5 (1976). The bibliographical achievements of the palaeographers have been outstand­ ing in Anglo-Saxon scholarship from the work o f Wanley onwards, and AngloSaxonists have been able to use Wanley as a firm foundation. Alone o f the

3 OED Suppl. (1933), pp. 1-91 after the supplement. 4 The last number is 6550, but 4500-999 were inadvertently omitted when numbers were allocated. 5 An example of such an omission of an interesting item is C. O’Conor’s printing of Cœdmon’s Hymn from the Moore Manuscript as part of his description of the Spel­ man Psalter (Ker, Catalogue (1957 [126]), no. 271 ), Bibliotheca MS. Stowensis 1 (Buckingham, 1818), 34. It had, of course, been printed in Wanley’s Catalogus (1705 [ 110] ), at p. 287; and the new bibliography lists C. U. Grupen’s reprinting (from Wanley) in Observationes rerum et antiquitatum (1763 [456]) — ‘allerdings mit vielen Druckfehlern’, says Wülker in the Grundriss (1885 [5] ), at p. 35.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A S Records 5

major works published before the 1830s, Wanley’s Catalogus o f 1705 [110] not merely has its occasional usefulness still, but in the fullness and reliability o f its listings has retained importance, and is wholly insufficient in respect only o f material not known to him.6 As John C. Pope says, in his introduction 225 to Homilies o f Ælfric (1967 [5297] ), at p. 2, Ker’s Catalogue is ‘the now in­ dispensable guide to all the vernacular manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period, which in most respects, except for manuscripts that have since been lost or burnt, has taken the place of Wanley’s great Catalogus of 1705’. That reliance can be placed on Wanley for material now lost or damaged ensues from his demonstrable accuracy in describing the much greater number of manuscripts which we can see still much as he saw them. For the manuscripts not known to Wanley, especially for continental materials, there was no comprehensive work o f reference till Ker. The 1830s saw a great advance in medieval scholarship on the continent and especially in England where it was the age o f Thorpe, Thomas Wright and Kemble, and a little later o f Joseph Stevenson. The best o f their Anglo-Saxon scholarship was founded on good work by N. F. S. Grundtvig on Beowulf and R. Rask on the language, and especially on the new philological learning of Jacob Grimm. Continental scholars gladly corresponded about matters o f interest in answer to inquiries from England. C. P. Cooper saw the proposal that Rymer’s Foedera should be re-edited under the auspices o f the Record Commission of which he was secretary as an opportunity for collecting information about all British materials on the con­ tinent, including Irish manuscripts. When, in the course of 1836 and 1837 [240] ,7 members of the Record Commission received officially the Report on the New Edition o f R ym er’s Foedera from Cooper they must have recognized at once that it was a very impressive presentation o f original source materials, with some facsimiles.8 For Anglo-Saxon scholars ‘Appendix B’ has a special significance in Benjamin Thorpe’s editio princeps from a transcript made by a continental scholar9 o f the verse texts from the Vercelli Book (together with 6 The extent to which Wanley’s influence makes itself felt is most strikingly illustrated in Wulfstan studies. His list (pp. 140-3) underlies Napier’s collections of Wulfstan and pseudo-Wulfstan homilies, first in the Göttingen dissertation of 1882 [6507] and then, more fully, in the edition of 1883 [6501 ]. 7 A good account of Cooper’s work as it touches Anglo-Saxon scholarship in connec­ tion with the Vercelli Manuscript is given in Pamela O. E. Gradon’s edition of Elene (1958 [3563]), at pp. 7-8. 8 More facsimiles were issued when in 1869 what was left of the printing of 250 copies was distributed with facsimiles not previously sent out. 9 For the original transcript, see N. R. Ker’s study of 1950 [252].

6 Part I. Surveys o f OE Studies

some other, less literary, texts). Cooper himself was modest in his claims as he sent out the sheets o f his Report to members o f the Commission:10 ‘You must look at them with much indulgence. They are as it were the mutilated fragments of a work never completed, but which, if the artificer had not been interrupted, might possibly have merited praise. At all events I trust you will consider them as furnishing some testimony of my zeal although they may afford small evidence of my Judgment.’11 226 We should recall at this point the low standards o f scholarship of a genera­ tion or two before Cooper: the example I give is too low for inclusion in the new bibliography, though relevant to the history o f Anglo-Saxon studies in their entirety. Charles O’Conor, the Irish antiquary (1710-91), had in his col­ lection an Irish manuscript which his grandson Charles O ’Conor (1764-1828) characterized thus: ‘Among his Irish MSS. one o f the most curious is a poem attributed to King Alfred, who travelled through various districts in Ireland in the 9th century, and gave in this poem an account of what he saw. It com­ mences with the words —Roidheat in Innis Finn Fail; the character is ancient and very obscure.’12 10 Cooper’s administration of the Record Commission came under attack, and his en­ deavours in exact documentation were left incomplete. (Sir) Frederic Madden, who is likely to have been in sympathy with Cooper’s ideal of exact scholarship, defend­ ed him; see Record Commission. Remarks upon the “Reply o f Francis Palgrave, Esq., to those Portions o f the Statements Drawn up by Mr. C. P. Cooper, which Relate to the Editor o f the New Edition o f the Rolls o f Parliament, ” etc. (London, 1832). 11 From a letter dated 19 December 1837, sent to L. H. Petit (1792-1849, Commis­ sioner of Public Records since 1835) with sheets of the Report. I give the date when official distribution of the Report took place as 1836 and 1837 to take account of the date of this letter. 12 Memoirs o f the Life and Writings o f the Late Charles O'Conor (Dublin, no date but certainly 1796), p. 255. Another Irish antiquary, J. C. Walker (1761-1810), refers to the matter in a letter of 25 March 1800, printed, without comment implying or urging doubt about Alfred the Great’s authorship of the poem, in The Literary Correspondence o f John Pinkerton, ed. Dawson Turner (London, 1830) II, at 138. The younger Charles O’Conor became Stowe librarian, and by the time he com­ piled the catalogue of manuscripts, Bibliotheca MS. Stowensis 1 (Buckingham, 1818), he knew (pp. 95-6) that the supposed author is not Alfred the Great of the ninth century but King Aldfrid son of Osuiu of Northumbria of the seventh (on whom see Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (1896 [1616 and 5558] ) II, 263-4). For details of what is in fact involved, see E. Fitzpatrick, Cata­ logue o f Irish Manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy, fasc. 24 (Dublin, 1938), p. 3026 ([Stowe] B. iv. 2, f. 120); a transcript made in 1627-8 of a now lost poem in the Book of Leinster, for which see R. Atkinson, The Book o f Leinster (Dublin, 1880), pp. 20-1, and The Book o f Leinster, ed. R. I. Best, O. Bergin and M. A. O’Brien I (Dublin, 1954), xii, xxii and 125-7.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A S Records 7

Anglo-Saxon ‘monumenta litterarum’used for theology and history including legal history The early nineteenth century, which witnessed the beginning of the end of in­ difference (among antiquaries with some interest in Anglo-Saxon records) to ascertainable and relevant, underlying factual information, saw also a shift of emphasis in the aims and interests pursued when reading the Anglo-Saxon records. Theologians, historians, including legal historians, and students of language began the study, with philology no more than the handmaiden of theology and history. Occasionally an early Anglo-Saxonist, especially George Hickes in the Thesaurus (1703-5 [268] ), considered the poetry in connection with the poetry in other northern languages; but generally from Tudor times to the end of the eighteenth century a less literary view was taken of the ex­ tant records, one consonant with the Renaissance concept o f the monumenta litterarum of Anglo-Saxon antiquity having their special value in tracing Eng­ lish Christian, constitutional and legal institutions to their origins. From the early nineteenth century onwards and increasingly, the literary value o f the study was seen as justifying it, and at the same time philological analysis and comparison with related languages became an end in itself and not merely the means to better understanding of what the records say. A chapter-heading in the new bibliography (p. 41) sufficiently indicates such primacy o f literary 227 values: ‘Studies in Historical, Linguistic, and Cultural Subjects (with a direct bearing on the Literature)’. In theory, the new bibliography, like Wülker’s Grundriss, excludes nonliterary publications. Greenfield and Robinson tell us so at length, and speak o f the difficulties they had in deciding what to exclude. A reader of their in­ troduction who thinks that, o f the four centuries o f publications surveyed, no more than the last century and a half —admittedly, for us who are of them, the most important —accord in any measure such primacy of literature over history and theology, may find his hackles rise as the compilers proclaim as their policy of selection one so much at variance with most earlier and some present Anglo-Saxon scholarship, a policy which panders to what scholars yet unborn may come to think o f as the weakness o f our age o f Old English stud­ ies, not its strength. At the same time, the compilers have excluded the literary works in many languages which have Anglo-Saxon England imaginatively as their setting.13 13 1 hope to write elsewhere [see pp. 410-40, below] about King Alfred in literature from the publication of Sir John Spelman’s The Life ofÆ lfred the Great by Thomas Heame in 1709 [5394] to R. Pauli’s König Ælfred of 1851 [5399]. Some of the

8 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

The rational ideal of good government in ancient times may, strange as it seems to us in an age incredulous of virtue, in the case o f Alfred at least not have been far from the truth in essentials, though false in not a few o f the circum­ stances used to show the ideal in action. 228 In practice, a reader’s hackles will be found to have been up without suffi­ cient cause; for the new bibliography has got in almost everything solid one could have wished for, except for general historical works with sections on the Anglo-Saxons,14 except for publications editing or concerned with charters other than the most important and comprehensive publications,15 and except works of that period had music - incidental music by Haydn, the masque by Arne and an opera by Donizetti. For details see F. Stieger, Opernlexikon I Titelkatalog A - E (Tutzing, 1975), 37-8, 672 and 680: about thirty works are listed. For Haydn’s incidental music, see A. van Hoboken, Joseph Haydn ... Werkverzeichnis II (Mainz, 1971), 450-2, and III (Mainz, 1978), 381 ; the words are a tragedy by J. W. Cowmeadow, Alfred König der Angelsachsen oder der patriotische König (Gratz, 1796), which I have not seen, said to be freely after A. Bicknell’s The Patriotic King, or Alfred andElvida, A Historical Tragedy (London, 1788). (I am much indebted to Professor Douglas Gray (Oxford) for lending me a transcript of the libretto used by Donizetti.) Among other literary works deserving consideration as having helped to shape a nation’s sensibility for an Alfredian ideal are Sir Richard Blackmore’s epic (1723), far removed from any sort of historical reality and justifying the adjective interminable, if that should not, in this context, be reserved for John Fitchett’s epic (1808-34, unfinished), which Robert Roscoe brought to a speedy and timely conclu­ sion (and published in 1841-2). On the other hand, Joseph Cottle’s Alfred, An Epic Poem in Twenty-Four Books (London, 1800) is a much better romantic work. Anne Fuller’s novel, The Son o f Ethelwolf: an Historical Tale (London, 1789), would have given Catherine Morland food for thought if she had stayed in suitable surroundings; it met with a favourable critical reception and was soon translated into French and German. The events of the 878 annal in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle augmented by reference to Asser’s Life o f King Alfred (not yet freed from the accretions of The Annals o f St Neots) and to the chroniclers, especially William of Malmesbury, under­ lie much of the literary exploitation of Alfred. Among the many plays with Alfred as hero David Mallet’s has a special place, not just because of Arne’s music already men­ tioned but because ‘Rule Britannia’, almost certainly James Thomson’s, rises out of it as a fit and moving finale - not taken seriously, alas, in the only performance I have seen. On the other hand, no proud Scotsman is likely to have called out from the pit at one of the few performances of John Home’s Alfred (published 1777, acted and failed in January 1778), ‘Whaur’s yer Wully Shakespeare noo?’ (for which, see J. R. Sutherland, Oxford Book o f Literary Anecdotes (Oxford, 1975), pp. 97 and 359). 14 Historians, even popular historians - 1 refer below (pp. 38-9) to J. R. Green, for exam­ ple - often attempt some account of Anglo-Saxon writings in the vernacular, occa­ sionally with reference to the sources for the history of the age or to give a fuller ac­ count of Alfred’s writings, and at times even the poetry is characterized. 15 To have included publications of all kinds on charters or making use of charters

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 9

for glossaries and non-continuous glosses.16 All publications concerned pri­ marily with historical matters (including the laws) are regarded by the authors of the bibliography as requiring some special reason for admission to their compilation. They often find such special reasons, so much so that, in spite of their stated policy, it comes as something o f a surprise when a work is, in fact, not listed. In this respect their bibliography is quite different from others, especially from W. Bonser’s Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Bibliography (1957 [36] ) which is unsystematic in what it includes, and for charters different from P. H. Sawyer’s excellent and systematic Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List (1968 [6499] ), which very strictly excludes publications thought to be no • longer of use to modern historians. Perhaps the most astonishing area o f inclusiveness of the new bibliography is in the listing of reviews. To have access so easily to the original reception of publications on Anglo-Saxon subjects by contemporaries is quite unusual in bibliographical works; though we may have been spoiled by D. K. Fry’s Beowulf... Bibliography (1969 [1631]) and have come to think o f lists of reviews as normal bibliographical practice, not selective lists but lists of reviews in their entirety. Who among modern scholars before Greenfield and Robinson would have gone to the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum to find out, for example, what was thought by continental scholars of Hickes’s Thesaurus when it ap­ peared in 1703-5 [268] or of Miss Elstob’s abridgement in English o f part of it when it came out in 1715 [270] ? A total reading o f long runs of journals underlies very brief mentions, such as for D. H. Haigh’s The Anglo-Saxon Sagas (1861 [917]): ‘Rvw: A t h { \ 8 6 l n) 472-3 ;SatRevL 13 (1862) 363-4’. Though it is not improbable that with some effort it may be possible to find items omitted from the bibliography, for example in local newspapers and early critical journals, and though for anonymous reviews diligent research may occasionally enable one to identify a reviewer, it should be obvious that a new standard of completeness has been achieved for tracing the history of AngloSaxon studies. 229

Theology As revealed in the form o f references in the new bibliography, the emphasis in would have meant a vast expansion of the bibliography because local and county histories and very many articles concerned with local and regional historical matters would have had to be included. 16 Thus continuous gospel and psalter glosses are in, as is the ‘Durham Ritual’; but the Epinal-Erfurt and Corpus Glossaries and the Aldhelm and Kentish Glosses (to Para­ bolae Salomonis) are out, to give just a few examples.

10 Part 1. Surveys of OE Studies

the early history of Anglo-Saxon studies was not literary. John Strype’s The Life and Acts o f Matthew Parker (1711 [804] ) IV, Observations ii, gives a good account of how the first publications of Anglo-Saxon records were achieved with the active encouragement of Archbishop Parker.17 Parker’s own aims and those of the men he stimulated were primarily theological and legal, as is clearly set out in The Testimonie o f Antiquitie o f 1566 or 1567 [5276] and William Lambarde’s Archaionomia o f 1568 [6281]. The theological aims of The Testimonie are well known, and they remained a formative influence for centuries and are of residual interest even now. Who, in addition to Parker, was involved with the publication is not fully established; John Joscelin cer­ tainly, and as M. J. Routh, among others, thought,1819John Foxe, the martyrologist, too. The purpose in publishing The Testimonie is single, resting in the hope that it is ancient witness to a peculiarly English, not Romish nor Gene­ van, understanding of the mystery of transubstantiation. Since Tudor times, the continuity of that Anglican understanding has been a common subject among Anglo-Saxonists. John Johnson (of Cranbrook) shows in his Collection o f All the Ecclesiastical Laws ... (1720 [6303] ) I, at xix-xx, how four hundred years after Augustine of Canterbury Ælfric ‘wrote many Things inconsistent with this absurd Notion [sc//, of transubstantiation], which had been indeed publish’d and defended in France by Paschalius Radbertus, above an hundred Years before Elfric, but was not yet establish’d either in France, or in any other part o f Christendom’. The same doctrinal point is central to [George Smith’s ] 19 The Britons and Saxons N ot converted to Popery; Or the Faith o f our Ancestors Shewn to have been corrupted by the Romish Church, A nd 17 Even before Parker the earliest Renaissance writers showed their concern for the preservation of the records of English antiquity, famously in The Laboryouse Jour­ ney and Serche o f Johan Leylande, fo r Englandes Antiquities... (London, 1549), of which ‘The Conclusion’ has a list of Latin sources for the history of England early in what we call the Middle Ages, and an appreciation of Bede’s use of sources. Eigh­ teenth-century reprints of The Laboryouse Journey include that in an appendix to William Huddesford’s edition of The Lives o f ... John Leland, Thomas Heame and Anthony à Wood (Oxford, 1772) I, a work in which is shown some sense of propor­ tion for what is valuable in the scholarship of earlier ages. [Cf. pp. 81-2, below.) 18 Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Opuscula (Oxford, 1832) II, 531, in the course of his annotations to Ælfric’s epistles. Cf. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, 2nd ed. (1570 [5277]) II, 1301-10. Cf. J. Strype’s Parker (1711 [804]), p. 530, on the Saxon Gospels of 1571 [5860], ‘The care of which lay upon John Fox'. 19 For the attribution see Wfilliam] H[unt] in DNB, under George Smith (1693-1756), the non-juring bishop of Durham, who is well known to Anglo-Saxonists because he completed his father John Smith’s great edition of Bede’s Historia (1722 [5547] ), a work to which his son frequently refers in The Britons and the Saxons.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance o f A-S Records 11

restored to its ancient Purity by the Reformed Church o f England (London, 1748), esp. pp. 321-38. J. Petheram in Historical Sketch (1840 [807] ), at p. 32, wrote: ‘It is now well known that the Anglo-Saxons, long after their con230 version to Christianity, and even as late as the eleventh century, entertained opinions on the subject o f Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament, very similar to those professed by the reformed church of England.’ Very strenuous on the subject, and in several publications, was H. Soames . 20 His view that ‘Anglo-Saxon divinity is essentially Protestant’ was controverted by J. D. Chambers, Anglo-Saxonica ... (London, 1849), esp. pp. 31-54, on the welljustified grounds that Soames does not define his terms with sufficient preci­ sion. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, the tools o f Anglo-Saxon lexicography were insufficient to gain semantic precision for vernacular theological terms of such subtlety; it would be difficult still. R. M. White puts the Protestant view forcefully in his edition of The Orrnulum (1852 [809] ) I, at xvi: ‘The Saxon homilies, from which Whelock has in­ serted various extracts in his edition of Beda , 21 serve moreover to shew a re­ markable freedom from errors into which the Roman Catholic Church has fallen.’ F. E. C. Dietrich, in his fundamental ‘Abt Aelfrik’, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 25 (1855 [5187]), at 576-87, summarizes the contro­ versy of Protestants against Roman Catholics with more references still. Re­ cently C. L. Wrenn in the Willard Festschrift (1969 [5336 and 444] ) looks upon Æ lfric’s formulation of the mystery of transubstantiation as one o f ‘some two contributions o f basic significance’ (p. 189) made by the AngloSaxons to theology, selecting (p. 186) a careful form of words from Æ lfric’s second Paschal Homily: ‘In a single sentence he has summed the basic mean­ ing o f the Eucharist: Christ consecrated upon his altar the mystery of our peace and o f our unity. “ Crist gehalgode on his beode þa gerynu ure sibbe and ure annysse.” ’ Denying sovereign pontificality to the pope was a further theological reason for drawing on the records from the earliest period o f the church in England. 20 In A n Inquiry into the Doctrines o f the Anglo-Saxon Church (1830 [5185]), at pp. 384-6 and 421-2, he considers Ælfric on transubstantiation, and particularly the relationship of Ælfric to Ratramnus. He returned to ‘Elfric’s invaluable testimony against Romish opinions’ in The Anglo-Saxon Church: its H istory... (1835 [5186]), at p. 248 and passim; and specifically in answer to John Lingard’s The History and Antiquities o f the Anglo-Saxon Church (1845 [461]), Soames returned to the sub­ ject yet again in The Latin Church during Anglo-Saxon Times (London, 1848), at pp. 432 and 466-72, the running title on pp. 466-9 being ‘Anglo-Saxon divinity substantially Protestant’. 21 Of 1643 [5546].

12 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

The Anglo-Saxon translation o f the Capitula Theodulfl had been published by Sir Henry Spelman in the Concilia I (1639 [6284] ), at 584-618.22 When George Hickes (anonymously) wrote An Apologetical Vindication o f the Church o f England: in Answer To Those who reproach Her with the English Heresies and Schisms, Or suspect Her not to be a Catholick Church, Upon their 231 Account (London, 1687), at p. 58 he urged the ‘Apostolic Equality’ of the English episcopate against ‘the exercise o f ... usurped Power o f the Pope’s ’ with reference to and quotation from the first Capitulum: ‘Ge sceolon eac witan þat [s/c] eowre hades [s/c] ... þa B[i]scopas Aarones . and þa mæsse preostas [habbað] þone had his suna . ’ 23 That is what he used to show how ‘the Saxon Bishops’ advised their clergy, that without reference to Rome ‘the Bishops are o f the Order o f Aaron, and the Priests have the Order o f his Sons’. At the time of publishing his Thesaurus (1703-5 [268]) George Hickes also brought out Several Letters Which passed between Dr. George Hickes, and a Popish Priest. Upon occasion o f a Young Gentlewoman ’s Departing from the Church o f England to that o f Rome ... (1705 [6261] ), chiefly to answer a Roman Catholic’s query, ‘(if the Protestant Church be the true One) where it was for many hundreds of Years before Luther? Name your Bishops, Writers, Churches ...’. Hickes gives an account, partly from Bede, of course, o f the con­ version, and he also uses vernacular texts of prayers and creeds (pp. 61-4), but chiefly Æ lfric’s De Fide Catholica from what is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 34224 and ‘another excellent Saxon Sermon , 25 in which you may see the Doctrine of our Ancestors, concerning Prayer, Faith and Repentance’, as well as the ordinance in the Ecclesiastical Laws of King Cnut ‘that every one should learn the Lord’s Prayer, as a Rule of Prayer, and the Apostles Creed, as a Confession o f the right F aith ’ . 26 It is evidence o f marvellous erudition that Hickes before the systematic publication o f Anglo-Saxon records was able 22 What the text is was identified by John Johnson in the Collection (1720 [6303] ) I, at sig. Aa2v, though B. Thorpe, in his edition in Ancient Laws and Institutes (1840 [6292] ), makes no mention of Johnson’s identification. Cf. Hans Sauer’s standard edition, Theodulfi Capitula in England, Münchener Universitäts-Schriften, Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie 8 (1978), at 81-2. 23 See ibid. p. 307, lines 12-17. 24 Ker, Catalogue (1957 [126]), no. 309, art. 40. For the earliest printing, see A. Whelock’s Historia Ecclesiastica (1643 [5546]), pp. 41-50, 420 and 422. 25 Probably The Homilies o f Wulfstan, ed. D. Bethurum (1957 [6503]), no. VII, and related Wulfstan texts, of which, of course, I Cnut 22-22.6 is one; see D. Whitelock, EHR 63 (1948 [6525] ), esp. 446. 26 F. Liebermann, Gesetze (1903-16 [6299] ) I, 302-4; and cf. ibid. Ill, 201, on related texts.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 13

to draw on related but superficially very different texts. More fundamental, however, than any display of learning is the use made of the institutes promul­ gated in the antiquity of the church in England to explain its nature in con­ trast with Romish innovation.

History and law The other great Renaissance and post-Renaissance interest in Anglo-Saxon England amounts to a demonstration o f the antiquity and continuity in Eng­ land o f the orderly governance of church and state, an interest that first mani• fested itself in William Lambarde’s Archaionomia o f 1568 [6281], and de­ veloped in very many studies by historians, particularly legal historians, over the centuries as they invoke Anglo-Saxon institutions as an ideal and the pre232 figuration o f an ideal of later ages. 27 This central activity of Anglo-Saxonists makes it impossible for us to sustain the view that legal texts are less literary than, for example, theological texts. The Alfredian ideal o f the late eighteenth century and after 28 had at bottom not only the pious myths o f early medieval St Neots or Renaissance Oxford 29 and the facts, some more wonderful than fiction, in the Chronicle, in the genuine Asser and, more doubtfully, in William of Malmesbury, but also King Alfred’s Will3 0 and especially that part of it in which he describes how, when his father’s will was read at the assembly at Lungandene, he, appealing to the love that the West Saxon council might bear him, guaranteed safety to those who spoke their mind as conscience prompted in a direction hostile to him and thus subordinated his royal person to the law o f the land. Without knowledge of this legal document we cannot understand fully the literary appeal of Alfred. 27 The theme, given a literary extension, rings out in P. Clemoes’s inaugural lecture, Rhythm and Cosmic Order in Old English Christian Literature (1970 [6 8 6 ] ). 28 See above, p. 7 and n. 13 [and paper 21, below]. 29 For King Alfred’s refoundation of the University of Oxford, see J. Parker, The Early History o f Oxford 727-1100, Oxford Hist. Soc. Ill (1884); for the origin of Alfred’s minstrelsy in the enemy’s camp, see Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Ser., I (1887), 126. 30 The Latin of the Liber de Hyda was available in Michael Alford’s Fides Regia Anglicana sive Annales Ecclesiæ Anglicanae (Liège, 1663) III, at 149-51. The Anglo-Saxon was first published for Thomas Astle, then owner of the manuscript, now London, British Library, Stowe 944, by Owen Manning, in The Will o f King Alfred (Oxford, 1788), at pp. 10-13, 31 and 41-2. For the early history of the manuscript, see W. de Gray Birch, Liber Vitae... of... Hyde (1892 [6363]),pp. i-iii. See further P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters (1968 [6499]), no. 1507. The existence of a fourteenth-century translation into English is evidence of a continual interest (Sawyer, ibid., gives details).

14 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

As we have seen ,31 Wulfstan writes homilies and laws, and his statecraft employs the same style as his exhortation. The form o f expression in legal records is not to be divorced from the form o f expression o f literary records. The alliterative ornament o f the laws gives force — not always clarity — to the way they are expressed. Legal institutions may help to explain texts now read as literature. A good example o f forceful vernacular expression occurs in Ine 61.32 It includes the alliterative phrase to ... healme and to ... heorbe. Jacob Grimm, had he known the alliterative phrase, would, no doubt, have liked it for his lists in Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer (Göttingen, 1828), and especially for his section Halm (pp. 121-30). Omission shows that he did not know it, for it was the kind of pair to which he attached particular importance, combining as it does the oral fulgor o f alliteration with impressive synecdoche: the haulm is no more the whole harvest than the hearth is the whole estate, but each is rather an essential and, therefore, centrally symbolic part o f the basis for the 233 assessment of church-scot. It was not correctly understood at once; to healme proved difficult. John Johnson got it wrong in Collection (1720 [6303]) I, at sig. E 4 : ‘The Church-Scot shall be paid for the Roof, and Fire-hearth, where Men are at Mindwinter’; and so still Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes (1840 [6292]), folio ed., p. 61, n. a, octavo ed. I, 141, n. b, on healm, ‘This word, in its simplest signification, meant a straw; and hence its secondary meanings, a chimney, and a roof of thatch. The latter may have been its im­ port here; nor, in this sense, is the word altogether obsolete in the provinces.’ Bosworth-Toller (1882-98 [75]) still has that, though the Supplement of 1921 corrects it to ‘stubble’ and explains how the Latin o f Quadripartitus misled earlier scholars. It should not have misled Bosworth in the Dictionary any longer; Reinhold Schmid had given the correct interpretation in what was (before Liebermann) the standard edition o f the laws, Die Gesetze der Angel­ sachsen, 1 st ed. 1832, 2nd ed. 1858 [6291]. The history of the scholarly study o f the laws is in part a history o f the struggle to recover the significance o f words; it is also a history o f the struggle to understand the nature of the institutions. A good account o f the history o f 31 See especially above, p. 12 and n. 25, as well as D. Whitelock’s other work on Wulf­ stan (now conveniently listed in the new bibliography) of 1937 [6520], 1941 [6521], 1942 [6523], 1955 [6529] and 1965 [6537], 32 Liebermann, Gesetze (1903-16 [6299]) I, 116-17, and III, 79/1-2, n. 2. ‘Ciric-sceat mon sceal agifan to þam healme 7 to þam heorbe be se mon on bit) to middum wintra’ (‘Church-scot must be rendered from the haulm and the hearth where one dwells at midwinter’).

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 15

the tools o f scholarship of Anglo-Saxon legal history is readily available in Liebermann’s introduction. Among relatively early works now forgotten, I think undeservedly, is George Phillips’s Versuch einer Darstellung der Geschichte des Angelsächsischen Rechts (1825 [6307] ). He was particularly good in singl­ ing out as significant that the Anglo-Saxons in the administration of law and in the ecclesiastical institutes made use o f the vernacular where they might have been expected, and would almost certainly have been able, to use Latin. He was therefore interested in the legal terminology of the Anglo-Saxons, a subject that had been given some lexicographical treatment by Sir Henry Spel­ man early in the seventeenth century . 3 3 Several writers strove to improve on Spelman, among them, for example, James Ibbetson, who in A Dissertation on the National Assemblies under the Saxon and Norman Governments (London, 1781), at p. 6 , attem pted to distinguish for such words as ealdorman technical legal usage from common speech, a distinction not previously made as far as I know . 34 As for theology, so for law: the precise significance o f the extant AngloSaxon records was not easily recovered. It was recognized early that the Anglo234 Saxons used vernacular legal terminology with precision, but early scholars often lacked the necessary practical grammatical knowledge to understand. One example of such a difficulty must suffice —it involves establishing which grammatical referent is meant. Ine 22 reads: ‘Gif ðin geneat stalie 7 losie ðe, gif ðu hæbbe byrgean, mana þone þæs angyldes; gif he næbbe, gyld ðu þæt angylde, 7 ne sie him no ðy ðingodre . ’35 D. Whitelock in EHD 1 (1955 [402] ), at 366, translates: ‘If your geneat steals and escapes from you, if you have a surety, demand the compensation from him; if he has no surety, pay you the compensation, and he is not to be any nearer a settlement on that account.’ Earlier scholars36 thought that the phrase g if he naebbe refers, not to the surety, 33 From A to L Spelman’s work was published as Archaeologus in 1626 [6283] ; but the whole of the glossary was published only in Sir William Dugdale’s revision as Glossa­ rium Archaiologicum in 1664 and again 1687. Spelman’s important interest in AngloSaxon legal terminology appears, of course, in this work which, however, covers legal antiquities of a period wider than that of the Anglo-Saxons. 34 For a modem statement of that distinction, see A. J. Bliss, 'Beowulf, Lines 30743075 ’, J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller —Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and R. T. Farrell (Ithaca and London, 1979), p. 53, n. 42: ‘the relevance of prose usage to poetic usage must be considered very dubious, especially when prose usage is effectively limited to legal contexts’. 35 Liebermann, Gesetze (1903-16 [6299]) 1 ,116-17, and III, 79/1-2, n. 2. 36 Thus D. Wilkins, LegesAnglo-Saxonicae (1721 [6288] ), p. 18; Phillips, Versuch (1825 [6307] ), pp. 106-7, n.; and Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes (1840 [6292] ), folio ed., pp. 50-1, octavo ed. I, 117.

16 Part 1. Surveys of OE Studies

but to the means. The first scholar to offer the current and, surely, correct interpretation was R. Schmid in the first edition o f the Gesetze (1832 [6291] ), at p. 19. H. (v.) Marquardsen, who became a distinguished jurist , 3 7 explicitly corrected Schmid in his Heidelberg Habilitationsschrift, Ueber Haft und Bürg­ schaft bei den Angelsachsen (Erlangen, 1852), at p. 34, and reverts to ‘if he lacks the angyld'. Schmid in his second edition (1858), at p. 31, maintained his earlier view, that the surety is referred to; later scholarship supports him. Important use is made of Anglo-Saxon legal texts for the elucidation of more narrowly literary texts of the period; and that use gave to the study of the laws a special significance early in the nineteenth century, a significance which it still holds. Jacob Grimm led the way in Deutsche Rechtsalt erthümer (Göttingen, 1828). He elucidated Beowulf 2884-91 by relating the passage to the Germanic legal background (pp. 42 and 731). Later scholars similarly eluci­ dated other passages. Thus the Haethcyn episode is elucidated as unintentional and therefore inexpiable crime in Heinrich Brunner’s masterly paper of 1890 [1843], especially at pp. 816-17. Hrothgar’s prediction that when Hygelac dies the Geats will find no better hordweard haeleþa (1852a) than Beowulf to elect as successor is elucidated by F. Liebermann in The National Assembly in the Anglo-Saxon Period (Halle, 1913), at pp. 73-4, in relation to Anglo-Saxon legal institutions. In the Haethcyn episode, F. Klaeber in the glossary to his edition of Beowulf (1st ed. 1922 [1650]) compares feohlëas (2441a) with botlëas o f the Anglo-Saxon laws; and D. Whitelock takes the matter further and satisfactorily interprets within the episode lines 2444-71 in MÆ 8 (1939 [2786] ), at 198-204. The central concept o f the episode is the legal one of inexpiable crime. 235

Lexicography In every literary endeavour involving understanding, linguistic competence is required. Though the new bibliography does not list fully linguistic studies of every kind, it does cover lexical studies and lexicographical works. The early history of Anglo-Saxon lexicography is well known and its sources are exten­ sively given in the bibliography. The biographers o f the early scholars are aware o f the existence o f Laurence Nowell’s manuscript dictionary produced in the reign o f Queen Elizabeth ; 3 8 Nowell himself was the subject o f Robin Flower’s British Academy Lecture of 37 Cf. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie LII (1906), 216-18. 38 But published only recently, by A. H. Marckwardt in 1952 [78].

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 17

1935 [825] . 39 James Brome, William Somner’s biographer ,4 0 seems to have recognized the importance of the first dictionary o f an ancient language to students trying to recover the significance o f extant records written in it, as he traces Somner’s lexicographical publications, beginning with his glossary in Meric Casaubon’s De Quatuor Linguis Commentatio (1650 [53]), glowingly described in the new bibliography as ‘the earliest published dictionary o f OE’, followed by Somner’s glossary to R. Twysden’s Historia Anglicanœ Scriptores X (1652 [54]), and culminating in the Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum o f 1659 [55]. The earliest study of the vocabulary reflects the interests of early Anglo-Saxonists, in theology, in law, in the documentation o f pre-Con­ quest affairs, public and private, secular and ecclesiastical, and these interests are consonant with the interests manifested in the Anglo-Saxon records them­ selves.

Literature: the imaginative reading o f Anglo-Saxon records The emphasis on literature in the new bibliography is hardly congruous with the balance o f interests of the Anglo-Saxons themselves as revealed in their writings. They did not design their writings to be read as literature; they lacked the concept literature and so they could not know that what they wrote might be read as literature by later ages, even when they themselves may have known that some o f their writings were well written. Of course they knew that some of their writings were verse. Ten times as much prose as verse survives: 41 that the new bibliography has about 3765 entries for verse against about 1412 entries for prose reflects the interests o f the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 236 not those o f the Anglo-Saxons themselves. This preponderantly literary view o f the vernacular records o f the Anglo-Saxons in prose and verse reminds me of The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature, which a New York publisher brought out in 1936 under the editorship of E. S. Bates. It was not thought that the Almighty, nor even King James’s translators (whose version 39 He had received incidental attention in the biographies of others: John Strype, Life and A cts o f Matthew Parker (1711 [804]) IV, Observations II {ad finem), 536; Ralph Churton, Life o f Alexander Nowell (Oxford, 1809), pp. 236-9 (a summary of earlier work on Laurence Nowell [but probably not the Saxonist]). 40 In Somner’s Treatise o f the Roman Ports and Forts in Kent (Oxford, 1693), ‘Life’, pp. 76-7. 41 My count, of roughly two and a quarter million words of prose to a little less than a quarter million words of verse (NM 72 (1971 [1248]), 385-6), may be found, when all that survives is concorded by computer, to be not too far out.

18 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

in modernized spelling the book was), had so designed the bible, but that the publisher and the editor intended the edition for literary reading and printed it, not, as time-honoured custom requires, each verse its own numbered para­ graph, but continuously, as is done ordinarily for prose, with the bits which were poetry in the original printed to look like poetry in the translation. Bates’ prefatory remarks (p. xi) illustrate well the aesthetic proclivities o f a modern literary reading of ancient theological writings: ‘In the New Testament, which is generally admitted to be on a considerably lower literary level than the Old Testament, the reader finds his sense o f the events in the life o f Jesus confused both by the repetitions and divergences o f the four Gospels, while the thun­ derous utterances of Paul, that burst into lightning in Corinthians and Romans, are dulled, to our ears, by his constant iteration and are further weakened by echoes in other epistolary writers.’ In some modern views, the life of Beowulf is similarly confused, and Wulfstan’s homiletic lightning similarly suffers in our ears by iteration and by the use made of him echoingly in other homiletic writers. As the imaginative modern reader goes to ancient records for more than facts to be recovered, he may find in them, as many now do, some literary art revealed, or he may turn to them for some moral lesson as did earlier generations o f readers. Often the moral is political: a wide range o f material related on the one hand to AngloSaxon England and on the other to the political ideal morality o f seventeenthcentury England is surveyed by Christopher Hill in ‘The Norman Yoke ’ ,4 2 though he reads his Saxon Arcadia as through the helots’ eyes when he looks at what appears to me to be an early modern idealization by the well-born and leisured classes contemplating strata of ancient society which, translated into contemporary terms, would often be beneath them. A parallelism, politically motivated in so far as it is a piece o f Caroline adu­ lation, is the raison d'être for the first modern life of King Alfred: Robert Powell’s The Life o f Alfred, or, Alvred: The first Institutor o f subordinate government in this Kingdome, and Refounder o f the Vniversity o f Oxford. Together with a Parallel o f our Soveraigne Lord, K. Charles untill this yeare, 1634 (London, 1634), which I select from among the great number o f early modern historical works to which an imaginative twist is given, making the ancient relevant to the modern world, because the title itself sufficiently pro237 claims the message. Such parallels only rarely extend throughout a whole work (as in the case of Powell’s Life o f Alfred), but are more usually confined to the dedication to a prince. The Norman antiquary Jaques Clavigny thus dedicates 42 Originally published in Democracy and the Labour Movement. Essays in honour o f Dona Torr, ed. John Saville (London, 1954), at pp. 11-66.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 19

to Louis XIV the .first o f his books, La Vie de Guillaume le Conquérant, duc de Normandie, et roy d'Angleterre (Bayeux, 1675); the possibility o f subjugat­ ing England is made the obvious parallel, for the land that became by just con­ quest Duke William’s still lies across the narrow seas. God’s purpose and God’s punishment of a sinful nation may be revealed by what is an imaginative rather than a dispassionate study of historical parallels, as in Orosius or Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Wulfstan in Sermo Lupi ad Anglos used, as Alcuin had done before him in a letter known to Wulfstan, the Anglo-Saxon conquest o f Britain as a parallel to the divine punishment assured­ ly to come to the English more than five centuries later as the Vikings harassed .the English, and Wulfstan (like Alcuin at a time also o f Viking raids) explicitly recalled Gildas on the destruction o f his people .4 3 After the Great Fire o f London, Edward Stillingfleet still felt the force of the parallel in the sequence o f civil wars, pestilence and fire, and made effective use of it in A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House o f Commons... Octob. 10. being the Fast-day appointed fo r the late dreadfull Fire in the City o f London (London, 1666).44 The example of Wulfstan went much further with William Elstob, George Hickes’s nephew and first editor of Sermo Lupi;4S it shaped his view of life, as is revealed in An Essay on the Great A ffinity and Mutual Agreement O f the Two Professions o f Divinity and Law, And on the joint Interests o f Church and State. In Vindication o f the Clergy's concerning themselves in Political Matters... (London, n.d. —printed without the author’s authority —(1713)). Elstob, at pp. 29-31, makes use o f the Gildas passage from Sermo Lupi and, at 43 See D. Whitelock’s edition, 1963 [6502], pp. 65-6; her notes indicate Wulfstan’s debt to Alcuin’s letter to Archbishop Æthelheard. Sermo Lupi was not available to Stillingfleet for his sermon of 1666; it was first printed in 1701 [6500], by Elstob who provided a Latin translation, the whole substantially as in Hickes’s Thesaurus, II.2 (1703 [268] ), at 98-106. [Reading University possesses a copy.] The Alcuin letter could have been seen by Stillingfleet in Alchuuini... opera, ed. A. Quercetanus (i.e. André Du Chesne) (Paris, 1617), Epistola XXVIII, col. 1535C. 44 lGod forbid, we should be so near a final subversion and utter desolation, as the ten Tribes were, when none of these things would bring them to repentance; but yet the method God hath used with us seems to bode very ill in case we do not at last return to the Lord. For it is not only agreeable to what is here delivered as the course God used to reclaim the Israelites, but to what is reported by the most faithful Historian of those times of the degrees and steps that God made before the ruines of the British Nation. For Gildas tells us the decay of it began by Civil Wars among them­ selves, and high discontents remaining as the consequents of them, after this an universal decay and poverty among them ...’ (pp. 16-17). 45 See above n. 43.

20 Paît I. Surveys of OE Studies

pp. 33-4, explains such terms as ungetrywða [s/c] and hlafordswicas, attaching to Wulfstan’s use of these words an application to Charles I’s martyrdom and Charles II’s banishment. 238 At a lower level of moral implication, Sir Richard Blackmore dedicates Alfred, an Epick Poem (London, 1723), to Prince Frederick o f Hanover, deliberately singling out Alfred as a means of inspiring the prince with senti­ ments suitable for a young man likely to be king, and the Preface (p. xli) adds further point to the dedication by describing Alfred as ‘An excellent Prince in his Youth, and afterwards a King of consummate Accomplishments’. Alexan­ der Bicknell closes the prologue of his The Patriot King; or, Alfred and Elvida. An Historical Tragedy (London, 1788)46 with the lines Thus may Britannia’s Sons again renew The glorious Scenes here pourtray’d to their View; The envy’d Height ere long they may attain, And GEORGE’S rank with ALFRED’S happy Reign.

Literature: the style and unity o f Anglo-Saxon records in verse and prose It is not current academic practice in the study of an ancient literature to seek parallels, however improving, with modern times. The aim is rather to solve problems of unity of the works, of identifying authorial styles and when pos­ sible to name the author, of restoring and improving the transmitted text and of recognizing the literary kinds to which the records belong. That practice has occupied Anglo-Saxonists for about the last 150 years, so much so that there is not space here to give more than a sampling o f some o f the activities that seem to me to have been, and sometimes still to be, prominent. A comparison of B. Thorpe’s Codex Exoniensis (1842 [207] ) with later editions of poems in the manuscript4 7 shows at once the major changes in the constitution of the poetic units. The following are examples: Christ one poem or three, Guthlac one poem or two, and where does Guthlac begin; The Hus­ band’s Message and the preceding Riddle, two poems or one; Riddles (ASPR nos.) 75 and 76, two poems or one, as in the most recent edition ? 4 8 Within 46 This is the work underlying the German tragedy for which Haydn composed music; see above, n. 13. [See pp. 410-40, below.] 47 Editions of the whole codex include C. W. M. Grein (1857-8 [259]), I. Gollancz (1895 [209] ) and W. S. Mackie (1934 [214] ), R. P. Wiilker and B. Assmann (revising Grein) (1883-98 [260]), and G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie (1936 [263]). 48 The Old English Riddles o f the ‘E xeter B ook’, ed. Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), no. 73; see pp. 352-6.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 21

Christ I the individual Advent Lyrics may be treated as separate poems, as they are in the line numbering of J. J. Campbell’s edition (1959 [3266] ). Loss of leaves has been carefully studied and conclusions reached include Resigna­ tion, not one incoherent, but two fragmentary poems, and Riddle (ASPR no.) 239 70 similarly .4 9 Thorpe in 1842 ([2 0 7 ], p. 312), in connection with what in ASPR numbering is The Seafarer 103, wrote, ‘I suspect that a leaf is here want­ ing, and that what follows is the end of another poem.’ The view does not commend itself to recent scholars for good but —dare one say it? —not con­ clusive reasons . 50 Other problems in the other manuscripts at once suggest themselves to •every reader of the verse. The relationship of the Ruthwell Cross inscription to The Dream o f the Rood, first established by J. M. Kemble in a paper read in 1842 (published in 1844 [3497]), shows the continuity of knowledge of a poem preserved in a manuscript, the Vercelli Book, no earlier than the late tenth century , 51 parts of which had been carved in runes in a very different dialect area some 200 or 300 years earlier. Did the runesmith quote from an earlier version of the longer poem? Does the inscription throw doubt on the integrity of the longer poem? The matter is complicated further by the inscrip­ tion on the Brussels Cross reliquary, the relationship of which to The Dream o f the Rood was recognized by J. Zupitza when he reviewed in ASNSL 87 (1891 [3198]) the monograph in which H. Logeman had given details of the reliquary. The relationship of Fates o f the Apostles to Andreas which precedes it in the Vercelli Book used to be discussed, and the matter was complicated further when A. S. Napier, in ZD A 33 (1889 [246] ), explained that lines 96122 had been misplaced: they include the runic ‘signature’ FWUL[CY]N, of which only F, U and L are visible with some clarity. Three other similar runic signatures point to CYN(E)WULF. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11 has within the first poem, Genesis, a fragment different in style; E. Sievers boldly advanced the theory in 1875 [3689] that it was not of a piece with the surrounding poem; moreover the 49 See J. C. Pope’s study of these related problems, ‘Palaeography and Poetry : some Solved and Unsolved Problems of the Exeter Book’, Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 25-65; A. J. Bliss and A. J. Frantzen, ‘The Integrity of Resigna­ tion', RES n.s. 27 (1976), 385-402; and J. C. Pope, ‘An Unsuspected Lacuna in the Exeter Book...’ [on Riddle 70], Speculum 49 (1974), 615-22. 50 See the exemplary discussion by Pope, ‘Palaeography and Poetry’, pp. 32-4. The continuity of the idea of the fear of God has to be weighed against the discontinuity of much at the end of the poem, and conclusions are difficult. 51 See Celia Sisam, EEMF 19 (1976 [158A]), 36. [See paper 18, below.]

22 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

[3689] that it was not o f a piece with the surrounding poem; moreover the difference can only be explained by regarding it as an Anglo-Saxon translation of a poem the nature of which made it certain that it was Old Saxon, and, what is more, by the Heliand poet himself. Less than twenty years later K. Zangemeister found Old Saxon poetic fragments, one o f which corresponded to a passage of the Genesis interpolation. The whole was published by Zange­ meister and W. Braune in 1894 [3690] ; reviewing the publication, Sievers, in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 27 (1895), at 534-8, said that he had long given up that part of his theory of 1875 which involved the poet of Heliand. The Genesis poet was the Heliand poet’s pupil and imitator; the newly discov­ ered fragments amply confirmed that, showing him to be gifted with a certain 240 swing, like the Heliand poet, but technically deficient in the art o f versification, almost a bungler. Whether the two parts o f Genesis preceding and following the interpolation are of a piece has also been discussed on stylistic grounds; late in life, Sievers thought not . 52 The relationship of Daniel in the manuscript to Azarias in the Exeter Book is also far from clear; theories of interpolation and excerpting have been considered . 53 When verse and prose appear closely related other literary problems call for solution. In spite of unequivocal and integral statements that Alfred turned his prose rendering of the Metres o f Boethius into a verse rendering , 54 A. Leicht, on subjective grounds amounting to little more than that the prose does Alfred credit, but the verse, if it were his, would do him little credit, denied Alfred’s authorship of the verse Metres in 1883 [3947], and he had the support of Sievers himself on flimsy dialectal (Kentish) evidence in BGDSL 10 (1885 [226] ), at 197, n. The great king’s poetry did not meet with the approval of Anglo-Saxonists. H. Sweet (whose literary taste preferred the ‘Cædmonian’ Fall of the Angels in Genesis B to Milton’s ‘bombastic pedantry’

52 See ‘Heliand, Tatian und Hraban’, BGDSL 50 (1927), 426, n. (cf. below, p. 25), and ‘Caedmon und Genesis’, Britannica (M. Förster Festschrift, 1929 [3746 and 419]), esp. pp. 60-2. 53 After reading René Wyss’s M.A. dissertation (Dublin, 1979), I am convinced that the view of O. Hofer (1889 [3410] ) and G. Steiner (also 1889 [3411 ]) is to be preferred to R. T. Farrell’s view (1967 [3418] ), summarized in his edition of Daniel and Azarias (London, 1974), at pp. 22-9 and 40-5, that the lines corresponding to Azarias are no interpolation. Azarias itself is a problem: it is probably not complete as we have it — see J. C. Pope, ‘Palaeography and Poetry’, pp. 37-41 - and the connection with Guthlac is far to seek. 54 See K. Sisam, Studies (1953 [425] ), Note D [3954]. The statements come in the Alfredian proems, ed. W. J. Sedgefield (1899 [5476]), p. 1, lines 9-10, and p. 151, Proem, lines l-3a.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 23

on a comparable subject) 55 dismissed Alfred’s verse Preface and Epilogue to the Pastoral Care as ‘curious doggrel... little more than dislocated prose ’ ,56 so that it is difficult to see how, so soon after Sweet published his views denying poetic skill to Alfred, Leicht came to reason that the poems could not be Alfred’s because they did not show sufficient skill. The existence of named authors invites speculation about what may be ascribed to them. Anglo-Saxonists since the 1850s have done better for writers of prose than verse. Not only Alfred’s Metres o f Boethius in verse and prose, but the rest of what has been ascribed to him has been investigated to confirm or reject his authorship, and with results. Syntactical and lexical studies have removed the Orosius from the canon; on the other hand, it looks as if the prose psalms of the Paris Psalter are to be ascribed to him, using similar criteria .5 7 In 241 addition to statements in the works themselves naming Alfred as author, William of Malmesbury’s list of the king’s works 58 has been fundamental. He includes a translation of Bede’s History among Alfred’s works, but the Mercian dialect colouring of the extant text has long led scholars to question that ascription .5 9 ForÆ lfric and Wulfstan the peculiarities of alliterative and strongly rhyth­ mic prose have been sufficient to identify a wide range of works. The early studies of F. Dietrich (1855 and 1856 [5187] ) have proved a fruitful founda­ tion for Æ lfric on which P. Clemoes in 1959 [5204 and 426] and J. C. Pope in 1967-8 [5297] have made great advances, but a long section of the new bibliography shows how many other Anglo-Saxonists share in that work. 55 In ‘Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ in Hazlitt’s Warton (1871 [878, cf. 873]) II, at 16. 56 In his edition of 1871-2 [5496], at p. 473. 57 See F. Dietrich on hopian (1853 [5914] ), and cf. J. Bromwich in Chadwick Memorial Studies (1950 [5927 and 424] ). J. Raith came to the conclusion, after studying ver­ bal constructions of the type by& smeagende, that the Paris prose psalms go with Alfred’s genuine works but that the Orosius does not: see Untersuchungen zum eng­ lischen Aspekt (Munich, 1951) I (no more published), 52-61 ; cf. H. Gneuss, Lehnbildungen (1955 [5947] ), p. 160. Other studies leading to conclusions about Alfred’s canon include K. Weimann’s Friede (1966 [753]), pp. 129-46; G. Büchner, Vergehen und Verbrechen (1968 [754]), pp. 184-5; and the two studies of the Orosius in Anglia 88 (1970 [5647 and 5648] ) by J. M. Bately and E. M. Liggins. See also H. Schabram, ‘Das Altenglische Superbia-Wortgut: eine Nachlese’, Festschrift... H. Koziol, Wiener Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 75 (1973), 278-9. 58 De Gestis Regum Anglorum I, 132. 59 The medieval evidence in favour of Alfred’s authorship is briefly given by Sherman M. Kuhn in NM 73 (1972 [5591 and 451 ] ), at 172-80, written in reply to D. Whitelock’s persuasive ‘The Old English Bede’, PBA 48 (1962 [5587] ), 57-90. See also T. Miller in the two introductions to his edition (1890 and 1899 [5549] ).

24 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Wulfstan studies too have advanced greatly since their beginnings in Wanley’s Catalogus of 1705 [110], at pp. 140-3, for the homilies and for the ecclesias­ tical institutes, as analysed and edited by A. S. Napier in 1882 [6507] and 1883 [6501]. The real achievement of disentangling Wulfstan’s writings on stylistic grounds, ‘the virtual creation of the figure of Archbishop Wulfstan of York’ as D. Whitelock rightly calls the process which led from the identifica­ tion of his works to firm knowledge of his place in the England o f his tim e , 6 0 belongs not to the period of Napier’s scholarship, but to that of K. Jost, D. Whitelock, D. Bethurum and (in contributing to our understanding of the nature of Wulfstan’s phrasal units) A. McIntosh . 61 The knowledge we have of writers o f prose, their names and often their dates —Werferth,62 Æthelwold,63 Byrhtferth,6465the glossators (or copyists o f glosses) Aldred of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual,6s Farmon and Owun of the two parts of the Rushworth Gospels,66 and finally Eadwine 242 of whom we have the portrait in his book,67 and also King Alfred, Ælfric and Wulfstan —is quite different from the hazy semblance of knowledge we have of the named poets. Dating the verse and allocating poems to the two named poets of the Anglo-Saxons, Caedmon and Cynewulf, became major preoccupa­ tions of Anglo-Saxonists. Not much progress was made with the dating; the recognition of poems as Caedmon’s or Cynewulfs proved to be as illusory as the dating. The ascription of the poems in Junius 11 to Caedmon reaches back to Francis Junius himself, even in the title o f the editio princeps o f 1665 [222] : Cædmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac Praecipuarum Sacrae Paginae Historiarum. Any reader, post-medieval certainly and Anglo-Saxon presumably, can see the similarity of Caedmon’s works as listed by Bede in his account of 60 Changing Currents in Anglo-Saxon Studies (1958 [847] ), p. 11. 61 Their contributions are listed, among others, in the new bibliography from item 6502 to item 6543. 62 See especially H. Hecht’s edition of the translation of Gregory’s Dialogues (1900-7 [5526]). 63 See A. Schröer’s edition of the Benedictine Rule (1885-8 [5369] ), reprinted in 1964 with H. Gneuss’s valuable appendix; M. Gretsch, Die Regula Sancti Benedicti in Eng­ land, Münchener Universitäts-Schriften: Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie 2 (Munich, 1973). 64 See S. J. Crawford’s edition of the Manual (1929 [5929] ). 65 See N. R. Ker, ‘Aldred the S c r ib , Essays and Stud. 28 (1942 [5815]), 7-12. 66 See Ker’s Catalogue (1957 [126]), no. 292. 67 See K. Wildhagen, Studien zur englischen Philologie 13 (1905 [5904] ), 7-10; and cf. M. R. James’s facsimile (1935 [138] ).

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 25

the poet Caedmon (Historia Ecclesiastica IV.24) with the contents o f the manu­ script; and it has been suggested that the selection of poems for inclusion in the manuscript may owe something to Bede’s list .6 8 The opening of Genesis A (1-8) has reminded Anglo-Saxonists of Caedmon’s Hymn,69 but otherwise the connection with Caedmon has found fewer and fewer supporters. The poems in Junius 11 are too different for the assumption o f common authorship, dif­ ferent in style and treatment of their biblical sources, and different also in quality as evaluated (usually by assertion only) in aesthetic criticism. ‘There can be no question that the Exodus must be assigned to a different author. It is much above either the Genesis A or the Daniel in poetic w orth’, said F. A. Blackburn in Exodus and Daniel (1907 [3605] ), at p. xxi; ‘Only Exodus and Genesis B are truly memorable as poetry. Genesis A has nevertheless a definite historical interest because of its apparently genuine echoes of the authentic Caedmon’, said C. L. Wrenn in A Study o f Old English Literature (1967 [607]), at p. 1 0 2 , to quote two typical utterances in two typical vehicles for publishing literary views, introductions to editions and literary surveys. ‘The authentic Caedmon’ is to be found only in Caedmon’s Hymn. No one has questioned, as far as I know, its authenticity. Bede’s Death Song has had its doubters. The poem is attested as the dying m an’s utterance in the Epistola Cuthberti. But did he compose it there and then, did he compose it together with the music that must have gone with it if canebat o f the Epistola has full force ? 70 17 W. Bulst, in ZDA 75 (1938 [1623]), wishing to give canebat its full musical sense, doubts if Bede on his deathbed 243 would have succeeded in devising words and composing music as well as sing­ ing the song, and thinks that he merely gave utterance to it: E. V. K. Dobbie had drawn attention to the fact that the wording which seems to attribute the composition quite clearly to Bede is not in all the versions of the Epistola,11 and Colgrave and Mynors conclude on these grounds that ‘the evidence for Bede’s authorship is by no means strong’. The evidence could be stronger 68 See, e.g., Daniel and Azarins, ed. R. T. Farrell (London, 1974), p. 2. 69 See, e.g., A. Brandi’s Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur (in H. Paul’s Grundriss, 2nd ed. (1908 [567 and 8 ]), p. 97 (= 1037)), and Genesis A: a New Edition, ed. A. N. Doane (Madison, Wise., 1978), p. 225. Cf. E. Sievers’s view that fifty-four of lines 1-233 (i.e. from the beginning to GenesisB) are Caedmon’s own. (For details, see above, n. 52; the view was arrived at by the method of Schallanalyse practised by Sievers increasingly as he got older, but now thought unacceptable. See below, n. 126.) 70 See Bede’s Ecclesiastical History o f the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 580-3, and note, pp. 580-1. 71 The Manuscripts o f Caedmon's Hymn and Bede’s Death Song (1937 [3 2 4 3 ]),pp. 50 and 1 2 0 - 1 .

26 Patt I. Surveys of OE Studies

perhaps, but is it really so weak as to put the authorship in doubt? Mixed in with interpretational and textual problems, the attribution of the little poem to Bede carries with it in some aesthetic judgements a note of regret that a man who did so well with words in his life should in dying have done no bet­ ter. A. Brandi, probably involved with the notion of the Anglo-Saxon m in­ strel, 72 thinks the song is like a Latin period and lacking the minstrel’s characteristic freshness. 73 ‘Fresh’ but also ‘terse and tight’ is the manner o f the minstrel. F. Schubel finds these qualities in the Finn and Sigemund episodes in Beowulf, and, con­ trasting them with the long speeches of later book-epic, senses proximity to the old, epic minstrel-song . 74 57 K. H. Göller rightly suggests that scholars may have transferred the conditions of late medieval minstrelsy to Anglo-Saxon times when they propose two types of Anglo-Saxon singer, one at court and one on the road; and then he himself, without stating his authority, adds a further locale, the singer in the Wirtshaus.15 Bede’s manner in the Death Song, as seen by Brandi, is like Cynewulf’s and that of his school. In view of such studies as K. Sisam’s British Academy Lec­ ture of 1932 [3401 and 425] and C. Schaar’s Critical Studies (1949 [3404]) there is no need to go over the ground again, where the four runic signatures spell out his name in poetic epilogues, and how his manner swelled out into his ‘school’ in the theories of Anglo-Saxonists. The four poems to which his name is attached occupy 2600 lines. He seems to have no homogeneity of style. The late Miss Rosemary Woolf in her edition of 1955 [3880], at p. 19, contrasts Juliana with Elene and Christ II: ‘compe­ tent in itself, though lacking the poetic mastery o f the Elene or Crist, Juliana 244 brings Old English poetry into a blind alley ’ . 76 Alone o f the Signed’ poems o f Cynewulf, it would be impossible to remove from Juliana the section in which 72 Cf. his ‘Spielmannsverhältnisse in frühmittelenglischer Zeit’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Classe 41 (1910), 873-92, esp. 875-8. 73 ‘der frische Zug des Spielmanns’, Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur (1908 [567 and 8 ]), p. 92 (=1032). 74 (Of the Finn and Sigemund episodes) ‘Nähe ... zum alten epischen Spielmannslied zeigen die straffe dramatische Darstellung, die knappe Zeichnung der Umgebung und die kurzen Worte statt der langen Reden des späteren Schreibepos...’ Englische Litera­ turgeschichte, Die alt- und mittelenglische Periode, 2nd ed. (1967 [595] ), p. 21. 75 Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur (1971 [610] ), pp. 32 and 72. 76 Nothing could be more devastating, though it is in line with the words of an earlier editor of Juliana, W. Strunk, in 1904 ([3879], pp. xxxviii-xl), who has a long condem­ nation of the poem’s bookishness and, therefore, its lifelessness and its unlifelikeness.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 27

the runic ‘signature’ comes without breaking into a manuscript section. At 695b Miss Woolf (who begins a new paragraph) signals ‘Beginning of the epi­ logue’. In fact, the manuscript section begins at 607a.77789The other three ‘sig­ natures’ could be regarded as coming in separable ‘epilogues’, Fates 78 at 8 8 , Elene with section XV at 1236 after the Finit,19 Christ II at 779 . 80 Cynewulf’s ‘signed’ output could therefore, in theory at least, consist of no more than the following: he must have written all of Juliana ending with the ‘epilogue’ by means of which he hopes that his name will be remembered in prayer, but of the other three poems he need have written no more than their ‘epilogues’, a total of only 940 lines and fairly homogeneous in style. Perhaps the whole of Fates might be regarded as an ‘epilogue’ by Cynewulf to Andreas, even if it does not fit very well. 81 That would give to Cynewulf a total of just over a thousand lines. That is not the number of lines to which Anglo-Saxonists limit the Cyne­ wulf canon. J. M. Kemble discovered three o f Cynewulf’s runic ‘signatures’ in a paper published in Archaeologia 28 (1840 [613]), at 360-4. As we have seen , 82 A. S. Napier discovered the ‘signature’ in the much-damaged part of Fates o f the Apostles almost half a century later . 83 77 Miss Woolf (p. 2) says of the sections into which Juliana is divided by manuscript pointing, paragraphing and ornamental capitals, that ‘they do not correspond to major structural points in the narrative’, a statement open to challenge. 78 See K. R. Brooks’s Andreas (1961 [1420] ), pp. xxx-xxxi, where he also discusses the poem’s lack of ‘literary merit’. 79 See P. O. E. Gradon’s edition (1958 [3563] ), p. 2, on the numbered sections; see C. L. Wrenn,,4 Study o f Old English Literature (1967 [6 0 7 ]),p. 125, on Finit. 80 In agreement with the manuscript, A. S. Cook states in his edition (2nd ed., 1909 [3265] ), at p. 150, ‘the doxology just preceding... suggests the close of a division’, but draws attention in the same note to the fact that 779-82a echo the wording of 761-75, and are to be regarded as ‘certainly transitional’. 81 We should then probably have to assume again that the Vercelli Book was not the first to let Fates follow Andreas. It seems arguable if such coupling is really as un­ warranted as S. B. Greenfield suggests, Critical History (1965 [603] ), p. 107. The ‘epilogues’ of Elene (86 lines) and Christ II (8 8 lines) are longer than the ‘epilogue’ of Fates (35 lines), but that corresponds in length to what Miss Woolf regards as the ‘epilogue’ of Juliana (695b-731). 82 See above, p. 21. 83 Napier announced his discovery in Academy 34 (1888 [3651]), at 15 3/3; he published it more fully in his collations of the Vercelli Book, ZDA 33 (1889 [246]), 70-3. The damaged wording was restored further by E. Sievers, Anglia 13.1 (1890 [3377]), 9-10. A very good picture of the state of scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century as regards this fourth ‘signature’ emerges from Nachtrag 2 of R. P. Wiilker’s edition of the Vercelli Book (1894 [260] ), pp. 566-8.

28 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Cynewulf’s name was attached to many poems, sometimes by now dis­ credited cryptographic means. In B. Thorpe’s edition o f the Exeter Book (1842 [207] ), at p. 380, our Wulf and Eadwacer appears (without translation, contrary to his normal practice) as the first o f the Riddles, and a note (p. 527) says: ‘Riddle I. —Of this I can make no sense, nor am I able to arrange the 245 verses.’ H. Leo tried to make sense of it by solving the ‘Riddle’ as ‘Cynewulf’ in 1857 ([3369], pp. 22-6). F. Dietrich, in ZD A 11 (1859 [4078]), at 486, added to that solution the solution of the Latin Riddle (ASPR no. 90), ‘lupus’, interpreted in Z D A 12 (1865 [4080] ), at 250, as signifying ‘Cynewulf’. The literary interpretation of the three ‘signatures’ then known had been very autobiographical. Dietrich’s understanding of the Riddles led to his identifica­ tion o f further autobiographical hints by Cynewulf. In ZD A 11 (1859 [4087]), at 487-9, he thought it likely that the poet, who in the ‘First Riddle’ as solved by Leo had introduced himself, should in his own person bid his readers fare­ well in the last Riddle of the collection. He thought further (in his second article [4080]) that the Riddles numbered by Grein in 1858 [259] 1-60 or 61 and 82-9 (i.e. ASPR’s Wulf and Eadwacer and Riddles 1-59 or 60 and 85-93, 95) were Cynewulf’s. 84 58 From these beginnings developed the gradual accumulation of Cynewulf’s supposed oeuvre. K. Jansen provided Cynewulf and the ‘School o f Cynewulf’ with a special bibliography in 1908 [3389; cf. 3387]. Not merely whole poems, for example The Dream o f the Rood,65 the whole of Christ, The Descent into Hell, Andreas, Guthlac, The Phoenix, The Riming Poem, The Judgment Day I, Soul and Body, The Gifts o f Men, Precepts, Vainglory, The Order o f the World, and perhaps The Ruin, to give one influential list , 86 but parts o f Beo­ wulf too, especially Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ according to A. S. Cook in 1925 [2069], were all Cynewulf’s. With hindsight we see what went blindingly wrong with the study o f AngloSaxon poetic authorship. Cynewulf scholarship is the extreme example of biographical folly. The poet is identified with a bishop of Lindisfarne who 84 Further involvement of Cynewulf in the Riddles is suggested by Edmund Erlemann, ASNSL 111 (1903 [4095]), 59-63, and Fritz Erlemann, ASNSL 115 (1905 [4098]), 391-2; cf. the editions of the Riddles, F. Tupper’s (1910 [4067] ), pp. 230-2, and Williamson’s, pp. 384-7, both on Riddle (ASPR no.) 90, with reference to the two articles in ASNSL 111 and 115. 85 The attribution goes back to J. M. Kemble in 1838 (Archaeologia 28 (1840 [613], 360-3), but only as a probability. 86 See C. W. M. Grein, Kurzgefasste angelsächsische Grammatik (1880 [549]), pp. 11-15. It is influential because it had the support of R. P. Wülker, Grundriss (1885 [5]), p. 177.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance o f A-S Records 29

held the see (according to the Chronicle D) from 737 to his retirement in 779 and died in 782,87 and whose life is imaginatively related to his supposed poetical work, especially by Grein in 1880 ([5 4 9 ], pp. 13-15), who makes the most of what is known of the bishop’s joys and sorrows . 88 A century after 246 some aesthetic judgements and imaginative Dichtung und Wahrheit were first committed to paper, they look tarnished, whereas each hard-won fact stays bright. Early literary scholarship was often at its best when dealing with sources and analogues. The astonishing brilliance of N. F. S. Grundtvig’s contribution to the study of Beowulf has been carefully discussed several times . 89 Very many of the points made by him have become part of the received understand­ ing of the poem —his view that it must have been written before the Scandi­ navian raids of the late eighth century was the standard view for a long time,

87 See the edition by E. Classen and F. E. Harmer (1926 [5982]), s.a. Cf. Continuatio Baedae (ed. C. Plummer (1896 [1616 and 5558]), I, 362; ed. Colgrave and Mynors (1969), p. 574), s.a. 740; Symeonis Monachi Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, ed. T. Arnold, RS, I (1882), 47-50; and his Historia Regum, RS, II (1885), s.a. 740 (p. 32) Cynewulf succeeds, 750 (p. 39) his troubles, 780 (p. 47) his resignation and 783 (p. 50) his death. 88 Attribution to Caedmon prospered less well. D. H. Haigh, ‘The Saxon Cross at Bewcastle’,Æ 4e n.s. 1 (1857), 173, conjectured that the Ruthwell Cross inscription was a fragment ‘of a religious poem of very high character, and that there was but one man living in England at that time [c. 665] worthy to be named as a religious poet, and that was Caedmon’. George Stephens, Runic Monuments I (1866 [4234] ), 41920, read CADMON on the Ruthwell Cross, and averred that Haigh’s ‘splendid, though daring, assumption or implication has now been approved by the very stone itself’ and then Stephens goes on to attribute Judith to Caedmon on aesthetic grounds. 89 See, e.g., K. Malone,RES 17 (1941 [3185]), 129-38, and his contribution to Grundtvig Studier 1960 [3193], at 7-25; the studies by H. Toldberg, of which the new bibliography lists those of 1946 [3187] and 1947 [3188], his review of two articles by Malone (a more general one of 1940 [3183] and that [3185] referred to above) in Grundtvig Studier 1948 [3190] and a book (1950 [3192] ); the work of R. Cooley in 1940 [3181], 1941 [3184] and 1949 [3191 and 423] ; and A. Haarder’s work specifically on Grundtvig in 1961 [2927] and 1968 [3195] and frequently in his book, Beowulf: the Appeal o f a Poem (Copenhagen, 1975), as well as in his book Det episke liv. E t indblik i oldengelsk heltedigtning (Copenhagen, 1979). See also two books by P. G. Lindhardt, Grundtvig: an Introduction (London, 1951) and Grundtvig (Copenhagen, 1964), which I have not seen; further, D. J. Savage (1949 [836 and 423] ). Lastly, I have profited greatly from Birte Kelly’s ‘The Formative Stages of Modern Beowulf Scholarship, Textual, Historical and Literary, Seen in the Work of Scholars of the Earlier Nineteenth Century’ (unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Lon­ don, 1979). Clearly Grundtvig’s importance has not remained unrecognized.

30 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

but has perhaps now had its day . 90 Grundtvig had a literary gift now probably, if considered at all, considered irrelevant to a sober assessment of his contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. He, like the Grimm brothers, wrote well enough for his scholarship not only to elucidate the recorded vernacular remains of Germanic antiquity: in writing with eloquence, Grundtvig and the Grimms made every act of elucidation of these ancient remains seem like a celebration of their glory. Some other, later writers —one might name Schücking, R. W. Chambers, Heusler and J. R. R. Tolkien, when they did not abstemiously restrict their style to one suitable for austere philological scholarship - had the gift of writing well, but none of them, I think, wrote with the felicity of Grundtvig and the Grimms. Their art of writing makes them persuasive beyond the measure o f reason: a reader may come to feel that he would rather be wrong with them than right with other scholars. Among earlier scholars who were often interestingly right in matters of fact the following may be remembered with profit: H. Leo’s Beowulf (1839 [1771] ) is memorable, partly because, together with the editio princeps o f the poem by G. J. Thorkelin (1815 [1632] ), Grundtvig’s own translation (1820 247 [1659]), J. M. Kemble’s second edition (1835-7 [1633 and 1660]) and L. Ettmiiller’s translation (1840 [1661]), it was included in material surveyed by Grundtvig in his long review article, Brage ogldun 4 (1841 [2711]), 481-538. The work of F. E. C. Dietrich on Ælfric (1855-6 [5187] ) shows his range and quality of scholarship, and his lexical study of 1853 [5914] gives him a place alongside scholars of a hundred years later . 91 The early work o f E. Sievers constitutes an unrivalled contribution to the whole field o f Germanic. A. S. Napier’s contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been recognized appre­ ciatively by N. R. Ker in the Meritt Festschrift (1970 [870 and 446]).

The texts: problems o f textual integrity When scholars of the nineteenth century and later sought to attach the distinc­ 90 See BjowulfsDrape (1820 [ 1659] ), pp. xxvi-xxvii; Grundtvig considers the composi­ tion in relation to Caedmonian narrative verse. See the important article by Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism and the Date of Beowulf', Poetica 8 (Tokyo, ‘1977’, in fact 1978), 23-43. 91 For details about Dietrich - who is described as a polyhistor —see F. Gundlach, Catalogus Professorum Academiae Marburgensis, Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Hessen und Waldeck 15 (Marburg, 1927), 424-5 (no. 784); as well as Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 55 (1910), 733-4.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 31

tive glory of a poet’s name to verse of a period ignorant o f such vanity for vernacular verse —or inclined to it only for pious purposes, a prayer for Cyne­ wulf, for example, or the sacred memory o f Caedmon and his first song and of Bede and his last song —they often went wrong as they established a cor­ pus for Caedmon and a school for Cynewulf. It proved impossible to lay down linguistic criteria to identify a poet writing at a time when scribes very often showed little respect for the integrity of texts which they were transmitting to posterity and for which usually only one manuscript witness survives. 92 Anglo-Saxonists and antiquaries from a very early period were aware that not even for the most sacred texts did the Anglo-Saxons possess anything like , a standard version in the vernacular. They only had to look at the interlinear Lord’s Prayer o f which one version is to be found in The Testimonie (1566 or 1567 [5276]), at sig. [Qiiijvo] - Rjvo (first issue), [Kviijvo] - Ljvo (second issue), republished on the continent by M. Freher in 1610 ([2 6 7 ], sig. A 3 ). The West-Saxon Gospels include, of course, in their proper place versions of the Lord’s Prayer, and they were available from the time of Foxe and Parker (1571 [5860], reused in Junius’s edition of 1665 [5861]), who published the text of Parker’s manuscript now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 441. William Camden published two versions in the Remained (1st ed. 1605 [530] ), at pp. 15-16. Comparison with the Northumbrian versions became possible when S. Henshall published extracts in 1807 [5787 and 5786] ,9 3 and more fully and 248 conveniently for St. Matthew when J. M. Kemble produced the Northumbrian and Mercian texts with the Latin under the Lindisfarne Gloss and the West Saxon on the page facing .94 (Comparison of Anglo-Saxon versions of the psalter was more difficult because the Gallican version of the Stowe Psalter, published interlinearly by J. Spelman in 1640 [5936] was followed in 1835 [5911] by B. Thorpe’s edition of the Paris Psalter the Latin of which is a Roman version. But that could be used for comparison with the Vespasian Psalter (also Roman) with its gloss in a different dialect, published by J. Steven92 Cf. K. Sisam, RES 22 (1946 [177]), 257-68; repr. in Studies (1953 [425]) and M. Steven and J. Mandel’s collection of 1968 [441]. 93 K. W. Bouterwek’s edition of the Lindisfarne Gospels (1857 [5788]) produces the gloss interlinearly for only the prefatory matter in the manuscript, but the edition by J. Stevenson and G. Waring for the Surtees Society (1854-65 [5789] ) gives the text of the Lindisfarne Gospels interlinearly and has the Anglo-Saxon text of the Rushworth Gospels for comparison. 94 The plan was Kemble’s, completed for Matthew after his death by C. Hardwick in 1858 [5773]. The standard edition by W. W. Skeat (1871-87 [5774-7] ) completes the project and reprints Matthew. (B. Thorpe’s edition of the West Saxon Gospels, published in 1842 [5862], prints a conflate text unsuitable for comparison.)

32 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

son for the Surtees Society (1843-7 [5938]). A mixture of linguistic and theological interests led to the publication of the earliest editions of these sacred texts . 95 The lack o f a standard vernacular version for any o f the texts must have been obvious from the start. A later generation of scholars than those of the middle o f the nineteenth century greatly advanced the study of the psalter in Anglo-Saxon England. K. Wildhagen’s edition o f the Cambridge Psalter (1910 [5899] ) with variant readings, and his careful studies of the Canterbury Psalter (1903 and, more fully, 1905 [5904]) and the Regius Psalter (1908 [5932]) and several later studies (1912 [5885], 1913 [5886 and 415] and 1920 [5887] ) laid the foundations for recent work. Not surprisingly, some important parts of Wild­ hagen’s work have been superseded, as is shown clearly by C. and K. Sisam’s introduction to their edition of the Salisbury Psalter (1949 [5935] ), at pp. 49-52. H. Gneuss’s work on the vocabulary o f the psalter glosses began with his study (chiefly of the Vespasian Psalter, but seen in relation to the other glosses) in 1955 [5947]. His work since (1968 [6248] and 1972 [5179]) has shown increasingly that a choice among synonyms may be influenced not only by dialectal variation but also by the new order of the Benedictine Reform . 96

The language: its copiousness As we have seen, 9 7 the study of Anglo-Saxon brought with it from the begin­ ning the compilation of dictionaries. The existence in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of glosses and glossaries giving the Latin equivalents of Anglo-Saxon words was 249 a great help. Some glossing words were not, however, in the ordinary language; and the language of poetry included many words not covered in glosses. Among poetic texts used by E. Lye and O. Manning for their great dictionary o f 1772 [61] were the Cædmon poems edited by F. Junius in 1665 [222] and Judith from E. Thwaites’s Heptateuchus of 1698 [5229]. The many errors in Lye95 The needs of the theologian were explicitly considered by Bouterwek as late as 1857 ([5788], p. [3] of the ‘Vorwort’). 96 The dialectal distribution of synonyms was studied first by Dietrich (see above, n. 57) in 1853 [5914]. The following are especially significant contributions in this area of the subject, but there are many more: R. Jordan, Eigentümlichkeiten des anglischen Wortschatzes, Anglistische Forschungen 17 (1906); R. J. Menner on the Judgement Day poems (1947 [3832]), on Wulfstan (1948 [6524]) and on Genesis A (1951 [3756] ); K. Jost on Wulfstan (1950 [6528] ); J. J. Campbell on the Old English Bede (1951 [5583]); R. Vleeskruyer on St Chad (1956 [6443]); and H. Schabram on words for ‘superbia’ (1965 [752] ). 97 Above, pp. 16-17.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 33

Manning show how difficult they must have found it. J. Bosworth’s first dictionary (1838 [63]) was no great advance. Real improvement came only when German philologists took Anglo-Saxon poetic lexicography in tow, first in L. Ettmüller’s Vorda Vealhstôd Engla and Seaxna (1851 [6 6 ] ) , 98 9 then, ex­ clusively the poetic vocabulary, in C. W. M. Grein’s Sprachschatz der angel­ sächsischen Dichter (1861-4 [6 8 ] ) . " In the early dictionaries Latin plays a great part. It is not always certain if a Latin equivalent given is one found in some Anglo-Saxon glossing text or if the modern lexicographer has put it there instead of his own English or his own German equivalent. The AngloSaxon glosses are part of the Anglo-Saxon literary heritage. The language of • literate Anglo-Saxon England was as Latin as the language and orientation of the first three hundred years of post-medieval Anglo-Saxon scholarship: it is much to be regretted that the new bibliography does not list publications of and about the entire body of Anglo-Saxon glosses just as it lists in their entire­ ty all other publications concerned with Anglo-Saxon literate civilization. The Latin orientation of the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his age led one man, Samuel Henshall(1764 or 1765—1807)to intemperate abuse of the schol­ ars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in their Latinity. He hoped for a different orientation to bring fully into view the Englishness of Anglo-Saxon. The Saxon and English Languages Reciprocally Illustrative o f Each Other; the Impracticality o f Acquiring an Accurate Knowledge o f Saxon Literature, through the Medium o f Latin Phraseology, Exemplified in the Errors o f Hickes, Wilkins, Gibson, and Other Scholars, and a New Mode Suggested o f Radically Studying the Saxon and English Languages (1798 [459] ): the title is program­ matic; it lays claim to developing a new literary sensibility by studying radical­ ly, i.e. root by root, the ancient words through their modern descendents . 1 0 0 Henshall’s reviewers {The Dictionary o f National Biography refers to some of them) had no difficulty in exposing his linguistic ignorance, and, contrasting 250 it with the learning of those he attacked, they condemned his arrogance. To me he seems rather like a refractory but clever undergraduate set to do his bit 98 In fact, the glossary to his prose and verse selections, Engla and Seaxna Scôpas and Bôceras (1850 [289] ). The arrangement is singularly inconvenient for reading the texts with the aid of the glossary, but useful for comparative philology. 99 The Sprachschatz is the glossary to the Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie (1857-8 [259] ), which was still the basis for J. J. Kohler’s revision (with the help of F. Holthausen) published in 1912-14: Wiilker’s revision of Grein (1881-98 [260]) was not used except to correct the errors of transcription in the original edition. 100 Henshall, though not influential, is of interest in connection with procedures adopted in translating from Old English, a subject which I intend to discuss elsewhere since it would occupy more space than could be given to it here [see pp. 99-103, below].

34 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

of Anglo-Saxon, and finding the methods of established academic scholarship not answering his urge to exercise an eager, unbridled literary egocentricity in fields of ancient record. The man is infuriating, as ignorant as dirt, too hasty even to copy texts accurately . 101 But hear him more calmly: when he rejects ‘the medium of Latin phraseology’ and longs for greater immediacy o f under­ standing the oldest English records he, by implicit aspiration, belongs with Grimm, Rask and Grundtvig. He lacks their learning, and so is a mere straw in the wind allowing us to perceive the direction of the change to come. The new direction in Anglo-Saxon scholarship entails the recognition that all languages —including Old English —are sufficient for the needs o f their speakers. Some languages —including Old English —are remarkable for their copiousness, i.e. for providing the means of expressing a wide range of ideas. The matter is well stated by the greatest amateur o f Anglo-Saxon and advocate of its study. Thomas Jefferson wrote his well-known An Essay towards Facili­ tating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon ... in the 1760s probably when he was a law student : 1 0 2 ‘That it [the Anglo-Saxon language] was sufficiently copious for the purposes of society in the existing condition o f arts and manners, reason alone would satisfy us from the necessity of the case. Its copiousness, too, was much favored by the latitude it allowed o f combining primitive words so as to produce any modification of idea desired’ (p. 8 ). The poet William Barnes delightfully exemplifies a mid-nineteenth-century taste for the expressiveness of Anglo-Saxon. In Se Gefylsta (1849 [286] ), at pp. iv-v, he writes: ‘The praise of greater richness which some bestow on Eng­ lish must be lessened by the truth that Anglo-Saxon, like German, had within itself the elements of the utmost richness; and that we have thrown away many of its good words to take in their stead less intelligible ones from the Latin and Greek.’ The beginner, for whom his book is intended, finds among ‘Questions Philological and Historical’ (p. 74): ‘Show that the Anglo-Saxons 101 So also in his inaccurate edition of extracts from the Gothic and Northumbrian Gospels (1807 [5787]), referred to above, p. 31. 102 It was first published in 1851 [469]. It has been suggested, by E. B. Setzler, Thomas Jefferson and the Study of Anglo-Saxon’, The Anglo-Saxon (‘The official organ of the Anglo-Saxon Club of Newberry College’) 1 (1926), 1-5, that Jefferson ‘found that the study of Anglo-Saxon in his day was hampered by the incrustations which the devotees of classical scholarship had fixed upon it’ (p. 4). The Essay pro­ vides no evidence for such an anti-classical view, and Jefferson’s splendidly classical endeavours in the architectural heritage of Virginia make Setzler’s view seem out of harmony with his largeness of mind, which led him to see the value of studying Anglo-Saxon in its own right (and in a way Wilhelm von Humboldt would have recognized), without rejecting classical excellence.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 35

had a knowledge o f the war-service of the elephant in the East. What did they 251 call the howda or elephant’s castle?’ The answer is to be found in the glossary (p. 70), ‘Wighûs, es, n, 2, a warhouse, “howda” ’; and the text to which it re­ fers is Æ lfric’s Hexameron.103 Barnes, in a manner of which no modern AngloSaxonist need feel ashamed, by that question showed to the contemporaries of Queen Victoria that even at its first entry English was fit to embrace the world: much better than Martin Farquar Tupper’s windy Anglo-Saxonism, whose insistence on the universality of the Anglo-Saxon genius runs through many of his multitudinous sonnets, his banal Alfredianism and the dreary pages of his journal, happily short-lived, The Anglo-Saxon (London, 1849-50), on all of which the new bibliography is silent. 1 0 4

Prosody Perhaps the weightiest of the new scholarly regards of the nineteenth century, the wish to understand the metre of the ancient poets, is in harmony with the attem pt to gain immediacy of understanding without ‘the medium of Latin phraseology’. For correct understanding, the ideals of classical versification had to be seen as not applicable to ancient Germanic poetry, without at the same time giving up the expectation that what was best in the art of expression of Germanic antiquity, its poetry, is sure to have had a goodly regularity. The study of Anglo-Saxon versification, especially the similarity to and congenerousness with Icelandic metre, goes back to Hickes’s Thesaurus I (1705 [268] ), 177-221. Hickes had a very good idea of the nature of the verse, and was able to print it divided into (half-)lines with considerable skill. For a long time that learning was not built upon. In fact, in the course of T. Tyrwhitt’s account of the nature of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the vernacular terminology for it, he controverted Hickes’s assertions about quantity with a general sneer: • ‘Unwilling... as it should seem, to leave his favourite language without some system of versification, he [Hickes] supposes, that the Saxons observed the quantity of syllables in their verses. ’ 105 103 Barnes used H. W. Norman’s edition (1848 [5220] ), p. 16, line 11 ; see BosworthToller (1898 [75] ), s.v. ; and cf. S. J. Crawford’s edition (1921 [5221] ), p. 55, line 292. 104 The bibliography includes, of course, his verse translations of the Metres o f Boethius (1850 [3943]). 105 ‘An Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer’, The Canterbury Tales IV (London, 1775), pp. 46-54, is relevant. See Tyrwhitt’s n. 40. See now also Daniel G. Calder, ‘The Study of Style in Old English Poetry: a Historical Introduction’, Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. D. G. Calder (Berkeley, Los Angeles and

36 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

The first case of an imposition of isochronous regularity on metrical units of Anglo-Saxon verse comes with J. Sibbald in the next century . 1 06 He varies the length of syllables and introduces rests as he scans in musical notation The Battle ofBmnanburh 37-9a and Caedmon's Hymn; for the former he varies 252 only the duration of the notes, for the latter also the pitch . 1 0 7 It is not too fanciful to see in Sibbald a forerunner of Andreas Heusler as a m etrist . 1 08 The real advance came with J. J. Conybeare . 1 0 9 He began by mixing his praise of Hickes with some major disagreement, skilfully analysing some cen­ tral differences between Anglo-Saxon verse and prose, with special considera­ tion both of metrical pointing in the manuscripts , 1 10 and o f the bilingual verse in The Phoenix, Aldhelm and A Summons to Prayer, in which vernacular metrical units alternate with similar Latin metrical units. He made good use also of verse in which the end-rhyme proclaims the end o f a metrical unit, as in The Riming Poem. He did not do well with Genesis B nor with hypermetric lines. Line-division and alliteration were well understood by the Conybeares,

106 107

108

109

110

London, 1979), pp. 1-65, esp. 6-7. Calder gives an account of the aesthetic study of Old English verse. He has a good bibliography. Chronicle o f Scottish Poetry: from the Thirteenth Century to the Union o f the Crowns (Edinburgh, 1802) IV, liv-lviii. He may have taken Brunanburh from Hickes’s Thesaurus I (1705 [268] ), 181-2; but his errors in line-division do not go back to Hickes. Caedmon's Hymn could be from Hickes, ibid. p. 187. Heusler’s theory is most conveniently available in Deutsche Versgeschichte I (1925 [1330] ). The use of musical notation reminds one, however, of J. C. Pope’s The Rhythm o f Beowulf (1942 [3155] ) rather than of Heusler. Unlike these modern scholars, Sibbald had odd views at bottom —for example, the likelihood that AngloSaxon was ‘Picto-Belgic’. A version of the first chapter, ‘Observations on the Metre of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, Illustrations o f Anglo-Saxon Poetry (published by his brother, W. D. Conybeare, in 1826 [278] ), had first been heard by the Antiquaries in 1813, and was published in Archaeologia 17 (1814 [1257]). W. D. Conybeare added the ‘General Laws of Anglo-Saxon Metre’ to his brother’s work. The importance of Cony beare’s Illustra­ tions was recognized, how fully it is difficult to say, by H. W. Longfellow, who con­ tributed a valuable article in North Amer. Rev. 47 (1838 [535] ), in which he sur­ veyed about sixteen important works, almost all of them of the 1820s and 1830s, five of which he singled out as ‘most necessary for a student of the Anglo-Saxon’ (p. 92). A reader of Longfellow’s survey recaptures easily the feeling of that age that here a great subject was in the process of being opened up by men of learning and imagination. Junius’s edition of the Caedmonian poems (1655 [222] ) and Thwaites’s of Judith appended to the Heptateuchus (1698 [5229] ) reproduce the pointing and, like the manuscripts, do not lay out the verse differently from prose.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 37

but in their belief in two feet to each metrical unit they seem not to have known of R. K. Rask’s Vejledning til det Islandske (Copenhagen, 1811), in which he pointed out (p. 2 1 1 ) the inadequacy of classical scansion in feet for Icelandic verse and that of other vernaculars; he applied that teaching to Old English in Angelsaksisk Sproglœre (Stockholm, 1817), at pp. 108-29.111 Whether to print the verse in short lines (i.e. ‘half-lines’) or in long lines each consisting of two short lines was for most of the nineteenth century a major prosodic controversy . 112 As far as I know, the first Old English verse 253 to be printed ‘in langen Zeilen abgetheilt’ is an extract from Judith (15-27) edited by the Grimms . 1 13 The argument involves the incongruity of the sense.unit with the metrical unit, the way the sense often extends beyond the long line, but also the way the end of the sense-unit often coincides with what, if verse is printed in long lines, is the half-way point of the alliterative prosodic unit. Rask controverted this view in Angelsaksisk Sproglœre (1817), at p. 1 10 .114 E. Guest, in A History o f English Rhythms (1838 [1258]) II, at 15-16, contrasted the practice of the manuscripts in aligning verse and prose alike with the modern editor’s task of shaping the ancient verse into what to a mod­ ern reader looks like verse. By the time Guest came to the subject a consider­ able body of Anglo-Saxon verse was available, printed in England and Denmark 111 Available with some changes made by Rask in B. Thorpe’s translation,^ Grammar o f the Anglo-Saxon Tongue with aPraxis (Copenhagen, 1830). 112 Those who print in long lines have the choice of splitting the two halves by a caesural space or not. A very small number of editions, perhaps because of the ugly ap­ pearance of the caesural river meandering down the page of Anglo-Saxon verse print­ ed with long lines split, print the verse with varying caesural spacing, so that the second half-lines always begin equidistantly from the margin; thus for Beowulf A. Holder’s edition, emended text volume (1884 [ 1645] ), and for rhythmical prose some parts of K. Jost’s edition of Polity (1959 [6504] ), e.g. pp. 59-66. To the read­ er such printing may seem an invitation to read down where he should read across, especially in Jost’s Polity where reading down is required whenever two variant texts are printed in parallel, and that is more often than not. 113 J. and W. Grimm, Die beiden ältesten deutschen Gedichte... Das Lied von Hildebrand und Hadubrand und das Weissenbrunner Gebet zum erstenmal in ihrem Metrum dar­ gestellt und herausgegeben (Cassel, 1812), pp. 35-8 (the argument for long lines) and p. 43 {Judith). Jacob Grimm returned to the argument in ‘Zur altdeutschen Metrik’, Altdeutsche Wälder 1 (1813), at 192-4. The first major edition to use long lines was J. Grimm’s Andreas und Elene (1840 [1417]). 114 In Thorpe’s translation (1830) at p. 137. The practice of ‘some recent scholars’ is rejected (presumably by Rask himself) at pp. 149-54, with reference specifically to the Grimms, including W. Grimm’s error in arranging Widsith in Deutsche Helden­ sage in 1829 ([915], pp. 18-19). Thorpe dropped this criticism in his second edition (London, 1865).

38 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

in short lines, but in Germany occasionally in long lines, the practice followed by Guest. There was also in existence a considerable body o f controversy, much of it in German and concerned with continental Germanic verse though that was often related to Anglo-Saxon verse. 115 Guest saw the wider signifi­ cance of what to most must have appeared as a technical prosodic or even typographic problem. First, he related it to living speech rhythms: ‘the scan­ sion of an Anglo-Saxon verse is not a matter of mere curiosity. There can be little doubt that the modern accentuation o f our language is mainly built upon that of its earliest dialect. ’ 116 But then, at pp. 70-1, he let himself go impres­ sionistically: ‘these short, abrupt, and forcible rhythms were the earliest that were known to our language. They are such as would naturally be prompted 254 by excited feeling, and are well fitted for those lyrical outpourings, which form the earliest poetry of all languages.’ Guest was not alone in such views. Longfellow in the same year ([5 3 5 ], p. 100) addresses himself to the sound-effects of The Riming Poem: ‘Though alliteration predominates in all Anglo-Saxon poetry, rhyme is not wholly want­ ing. It had line-rhymes and final rhymes; which being added to the alliteration, and brought so near together in the short emphatic lines, produce a singular effect upon the ear. They ring like blows o f hammers on an anvil.’ J. R. Green too is enthusiastic in A Short History o f the English People (London, 1874), at p. 27: wrought by Caedmon in the outer form of English song, as it had grown out of the stormy life of the pirates of the sea ... powerful without beauty ... eminent­ ly the verse of warriors, the brief passionate expression of brief passionate emo­ 115 Alliterative verse in Old High German, Old Saxon and Old Icelandic. In addition to the work of the Grimms, that of K. Lachmann is of importance: Über althoch­ deutsche Betonung und Verskunst, Abhandlung der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin... 1832, Historisch-philologische Klasse (Berlin, 1834), 235-70, incidentally compares Heliand with Otfrid’s accentuation (the connection between Heliand and the ‘Cædmonian’ poems had been made much earlier, by J. Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik I (Göttingen, 1819), at lxvi-lxvii - he did not attribute them to C(a)edmon). See also Lachmann’s article, ‘Otfried’, S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, section III.7, ed. M. H. E. Meier and L. F. Kämtz (Leipzig, 1836), pp. 280-2; and Über das Hildebrandslied, Abhand­ lungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin... 1833, Historisch-philologische Klasse (Berlin, 1835), 123-62. (All these are reprinted, with slight changes, in his Kleinere Schriften zur deutschen Philologie, ed. K. Müllenhoff (Berlin, 1876).) Lachmann’s prestige was great; his scansion of Otfrid and, with less justification, of allit­ erative Germanic verse was, however, that of a classicist. 116 P. 16. Some more recent studies run in a similar direction: e.g., M. Daunt, ‘Old Eng­ lish Verse and English Speech Rhythms’ (1946 [1347 and 439]).

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 39

tio n s... vivid, harsh, and emphatic. The very metre is rough ... the verses fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle. Similarly, F. B. Gummere,^4 Handbook o f Poetics (Boston, Mass., 1885), p. 176: Our old metre inclines, like our ancestors themselves, to violence ... a verse cadenced by the crashing blows of sword and axe. But we do not move for­ ward ... parallelisms and repetitions of the Anglo-Saxon diction ... there is an eternal leaping back and forth, but there is little actual advance117... the Ger­ manic nature was fond of raining its blows on the same spot. With M. Rieger’s account of alliterative poetry (1876 [1266]) we have arrived in the new world of philological acumen. His classification of the words which take stress is based on his recognition of the fact that in German­ ic verse sentence-stress coincides with verse-stress. 1 18 What he says of rhyming verse, however, is not so happy, though it serves tó show something of the passion of German scholarship devoted to Germanic antiquity: ‘a parasite for­ mation that grows rank upon the organism of the old poetic art and saps its 255 strength ’ . 1 19 Rieger’s reputation as a metrist has been overshadowed by that of Sievers. 1 2 0 Sievers’s theories as refined by H. Kuhn in 1933 [1339] , 121 by 117 Is this the source of Klaeber’s ‘LACK OF STEADY ADVANCE’, Beowulf (1922 [1650] ), p. lvii? Theories of indebtedness have been built on less. 118 Rieger himself acknowledges that he is indebted to H. Schubert (1870 [1264]) and that he has profited from F. Vetter’s criticism of Schubert (1872 [1265] ). As far as I know, Schubert was the first to classify the stressed parts of speech systematically. 119 ‘Ein schmarotzergewächs, das auf dem organismus der alten verskunst wuchert und ihm die kraft aussaugt’ (p. 3). Rieger’s indignation was aroused in part by Lachmann’s brilliant encyclopaedia article on Otfrid (see above, n. 115), in which he saw Otfrid’s use of rhyming verse as a way forward from the lifelessness and formulaic alliterative verse of the Old High German poets immediately preceding Otfrid. 120 Sievers’s scansion is set out in masterly fashion in the great articles of 1885 and 1887 [1277] and the monograph, Altgermanische Metrik, of 1893 [1285], which took account of and often superseded earlier work. It led J. M. Schipper to modify his excellent work: cf. the books of 1882 [1268] and 1895 [1293] - the English trans­ lation of 1910 has further modifications. It prompted K. Luick to an authoritative summary in the second edition of Paul’s Grundriss II.2 (1905 [1308 and 8] ). It led to controversy with M. Kaluza in Studien zum germanischen Alliterationsvers (1894 [1290 and 3148]) - with his collaborator F. Graz on the ‘Caedmonian’ poems [3220]. Kaluza’s historical account is of great interest in keeping alive the possibility that Lachmann’s idea of four lifts to the half-line had not been entirely knocked out by the Vetter-Rieger-Sievers theory of two lifts: in fact, the theory of four lifts is useful still (as B. Kuhnke showed on Gawain in the last issue, 1900, of Kaluza’s Studien) for Middle English alliterative verse, and for some very loose Old English verse. 121 English summary by D. Slay in 1952 [1353].

40 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

A. J. Bliss in 1958 [3163], and with further points by T. Cable , 1 22 have sharpened our understanding of the mechanics o f the alliterative line most usefully for editorial work. A sense of what we should listen for when we hear the verse is best conveyed by A. Heusler and especially J. C. Pope . 123

Emendations and metre From the 1880s onwards, scholars favoured systematic emendation metri causa. There is talk of laws and the disturbance of metrical laws, and editors soon condemn transgressions in the transmitted texts, a scholarly habit in which Rieger led the way and Sievers gave firm direction. H. Schubert in 1870 ([1264], pp. 34-51) was, I believe, the first to explain how metrically to eval­ uate contracted forms , 1 24 how weak verbs o f the second class have metrically syllabic and how we may syncopate words o f the type hal(i)ge; at the same time he explained how the texts were not reliably transmitted by the scribes. Till Anglo-Saxonists had some exact notion of scansion they had no means of competent editorial emendation: editors are in duty bound, when they im­ prove or emend a half-line, not to create a unique metrical pattern. Older theorists, especially Sievers, assumed one single metrical standard for all ‘strict’ Old English verse. More recently, some variation of metrical practice has been noted, though deviations are not great.12S That a good ear has to be reinforced by systematic knowledge of the metre is shown by analysing the most distin­ guished early mock-Anglo-Saxon verse known to me, that by Grundtvig, pre­ facing Bfowulfs Drape (1820 [1659]), which was metrically correct whenever he stuck closely to genuine half-lines, but not otherwise, celebrated poet though he was. 256 Since Rieger some scholars, notably Sievers and Holthausen, have been led by their knowledge of scansion to emend in order to confer regularity on lines of verse that lacked it. Conservative scholars were inclined to regard emenda­ tion metri causa as verging on a heretical rejection o f an overriding principle of textual criticism, that —metrically, at least — ‘whatever is, is right ’ . 126 122 The Meter and Melody o f 'Beowulf’, Illinois Stud, in Lang, and Lit. 64 (1974). An important study is that by E. Neuner (1920 [ 1324] ), especially on light verses. 123 See above, n. 108. 124 C. L. Wrenn actually printed the decontracted forms in his edition of Beowulf (1953 [ 1654] ), but W. F. Bolton, when he revised Wrenn’s edition in 1973, removed the decontractions. 125 See A. J. Bliss, The Metre o f Beowulf (1958 [3163] ), chs. 15 and 16; and Jane Roberts on Guthlac (1971 [3814]). 126 J. Hoops, in Beowulfstudien (1932 [2508] ), at pp. 1-13, sets out the principles of

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance o f A-S Records 41

An extreme example of the refusal to make an obvious metrical improvement is Beowulf 947a and 1759a, secg betsta, which modern scholars hesitate to emend to secga betsta. When imperfect sense requires emendation, the emended text must be metrically regular. That is not always easy to achieve. One example has to suffice. B. Thorpe in his edition (1855 [1635]) emended Beowulf 2941a (his line 5874) very plausibly to fuglum to gamene. The poem has no other exam­ ple of a Sievers type ‘A’ line with dissyllabic middle dip and second lift re­ solved unless there is double alliteration, when it is not uncommon . 1 27 Many editors and commentators have noted the difficulty, which none has solved convincingly. One hesitates to accept J. C. Pope’s ‘The singularity of this emended verse need not arouse suspicion.’ It is an emended verse, one o f our making, and whatever they may do, we must avoid singularity.

Interpreting the Anglo-Saxon records Approaches to problems of interpretation have changed over the long period o f Anglo-Saxon scholarship. A multitude o f single words or phrases or passages or whole units have needed some explanation. For single words, context and etymology are relied on. Some scholars believe that, mysteriously, ancient meanings, inherited from ancestors who belonged to a different civilization, inhere in words long after. Pagan beliefs 1 2 8 and leafy folk-memories1 2 9 have conservative textual criticism as they apply to an Anglo-Saxon poem. He is averse from improving the rhythm, but more ready to fulfil editorially the requirements of alliteration. It may well be that conservatism was reinforced as a reaction to E. Sievers’s senescent involvement with ‘Schallanalyse’, as is shown in connection with Old English in the following references in the new bibliography: general (1924 [1328]); and cf. G. Ipsen and F. Karg (1928 [1333]); short pieces in verse and prose (1918-19 [1321]); Widsith (1921 [5024] ); Cynewulf (1925 [3400 and 417] ); Caedmon (1929 [3746 and 419] ); The Dream o f the Rood in H. Biitow’s edition (1935 [3486]), at pp. 176-85; and Beowulf, in T. Westphalen’s study (1967 (2677]), at pp. 124-32 and pis. III-IV. See also the valuable account of Sievers’s scholarship by P. Ganz, in BGDSL (Tübingen), 100 (1978), at 40-85, esp. 65-85, with further references to relevant works. I am indebted to Professor Ganz for kindly allowing me to see reproductions of further specimens of Sievers’s text of Beowulf edited accord­ ing to the principles of ‘Schallanalyse’, the original of which is preserved in the archives at Leipzig. 127 See Pope, The Rhythm o f Beowulf (1942 and 1966 [3155]), p. 253; cf. Sievers’s analysis of metre (1885 [1277]), pp. 272 and 276. 128 Cf. my The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (1975 [677] ), esp. pp. 17-18 and 71-5. 129 See the works of the ‘Münster School’: for Old English, e.g. H. A. Benning, ‘Welt’ und ‘Mensch ’ (1961 [747]), and E. S. Dick, Altenglisch ‘dryht’ (1965 [751]).

42 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

257 been felt by scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in words that are unlikely to have been etymologically transparent to the Anglo-Saxons in historical times. For rare words some solutions are convincing. Two examples o f interesting words must suffice; they are very different. The word œstel is solved: ‘ae. æstel ist bei Ælfric mit indicatorium glossiert und stammt über air. astal aus lat. has­ tula “kleiner Speer” , was ...für Bedeutung “ Buchzeichen, Lesezeichen” spricht. Das air. astal wird in Cormacs Glossar erklärt als slisin nô gai liub, d.h. “Holzspan oder Speer eines Buches” . ’ 1 30 Early guesses included ‘stylus’ and ‘seal’. The former goes back to the Parkerian edition o f the Preface to Pastoral Care, part of the first edition of Asser in 1574 ([5954], sig. Fij): an œstel... þone œstel ‘a stile ... that style’, soon republished on the continent by great foreign and English scholars: Bonaventura Vulcanius (De Literis & Lingua Getarum, siue Gothorum (Leiden, 1597), p. 80) and, not without misprints, William Camden ((Frankfurt, 1602) [5495], p. 26, and again in the 1603 ed.). The Poet Laureate Alfred Austin finds poetic expression for the latter sense, ‘seal’: ALFRED To every Bishop in the land, when once The Danish Raven flickers, must I send A copy of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral, With Golden seal worth fifty mancuses.131132 F or Beowulf 2885a ebelwyn, J. Hoops, BeowulfStudien (1932 [2508]), pp. 1 1 0 - 1 2 , gives a good, modern discussion in the course o f a more wide-ranging discussion of abstracts used for concretes, and specifically Beowulf 1728a on lufan. 132 The etymological connection between wynn ‘jo y ’ and (gejwunian ‘dwell’ was established for the German cognates well before the time of the Grimm brothers . 133 Their comment on ‘Fafnis mál’ 8,2 munr ‘jo y ’ with the contextual sense ‘dwelling, home’ takes them back to the thing and its expres­ sion in language : 1 3 4 thus una ‘gaudere’, therefore ‘dwell in jo y ’, for German Wonne and Wohnung are related, ‘to die’ is expressed by the Christian idiom 130 M. Förster, Reliquienkultus (1943 [658]), p. 11, n. 3. 131 England’s Darling (London, 1896), p. 80, Act III, sc. V {ad finem). 132 In K. Ostheeren’s full discussion of Old English words for ‘joy’ (1964 [750]), at p. 82, ebelwyn has its place. 133 See J. G. Scherz, Glossarium Germanicum Medii Aevi, ed. J. J. Oberlin (Strasburg, 1784), cols. 2056-7 (s.v. wonne). 134 ‘Der Grund liegt tief in der Sache und Sprache’, Lieder der alten Edda, ed. J. and W. Grimm I (Berlin, 1815), 183-4.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 43

258 zu des Vaters Freude eingehen, viz. into the heavenly dwelling.135 The con­ nection of home and delight was made etymologically by the Grimms for munr; lufen and eðelwyn show such a connection to be present in AngloSaxon habits of poetic thought. The study o f Icelandic as o f all other Ger­ manic languages has been a living part o f the study of Old English from the time o f Hickes onwards. Eager to detach Anglo-Saxon antiquity from the Latin learning of Christian, European post-classical civilization, Anglo-Saxonists looked for monuments of a bookless world of the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain or be­ fore. Widsith was interpreted as some scald’s or minstrel’s autobiography, according to J. J. Conybeare, Illustrations (1826 [278]), p. 28, of the mid-fifth century, but modernized in transmission; E. Guest in 1838 ([1258] II, 78-93), in a long account of the poem, claimed to confirm its early date on prosodic grounds: early date and early metric have been standard teaching —except for the lonely voice of G. Langenfelt in 1959 [5084] and 1960-1 [5085]. I dare say he was right. A continental legend cycle, Eadwacer’s, flourished in R. Imelmann’s mind as he contemplated obscure Old English poems in 1907 [958 and 959] and 1920 [981]. Here was story transmitted without resort to pen and parchment. Folk-tales and their motifs and structure have been much studied in connec­ tion with Beowulf, ever since F. Panzer’s Studien zur germanischen Sagen­ geschichte I (1910 [1935]) gave modern direction to that line of inquiry, with T. A. Shippey in 1969 [2990] bringing the analysis of the narrative structure into the realm of Structuralism. Anglo-Saxon material that has come down to us in books is seen in relation to oral story matter. In the minds of some scholars the recognition of that relationship was not without a strain of hostility to book-poetry. H. M. Chad­ wick, doubting ‘theories o f biblical or classical influence’, turned against the academic thinking behind them, ‘this intellectual atmosphere which, naturally enough, has given birth to the chimaera o f a literary Beowulf’ . 13 6 Sievers 135 The phrase occurs in J. H. Jung (Stilling), Theorie der Geister-Kunde (Nuremberg, 1808), at p. 338, in which the death of a clothmaker is given the euphemisms ‘gieng ein zu seines Herrn Freude. Ich war bey seinem Heimgang’. For at til fiarri siác minom feþr munom, the Grimms’ literal verse translation has ‘dass zu fern ich sey meinen VatersFreuden’, but the poetically conceived prose rendering has ‘dass ich allzufern sey meines Vaters freudenreicher Heimath’ (pt 2, p. 47). [In his review of ASE 9, in RES n.s. 35 (1984), 345, J. D. Pheifer points out that ‘zu des Vaters Freuden eingehen echoes Matt. 25:21, 23’ (in the parable of the talents), and so provides an example of shared debt to Christian writings rather than a gemeingermanisch locution.] 136 In the Note, ‘Literary Influence in Beowulf’, The Heroic Age (1912 [489]), at p. 76.

44 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

treated with august contempt that manifestation of sick philological fantasy, Caedmon as the inventor of the book-epic . 1 3 7

Oral-formulaic poetry: ‘a gusle in every home ’ The beginnings of such an attitude lie in the realm of oral poetry. By 1825 Goethe tells us that Serbian song had occupied German minds and hearts for 259 half a century . 1 38 The work of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic had stirred Germany. Jacob Grimm played a prominent part as translator and as critic. ‘Even now there is a gusle in every house in the interior of Serbia, a country left to it­ self. ’ 139 Not diligent search of ancient parchment, but the warm mouth of the Serbian people has brought forth Serbian song . 1 4 0 That new folk-poetry could become in time old was not beyond Grimm’s grasp; that true folkpoetry could lead to literary re-creations and reuse of ancient melodies was not beyond the grasp o f Goethe , 141 who well knew how to give to new poems some semblance of folk-poetry. 137 ‘Caedmon, der erfinder des “buchepos” ist eben, bei lichte besehen, nur eines der übelsten hirngespinste auf das jemals eine philologie hereingefallen ist!’, ‘Heliand, Tatian und Hraban,’ BGDSL 50 (1927), 426, n. 138 ‘Bereits ein halbes Jahrhundert hindurch beschäftigt man sich in Deutschland ernst­ lich und gemüthlich damit’, ‘Serbische Lieder’, Ueber Kunst und Alterthum 5.2 (Stuttgart, 1825), 35-6 (Weimarer Ausgabe 41.2 (1903), 136). 139 ‘Noch hat in dem innern sich selbst überlassenen Serbien, jedes Haus seine Gusle’, J. S. Vater’s introduction, ‘Ueber die neueste Auffassung langer Helden-Lieder aus dem Munde des Volks in Serbien; zur Vergleichung mit Homer und Ossian Wuk’s Stephanowitsch kleine serbische Grammatik, trans. J. Grimm (Leipzig and Berlin, 1824), p. lviii. 140 ‘Nicht aus alten Pergamentblättern hervorgesucht worden sind unsere serbischen Lieder, sie sind alle aus dem warmen Munde des Volks aufgenommen, sie waren viel­ leicht vorher nie aufgeschrieben, sie sind in diesem Sinne also nicht alt, werden aber wohl alt werden’, Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (1823), Stück 177-8, p. 1764 (repr. in J. Grimm’s Kleinere Schriften IV (1869 [412] ), at 199). 141 An anonymous ‘Voranzeige’, presumably by K. von Holtei, described in the table of contents as ‘Eingereicht’, so that Goethe clearly did not accept responsibility for it when he published it in his journal Ueber Kunst und Alterthum 6.2 (Stuttgart, 1828), at 352-3, under the heading ‘Gedichte in schlesischer Mundart’, has been thought by E. von der Hagen (Goethe als Herausgeber von \Kunst und Alterthum ' und seine M it­ arbeiter (Berlin, 1912), pp. 180 and 206) to be by Holtei but worked over by Goethe. It refers to the literary re-creation of popular poetry in modern times: ‘D er... Zwei­ fel ...: ob die aus der F eder geflossnen Gesänge, in Volkes Mund einen Wiederklang finden werden? hebt sich zum Theil dadurch, dass die im schlesischen Musenalmanach mitgetheilten Proben, ihre Melodien gefunden haben und innerhalb wie ausserhalb Schlesiens nicht ohne Vergnügen gesungen werden.’

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 45

The application to early Germanic verse of the living epic traditions of Yugoslavia was made explicitly by J. A. Schmeller in a paper read in 1839, which contains the ingredients of the full oral-formulaic theory: the songs of the Iliad and Odyssee, the songs that go under the name der Niebelunge liet, together with a footnote about Yugoslavia where heroic songs are still alive — ‘Dazu trifft man ein [s/c] Gusle in jedem Haus, besonders in der Wohnung des H irten’ —all o f it apropos of the metre of Heliand. 142 F. P. Magoun, Jr, led the field in articles that revived similar interests about a quarter of a century ago (1953 [1195] and 1955 [1199] ). A. B. Lord’s The Singer o f Tales (1960 [3101]) is close to Magoun, and in 1965 [2929 and 435] Lord wrote more, as did a flourishing school, especially in a collection o f essays gathered by R. P. Creed in 1967 [437]. Some voiced their misgivings, among them A. G. Brodeur in his distinguished The Art o f Beowulf (1959 [2856] ) and A. Bonjour in several o f his papers (collected in 1962 [2884] ); but espe­ cially vigorously Kemp Malone in a review in ESts 41 (1960 [3089] ), at 204: 260 The B e o w u lf p oet was no m instrel, strum m ing a harp and com posing verse as he strum m ed. He was a sophisticated literary artist, who gave careful thought to w hat he was doing and did n o t rest co n te n t un til he had found the right w ords for w hat he had in m ind. The use o f trad itio n al diction is one thing; im­ provisation is som ething else again. The tw o need no t go together and in B eo ­ w u lf they m ost em phatically do not.

Other major literary theories A review o f the major theories that have proved infectious in Anglo-Saxon scholarship would require long exposition. In 1921 ([2 0 3 3 ], pt I, ch. Ill) R. W. Chambers wrote well about the disintegrators o f Beowulf; in 1964 ([677] N&Q 209, 455-62 (1975, ch. 9, Aii)) I tried to give a sketch of the 142 Ueberden Versbau in der alliterirenden Poesie besonders der Altsachsen, Königlich Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Abhandlungen der philosophisch-philolog. Classe 4 1847 (5), 211 and n. Schmeller must have been familiar with Grimm’s translations of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, and indeed refers to him; but he also uses a more journalistic source, a series of articles by ‘L.H.’, ‘Serbische Sitten’, in (J. P. Kaltenbaeck’s) Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichts- und Staatskunde 3 (1837), at 57-9 (this is the instalment referred to by Schmeller), 61-3, 65-6, 70-2, 75-6 (irrelevant), 79-80 and 83-4. [On Vuk Stafanovic and his manifold contacts, including those with Goethe and especially Grimm, see (A.) Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times o f Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic 1787-1864 (Oxford, 1970). Wilson translates most of Grimm’s review in the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen of 1823 as Appendix D. Sir Duncan Wilson’s informative work was not known to me when I wrote the article.)

46 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

disintegration of the ‘elegies’. More durable and better founded, though not therefore correspondingly more convincing in detailed application, are theories linking Anglo-Saxon verse with Christian allegory. Overtly explicit allegory is rare, but the possibil­ ity of allegory is common. The likelihood, for example, that a poem on the phoenix should in the early Middle Ages receive more than a historical reading underlies J. E. Cross’s view in a review o f an edition (1965 [4019] ) and in a symposium in 1967 [4046 and 437] , 1 4 3 It seems odd that the poet o f Exodus gives no distinct hints that he is aware o f how his learned contemporaries prac­ tised typological readings for the biblical book . 1 4 4 Perhaps no Old English poem demonstrates the possibilities of allegory and the difficulty of proof better than The Seafarer. O. S. Anderson has told the history o f the allegorical interpretation of the poem well (1937 [4294]), as has I. L. Gordon in her edition (1960 [4276]), esp. at pp. 4-12. G. Ehrismann, in an outstanding paper ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Beiträge zum germanischen Frühchristentum ’ (1909 [964]), has the poem at the centre of his discussion of allegory in Old English verse; but though he connects Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ in Beowulf with The Seafarer he infers no allegory in Beowulf The nature o f allegory in Beow ulf has often been discussed recently, and the existence of allegory often denied . 145 Other non-literal interpretations had m yth at heart, most elaborately K. Müllenhoff’s view of Beowulf (1889 [1842]), based especially on the etymo­ logy of names and correspondences with Icelandic myths. Numerology has taken hold of some Anglo-Saxonists more recently, and subtleties which 261 emerge to their view might have brought astonishment to the Anglo-Saxons since they arranged their poetry so inconveniently for numerology . 1 4 6 Other scholars give us the benefit o f their understanding of the poems in various ways. J. R. R. Tolkien has an imaginary setting for The Battle ofMaldon (1953 [1586] ); Gisela Reichel’s Hakons Lied: Ein Roman um den Schreiber des Beowulf-Epos (Leipzig, 1962) creates a Bruder Matthäus as the poet; and 143 Cf. the extensive treatment of symbolism in R. van den Broek, The Myth o f the Phoenix according to Classical and Early Christian Traditions (Leiden, 1971); the book does not deal with the Old English poem. 144 Cf. J. E. Cross and S. I. Tucker’s article (1960 [3632] ). 145 Cf. M. E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning o f ‘B eow ulf (1970 [ 3001 ] ), and the debate in Chicago in 1971 (ASE 2 (1973), 285-302). 146 R. D. Stevick’s ‘Geometrical Design of the Old English Andreas', Poetica 9 (Tokyo, ‘1978’, in fact, 1979), 73-106; an earlier study of Beowulf (1968 [3171]) with reference to manuscript spacing has given us reviews of real value, especially that by C. J. E. Ball.

Paper 1. Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of A-S Records 47

Matthäus’s commentary delivered to young Wulfhere, a king’s son, seems often very good to m e . 1 4 7 A more down-to-earth reading of Beowulf is pro­ vided by E. B. Irving (1968 [2969] ).

Textual scholarship A vast deal o f writing involves cruces. Earlier commentaries, e.g. J. Hoops’s two books (both 1932 [2508-9] ), clarify textual obscurities in Beowulf ]ike full notes to an edition. There are many series o f such textual notes. Accord­ ing to the new bibliography, C. W. M. Grein’s notes are among the very earliest (1865 [1077] ), and E. A. Kock’s two series with their titles jingling jauntily, ‘Jubilee Jaunts and Jottings’ (1918 [1104]) and ‘Plain Points and Puzzles’ (1922 [1115]), are the result of much ingenious thinking. In dealing with little cruces as with larger matters —was Beowulf king o f the Danes? 1 4 8 —one scholar answers another, and the new bibliography lists all attempts at solu­ tions, all the replies they evoked, all the reviews they received, as far as human skill is capable of treating anything in its entirety.

Retrospect As we consider the listings in the 380 pages o f this new bibliography extend­ ing over more than four hundred years some of us may succumb under a Swiftian ad infinitem. It is, most of it, so minor. Seen in our entirety may we not come to regret the company we keep? Writers on Germanic antiquity at times raised themselves up by gracing their pieces with a Goethewort.14 9 One might think of one: Maus’ und Ratten, Flöh und Wanzen Müssen alle beytragen zum Ganzen . 150 262 There is a wholesome lesson for us to be derived from a contemplation of this 147 Her explanations are imaginative and plausible in such examples as Grendel’s mere and hell (p. 187) and Beowulf’s pagan burial (pp. 210-11) and there is a postscript (pp. 261-4) on Sutton Hoo. The use of the novel as a vehicle for literary criticism is familiar enough; e.g. Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister, Home’s Douglas in The Virginians. 148 See Hoops, Beowulfstudien (1932 [2508] ), pp. 78-88. 149 Thus H. Brunner in 1890 [1843], ad finem. 150 For mouse and rat, bed-bug and flea Consort in our entirety. ‘Ein Fastnachtspiel vom Pater Brey’ 196-7 (Der junge Goethe, ed. H. FischerLamberg III (Berlin, 1966), 169).

48 Part I. Surveys o f OE Studies

new bibliography, a kind of memento mori; such as the Anglo-Saxonists of the past now seem, such shall we be. We might have flattered ourselves if we had been given merely a select bibliography. There is, however, a less gloomy reason for welcoming this complete biblio­ graphy. Once the reader has begun to find his way round , 1 S1 he learns some­ thing new every time he consults the book; the entries before our own cen­ tury are not to be ignored. Those who have laboured at the Anglo-Saxon records have created over the centuries a body of scholarly endeavour relevant to ours and of interest to us even when we now think them wrong. As we go to their work from our mounds of examination scripts, from dissertations submitted, alas, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for some higher degree, or look up from the interesting spectacle o f ourselves rubbing dry old sticks together without much hope of kindling flame, and read instead the works of earlier generations o f scholars, how more varied in mind and more unexpected in error they seem. Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson have given us the key with which we, who in English studies go back farther in time than do our colleagues studying later periods, may enter upon our inheritance. Here is a better Goethewort: Mein Erbtheil wie herrlich, weit und breit! Die Zeit ist mein Besitz, mein Acker ist die Zeit . 15 5 2 351 It is rendered sufficiently by its source: ‘Tempus divitiae meae, tempus ager meus . ,1 S 3

151 It is advisable to ignore some of the over-subtle divisions for studies of Beowulf, probably forced on the compilers because the Beowulf section is voluminous enough to require some kind of subdivision: it amounts to about a quarter of the total on verse and prose. 152 West-östlicher Divan, in Goethe’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand V (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1828), at 119. 153 J. W. von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, ed. H. A. Maier (Tübingen, 1965) II, 235; cf. I, 106.

2

9

10

The Continental Contribution to the Study o f Anglo-Saxon Writings up to and including that o f the Grimms Both in England and on the continent of Europe the scholarly study of AngloSaxon preceded the scholarly study of later English writings. In England the study of Anglo-Saxon writings began towards the end of the sixteenth century as part o f a wider interest in theological, legal, historical, and linguistic matters (see Stanley 1980,229-35 [= 9-16, above] ; [for bibliographical references in parentheses see the Bibliography, pp. 63-74; cross-references to papers reprint­ ed here are given in the form ‘[= 49-74] ’]). Anglo-Saxon occupied only a small part o f that interest, but it enjoyed the special favour of Queen Eliza­ beth’s great Archbishop o f Canterbury, Matthew Parker, and the men around him. The details o f the Germanic origins o f the English as told in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum were never forgotten in England, and on the continent too the wide distribution o f manuscripts o f the Historia en­ sured ready familiarity with the Saxons, Angles and Jutes . 1 I do not know which Renaissance scholar first made learned use for linguis­ tic inference of the knowledge of the three tribes that settled in Britain in the fifth century. Conrad Gesner, ‘der eigentliche Gründer der neueren Linguistik’, as Rudolf von Raumer (1870: 37) called him, deserves this distinction among his many, that he should be remembered as among the first, if not the first, who correctly analysed the fact that English is a Germanic language to the extent to which it is derived from Saxon; he discusses the matter in his Mithri­ dates of 1555, a book valued highly by Raumer (1870: 37-46) in his extended account of Gesner. In this paper I have very often drawn on Raumer whose history o f German­ ic Philology is attractive to me not only because he sees the work o f Jacob Grimm as the zenith of all Germanic scholarship, but more essentially because he knew how to evaluate earlier scholarship. He does not see it simply with the hindsight of error overcome; he is guided rather by a sympathy which allows him to be caught up in the hopes of each past development of interest. He sums up, characteristically in a footnote (p. 180), the right attitude: ‘Die Geschichte der Wissenschaft hat sich in die Zeit zu versetzen, die sie schildert.’ The first o f a long line of continental printings of short Anglo-Saxon texts 1 Bede’s Historia was first printed, according to GKW 3/1928: No. 3756, at Strasburg c. 1475-8; and another Strasburg edition followed in 1500 as the second part of an edition of Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica, GKW 7/1978: No. 9439. Further editions followed with increasing frequency in the sixteenth century and later.

50 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

11

from exemplars in print in England is, I believe, in Bonaventura Vulcanius’ De literis & lingua Getarum, siue Gothorum, pp. 73-80, in 1597. With many mistakes and without the use of any Anglo-Saxon letters Vulcanius copied King Alfred’s Preface to the Cura Pastoralis from the Parkerian edition of Asser’s Life of Alfred of 1574.2 The first piece of independent editing on the continent o f any Anglo-Saxon text was a by-product o f theological scholarship by the Jesuit Nicolaus Sera­ rius, who edited from manuscript the letters of St. Boniface and his contem po­ raries, 1605; and so he published the ‘Proverb from Winfrid’s Tim e’ as it was recorded by one of the saint’s contemporaries . 3 Not knowing the language, Serarius made some mistakes, especially o f word-spacing. Catechetical texts, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and versions of the Creed, were from the Renaissance onwards often printed in many lan­ guages, Anglo-Saxon included. The first books in England ever to print AngloSaxon, the Parkerian edition o f 1566 or 1567 o f Æ lfric’s A Testimonie o f Antiquitie, and William Lambard’s Archaionomia of 1568, included these texts in an appendix or as part of the Preface to the Laws o f King Alfred; and they, or different versions of them, were often reprinted in England . 4 Marquard Freher, the jurist, published them for the first time on the continent in 1609 and 1610. Freher’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon went a little beyond that, for he used Anglo-Saxon glosses to explain Germanic words in his study o f the Westphalian Fehmgerichte of 1610. Catechetical and legal texts are printed in a conflation and with many inaccuracies o f detail, so that it is not easy to establish the immediate source, by Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn in his elegant little Prima Religionis Christianae rudimenta of 1650. Linguistic scholarship of a different quality is for the first time deployed in continental Anglo-Saxon studies in the works of Franciscus Junius the Younger. He shows a formidable understanding of etymology, involving Anglo-Saxon, in his Observationes in Willerami... Francicam paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum of 1655 which includes (pp. 176ff.) an alphabetically arranged, etymological 2 The text was reprinted by Camden in 1602 (and again 1603): 25-27. 3 Epistle 61 (p. 73). Cf. Dobbie 1942: lxvii-lxviii, clxv. Serarius’ text was reprinted (with its errors) in La Bigne 1618: 89, and later collections of Christian writers. 4 In the many editions of Camden’s Remaines, of which the first was 1605: 16; in Lisle 1623 and 1638; in H. Spelman 1639: 264-6, 354-63; and in Whelock 1643: 495-6,1644: 22-24. That the manuscripts are not always followed reliably is well exemplified by Lisle’s Anglo-Saxonization of prayers from the Ancrene Riwle in Bodleian MS Laud Mise. 201 [olim Laud D.85 ; see Wanley 1705: 100-101 ] ; cf. Napier 1909.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 51

12

treatment o f Germanic monosyllables, a forerunner o f his etymological dictio­ nary, extant in Bodleian MSS Junius 4-5 at Oxford, and only published in 1743 long after the death o f Junius (who lived from 1589 to 1677). Raumer writes fully on Junius, and praises him highly, noting that Jacob Grimm had praised him too as a great scholar . 5 Johannes Vorst’s highly competentOèservationum in linguam vernaculam specimen of 1669 owes much to Junius on Willeram, and he has also made good use o f William Somner’s Dictionarium of 1659 (from which he probably derives his occasional references to texts, as he quotes from the Laws of King Alfred ,6 the Old English Bede, 7 and SpeLman’s Psalter of 1640), as well as of etymological information from Meric Casaubon . 8 Significant further progress in German etymology using AngloSaxon did not, in continental scholarship, make much direct use o f the texts themselves, as Junius had done, not even in such major works of reference as Johann Georg Wachter’s Glossarium Germanicum of 1737, or Johannes Ihre’s great Glossarium Suogothicum of 1769. Junius chose the word ord ‘beginning’ in the Observationes of 1655 (p. 248) to announce that he had received from Archbishop Ussher the Caedmon MS (cf. Gollancz 1927: xiv). The publication by Junius, and also in the year 1655, o f the poems contained in this famous manuscript is a most important act of scholarship involving Anglo-Saxon literature centrally. It is easy for us now to criticize the edition because of its many errors o f detail; but the difficulty o f the texts is formidable, and seemed so till well into the nineteenth century: even for so brilliant a scholar as Junius the tools were lacking to succeed better. Unlike English printers from the time o f Archbishop Parker’s printer, John Day, onwards, continental printers did not possess a special fount for printing Anglo-Saxon, not even sorts for thorn or barred d; for them possible (or near) equivalents like th (or in earlier use just d) were in use. As early as 1597 Franciscus Raphelengius Plantin at Leiden provided and made much of a Gothic fount for Vulcanius’ De literis et lingua Getarum siue Gothorum. Junius had Gothic and also Saxon founts made, and he used them in the two Amsterdam 5 Raumer 1870: 107-29. Cf. J. Grimm (Murbach Hymns) 1830: i-v (= Kl. Sehr. VIII, 129-34). In fact, some of Junius’s most lasting contributions to Anglo-Saxon scholar­ ship are his transcripts of Cottonian manuscripts. They are preserved in Junius MSS at the Bodleian Library ; and those of damaged or destroyed manuscripts have assumed a major role as witnesses. This study, however, concerns itself almost exclusively with printed works. [On Junius’s Saxon type, see pp. 78-9, below.] 6 Available in Lambard 1568, H. Spelman 1639, Whelock 1644. 7 Available in Whelock 1643. 8 Vorst refers to Casaubon’s part of the book, not Somner’s.

52 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

books of 1655 and again in the great edition o f the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels complete with glossary and annotations to which the Oxford scholar Thomas Marshall contributed directly; the Gospels were published at Dort in 1665, 1664. Among the rarer books using Junius’s type is T Vader Ons pub­ lished anonymously at Breda in 1666; it includes the Lord’s Prayer in AngloSaxon with notes. His own copy of the book is preserved at Oxford as MS Junius 95. That the book is by Junius, or by one very close to him, is shown not merely by the display o f his Anglo-Saxon and Gothic type and the obvious indebtedness of the little compilation to the Dort Gospels, but by an elaborate bibliographical note (at sig. (a4)) giving details of Junius’s printed works. The publication of the Lord’s Prayer in different languages or in one or more languages at different stages o f their history was an increasingly common occurrence. It provided materials for learning the rudiments of languages and it facilitated linguistic comparison. In the case o f Old and Modern English the practice had begun with the first publication of Anglo-Saxon, Æ lfric’s Testimonie, in 1566 or 1567, and was reinvigorated with the publication o f William Camden’s Remaines in 1605. Collections in many languages were not initiated by Junius. Among relevant earlier ventures o f this kind is Johann Reuter’s Oratio Dominica XL. Linguarum of 1662. [Until 1983 it was known to me only from references in later collections . ] 9 John Wilkins followed in 1668 (pp. 435-9) in An Essay Towards a Real Character A nd a Philosophical Lan­ guage. Thomas Lüdecke (or Ludekenius) published a book with ninety-nine versions in 1680. Though printed on the continent, at Amsterdam, the great collection of 1715 must be regarded as a work o f English scholarship ; 10 1 it in­ cludes no fewer than five different or differently produced Anglo-Saxon texts of great interest. Johann Friedrich Fritz in 1748 appended a collection of many versions of the Lord’s Prayer in many languages as well as a useful bib13 liography as a second part of a work o f Oriental and Western linguistic interest. As late as 1789 Gustav von Bergmann derives (p. 15) for a similar collection his Anglo-Saxon version from Junius’s Dort Gospels. In the same year P. Willen bûcher and J. Birkenstock published Anglo-Saxon versions of the Lord’s Prayer, the Decalogue and the Creed anonymously to illustrate manifestations of linguistic change in Germanic, taking the Anglo-Saxon specimens from Freher 1609-10. 9 Lüdecke 1680: 44; Fritz 1748. See also Rotermund in Jöcher 1813: s.n. 10 Both the West Saxon Gospels and the Anglian Rushworth Gospels are quoted. For the publication, see Reed 1952: 67. 11 For an earlier edition, 1743, cf. Alston 1974: 2, 466b. It has not been available to me and may not include the versions of the Lord’s Prayer.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 53

Continental literary scholarship involving Anglo-Saxon literature seems to have gained little from Junius’s publication in 1655 of the Cædmonian para­ phrases. Raumer (1870: 155) praises Daniel Georg Morhof generously for re­ taining his love of German language and literature while ranging widely be­ yond Germanic in his learning. His Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie o f 1682 shows knowledge of the earlier stages of continental Germanic languages, including Gothic. But his perfunctory mention of Anglo-Saxon literature may seem even less well informed than what he says of contemporary English poetry. He moves quickly from Alfred and Aldhelm to Abraham Cow­ ley who is regarded, he tells us, by his compatriots as the equal of Virgil and Horace. He refers to Anglo-Saxon poetry of the age o f Alfred (p. 233), yet shows no evidence of direct familiarity with it, and what he says of the poetry of the English at all times condemns him as he condemns it: ‘Ihre Poeterey ist ziemlich dunkel und verkrochen/ voll von weitgeholten Metaphoris' Johannes Schilter’s Thesaurus appeared posthumously in 1728. His interest in the organization of Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch led him to related and analogous materials in the related languages; and in the second part of the first volume he published Anglo-Saxon texts, with a more precise indication o f where he took them from than is to be found in most of the works of earlier scholars. He included a collection of Anglo-Saxon Gospel pericopes from Junius’s Dort Gospels and probably the earlier Parkerian Gospels of 1571, associated with John Foxe; he went to Whelock’s Bede of 1643 for the Decalogue; he took the Lord’s Prayer from Freher’s book of 1609, the Words of the Communion from Boxhorn’s little book of 1650. As a compilation of Anglo-Saxon liturgi14 cal materials Schilter’s is the most elaborate produced so far on the continent. The first volume o f Rapin Thoyras’s great Histoire d ’Angleterre published at The Hague in 1724 includes an account of Anglo-Saxon England which occupies an important place in the history of Alfredian veneration (cf. Stanley 1981: 107 and passim [= 413, below ]. There is little evidence that Rapin had any knowledge of vernacular writings. He does refer several times to the Chronicle, and that was available in both Whelock’s edition of 1643 and Ed­ mund Gibson’s o f 1692, both with Latin translations. Otherwise his knowledge seems not to extend beyond ‘Caedmon’s Hym n’, and for that the Latin trans­ lation was, o f course, to hand in any edition o f Bede’s Historia. C.U. Grupen’s Formulae veterum confessionum o f 1767 brings together (with misprints) from Lambard 1568, Sir Henry Spelman 1639, and D. Wilkins 1721, as well as Wanley 1705, penitential texts and Caedmon’s Hymn. The first continental contributions to the understanding of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, which form an account included with the preliminaries to the

54 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Anglo-Saxon version of Orosius, are at the usual level. An appendix to Andreas Bussaeus’s edition o f Ari Thorgilsson’s Islendinga bok o f 1733 has (from Sir John Spelman’s Life o f Alfred, 1709: 152-6) the text together with notes . 12 Johann Philipp Murray gave two lectures to the Königliche Societät der Wissen­ schaften at Göttingen of which only summaries are available in the Society’s journal for 1765. In 1773 Albrecht von Haller gave a slight and largely imagi­ native account (p. 250) in his life of King Alfred (cf. Stanley 1981: 110-11 [=417-18, below]). When we consider Johann Reinhold Forster’s contribution we enter a dif­ ferent order of magnitude. Forster himself was a famous navigator and a dis­ tinguished historian of navigation. In 1773 Daines Barrington produced the first edition of the Orosius; he had been helped by Forster who provided the map and notes constituting the first direct continental contribution to English scholarship o f Anglo-Saxon. 13 A few years later Barrington tried to make it 15 seem that not merely the initiative for the study and edition of the Orosius had lain with himself, but that he himself had most strongly contributed to the elucidation of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, so that the reader forms the impression, and was meant to do so, that Forster’s part in the m at­ ter had been minor though not without interest. Forster did not let the m atter rest there, but in his famous book on the history of northern discoveries o f 1784 gives an account of Ohthere, and in a footnote (p. 87, n. 46) puts the matter straight: ‘Die Mühe, den Herrn Barrington zu überreden, dass Ohthere wirklich nach Permien oder Biarmien gesegelt sey, war sehr gross; weil der Mann in der Geographie so unwissend war, und nachdem ich ihn überzeugt, so will er das Verdienst haben, durch seine Karte nordische Erdbeschreibung erläutert zu haben, und sagt in seinen Miscellanies [1781: 453-68] nicht ein Wort davon, dass ich die Karte entworfen, sondern giebt sich selbst alles Ver­ dienst.’ We have almost reached the age of the Brothers Grimm, and I wish that I could jump straight from the impressive Forster to the even greater Grimms, but some work must be mentioned before we get there. Two major Danish scholars involve themselves with Anglo-Saxon texts: first, Langebek 1773 only reprints what is readily accessible, the voyages o f Ohthere and Wulfstan, ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ from the Chronicle, and ‘Sermo Lupi ad Anglos’ from 12 The text only in J. Spelman 1678: 207. Cf. Stanley 1977: 7-8 [= pp. 345-6, below], 13 Barrington 1773: xxvii ‘Whilst I had this part of the first chapter under consideration, I had an opportunity of consulting the very learned Mr. John Reinhold Forster [fo o t­ note Now gone upon discoveries in the Southern hemisphere] who had made the Northern geography of Europe his particular study.’

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 55

Hickes 1703-5: iii 98-106; and secondly, Suhm 1787: 147-50. Suhm pub­ lished E. Nyerup’s edition of F. Rostgaard’s transcript of Franciscus Junius’s transcript (in Bodleian MS Junius 103) of the charm ‘For Unfruitful Land’ from Cotton MS Caligula A.vii —all as pointed out by Wtilker 1885: I § 52. In Germany C. Michaeler derived, from Hickes and Wanley 1705,1703, and from Gibson 1692, Anglo-Saxon texts, including ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’, 'Caedmon’s Hymn’ and ‘Durham’ (to give the poems their modern names), for his Tabulae parallelae antiquissimarum Teutonicae Linguae dialec­ torum of 1776. A distinguished German scholar deserves a place here, though what he does with Anglo-Saxon is slight: Johann Christoph Adelung, the lexicographer. In 16 the preface to his Neues grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache o f 1783 he says that he has modified Johnson’s history o f the lan­ guage (1755: [1-5]). He prints ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ from Hickes 1703-5; i 187, and Wanley 1705: 287; instead of Johnson’s use of quotations from gospel translations o f various dates, Adelung prints (from Spelman 1678: 207, or 1709: 152-6) the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan; and instead of the suppos­ edly Saxon poem given by Johnson, in fact, the early Middle English ‘Moral Ode’, Adelung prints (from Hickes 1703-5; i 178-9) the very late Old English poem ‘Durham’. The choice is close to Michaeler’s. Adelung’s brief history was translated into English, with some modification, by the Kant scholar A.F.M. Willich in 1798, and issued with his study of Kant. At the very end of the century appeared the first Anglo-Saxon reader, Johann Oelrichs’s Angelsächsische Chrestomathie of 1798, which brought to ­ gether about fifty pages of texts, all reprinted from earlier editions, but pro­ vided by Oelrichs with translations into German. In England only Hickes in the Thesaurus had a range in Germanic scholar­ ship sufficiently wide to be comparable with that of the Grimms, and it must be recalled that the Thesaurus of 1703 to 1705 was only just over a hundred years old when the Grimms started to publish in the second decade of the next century . 14 On the continent only Junius’s achievement is comparable 14 J. Grimm Deutsche Grammatik I 2nd edn 1822: 222 rejects Hickes’s views in several important respects: Hickes Vorstellung von einer dänisch-sächsischen und normannischen periode kann, wenigstens in der weise, wie er sie durchführt, nicht gebilligt werden. Gründlichere einsichten würden aber von genauerem studium der hss. selbst, das nur in England vorzunehmen wäre, abhängen: ich habe mich hauptsächlich an die ältesten quellen, nämlich an die poetischen gehalten und mittels der analogie der übrigen deutschen sprachen gestrebt, die angels, buchstabenlehre sorgfältiger aufzufassen, als bisher ge­ schehen war.

56 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

with that of the Grimms, especially with that of Jacob Grimm , 15 and then only when his posthumously published work, and his work unpublished even now, is taken into consideration (cf. Raumer 1870: 121-9). The most signifi­ cant Germanic grammatical work of Rasmus Kristian Rask belongs to the same decade as the earliest work of the Grimms, as does Grimur Jónsson Thorkelin’s editio princeps of Beowulf\ but unlike the excellent work of Rask’s , 16 Thorkelin’s scholarship was insufficient for the task —perhaps not surprisingly when the state of Anglo-Saxon lexicography at the turn of the century is called to m ind . 17 It would be well to begin this account of the Grimms’ contribution to 17 Anglo-Saxon scholarship with a clear statement of what was lacking. From the outset Jacob showed sound knowledge of printed sources , 18 but he had no knowledge at all at any time of his life of the manuscripts themselves . 19 Jacob laments that he does not know, for example, the practice of the manu­ scripts in respect of showing vocalic length by means o f accents, though he suspects (Deutsche Grammatik 1/1822: 222-3) that Thorkelin’s edition of Beowulf may not have reproduced manuscript accentuation faithfully. The Grimms were, from the start, much concerned with the appearance in

15 16

17

18

19

But Hickes is used often by both Grimms, and is not infrequently praised; for exam­ ple in their edition of Hildebrand 1812: towards the end of the Vorrede, where they acknowledge that it was Hickes who first established the rules of alliteration. Jacob acknowledged Junius’s achievement especially in Deutsche Grammatik I 1819: 13 =Kl. Sehr. VIII, 89, and in the edition of the Murbach Hymns 1830, cf. n. 5, above. Wilhelm acknowledges the importance of Rask’s work in Anglo-Saxon scholarship in 1820: 40 = Ä7. Sehr. Ill 64-5. See also Raumer 1870: 476: Unter allen Vorgängern [J.] Grimm’s nimmt Rask an Scharfsinn und Gründlichkeit die erste Stelle ein. Keiner von allen hat Grimm so vorgearbeitet wie Rask, der man­ chen von Grimm’s schönsten Entdeckungen bereits ganz nahe war. Thorkelin’s most permanently valuable work on Anglo-Saxon is his commissioning a transcript of Beowulf from the damaged Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, and his executing himself a second transcript, both in 1787, in preparation for his edition of the poem. His first published work involving Anglo-Saxon was his editing, after the author’s death, E. Rowe Mores’s De Æ lfrico 1789. Thorkelin’s own copy of the best Anglo-Saxon dictionary available then, Lye/Manning 1772, shows in some marginal annotations his difficulties with the language. The book was of little special help for Beowulf“ of course. Before Thorkelin’s edition of 1815 some extracts from the poem had been published with inadequate translations by Sharon Turner in 1805: 398-408. [Cf. p. 80, below.] Cf. the references in n. 15, above. Jacob, of course, knew and used Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica of 1824. See also his review of 1833 of Cardale 1833; and cf. p. 18 [= pp. 57-8, below] of this paper. But see n. 32, below.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 57

print of Anglo-Saxon. The use of special Saxon type seemed unnecessary to Jacob (review of Cardale, 1833: 1588 =Kl. Sehr. V, 163-4). As early as Hilde­ brand 1812: 36-9, 43, when they edited their first bit o f Anglo-Saxon, lines 15-27 o f the poem Judith, they not merely used their method of representing Anglo-Saxon letters, including the use of ä for short œ and ae for long æ as differentiated by a knowledge o f Philology; they printed Anglo-Saxon verse as we print it now: in long lines . 20 At the same time they announced their inten­ tion o f editing the whole o f Judith and also Genesis the old editions of which 21 printed the texts continuously like prose, and therefore ‘für ihre Metrik unan­ schaulich’. Both the language and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons were part of the Grimms’ scholarly equipment. The contribution made by Jacob to the study of the language in Deutsche Grammatik (and, less systematically, elsewhere) was fundamental because it was part of a larger scholarly structure. The book was very much Jacob’s, and of a kind which Wilhelm would probably not have been able to construct, thougn he must have felt at home in it if we are to believe, as I do, Jacob’s tribute and moving dedication to Wilhelm, that prefacing the third part (1831) o f Deutsche Grammatik: Darum von rechtswegen gehört dir auch das buch. Zwar heisst es, einige bûcher würden für die nachweit geschrieben, aber viel wahrer ist doch noch, dass ein jedes auch auf den engen kreiss unserer gegenwart einge­ schränkt, sein innigstes Verständnis durch ihn bedingt ist und nachher wieder verschlossen bleibt. 18 The contribution made by the Grimms to the study o f Anglo-Saxon literature is the direct consequence o f their knowledge o f the published sources. They showed, in their edition of Hildebrand (1812), as we have seen, their detailed knowledge of Judith, and they made use o f the ‘Caedmonian poems’ to eluci­ date their Old High German text (p. 22). When reviewing in 1833 J.S. Cardale’s edition o f Alfred’s Boethius, Jacob welcomed recent work. He had higher hopes of Joseph Bosworth’s dictionary (published in 1838) than he had been able to find of merit in the same scholar’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar of ten years earlier. He singles out for special praise N .F.S. Grundtvig’s work on Beowulf. 20 Cf. Stanley 1980: 252-3 [=pp. 37-8, above]. The Grimms’restricted use of capital letters in their edited texts as in their writings has affinities with B.J. Docen, who published a declaration of war on capital letters in 1824. In it early and mid-eighteenth-century English practice (similar to that used in Modern German) is incidentally attacked sim­ ilarly. Docen’s edition of Old High German texts (1825) also shuns capitals, much like the editions of Germanic texts by the Grimms. Cf. K.J. Andresen 1867: 4-9. 21 Judith had been edited by Thwaites 1698, Genesis, as we have seen, by Junius 1655.

58 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

And he approves of Richard Price’s work presumably in revising Warton’s History o f English Poetry in 1824 (but the work on the Chronicle may have been known about by Grimm though only published in Petrie/Sharpe 1848: 299-466).22 Grimm refers to Reinhold Schmid’s excellent edition o f the Anglo-Saxon Laws. Of Benjamin Thorpe’s works, published and projected, he mentions the translation of Rask’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar, the edition o f the Caedmonian poems of 1832, and the promised edition o f the Exeter poems (1842). He values J.M. Kemble’s edition of Beowulf { 1833, cf. 1835-7) and expects much from the projected edition of the Lindisfarne Gospels (1858). Of all these, in esse or in posse, he thinks better than o f Cardale’s Boethius; that is edited without the Metres, and Grimm inveighs against the omission, which he suspects to be the result of Cardale’s inadequacy to edit them. In 1848, by which time much more Anglo-Saxon literature in prose and verse was in print, Jacob Grimm, who had kept abreast with all new developments in the subject, wrote o f the reasons for the relative wealth o f Anglo-Saxon literature:

19

Der Sprache schlug in grossen vortheil aus, dass die Angelsachsen, ob­ gleich früher zum christenthum übergetreten als die zurückbleibenden Altsachsen, durch einfluss der freieren britischen kirche weniger zum gebrauch der lat. spräche gezwungen waren und in den kirchlichen handlungen meistentheils die ihrige beibehielten, weder geistliche noch könige und vornehme verschmähten es die angebome zunge fortzubilden, und daher rührt die beträchtliche zahl von prosaschriften aus einer zeit, wo bei uns mitten in Deutschland die muttersprache gering geschätzt wurde . 23

Beowulf naturally occupied a special place in their interests. At the beginning of their scholarly activity not much of it was know n ;2 4 but even before the publication in 1815 of the editio princeps by Thorkelin, a letter dated 1 Nov­ ember 1814 (and published in their Briefwechsel aus der Jugendzeit, 1881: 373) from Jacob to Wilhelm indicates Jacob’s recognition o f the importance of the work of which Jacob had seen a sheet in advance o f publication (W. Grimm Kl. Sehr. IV, 559). In 1823 Jacob reviewed Grundtvig’s Bjowulfs Drape. He notes how little o f the poem Sharon Turner had understood correctly, and in view of Thorkelin’s errors he knows that Grundtvig’s excellent work will prove indispensable. The significance of the poem itself is explained. Unlike 22 Grimm’s praise was long recalled in England, as by G. le G. Norgate in his account of Price inDNB 46/1896: 337. 23 Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache, 1848: 11,660. 24 Cf. p. 16 and n. 17, above [= p. 56, above).

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 59

the poet o f Beowulf, the poet of the ‘Cædmonian poems’ or the poet of the Boethius or the poet of Judith ‘lebt nicht in den Sitten und thaten seines volks’ (p. 2 =Kl. Sehr. IV, 179). In the course of the review he discusses poetic com­ pounds, and he prints lines 3137-47 in long lines (p. 8 =Kl. Sehr. IV, 183). Most often Beowulf is used by the Grimms to illustrate Germanic story, customs or ways o f expression. Wilhelm, relying heavily on J.J. Conybeare’s Illustrations of 1826, uses the poem in Deutsche Heldensage (1829: § 6 ) as witness for Welandes geweorc, Sigemund, Waels, Fitela, Hama, Eormenric, and Heremod, translating some of the poem into German. A note o f 1841 by Jacob (Kl. Sehr. VII, 53-4) makes full use of Fitela in Beowulf to explain that son of Sigemund. Wilhelm in lecture notes of the 1840s (published in Kl. Sehr. IV, 524-76) on the Middle High German Kudrun summarizes and discusses Beowulf at length; he suggests that in its present form the poem is no earlier than o f the seventh and more probably o f the eighth century. His characteriza­ tion of the poem asserts without demonstration : 20

Der A usdruck ist voll sinnlicher K raft und W ahrheit, etw as schwieriger als der A usdruck in den eddischen Liedern, aber m it ihm verw andt. Er ist ohne Milde und A n m u th , was beides jen er Zeit fehlte, aber ernst und edel (W. Grim m Kl. Sehr. IV, 559).

At some unknown date Jacob made an addition to Wilhelm’s Irische Elfen­ märchen in the course o f which he edited and translated lines 86-90a, Grendel hearing with distaste the clear song o f the minstrel (see W. Grimm Kl. Sehr. I, 467). In his paper Über Schenken und Geben of 1848 Jacob illustrates by reference to Beowulf lines 1232-42 how ‘oft läszt auch unser alterthum königin und königstochter im kreise der helden wandeln und jedem aus dem becher zutrinken’ (p. 124 =Kl. Sehr. II, 178). A year later, in the famous paper Über das Verbrennen der Leichen the Beowulf cremations (and more briefly the passage on Abraham and Isaac in Genesis [lines 2846 ff.] as well as the Laws) are used to illustrate Germanic practice, whereas Wulfstan the voyager’s account o f Esthonian funeral customs is regarded as too remote from those o f Germanic peoples to be relevant (pp. 245-6 =Kl. Sehr. II, 280-1). Anglo-Saxon texts are used again in additional notes to the celebrated paper Über den Ur­ sprung der Sprache: Beowulf 1841-1842 a þe þa wordewydas wigtig Drihten on sefan sende, translated by him ‘das wort liesz dich gott sprechen, gab dir gott ein’, as well as the locution for brutish beasts, stunte nytena2S from the Anglo-Saxon translation of Æ lfric’s Colloquy (Kl. Sehr. I, 275-6 [2nd edn 25 Edited by G.N. Garmonsway 1939: 250; Grimm used Thorpe’s edition in Analecta 1834:114.

60 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

276-7] notes). Beowulf 286 Weard maþelode, ðœr on wiege saet and 371 Hróbgar maþelode, helm Scyldinga are thought by Jacob in Über den Personen­ wechsel in der Rede of 1855 (p. 37 = Kl. Sehr. Ill, 280) to exemplify ancient Germanic epic practice of using a complete long line to introduce direct speech. An excursus to the same paper etymologizes such words as ‘to speak, to think’ and the like, and he draws on the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary as necessary. A late work of Wilhelm’s, Zur Geschichte des Reims, illustrates well the centrality in his thinking of Beowulf as evidence for Germanic:

21

Die Alliteration war für die älteste Dichtung, die über Anhöhen hin­ schreitend mit kurz zugemessenen, oft formelhaften Worten die mythische und geschichtlich umgewandelte Sage erzählte, die natürlichste Form. So finden wir sie in den eddischen Liedern und in dem von den Angelsachsen auf die britische Insel hinübergebrachten Beowulf: so zeigt sie sich auch in den deutschen aus jener Zeit übrig gebliebenen, zum Theil auf das Heidenthum hinweisenden Liedern . 26 No other Anglo-Saxon work in verse or prose is referred to as often; ‘Caedmon’ the most, because the four ‘Caedmonian poems’ are treated for purposes of reference as one. Some of the details are o f interest even when perhaps far­ fetched. Jacob in Über die Namen des Donners of 1855 (p. 308 = AT/. Sehr. II, 406) uses from Exodus 431 þeosgeomre lyft to suggest that it signifies ‘gerade­ zu die seufzende, heulende, sausende, murmelnde lu ff . Subtle exploitation of various aspects of the vocabulary is very common indeed, and poetic words are laid under tribute; such as ælfseine in an addition by Jacob on the nature o f elves in Wilhelm’s introduction to Irische Elfenmärchen (1826) (W. Grimm Kl. Sehr. 1 ,443), or the word ides used by Jacob in 1842 to elucidate the idisi o f the Merseburg Charms. 27 There is no doubt in Jacob Grimm’s mind that poetry exceeds prose in value as evidence for Germanic antiquity. In his review of Cardale’s Boethius (1833)28 he deplores the squandering of funds by the Record Commission on producing editions of public records (with the exception of a few major, valuable works, like Rymer’s Foedera and Domesday Book); and in his review of 1838 of the editions published up to that time for the English Historical Society he expresses his annoyance at the fact that Benjamin Thorpe’s edition

26 Delivered in 1850 and published 1852: 701 (or 181 of separate) = Kl. Sehr. IV, 321. 27 Über zwei entdeckte Gedichte aus der Zeit des deutschen Heidenthums 1842: 4-6 = Kl. Sehr. II, 4-6. 28 See p. 18 of this paper [= pp. 57-8, above]. For the value he attaches to verse, cf. his remarks quoted in n. 14, above.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 61

22

of the Vercelli poems was of such restricted distribution 2 9 that Friedrich Blume’s great discovery of major literature 30 was not made available to schol­ ars eager to see it. Both the annoyance and the eager interest led Jacob to his single most important contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies, the edition in 1840 of the Vercelli poems , Andreas and Elene. To do justice to that work would require more space than can be given to it here. We must look to the achievements, the handling of the text, the elucidation of difficulties, the etymological understanding, the arrangement o f the register of words discussed in the many notes; and we must look away from Grimm’s characteristic m ytho­ logizing of the locutions and (pp. 1-li) the involvement with Cynewulfian authorship of both poems ;31 only then can we recognize Andreas und Elene as of its time a truly great edition . 32 Jacob owes to his teacher F.C. von Savigny an interest throughout his life in the history of Law, including the history of Anglo-Saxon Laws, as is evi­ dent in all his writings on the subject. In Von der Poesie im Recht of 1815 (p. 9 0 =Kl. Sehr. VI, 187) he quotes the well-expressed II Cnut 76 on the guilt of a wife or even of a cradle-child in cases of concealment of property stolen by the husband or father . 3 3 Deutsche Rechtsalterthiimer, 1828, makes fre­ quent use of Anglo-Saxon legal and poetic texts. Both Beowulf and ‘Caedmon’ are used to exemplify alliterative and rhyming formulas as well as recurrent epithets. For example, Beowulf 2738-9 exemplifies perjury (1828: 904 = 1899: II, 558); and Beowulf 2884-91 is used as ‘Beispiel einer alten verbannungsformel’ (1828: 42,731 = 1899: I, 60,11, 331; cf. Stanley 1980:234 [= 16, above]); following J.M. Kemble’s edition in the 1830s, Grimm added the explanation of the difficult passage in Beowulf 2445-6 and 2457 about 29 In Appendix B to Cooper’s Report on R ym er’s Foedera, printed in 1836 for distribu­ tion principally to Members of the Record Commission. Cf. Greenfield/Robinson 1980: No. 240, and Stanley 1980: 225 [= pp. 5-6, above], 30 See J. Grimm Andreas und Elene 1840: iii fn., and cf. Greenfield/Robinson 1980: No. 237. 31 For the former, cf. Stanley 1975: 17-18; for the latter, Stanley 1980: 243-6 [= pp. 26-9, above]. 32 Grimm, though he did not himself have at first hand any familiarity with AngloSaxon manuscripts, knew well its importance for textual work (cf. p. xlv of the intro­ duction); and he provided a copy of the facsimile page of verse given originally in Thorpe’s edition in Appendix B 1836. 33 Grimm could have used any of the early collected editions of the Anglo-Saxon Laws, the most recent of which was then D. Wilkins 1721. For the standard text of Cnut’s Law, now II Cnut 76 (earlier (II) Cnut 74 ; Thorpe Ancient Laws 1840: (II) Cnut 77], see Liebermann 1898-1916: I 362-5.

62 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

riding the gallows (1899: I, 59; cf. 1828: 41); the instruments o f death in Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ 1763-67 are used significantly in an addition (1899: 72). Much is made of numbers: seven in Beowulf (1828: 214 = 1899: I, 297), nine in the ‘Nine-Herbs Charm’ added to the examples (1899: I, 297). Beowulf 1863 lac ond luftacen is regarded in another addition as a customary tribute given traditional expression (1899: I, 342). The words o f a Riddle, eorles dohtor, þeah hio aebele sy , 34 are quoted as fully expressive o f nobility (1899: 1 ,370), as is, after the appearance of the Catholic Homilies (in Thorpe’s edi­ tion 1843-6: I, 356, 358, 402), Æ lfric’s description o f Christ as se heofonlica œðeling (1899: I, 370). ‘The Finnesburg Fragm ent’ 37-40 is well explained with reference to the comitatus spirit in a similar addition (1899: I, 386). In Jacob’s review (1841) of Thorpe’s Ancient Laws of 1840 a very wide range o f information is used to explain Anglo-Saxon legal terminology. Wilhelm shows no similar central interest in the Anglo-Saxon Laws, though now and again a legal concept is discussed by him, for example, the use o f orleg in verse is referred to in a paper of 1846, ‘Deutsche Wörter für Krieg’ {Kl. Sehr. 111,562). 23 I have not the space to deal here fully, as the subject requires, with the use made of Anglo-Saxon material in the relevant longer works o f the Grimms. Jacob draws on Anglo-Saxon evidence whenever there is need for it in the Deutsche Mythologie first published in 1835. As we have seen, Jacob not infrequently advances the scholarly understand­ ing of the Anglo-Saxon material. Wilhelm does so less substantially, and that is well exemplified by his account of Anglo-Saxon runes. Runes were a special interest of Wilhelm’s and in his Über deutsche Runen o f 1821 Anglo-Saxon runes are fully considered, but, as far as I can determine, mainly at second hand using expecially Ole Worm 1636 (and 1643) and Hickes 1703-5 among early scholars, without adding much material or arriving at many original con­ clusions, but he does provide a German translation of the ‘Rune Poem ’ and a full discussion. In his long review (1840) of Kemble’s paper ‘The Runes of the Anglo-Saxons’ of 1840 everything is praised, but nothing is added to it. We may therefore arrive at a conclusion, just I hope, but damaging perhaps to the reputation of Wilhelm as regards this limited aspect o f the Grimms’ wide interests in Germanic antiquity. Wilhelm used Anglo-Saxon evidence but did not advance the understanding of Anglo-Saxon writings. Occasionally we have evidence that Jacob drew Wilhelm’s attention to relevant Anglo-Saxon material or added references to it in Wilhelm’s work. Jacob Grimm’s use of 34 In G.P. Krapp/E.V.K. Dobbie The Exeter Book 1936: No. 80 line 5. Grimm used Thorpe’s Codex Exoniensis 1842: 489, No. XVIII.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A S Writings 63

Anglo-Saxon evidence was more extensive and more profound, and his contri­ butions to the subject are similarly extensive and profound. Before him only Junius and Hickes deserve to be compared with him. Contemporaneous with him and after him his influence on continental and English scholars was semi­ nal. To our advantage it flourishes still. 28 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Bibliographical works and other works o f reference. Adams, E.N.: Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800. Yale Studies in English 55/1917. Reprinted Hamden (Connecticut): Shoestring Press, Archon Books 1970. Adams, H.M.: Catalogue o f Books Printed on the Continent o f Europe, 15011600, in Cambridge Libraries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1967. Alston, R.C.: A Bibliography o f the English Language from the Invention o f Printing to the Year 1800. A corrected reprint of volumes I-X. Ilkley: Janus Press 1974. DNB = Dictionary o f National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee. London: Smith Elder 1885-1900. Fry, D.K.: Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh. A Bibliography. Charlottes­ ville (Virginia): University Press of Virginia, for the Bibliographical Society of Virginia 1969. GKW = Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. 3 (1928) Leipzig: Hiersemann , 8 (1978); Stuttgart: Hiersemann; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, New York: Kraus. Greenfield, S.B./Robinson, F.C.: A Bibliography o f Publications on Old Eng­ lish Literature from the Beginnings to the End o f 1972. Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University Press 1980. Jöcher, C.G.: Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon ..., I-IV. Leipzig: Gleditsch 1750-1. Adelung, J.C.: Fortsetzung und Ergänzungen zu ... Jöcher GelehrtenLexico, I-II. Leipzig: Gleditsch 1784-7. Rotermund, H.W.: Jöcher Gelehrten-Lexiko, fortgesetzt von, III. Delmen­ horst: Jöntzen 1810. IV. Bremen: Jöntzen & Heyse 1813. Petheram , J .: An Historical Sketch o f the Progress and Present State o f AngloSaxon Literature in England. London: Lumley 1840. Pollard, A. W ./Redgrave, G.R.: A Short-Title Catalogue o f Books Printed in England A nd o f English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640. London: Bibliographical Society 1926. 2nd ed.: III-Z . 1976.

64 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Raumer, R. von: Geschichte der Germanischen Philologie vorzugsweise in Deutschland Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland. Neuere Zeit, IX. Munich: Oldenbourg, for the Historische Commission bei der König­ lichen Academie der Wissenschaften 1870. Reed, T.B ./Johnson, A.F.: A History o f the Old English Letter Foundries. London: Faber 1952. STC= Pollard, A.W ./Redgrave, G.R. 29 Watt, A.: Bibliotheca Britannica or A General Index to British and Foreign Literature. Edinburgh: Constable. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and Hurst Robinson 1824. Wülker, R.: Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur... Leipzig: Veit 1885. (Zedier, J.H .:) Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon, + supplements. Halle and Leipzig: Zedier 1732-54. 2. Recent studies and modern editions o f Anglo-Saxon texts: significant earlier secondary studies. Andresen, K.G.: Ueber Jacob Grimms Orthographie. Göttingen: Dieterich 1867. Dobbie, E.V.K.: The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University Press 6/1942. Ebel, E.: “The Beginnings of Runic Studies in Germany. A Survey.” Michigan Germanic Studies 7 (1981): 176-85. (I owe this reference to Professor R. Derolez.) Garmonsway, G .N .: Ælfric’s Colloquy. Methuen’s Old English Library. Lon­ don: Methuen 1939. Gollancz, L: The Caedmon Manuscript o f Anglo-Saxon Biblical Poetry, Junius X I in the Bodleian Library. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, for the British Academy 1927. Krapp, G .P ./Dobbie, E.V.K.: The Exeter Book. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University Press 3/1936. Liebermann, F.: Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. I Text und Übersetzung. Halle: Waisenhaus 1898-1916. Reprinted Aalen: Scientia 1960. Malone, K.: The Thorkelin Transcripts o f ‘Beowulf... ’ Early English Manu­ scripts in Facsimile. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger. London: Allen & Unwin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1/1951. Napier, A.S.: “The ‘Ancren Riwle’.” Modem Language Review 4 (1909): 433-6.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 65

Stanley, E.G.: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism. Cambridge and Ipswich: D.S. Brewer. Totowa (New Jersey): Rowman & Littlefield 1975. Stanley, E.G.: “How the Elbing Deprives the Vistula of Its Name and Con­ verts It to the Elbing’s Own Use in ‘Vistula-Mouth’.” Notes and Queries 222(1977): 2-11 [= paper 16, pp. 336-51,below]. 30 Stanley, E.G.: “The scholarly recovery of the significance o f Anglo-Saxon records in prose and verse: a new bibliography.” Anglo-Saxon England 9/1980: 223-62 [= paper 1 , pp. 3-48, above]. Stanley, E.G.: “The Glorification of Alfred King of Wessex (from the publication of Sir JohnSpelm an’sLi/e, 1678 and 1709, to the publication of Reinhold Pauli’s, 185 l)P Poetica (Tokyo) 12(1981): 103-33 [paper 21,410-40, below], 3. Earlier printed studies, especially those bearing on or containing AngloSaxon texts. Adelung, J.G .: Neues grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache für die Deutschen. Leipzig: Schwickert 1/1783. For an expanded translation of the historical introduction, see A.F.M. Willich 1798. Æ lfric: A Testimonie o f Antiqui tie. London: John Day [1566 or 1567], Cf. Lisle 1623 and 1638. Asser: Ælfredi regis res gestae. London: John Day 1574. Barrington, D.: The Anglo-Saxon Version, From the Historian Orosius. By Ælfred the Great. London: Bowyer and Nichols, for Baker, Leigh, Payne and White 1773. Barrington, D.: “Ohthere’s Voyage and the Geography o f the Ninth Century Illustrated.” Miscellanies. London: Nichols, for White and Nichols 1781: 453-68. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglomm. Strasburg: Eggestein [1475-8]. See GKWWl 3756. Another edition Strasburg: [Husner] 1500. See GKW III 3756. Bedz, Historice ecclesiasticœ gentis Anglorum libri v ... Edited by A. Whelock. Cambridge: Daniel 1643. Another issue 1644 with Lambard, Wm: Archaionomia. Bergmann, G. von: Das Gebeth des Herrn oder Vaterunsersammlung in hundert zwey und fünfzig Sprachen. Ruien (Livonia) [i.e. Rüjiena (Latvia)]: no publisher 1789. Bosworth, J.: Elements o f Anglo-Saxon Grammar... London: Harding, Mavor& Lepard 1823. Abridged and improved A Compendious Grammar o f the Prim­ itive English or Anglo-Saxon Language. London: Simpkin & Marshall 1826.

66 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Bosworth, J.: A Dictionary o f the Anglo-Saxon Language. London: Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman. Oxford: Talboys. Cambridge: Stevenson 1838. Boxhorn, M.Z.: Prima religionis Christianas rudimenta. Issued with Boxhorn’s edition o f Hay mo: Historias ecclesiasticae breviarium. Leiden: Lopez de Haro 1650. Bussaeus, A.: “Periplus Ohthere ... et Wulfstani.” Ari Thorgilsis Filii... Schedae, seu libellus de Is-landia. Copenhagen: Schmidtgen 1733. 31 Camden, Wm: Anglica, Hibernica, Normannica, Cambrica, a veteribus scripta... Frankfurt: Marnius and heirs of Aubrius 1602. Another issue 1603. Camden, Wm: Remaines o f a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine. London: C. E[ld] for Waterson 1605 (STC 4521). Other editions and issues 1614, 1623, 1629, 1636, 1637, 1657 (2 x), 1674. Cardale, J.S.: King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version o f Boethius’De Consolatione Philosophiae. London: Pickering 1829. Casaubon, M .: De quatuor linguis commentationis, Pars prior: quas, de lingua Hebraica: et, de lingua Saxonica. [Second part] Somner, Wm: A d verba vetera Germanica... notas. London: Flesher, for Mynne 1650. Chamberlayne, J.: Oratio Dominica. Amsterdam: Goere 1715. Conybeare, J.J./C onybeare, W.D. (eds.): Illustrations o f Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Harding & Lepard 1826. Docen, B.J.: Ueber Sprache, Schrift und Literatur der Deutschen —Mitteil­ ungen I Theoretisch-praktische Kriegserklärung gegen die grossen Anfangs­ buchstaben. Munich: no publisher 1824. Docen, B. J.: Einige Denkmäler der althochdeutschen Literatur. Munich: no publisher 1825. Forster, J .R.: Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Seefahrten im Norden. Frankfurt an der Oder: Strauss 1784. [Foxe, J.] : The Gospels o f the Power Evangélistes, translated in the olde Saxons tyme out o f Latin into the vulgare toung o f the Saxons. London: John Day 1571. Freher, M.: Orationis Dominicae, et symboli apostolici Alamannica versio vetustissima. [Heidelberg]: Voegelin 1609. Re-issued with Freher, M.: Decalogi, orationis, symboli Saxonica versio vetustissima. [Heidelberg] : Voegelin 1610. Freher, M.: De secretis iudiciis olim in Westphalia aliisque Germanice partibus usitatis postea abolitis commentariolus. [Heidelberg] : Voegelin [1610]. Fritz, J.F.: Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, Welcher nicht allein hundert Alphabete... vor Augen leget, Sondern auch das Gebet des

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study o f A-S Writings 67

HErrn, in 200 Sprachen... mittheilet. Leipzig: Gessner 1748. (Alston 1974: II 466b; 466a has not been accessible to me. Alston gives the title as Neue [sic] eröffne tes in hundert Sprachen bestehendes A.b.c. Buch.... Leipzig: Gessner 1743, and he describes Fritz 1748 as an expanded and altered version o f Fritz 1743, but I do not know if 1743 includes the Lord’s Prayer in many languages.) Gesner, C.: Mithridates. De differentiis linguarum tum veterum tum quae hodie apud diversas nationes in toto orbe terrarum in usu sunt... Zurich: Froschover 1555. 32 Gibson, E.: Chronicon Saxonicum seu annales rerum in Anglia praecipue ■ gestarum... Oxford: At the Theatre 1692. Grimm, J.: “Von der Poesie im Recht.” Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechts­ wissenschaft 2.1 (1815): 25-99 = Kl. Sehr. VI 152-91. Grimm, J.: Deutsche Grammatik. Göttingen: Dieterich 1/1819 (the preface reprinted Kl. Sehr. VIII 25-96), 2nd edn 1822; 3/1831. Grimm, J.: Review o f Grundtvig 1820 in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen Stück 1 for 1823: 1-12 = Kl. Sehr. IV 178-86. Grimm, J.: Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer. Göttingen: Dieterich 1828, reprinted 1854 and 1881. Heusler, A ./ Hübner, R. (eds). Leipzig: Dieterich & Weicher 1899. Reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1955. Grimm, J.: Review of Cardale 1829 in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen Stück 160/1833: 1586-95 = Kl. Sehr. V 163-8. Grimm, J .: A d auspicia Professionis Philosophiae ordinariae in Academia Georgia Augusta rite capienda invitat Jacobus Grimm Inest Hymnorum veteris ecclesiae X X V I interpretatio theotisca. Göttingen: Dieterich 1830 [1st edn o f ‘Murbach Hymns’]. Preface reprinted Kl. Sehr. VIII 129-44. Grimm, J.: Deutsche Mythologie. Göttingen: Dieterich 1835. 2nd edn 1844. 3rd edn 1854. Meyer, E.H. (ed.) Berlin: Dümmler, Harrwitz & Gossmann 1875-8. Reprinted Tübingen: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft 1953. Grimm, J.: ‘Neue Sammlung der altenglischen Historiker’ [review of editions published for the English Historical Society]. Höllische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst 221 (1838): 1761-6 = AT/. Sehr. VII 15-19. Grimm, J.: Andreas und Elene. Kassel: Fischer 1840. Grimm, J.: Review o f Thorpe Ancient Laws 1840 in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen Stücke 36-7/1841: 345-62 = Kl. Sehr. V 312-23. Grimm, J.: Über zwei entdeckte Gedichte aus der Zeit des deutschen Heiden­ thums [‘Merseburg Charms’], Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1842: 1-26 =

68 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

Kl. Sehr. II 1-29. Grimm, J.: Über Schenken und Geben. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1848: 121-52 = Kl. Sehr. II 173-210. Grimm, J.: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: Weidmann 1848.2nd edn Leipzig: Hirzel 1853. 3rd edn 1868. Grimm, J.: Überdas Verbrennen der Leichen. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1849 191-274 = Kl. Sehr. II 211-313. 33 Grimm, J.: Überden Ursprung der Sprache. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1851: 103-40 = Kl. Sehr. I 255-98, 2nd edn 256-99. Grimm, J.: Über die Namen des Donners. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1854: 305-32 = Kl. Sehr. II 402-38. Grimm, J.: Über den Personenwechsel in der Rede. Abhandlungen der König­ lichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1856: 1-63 = Kl. Sehr. III 236-311. Grimm, J.: Kleinere Schriften [Kl. Sehr.]. Müllenhoff, K. (ed.): I-V Berlin: Dümmler, Harrwitz & Gossmann 1864-71. Ippel, E. (ed.): VI-VII 1882-4, VIII Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1 8 9 0 .1 2nd edn Berlin: Dümmler etc. 1879. I-VIII reprinted Hildesheim: Olms 1965-6. Grimm, J./G rim m , W.: Die beiden ältesten deutschen Gedichte... Das Lied von Hildebrand und Hadubrand und das Weissenbrunner Gebet. Kassel: Thurneisen 1812. Grimm, J./G rim m , W.: Irische Elfenmärchen. Leipzig: Fleischer 1826. W. Grimm’s “Einleitung über die Elfen” reprinted in his Kl. Sehr. I 405-90, with additions of unknown date by J. Grimm. Grimm, J./G rim m , W.: Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, edited by Grimm, H., and Hinrichs, G. Weimar: Böhlau 1881. Grimm, W.: “Die altnordische Litteratur in der gegenwärtigen Periode.” [1820] Kl. Sehr. Ill 1-84. Grimm, W.: Über deutsche Runen. Göttingen: Dieterich 1821. The introduc­ tory “Zur Litteratur der Runen” reprinted Kl. Sehr. III 85-131. Grimm, W.: Deutsche Heldensage. Göttingen: Dieterich 1829. Müllenhoff, K. (ed.): Berlin: Dümmler, Harrwitz & Gossmann 1867. Reprinted Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1889. Grimm, W.: Review of Kemble “ On Anglo-Saxon Runes” 1840 in Göttingische

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 69

gelehrte Anzeigen Stücke 114-15/1841: 1129-38 = Kl. Sehr. II 483-90. Grimm, W.: “Einleitung zur Vorlesung über Gudrun.” [1843-9] Kl. Sehr. IV 524-76. Grimm, W.: “Deutsche Wörter für Krieg.” [1846?] Kl. Sehr. III 516-67. Grimm, W.: Zur Geschichte des Reims. Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1852: 521-713 (separate Göttingen: Dieterich 1852) = Ä7. Sehr. IV 125-336. 34 Grimm, W.: Kleinere Schriften [Kl. Sehr.]. Hinrichs, G. (ed.): I-III Berlin: Dümmler, Harrwitz & Gossmann 1881-3. Hinrichs, G./Schröder, E. (eds): IV Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1887. Grundtvig, N .F.S.: Bjowulfs Drape: Et Gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige AarTusinde a f Angel-Saxisk paa Danske Riim. Copenhagen: Seidelin 1820. Grupen, C.H.: Formulae veterum confessionum cum versionibus & illustratio­ nibus et capitulare LudoviciPii... alte Fränkische Alemannische und Angel­ sächsische Beicht-Formuln... Hanover: heirs of N. Förster & Son 1767. Haller, A. von: Alfred König der Angel-Sachsen. Göttingen and Berne: widow o f A. Vandenhoek & E. Haller 1773. Hickes, G.: Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus. Oxford: At the Theatre 1705,1703. Cf. Wanley 1705. Ihre, J.: Glossarium Suogothicum; in quo tam hodierno usu frequentata voca­ bula, quam in legum Patriarum tabulis aliisque aevi medii scriptis obvia explicantur, et ex dialectis cognatis, Moesogothica, Anglo-Saxonica, Alemannica, Islandica ceterisque Gothicae et Celticae originis illustrantur. Upsala: Erdman 1769. Johnson, S.: Dictionary o f the English Language. London: Strahan, for J . &P. Knapton, T .& T . Longman, C. Hitch & L. Hawes, A. Millar, R.& J. Dodsley 1755. For the many early editions, see Alston 1974: V 177-91. Junius, F., the Younger: Observationes in Willerami abbatis Francicam paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum. Amsterdam: Cunrad 1655. Junius, F., the Younger: Caedmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. AngloSaxonicè conscripta. Amsterdam: Cunrad 1655. Junius, F., the Younger: Cf. ’T Vader Ons’ 1666. Junius, F., the Younger: Etymologicum Anglicanum. Ex autographo descrip­ sit et accessionibus permultis auctum edidit E. Lye. Oxford: At the Theatre 1743. Junius, F., the Younger/Marshall, T.: Quatuor D.N. Jesu Christi Evangeliorum versiones perantiquae duae, Gothica scii, et Anglo-Saxonica... Dort: H .& J. Essaeus 1665,1664. Re-issued Amsterdam: Janssonius&Waesbergii 1684.

70 Paît I. Surveys of OE Studies

Kemble, J.M.: The Anglo-Saxon Poems o f Beowulf, the Traveller’s Song, and the Battle o f Finnesburh... London: Pickering 1833. 2 nd edn 1835, with A Translation o f the Anglo-Saxon Poem o f Beowulf... 1837. Kemble, J.M.: “On Anglo-Saxon Runes.” Archaeologia 28 (1840): 327-72. 35 Kemble, J.M ./Hardwick, C.: The Gospel according to St Matthew in AngloSaxon and Northumbrian Versions... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1858. La Bigne, M. de: Magna bibliotheca veterum patrum et antiquorum scriptorum ecclesiasticorum. VIII Cologne: Hieratus 1618. Augmented edition Maxima bibliotheca veterum patrum... XIII Lyons: Anisson 1677. Lambard, Wm: Archaionomia, sive de Priscis Anglorum legibus libri. London: John Day 1568. Re-edited by Whelock, A.: Cambridge: Daniel 1644. Cf. Bede 1643, 1644. Langebek, J.: Scriptores rerum Danicarum medii aevi... Copenhagen: widow of A.H. Godiche, F.C. Godiche 2/1773. Lisle, Wm: A Saxon Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament, written about the time o f King Edgar ( 700 years agoe) by Ælfricus Abbas... London: Haviland, for Seile 1623 (includes a reprint of Æ lfric: A Testimonie o f Antiquitie). Lisle, Wm: Divers Ancient Monuments in the Saxon Tongue: Written Several Hundred Years agoe. London: E.G. for F. Eglesfield 1638 (includes a re­ print of Ælfric: A Testimonie o f Antiquitie). Ludekenius [Lüdecke], T.: Orationis Dominicae versiones ferme centum. Berlin: Runge 1680. Lye, E./Manning, O.: Dictionarium Saxonico et Gothico-Latinum... London: E. Allen, for White, Woodyer. Cambridge: Merril. Oxford: Fletcher and Prince 1772. Mallet, P.H.: Introduction à l ’Histoire de Dannemarc. Copenhagen: heirs o f Berling 1755-6. Translated Percy, T.: Northern Antiquities: or, A Descrip­ tion o f the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws o f the Ancient Danes, And other Northern Nations; Including those o f Our own Saxon Ancestors... London: Carnan 1770. Michaeler, C.: Tabulae parallelae antiquissimarum Teutonicae linguae dialecto­ rum, Moeso-Gothicae, Franco-Theotiscae, Anglo-Saxonicae, Runicae, et Islandicae, aliarumque... Innsbruck: Wagner 1776. Mores, E. Rowe: De Ælfrico... commentarius, edited and with a preface by Thorkelin, G.J. London: Clark, J.& T . Egerton 1789. Morhof, D.G.: Unterricht Von Der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie... Kiel: Reumann 1682.

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study of A-S Writings 71

Murray, J.P.: “ Von drei nordischen Seereisen des 9ten Jahrhunderts.” Göttingische Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen 1765 2/625-9, 761-72 (summaries of two lectures). Oelrichs, J.: Angelsächsische Chrestomathie oder Sammlung merkwürdiger Stücke aus den Schriften der Angelsachsen einer uralten Deutschen Nation m it beigefügter hochdeutschen Übersetzung... Hamburg: Hofmann. Bremen: Wilmans 1798. 36 Percy, T.: see Mallet, P.H. Petrie, H ./Sharpe, J.: Monumenta historica Britannica, or Materials for the History o f Britain, from the Earliest Period. I (includes Price, R.: Saxon ■ Chronicle to 1066) London: At Command o f Her Majesty 1848. Price, R.: Saxon Chronicle, see Petrie, H./Sharpe, J. Price, R.: Cf. Warton, T., 1824. Rapin [de] Thoyras, P.: Histoire d Angleterre. I The Hague: A. de Rogissart 1724. Rask, R.K.: Vejledning til det Islendske. Copenhagen: Schubothe 1811. Rask, R.K.: Angelsaksisk Sproglaere, tilligemed en kort Læsebog. Stockholm: Hedman 1817. Translated Thorpe, B.: A Grammar o f the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis. Copenhagen: Moeller 1830. 2nd edn A Grammar o f the Anglo-Saxon Tongue from the Danish o f Rasmus Rask. London: T rü b n e r1865. Reuter, J.: Oratio Dominica XL linguarum. Riga: 1662. See p. 74, below. Schilter, J.: Thesaurus antiquitatum Teutonicum, ecclesiasticarum, civilium, litterarium. Ulm: D. Bartholomäus & sons 1728. Schmid, R.: Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. In der Ursprache mit Übersetzung und Erläuterungen. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1832. 2 nd edn 1858. Serarius, N.: Epistolae S. Bonifacii martyris. Mainz: Lipius 1605. Cf. La Bigne. Somner, Wm 1650: see Casaubon, M. Somner, Wm: Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, voces, phrasesque praecipuas Anglo-Saxonicas ... Oxford: Hall. London: White 1659. Spelman, H.: Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, in re ecclesiarum orbis Britannici. I London: Badger 1639. Spelman, J.: Psalterium Davidis Latino-Saxonicum. London: Badger 1640. Spelman, J.: Æ lfrediMagni Anglorum invictissima vita. Translated into Latin by Wase, C. Oxford: At the Theatre 1678. Spelman, J. : The Life ofÆ lfred the Great... from the original Manuscript in the Bodleian Library, edited by Hearne, T. Oxford: At the Theatre 1709. S uhm ,P .F. Symbolae ad literaturam Teutonicam antiquiorem... Copenhagen: Horrebow 1787.

72 Part I. Surveys o f OE Studies

37 Thorkelin, G .J. 1789: see Mores, E. Rowe. Thorkelin, G.J.: De Danorum rebus gestis secui. I ll & IV. Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglosaxonica... Copenhagen: Rangel 1815. Thorpe, B. 1830: see Rask, R.K., 1817. Thorpe, B.: Cœdmon ’s Metrical Paraphrase o f Parts o f the Holy Scriptures, in Anglo-Saxon... London: Black, Young & Young, for the Society of Antiquaries 1832. Thorpe, B.: Analecta Anglo-Saxonica. London: J. & A. Arch 1834. 2nd edn London: Russell Smith 1846. [Thorpe, B., no author; handwritten title:] Report on the New Edition o f Rym er’s Foedera by C.P. Cooper. Appendix B. No place, publisher or date. [London: for H.M. Commissioners on the Public Records 1836; first distributed 1836-7.] Thorpe, B.: Ancient Laws and Institutes o f England...; also, Monumenta Ecclesiastica Anglicana...; and the Ancient Latin Version o f the AngloSaxon Laws. London: for the Public Records Commission 1840 (issued in two formats: in two volumes octavo and in one volume folio). Thorpe, B.: Codex Exoniensis, A Collection o f Anglo-Saxon Poetry... London Pickering, for the Society of Antiquaries 1842. Thorpe, B.: The Homilies o f the Anglo-Saxon Church... The Sermones Catho­ lici, or Homilies o f Ælfrie... Æ lfric Society Nos [1-4], 6-7, 9-12. London: R. & J.E. Taylor, for the Æ lfric Society 1843-6. Thwaites, E.: Heptateuchus, Liber Job, et Evangelium Nicodemi; AngloSaxonice. Historiae Judith fragmentum; Dano-Saxonice. Oxford: At the Theatre 1698. Turner, S.: The History o f the Manners, Landed Property, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion, and Language o f the Anglo-Saxons. London: Cadell & Davies 4/1805. 2 nd edn The History o f the Anglo-Saxons. Lon­ don: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme 1807. For later editions, see Green­ field/Robinson 1980: No. 534. T Vader Ons in X X Oude Duijtse En Noordse Taelen. Breda: Subbinck 1666. (In Junius’s type, and perhaps by Junius.) Vorst, J.: Observationum in linguam vernaculam specimen. Kölln an der Spree Schulz 1669. Translated into German in (J.C. Gottsched’s) Beyträge zur Critischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit 1 (Stück 26)/1741: 179-241. Vulcanius, Bonaventura: De literis & lingua Getarum, siue Gothorum; item de notis Lombardicis. Quibus accesserunt specimina variarum linguarum... Leiden: Franciscus Raphelengius Plantin 1597. STC 24893.3; later issue

Paper 2. Continental Contribution to the Study o f A-S Writings 73

24893.5 (1617), variant 24893.7 (1618), appended to Vulcanius, B. (ed.): lornandes episcopus Rauennas de Getarum siue Gothorum. Leiden: Maire. Wächter, J.G.: Glossarium Germanicum continens origines et antiquitates linguae Germanicce... Leipzig: Schuster 1727. 38 Wächter, J.G.: Glossarium Germanicum, continens origines & antiquitates totius linguce Germanicae... Leipzig: sons of J.F . Gleditsch 1737. Wanley, H.: Librorum veterum septentrionalium ... catalogus historico-criticus. Oxford: At the Theatre 1705. This is vol. II o f Hickes 1705, 1703. Warton, T.: The History o f English Poetry. 2nd edn revised by Price R. • London: Tegg 1824. Whelock, A. 1643: see Bede; 1644: see Lambard, Wm. and cf. Bede. Wilkins, D.: Leges Anglo-Saxonicae ecclesiasticae et civiles... London: Bowyer 1721. Wilkins, J.: An Essay Towards a Real Character, And a Philosophical Language. London: Gellibrand & Martin 1668. [Willenbücher, P./ Birkenstock, J.] : Praktische Anweisung zur Kenntnis der Hauptveränderungen der teutschen Sprache, von den ältesten Zeiten bis ins vierzehnte Jarhundert, in einer Folge von Probestükken aus dem Gothischen, Altfränkischen, oder Ober teutschen, Niederteutschen und Angelsächsischen ... Leipzig: Crusius 1789. Willich, A.F.M.: “ Essay First. A concise history of the English Language, &c.” Three Philological Essays chiefly translated from the German o f J.. C.. Adelung... London: Longman 1798. The separate (with roman page num­ bers) of Essays issued with Willich’s work on Kant: Elements o f the Critical Philosophy... W orm ,0.: FastiDanici... Copenhagen: Sartorius 1626, reissued 1633; another edn Copenhagen: Moltke 1643. Reissued 1650-1. Worm, O.: Runer Seu Danica literatur antiquissima, vulgà Gothica dicta... Amsterdam: Janson 1636; another issue Copenhagen: Martzan 1636; another issue Copenhagen: Holst 1636. Another issue or edition (with Specimen lexici runici 1650) in Antiquitates Danicae 1650-1. Worm, O.: Danicorum monumentorum libri sex... Copenhagen: Moltke 1643; with Worm, O.: Regum Daniae series duplex... Copenhagen: Martzan, for Moltke 1642. Re-issued 1650-1. Worm, O.: Antiquitates Danicae. Copenhagen: Martzan (& Holst) 1650-1. Contains new issues or editions of the three preceding items.

74 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

APPENDIX (1985) Reuter, J.: [Hebrew title] Ezrënû bishem Yahweh. Oratio Dominica XL. Linguarum nempe Hebraicae. Syriacae. Arabicae. Æ thiopicæ. Graecae. Graecae hodiernae. Latinae. Italicae. Gallicae. Hispanicae. Portugallicae. Sardorum op­ pidanorum. Sardorum extrà civitates habitantium. Germanicae. Sveticae. Danicae. Anglicae. Scoticae. Anglo-Saxonicae [1 o f Anglo- inverted ] , Can tab ri­ cae. Frisicae. Gothicae. Islandicae. Batavicae. Geldricae. Germanicae antiquae. Irlandicae. Sclavonicae. Polonicae. Bohemicae. Crainericae. Muscowiticae. Dalmaticae. Rhætorum. Lausaticae. Hungaricae. Turcicae. Lapponicae. Esthonicae. Laetthonicae. Prussicae antiquae. Collecta â Joh. Reuter, Ronneburgensium Pastore. Rigae, Typis Henrici Bessemesser, Anno M.’DC. LXII. [ 8 °, ) ( 8 ( )(1 + 1), ( )(5 signed), 9 leaves. Pp. 18. The leaf added after the title has the dedication.] A copy of the book was sold at Sotheby’s (London) 11 October 1983, lot 411. Jöcher/R oterm und 6/1819 col. 1894 refers to a 2nd edn Rostock 1675, of which I have seen only a facsimile with a pre­ face by B. Jegers (in Danish, Latvian and German versions), Copenhagen: Imanta 1954; Jegers was unable to trace a copy of the 1662 edition, which he regards as lost without trace; he did locate copies of the Rostock edition in Stuttgart, Hanover and (with a dedication) in Lübeck, and he reproduced the Lübeck copy in facsimile. The Anglo-Saxon text is on p. 39. The Anglo-Saxon text of the 1662 edition comes on the recto o f the only signed leaf of the pamphlet: )( 5. It reads: Anglo-Saxonicè VRen Fader thic arth in heofnas, sic gehalgud thin noma, to cijmeth thin ric. Sic thin uilla sue is in heofnas, and in eortho. Vren hlaf ofer wirthlic sel us to daeg, and forgefe, us scijlda urna, sue we for gefan scijldgun urum, and no in lead vsith in custnung. Ah gefrig Vrich from ifle, Amen. [I have replaced long s by round s (lower case) at each o f its eight occurrences. Obvious misreadings include ic for u, c for e, r for insular s, t for c: thu ( 1 ), sie (1), Sie (2), ofer-wistlic (with h added) (3), vsich (5), Vsich ( 6 ); probably we should read laed (5) and ijfle ( 6 ). The text is, it seems, an edited version of Lindisfarne, Matthew 6:9-13, derived from Camden’s Remaines.]

3

3 Sharon Turner’s First Published Reference to B e o w u lf

We owe to Sharon Turner’s The History o f the Anglo-Saxons, IV (1805), 398408, the first appraisal of Beowulf, and to his index (1807 edition) the title of the poem: “Beowulf, a narrative poem ” ; though of course it had been des­ cribed by Wanley exactly a hundred years earlier in the Catalogus of Hickes’ Thesaurus, pp. 218-19. None of the standard bibliographies and accounts of Anglo-Saxon scholarship refers to Turner’s earlier mention of the poem pub­ lished in 1803; it is not in John Petheram’s excellent An Historical Sketch o f the Progress and Present State o f Anglo-Saxon Literature in England, London, 1840; or in R. Wülker’s Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur, Leipzig, 1885, which leans heavily on Petheram; or in the bibliographies o f the editions of and books on the poem, not even in Klaeber or Chambers; or in Donald K. Fry’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburh A Bibliography, , Charlottesville, Virginia, 1969, which has an admirable entry for the various editions of Turner’s History (2125); or in Stanley B. Greenfield’s valuable section on Anglo-Saxon “ Poetry” in The New Cambridge Bibliography o f English Literature, edited by G. Watson, I (1974), which is o f course deliber­ ately selective. Turner’s first reference to Beowulf comes in his A Vindication o f the Genuineness o f the Ancient British Poems o f Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and Merdhin, with Specimens o f the Poems, London, Longman’s, 1803, pp. 110-12. He refers to Wanley’s account and quotes from it for his description 4 which is, however, not entirely dependent on Wanley, for he has gone to the manuscript and noticed that it is “ in 40 sections” —in fact, there are fortythree. The existence and genuineness of Beowulf is used by Turner in conjunc­ tion with the fact that its author is unknown and the poem itself “ mentioned in no writing that has survived to us” in his argument that the Welsh poets and their extant works are genuine.

3

4 The Bibliography o f Old English: The Past First I must indicate how I understand the word “ bibliography.” It will then be seen that one of my two areas is only marginal to true bibliography, though it amuses me; but the other is central. As I understand it, bibliography is the formal study of books and other objects displaying words in print considered with regard to their manufacture, distribution, and history o f ownership rath­ er than with regard to their content . 1 We are marvelously well supplied with bibliographies in the sense of listings through the work o f Stanley Greenfield and Fred Robinson, and of Donald Fry for Beowulf, as well as the many annu­ al lists including those in Anglo-Saxon England and the Old English Newsletter. In the sense of formal bibliography, we have hardly begun, except that Eliza­ bethan Anglo-Saxon studies as they emerge in print are incidentally discussed. For them we can go to John Strype’s The Life and Acts o f Matthew Parker (1711).2 A learned London bookseller, publisher, and antiquary, John Petheram, provides us with a still useful and highly readable survey, An Histor­ ical Sketch o f the Progress and Present State o f Anglo-Saxon Literature in England (1840); and a very good Yale dissertation by Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800 (Yale Studies in English, 55 [1917]), builds up the bibliographical study further and adds to it appendices 1 W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers have often addressed themselves to the nature and purpose of bibliography; R. B. McKerrow and Philip Gaskell have sections on it in their well-known introductions to the subject. The sections devoted to Bibliography in the several excellent bibliographies of English, or more especially, of Old English studies, are far from comprehensive for older material. I should like to be better informed by them on the aids available to earlier researchers, aids well represented by and described by the long title of J. F. A. Kinderling’s revision of J. D. Kohler’s Anweisung zur Reiseklugheit für junge Gelehrte, um Bibliotheken, Münzkabinette, Antiquitätenzimmer, Bildersäle, Naturalien- und Kunstkammern, etc., mit Nutzen zu besuchen (Magdeburg, 1788); it has brief hints on the contents of libraries in England, private and public, including some with early material. English scholars were able to draw on the information in Wm. Nicolson’s The English Historical Library (1696-99), and for Scottish and Irish libraries the further volumes of 1702 and 1714. I am very grateful to my colleagues at Pembroke College, Oxford, Dr. D. F. Fleeman and Dr. Peter Godman, for reading this paper in typescript and making sugges­ tions for its improvement, by corrections, additions, and excisions. 2 See the opening words of W. W. Greg on the authoritativeness of Strype, in “ Books and Bookmen in the Correspondence of Archbishop Parker,” The Library 4th ser., 16 (1935-36), 243.

Paper 4. Bibliography of Old English: The Past 77

4

including a brief adumbration on Saxon type, much used by later writers. [To these must now be added: C. T. Berkhout and M. McC. Gatch (eds), AngloSaxon Scholarship - The First Three Centuries (Boston, Mass., 1982).] For the small number of books up to 1640, STC and even better Revised STC give brief guidance with references, where available, to more extensive treatments. That may seem at least a foundation. Perhaps a single example will suffice to show that we have, in fact, very little to help us, very little indeed when it is recalled how small is the number of books on the subject of Anglo-Saxon in the early period of scholarship. Abraham Whelock’s edition of the Old English History by Bede consists of two main parts. Each o f them has a title page, the first dated 1643, the second 1644. There is also a title page to the work as a whole, dated 1644. In many copies when the title page to the whole is present, the title page to the first part is cancelled. Is all that differentiates these copies a cancelled title bearing the date 1643? I ask because the ornament on the title page to the second part exists in two shapes, one rectangular and the other triangular. When the title page to the first part is cancelled, we may find either shape on the second title page. Which shape is the earlier? I know of no place where I can look up the answer to these simple questions about a Cam­ bridge book printed by Roger Daniel.3 We have not even a full list o f books using Saxon type, and we have no full and illustrated account of such type. Adams’s appendix on the subject is still the best we have on it. For Oxford books Falconer Madan’s bibliography cov­ ers the period up to 1680 satisfactorily as a descriptive listing of books; T. B. Reed, revised by A. F. Johnson, has a section on Saxon type in A History o f the Old English Letter Foundries (1952), but it is really no advance beyond Adams and is not nearly so full.4 In recent years the printing in Saxon type has been largely abandoned. Methuen’s Old English Series toyed with the let­ ter wynn for a while and used a post-Conquest shape of g to recall insular g. Lower and upper case æ, þ, and ð are in general use. The use of other letters, e.g., lower case d, f r, s, t, and unpointed i and pointed y —together with a wide range of abbreviations and suspensions of which those for and, þæt, and vel are still widely employed —imitative of insular script, was standard practice 3 Wing (and Revised Wing) B 1661-2 and BLC to 1975, vol. 23, p. 47, regard the books of 1643 and 1644 as separate editions. No one seems to have attempted for Cam­ bridge anything like Falconer Madan’s work on the bibliography of Oxford books. 4 See also J. Johnson, Typographia (1824), II, 453-63, and W. Savage, Dictionary o f the A rt o f Printing (1841), 730-36. In Reed’s title “Old” of course describes the letter foundries and does not go with “English” to give us our more familiar meaning of the two words.

78 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

in the “ record type” used (since the late eighteenth century) in the nineteenth century for books published for the Record Commission. That is now regarded as extreme ,5 and leads to misunderstanding . 6 Junius’s Saxon type is well discussed, though not fully, by Stanley Morison and Henry Carter in John Fell (1967), but that only because Junius had given his type and the punches for it to the University o f Oxford. No other continen­ tal Saxon type is systematically discussed anywhere, as far as I know. Even Adams, Reed, and Morison give us no list of books in which Junius’s Saxon type is used. Such a list would begin not with Junius’s edition of the Cædmonian poems (Amsterdam, 1655) but with his Observationes in Willeramo of the same place and date. The book is of some importance, quite apart from its place in the bibliography of Old English. A long section in it is an etymological dictionary of many of the monosyllabic words of the Germanic languages. As such, it is a printed forerunner of the Etymologicum Anglicanum eventually published with additions by Edward Lye in 1743 from Junius’s manuscript dictionary (now Bodleian MSS. Junius 4 and 5). (No real advance was made in Germanic etymology after Junius till Johannes Ihre’s Glossarium Suiogothicum, Uppsala, 1769.) Anglo-Saxonists, however, value the book affectionately be­ cause in it Junius announced, s.v. ord, “beginning,” how the beginning of man­ kind was, according to Bede, first told in English verse by Caedmon: in the metrical paraphrase preserved, so Junius declared, in a manuscript munificent­ ly given to him by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh —the “ Caedmon Manuscript,” as it is still often called, now Bodleian MS. Junius 11. 7 The bibliographic importance of the Observationes in Willeramo is that in it Junius employed his Saxon font for the first time. Adams and Reed do not mention th a t , 8 and even Stanley Morison neglects it in his excellent section on 5 See C. R. Cheney’s remarks in Alistair Campbell, ed., Charters o f Rochester, AngloSaxon Charters 1 (London, 1973), p. vi. 6 See, for example, OED Supplement, I (1972), s.v. Davidic, where sealmum in the record type of Cockayne’s edition of the Leechdoms, Rolls Series, 35, iii (London, 1866), 428, is incorrectly printed because it was misread as realmum. (The word comes from added text in the Lambeth Psalter; see N. R. Ker, Catalogue o f Manu­ scripts containing Anglo-Saxon [Oxford, 1957], no. 281.) There is no similar danger in Max Forster’s edition in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litera­ turen 132 (1914), 333, line 9 of the text. 7 The Caedmon Manuscript o f Anglo-Saxon Biblical Poetry (Oxford, 1927) is the title of Sir Israel Gollancz’s facsimile. Gollancz refers at length (p. xiv) to Junius’s announce­ ment of the Caedmonian poems in the Observationes in Willeramo, p. 248. See also B. J. Timmer, ed., The Later Genesis (Oxford, 1948), pp. 4-9 [and pp. 50-51, above]. 8 Reed, p. 67, perhaps means us to understand this book when, after giving us the title

Paper 4. Bibliography of Old English: The Past 79

“ Punches, Matrices, and Type given [to the University of Oxford] by Francis Junius in 1677,” 9 but then Morison is not concerned with books so much as 5 with the type used for printing them. The Observationes contains, immediate­ ly after the A d lectorem, a table in which Junius sets out those Saxon letters, upper and lower case, which differ from type used for Latin: there his beauti­ ful Saxon pica, probably the product of the elegant punchcutter Christoffel van Dy(c)k , 10 makes its first appearance in full. One letter-shape appears in the table o f the Observationes but is used no­ where else in the book: square upper case C, rather like upper case roman E but without the middle bar. This sort is used beside the more usual upper case round C in Junius’s edition of Caedmon (much as in many early Saxon type­ faces there are two shapes of upper case G, one square and one round). Junius might have used square upper case C a number o f times in the Observationes, e.g., p. 248 in the Saxon form of Caedmon’s name which he gives as Cedmon or Ceadmon with Saxon lower case d, so that it is no unreasonable inference to suppose that, had a more Saxon-looking shape o f upper case C been avail­ able, Junius should probably have wished to use it for the Saxon name. If so, it is possible that this sort was not available for p. 248; the unsigned prelimi­ naries are almost certain to have been printed last. I do not know why square upper case C should have been added late to the type-face. And I know of only one earlier use o f it —in the first part of Sir Henry Spelman’s Concilia printed in London in 1639 by Richard Badger. 1 1 Badger did not use this shape a year later for Sir John Spelman’s edition o f the Saxon Psalter, for which a new font was made. We need a history of Saxon type, illustrated letter by letter. Let me change my subject to suggest a second major bibliographical deside­ ratum, though it may take us towards sentimentality, away from more rigorous bibliography. I should like to see a catalogue of association copies of books relevant to Anglo-Saxon studies, especially of early books, say up to 1880, for after that, though still o f great value in tracing the history of Anglo-Saxon of Junius’s Caedmon published in Amsterdam in 1655, he refers vaguely to Junius hav­ ing printed some other works in that city before he brought the type over to England. 9 John Fell, pp. 244-45. 10 Some account of van Dy(c)k is given by Reed, p. 227 (with further references). Morison, John Fell, p. 244, attributes to van Dy(c)k Junius’s Saxon, though only as a probability. See also Morison’s draft appendix in H. Carter’s translation of C. Enschedé’s Typefoundries in the Netherlands (Haarlem, 1978), p. 422. 11 See Adams, p. 163.

80 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

6

scholarship, such a catalogue would become exponentially more bulky. Till the present century there were so few Anglo-Saxonists and so few with inter­ ests wide enough to comprehend the study o f Anglo-Saxon that a catalogue of association copies would not be an impossibly large undertaking. Every library with any books of Anglo-Saxon interest has some association copies. They are of varying kinds. Perhaps one might give a miss to those German dissertations of the nineteenth century and after inscribed to Herrn Geheim­ rath Professor Dr. X, “ vom Verfasser ehrfurchtsvoll überreicht” ; but I should be sorry not to find, if we can afford to go up to 1842 for dates of publica­ tion, William Morris’s copy of Benjamin Thorpe’s Codex Exoniensis with Morris’s signature and his bookplate. (There is no sign, other than that the pages are opened, that Morris ever read it.) Similarly unmarked and unannotated is a large-paper copy of J. J. Conybeare’s Illustrations o f Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826), with, on the cover, the arms and name of Hudson Gurney, himself a great antiquary and the eldest brother of Anna Gurney, whom his rich library furnished with the tools of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Her life as a courageous invalid is movingly told in the DNB, and the late Norman Garmonsway has written attractively of her style in the work published by her for private distribution, A Literal Transla­ tion o f the Saxon Chronicle by a lady in the country, Norwich 1819.12 Early Anglo-Saxon dictionaries annotated by editors provide us with clues to their understanding or lack of it. An extant copy o f the Dictionarium Saxonico- et Gothico-Latinum by Edward Lye and Owen Manning (1772) with the fine bookplate of Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, first editor of Beowulf, is a good example —though some of the annotations are definitely by later owners. Quite recently, in 1980, we have been given a privately published study by M. Sue Hetherington, The Beginnings o f Old English Lexicography. She deals with a subject largely outside my definition of bibliography, manuscript dic­ tionaries of Anglo-Saxon up to the time when William Somner put his into print in 1659. She mentions and discusses, as far as that is possible, lost dic­ tionaries in manuscript including that by Francis Tate, an important antiquary who lived from 1560 to 1616. Some of his work is preserved in manuscript in the British Library. It shows his antiquarian interests which had at their center the tracing of institutions and offices of state back to Anglo-Saxon times. He used as evidence Anglo-Saxon words which were, or he thought they were, 12 G. N. Garmonsway, “AnnaGurney: Learned Saxonist,” Essays and Studies n.s. 8 (1955), 40-57. [Cf. pp. 104-5, below.]

Paper 4. Bibliography of Old English: The Past 81

the Anglo-Saxon names for these institutions and offices of state, and which he etymologized, not always correctly. That line o f antiquarian interest was widespread among members of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, of which Tate was the secretary . 13 41 British Library MS. Stowe 1045 has a list of names of members and also a number of papers often only in outline, all in Tate’s hand, showing a wide understanding o f Saxon antiquity. He writes Saxon words in imitation of the script he found in Saxon manuscripts, and close to the Saxon type found in the earliest books using it. The late Eric Sexton of Rockport, Maine, himself a Fellow of the Society o f Antiquaries, had in his possession a copy of the 1566 Louvain edition of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica.14 It had been given to Francis Tate by Sir Robert Cotton, the great book-collector, and contains many annotations in Tate’s hand. Often he gives in the margin the Anglo-Saxon equivalent o f words used in Bede’s Latin, especially for terms relevant to antiquarian studies. In a note Tate says that he collated the Latin text o f the Louvain edition with Lord Burghley’s manuscript, of which, after the Cottonian fire, only fragments re­ main . 15 From the point of view of an investigator of Tate’s lost dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, or perhaps rather encyclopaedia, the book is of great interest. It shows how he set about getting Anglo-Saxon technical terms and names right. Here are some typical examples: aldorbiscop metropolitanus, festerfeder nutritor, gesið comes, spell historia, uhtsang hymnus matutinalis, Beomica maegþe prouincia Berniciorum, Swaefheard Suebhardus, Tondbyrht Tonbert. The most princely of all Anglo-Saxon association copies, the prize item in any catalogue of such books, is that copy o f the first issue of Æ lfric’s A Testi7 monie o f Antiquitie kept in the British Library as MS. Add. 18160.1 am in­ debted to my colleague Dr. Henry Woudhuysen o f Lincoln College, Oxford, 13 Though it is doubtful if there is continuity between the first Society of Antiquaries and the present Society, there is a continuity of interest in Saxon antiquities that runs right through the seventeenth century and manifests itself in frequent profession­ al copyings of the tracts of the antiquaries around Tate, Camden, Cotton, and others. Several such manuscript volumes of antiquarian tracts survive, and many of the tracts themselves were printed eventually in Thomas Hearne’s Curious Discourses (1720, reprinted with additions in 1771). 14 Lot 85 in the sale of his books at Christie’s, London, 15 April 1981. 15 Tate is referring to the manuscript described in Ker, Catalogue, no. 180. See also Dorothy Whitelock, ed., The Peterborough Chronicle, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 4 (Copenhagen, 1954), pp. 25-27. It may be that some of Tate’s words supply readings no longer extant, but the whole text had been transcribed by Laurence Nowell (in what is now British Library MS. Add. 43703), and Nowell excerpted some words from it (in what is now Lambeth Palace MS. 692, fol. 32).

82 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

for getting me to look at the book, which I had known only as a catalogue entry. It has, in addition to some marginalia, an attestation signed by seven­ teen bishops headed by the two Archbishops, Matthew Parker of Canterbury and Thomas Young o f York, in which they set forth concerning Transubstantiation what in Æ lfric’s Paschal Sermon “ hathe ben the comon taught doctrine o f the churche of England on this behalfe manie hundred yeres ago,” and therefore consonant with sound doctrine in the Reformed Church o f England and at variance with what was in their time Roman practice —though “ the first age of the churche” in England was “ ouermuche cumbered withe monckerye.” The book was presented to the British Museum in 1850 by William Masked, the great liturgiologist, who pointed out that this very book is the one Strype spoke of in his life of Parker . 16 Masked also drew attention to a previous own­ er, Sir Peter Manwood . 17 The handwritten date 1567 together with and at the level of Manwood’s signature appears on the undated title page. The date, who­ ever wrote it (probably Manwood), may mean that a contemporary wished to record the date o f publication or more especially the date o f the episcopal attestation. Strype, however, gives the date of publication under the events o f 1566.18 The handwritten date on the title page is therefore o f some impor­ tance. Between the passing by Convocation o f the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1563 and Pius V’s bud excommunicating Queen Elizabeth in 1570, dates o f state­ ments of Anglican doctrine mattered to contemporaries —and the date o f the first printed book using Saxon type matters to us for different reasons. I have time for no more. ... For us involved in the bibliography o f Old English, our science, there is life in the books, the vehicles o f transmission.

16 The Life and Acts o f Matthew Parker, pp. 239ff. 17 Maskell misread the name as Hanwood. Manwood is known as the owner of manu­ scripts now in the Bodleian Library, at Lambeth Palace, and in the British Library, one of which (Add. 17010) Maskell refers to as also his. Dr. Woudhuysen kindly provided me with much of this information on Manwood. 18 The same date appears at the foot of the title page, also handwritten, and next to the name of another previous owner, Jo[hn] Hilton. Other owners were Ja[mes] Baynton and Geo[rge] Chaimer, the well-known Scottish antiquary whose bookplate is on the former pastedown of the upper cover.

67

68

5 Translation from Old English: “ The Garbaging War-Hawk,” or, The Literal Materials from Which the Reader Can Re-create the Poem Talbot Donaldson’s translation o f Beowulf 1 is highly successful. In introduc­ ing it to his readers, he lets us feel that he has been successful not by chance but through the avoidance o f pitfalls; he speaks not for valor but for discretion in a translator: “ Rather than try to create a new and lesser poem for the read­ er, it seems better to offer him in prose the literal materials from which he can re-create the poem . ” 2 At frequent but irregular intervals scholars and others write about transla­ tions o f Beowulf and how to do it or how not. Donald K. Fry’s admirable Beowulf bibliography lists nearly thirty items “ about trl” up to July, 1967. He published before the appearance o f John Crane’s “ To Thwack or Be Thwacked: An Evaluation of Available Translations and Editions of Beowulf ” (CE 32 [1970]: 321-40). Crane speaks of the Donaldson translation: “ Its appeal throughout is always to the upper-level o f college student ” (p. 327). I do not know whether the translator feels thwacked by that, but I do not feel thwacked as the typical reader; the translation appeals to me, and the upper level o f college student is where I belong. Among the best o f such studies is Chauncey Brewster Tinker’s book on the subject . 3 His own translation is among the best in prose ,4 and it is pleasing to think that he too did well with the actual translation because he was in the process of surveying translators’ failures. Yet even Tinker has, in a favorite passage, some words like “must needs” and “ the wan raven... shall chatter freely” : “ Therefore many a spear, cold in the morning, must needs be clasped 1 Beowulf : A New Prose Translation (New York, 1966). 2 The words quoted do not occur in the preface to the 1966 edition but are one of the changes made for the republication of the translation in Beowulf: The Donaldson Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Joseph F. Tuso (New York, 1975), p. xvi. 3 The Translations o f Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography, Yale Studies in English, vol. 16 (1903). Edwin Morgan’s Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English (Alding­ ton, Kent, 1952 [reprinted in paperback, Berkeley, Calif., 1962]) has a particularly valuable discussion of the art of translating the poem. A very good contribution to the subject is made in Adelheid Stiegler’s Munich doctoral dissertation, Studien zur Über­ setzung des altenglischen Beowulfepos (1964). 4 Beowulf Translated out o f the Old English (New York, 1902).

84 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

by the fingers, uplifted in the hand; the sound o f the harp shall not waken the warrior, but the wan raven, eager o ’er the doomed, shall chatter freely, telling the eagle how he sped at the feast, when with the wolf he plundered the slain.” s Every translator has his own recipe for avoiding the mistakes made by others. Prose has fewer pitfalls than verse; to undertake a verse translation requires courage. I have looked at most of the English verse translations o f Beowulf, and to characterize them a little, I select from each a short and, I hope, typical passage. I think several of the more recent translators come out well, but they are usually the ones who have been least forceful in what they do to the lan­ guage, and they do not use rhyme. In short, they are the closest to prose. Michael Alexander’s translation o f the poem has undergone many changes. The revised version, given first, is an improvement on the earlier version: “ This mail-shirt travelled far, hung from a shoulder that shouldered warriors: it shall not jingle again. There’s no joy from harp-play, glee-wood’s gladness, no good hawk swings through hall now, no swift horse tramps at the threshold. Terrible slaughter has carried into darkness many kindreds of mankind . ” 65 69

“ This mailshirt travelled far, hung from a shoulder shouldered warriors; it shall not jingle again. There’s no joy from harp-play, gleewood’s gladness, no good hawk swings through hall now, no swift horse tramps at threshold. The threat came: falling has felled a flowering kingdom . ” 7 Kevin Crossley-Holland gives the first version below for the same lines in the course of his complete translation ; 8 but the lines o f the second version are from his “ Literal Gloss” ; that is, they are word for word:

5 For all Old English poems I give the line numbering of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, adding for short poems the volume and page number. The quotation from Tinker comes at p. 141, and translates line 3021&-27. 6 Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973), p. 122, lines 2260-66. 7 The Earliest English Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley, 1970), p. 68, the same lines. The last line reproduces the/alliteration of the Old English. 8 Beowulf (London, 1968), pp. 97 and 133.

Paper 5. Translation from Old English 85

“ The linked mail may no longer range far and wide with the warrior, stand side by side with heroes. Gone is the pleasure of plucking the harp, no fierce hawk swoops about the hall, nor does the swift stallion strike sparks in the courtyard. Cruel death has claimed hundreds of this human race.” “ Nor may ring-mail alongside war-leader widely journey heroes beside. Not at all harp’s joy, mirth of song-wood, nor good hawk through hall swings, the swift steed fortress-yard beats. Bale-death many of human races forth on-sent! ” It is obvious, therefore, that Crossley-Holland never confused the literal gloss with the translation. It would have been possible to have regarded such literal­ ism as poetry adopting Anglo-Saxon attitudes, and, as we shall see, several verse translations seem the product of such confusion. Burton RaffePs translation grows on one. When I first read it and reviewed it , 10 9 I thought it lacked some of the courage which William Morris had to 70 excess; and so it does, but it seems now that Morris’s courage as displayed in his translation of Beowulf is of the kind o f which even a little is too much. Raffel’s simplicity o f diction and syntax is as bearable as good prose: “ Take these treasures, earth, now that no one Living can enjoy them. They were yours, in the beginning: Allow them to return. War and terror Have swept away my people, shut Their eyes to delight and to living, closed The door to all gladness. No one is left To lift these swords, polish these jeweled Cups: no one leads, no one follows. These hammered Helmets, worked with gold, will tarnish And crack; the hands that should clean and polish them Are still forever. ” 11 If great poetry were the result, no Anglo-Saxonist would grudge a little free­ dom in translation. Kenneth Sisam, accurate scholar of Old English that he 9 Beowulf: A New Translation (New York, 1963). 10 Modem Language Review 59 (1964): 253. 11 P. 93, lines 2247-57.

86 Part I. Surveys of OE Studies

was, may have done a disservice to his subject by taking too schoolmasterly a view of Ezra Pound’s modern interpretation o f The Seafarer,12 though per­ haps Pound’s poem is not great enough to excuse his freedom. I. Seraillier is free in his translation o f Beowulf, o f which the following is a sufficient sample “ And many a man shall greet his fellow with gifts Over the surging water, the seagulls’ way.” Then Hrothgar, the grey-haired king, giver of treasure, Embraced him, clinging to his neck and weeping bitterly As if his heart would break . 13 Edwin Morgan’s translation into verse seems to me the most satisfactory o f all the attempts to reduce Beowulf to Modern English verse. He coins some mild compounds and ventures with some freedom to interpret the poem anew for modern readers:

71

All these death swept, Years gone, away; and one man remained From the host of the people, the last wanderer there, A watchman grieving over friends, to augur For his own life the same; brief use, brief love Of long-prized wealth. The barrow of the dead Stood ready on the plain near the breaking sea, New-made on the headland, built hard of access; Into its interior the jewel-guardian took That cherishable mass of the treasures of men, Of the beaten gold, and uttered these words: “ Now earth hold fast, since heroes have failed to, The riches of the race! Was it not from you That good men once won it? Battle-death, evil Mortal and terrible has taken every man Of this folk of mine that has left life and time, That has gazed its last on feast and gladness. No one I have to be sword-bearer or burnisher Of the beaten-gold goblet, the dearly-loved drinking-cup: That chivalry has slipped away . ” 14 Morgan is literal enough for us to know what words o f his render each half 12 In Pound’s Personae (New York, 1926), pp. 64-66; Sisam gave his views on the poem as a translation in the Times Literary Supplement, June 25, 1954, p. 409. 13 Beowulf the Warrior (London, 1954), p. 34, lines 1860-74, loosely and with much omission. 14 1962 ed., p. 61, lines 22366-54.

Papei 5. Translation from Old English 87

line of the poem, and good enough for us to feel that some new grace has been given to many ancient lines. More often, alas, when reading verse renderings o f Beowulf, one longs for honest, kersie prose. Thus Mary E. Waterhouse’s translation is serviceable but far from distinguished verse: No la d y ’s custom such F o r m aid to practise, peerless though she be, T h at a peace-loving girl exact the life O f a good m an for a p reten d ed insult; But O ffa, H em m ing’s kinsm an, dealt w ith th a t . 15

Better, at least to my taste, Gavin Bone avoids excessive ordinariness:

72

“ W ith the first in war the corselet cannot walk, N or keep com pany w ith a hero. No harp sings on, No pleasure o f the playing-w ood — no good haw k Swings dow n th e hall, nor th e stallion of pace Beats on the terraced cam p. Life-harm has caught M any a creature o u t of his dwelling-place! ” *6

Ordinariness combined with antiquarian word lore pulls down D. H. Crawford’s verse: The w arder had slain one o f a few ; and so in fell w rath the feud had been w reaked. ’Tis a m ystery where a m ighty earl and brave will com e by the destined end of his life, w hen no longer he m ay w ith m en of his kindred inhabit the m ead-hall. W ith B eow ulf ’tw as so, w hen the w arder o f the barrow he sought in m o rtal strife; he him self knew not w hat should constrain him to part w ith the w orld . 17

That a translator of Beowulf should have expected anything other than failure from rhyming fourteeners seems amazing. A. Strong had the advantage of R.W. Chambers’s well-known “ ZteowM//and the Heroic Age in England” as a foreword to his translation, but otherwise little can be said o f the work to recommend it. The poeticizing language is further from normal speech than that of most. As poetry it seems a bad translation, though not inaccurate, so that it may be forgivable to quote from it the line about the “ revel... In the 15 Beowulf in Modern English (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 67-68, lines 1940&-44. 16 Beowulf in Modern Verse (Oxford, 1945), p. 65, lines 226 Ob-66 . 17 Beowulf Translated into English Verse (London, 1926), p. 116, lines 3060b-68.

88 Part I. Surveys o f OE Studies

lift at night,” unfortunately not to be fully savored by speakers who use “elevator” for “lift” : Ay, surely the lord of the Weders, the monarch fell in war, Had done with the days of his living, and a wondrous death had dreed. But erst saw they over against him a being of monstrous breed, For loathly there on the meadow lay the dragon. The guest of shame And terror, the fiery serpent, was utterly shent with flame: Fifty feet was his length as he lay there. Revel oftwhile had he kept In the lift at night, and thereafter down into his cavern swept, But now by death was he fettered, and the last of his pleasure and pride Has he ta’en in his earthy caverns. But there lay there by his side Beakers and stoups amany, and platters of price thereto, And many a sword-blade splendid that the rust had eaten through . 18 73

There is a greater competence in C. Scott Moncrieff’s translation o f Beo­ wulf, in spite of the pinchbeck compounds, and in spite of the difficulty a modern reader has when faced with regular, caesural virgules: Then swiftly (as I heard) / the son of Weohstan When this word was spoken / his wounded lord, War-sickened, obeyed, / went in his ringed byrny, His braided battle-sark, / under the barrow’s roof, Saw he then in his triumph, / as by the seat he went, A masterful tribe-thegn, / treasures many, Glistening gold / on the ground gathered, Wonders on the walls, / and the Worm’s den, The old twilight-flier’s; / flagons stood there, Far-dead men’s vessels, / with none to furbish them, Husked of their platings. 19 In some of these verse renderings the wording is too far from modern lin­ guistic reality, and the word order even further, as an attem pt is made to re­ capture a long lost relative freedom. Modern English can hardly accommodate the Nibelungen stanza: Diu junge marcgrâvinne kuste die künige alle drî, (alsam tet ir muoter). dâ stuont ouch Hagene bî. ir vater hiez in küssen; dô blihte si in an. er dûhte si sô vohrtlîch daz siz vil gerne hete lân . 2 0 18 Sir Archibald Strong, Beowulf Translated into Modern English Rhyming Verse (London, 1925), p. 93, lines 3037-49, ed. W. Levison, Vitae Sancti Bonifatiif Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, 1905, p. 48. 20 See note 6, above. 21 J.E. Cross makes the point well, that Bede told the story as a miracle, to us it is an imponant event of literary history; see Sphere History o f Literature in the English Language, I, The Middle Ages, ed. W.F. Bolton, London, 1970, p. 20. Cross follows G. Shepherd, Review o f English Studies, n.s. v (1954), pp. 113-22, who emphasizes the prophetic aspects of the miracle. Other important articles on the short poem in­ clude C. L. Wrenn, “ The Poetry of Cædmon”, Proceedings o f the British Academy, xxxiii (1946), 277-95; F.P. Magoun, Jr., “ Bede’s Story of Caedman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer”, Speculum, xxx (1955), pp. 49-63; Morton W. Bloomfield, “ Patristics and Old English Literature: Notes on Some Poems” in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor o f Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield, Oregon, 1963, pp. 41-3. The articles by Wrenn and Bloomfield have been reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study o f Old English Poetry, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., and Stanley J. Kahrl, Hamden, 1968. An excellent edition and account of the poem is provided by John C. Pope, Seven Old English Poems, in The Library of Literature, ed. J.H. Raleigh and I. Watt, Indianapolis, 1966, especially pp. 45-54. Cædmon is dis­ cussed in all histories of Anglo-Saxon literature, among which Stanley B. Greenfield’s A Critical History o f Old English Literature, New York, 1965, pp. 168-72 deserves special mention. 22 The editors of Bede, at least since C. Plummer, Opera Historica, Oxford, 1896,1, p. 259, draw attention that Bede echoes in what he says of Cædmon the words used by St. Paul of himself, Galatians i.l, “non ab hominibus neque per hominem ... sed ...” .

124 Part II. OE Texts in Verse and Prose

were words he had never heard before, “uersus quos numquam audierat” . Attention has rightly been drawn to the harp in the account o f the singing from which Caedmon retired. Bede’s account is clear, that secular song o f a kind sung by the lay servants of the monastery was associated with harp play­ ing, though we have no idea what the nature o f their songs was or even wheth­ er the harp actually accompanied the verse or came in during intervals between the singing of the words. I have no wish to speculate on that, except to stress that the view sometimes expressed that the harp in the account of the poet Caedmon actually accompanied the singing o f words is no more than a likely speculation. We are told nothing whatever of Caedmon’s manner o f public performance of the song given him in sleep. The evidence of another Old English poem, Widsith, may be relevant here: Hyre lo f lengde geond londa fela, þonne ic be songe secgan sceolde hwaer ic under swegle selast wisse goldhrodene cwen giefe bryttian. Donne wit Scilling sciran reorde for uncrum sigedryhtne song ahofan, hlude bi hearpan hleoþor swinsade, þonne monige men, modum w lonce, wordum sprecan, þa þe wel cuþan, þæt hi naefre song sellan ne hyrdon. (9 9 -1 0 8 )23

“ [Queen Ealhhild’s] praise extended through many lands when I had to say in song where under heaven2425I knew the best queen, gold-adorned, distributing gifts. Whenever Scilling and I with clear voice raised a song before our victori­ ous lord, the voice making music loud to the harp, then many men proud o f spirit spoke in words that they had never heard better song.” 11 Scilling is known as an Anglo-Saxon personal name, but the suggestion has been made, and seems plausible to me, that it is not the name of a second singer —it is the name of the harp itself,2s based on the Old English adjective 23 A.S.P.R., III, p. 152. 24 It is probably the merest coincidence that MS. swegl (emended to swegle) which is used here in the ordinary sense ‘heaven’, occurs also as the first element of sweglrad in the Riming Poem 29 (which is discussed next); ultimately the words may well be related (cf. S. Feist, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der gotischen Sprache, Leiden, 1939, S.V. swiglon. 25 The evidence for Scilling as a proper name is adduced in R.W. Chambers, Widsith, Cambridge, 1912, p. 218. See C.L. Wrenn, “ Two Anglo-Saxon Harps”, Studies in Old English Literature in Honor o f Arthur G. Brodeur, Oregon, 1963, p. 120, for the view that it may be the name of the harp.

Paper 6. The Oldest English Poetry Now Extant 125

scill ‘sonorous’ and the verbs scillan ‘to cause to resound’ and scellan ‘to make a sound’.26 The adjective, which lives on into later English as O.E.D. demon­ strates s.v. Shill, a. and adv., is used in collocation with the harp, as in the Old English Riming Poem: Scealcas wæron scearpe, scyl wæs hearpe, hlude hlynede, hleoþor dynede, sweglrad swinsade, swiþe ne minsade:burgsele beofode, beorht hlifade. (27-30)27 The meaning is probably: “ The men were keen; the harp was sonorous re­ sounding loudly; the sound rang out, the fluting28 made music by no means subsiding; the castle-hall, towering up bright, trembled.” It looks as if both in the descriptions of music given in Widsith and in the Riming Poem the harp and the singer make music at the same time: the harp is the accompanist, it does not come in only when the voice is silent. Bede’s ac­ count of the poet Caedmon refers to the harp at a secular, convivial entertain­ ment. We learn that it was passed from singer to singer as each took his turn, presumably singing solo and playing the harp; though we are told nothing about what the servants were singing (except, by implication, that it was foolish and trivial —for Caedmon never composed anything of that kind, “nil umquam friuoli et superuacui poematis facere potu it”) or how the harp came in. We are not told that Caedmon did not know how to play the harp, though we are told that he had learnt no songs. Yet when he received miraculously the gift of song the harp is not mentioned again. The expressions used by Bede of Caedmon’s singing are canere and cantare, either of which can mean ‘to sing’ or ‘to recite verse’, but also dicere carmen ‘to recite a song’. It is possible but not likely 12 that the Anglo-Saxon who about A.D. 900 translated Bede’s Latin into Old English had access to a tradition independent of Bede for his statement in 26 The words are rare in Old English. Bosworth-Toller gives the uses of the verbs in the glossaries, as well as the use of the adjective in the Riming Poem. 27 A.S.P.R., III, p. 167. 28 sweglrad is obscure; the first element is taken to be cognate with Old High German swegala, etc., ‘flute’, on which see E.G. Graff, Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz, VI (1842), cols. 857-8; the second element may be comparable with the use of -rad in þunorrad ‘clap of thunder’, though not unless we reject the satisfactory etymology (going back to J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, Göttingen, 1835, pp. 112-13); cf. R. Jente, Die mythologischen Ausdrücke im altenglischen Wortschatz, Anglistische Forschungen, 56 (1921), p. 83. [O.D. Macrae-Gibson, The Old English Riming Poem (Cambridge 1983), 45, explains sweglrad very satisfactorily as ‘the heavens, seen as the place of the sun’s course.’]

126 Part II. OE Texts in Verse and Prose

which he expands Bede’s cantare (in “ ut omnes per ordinem cantare deberent” ‘that they should all sing in turn’) to be hearpan singan ‘to sing to the harp’.29 That would seem to indicate that the Anglo-Saxon translator thought o f the songs sung at the secular revelry as song and harp together. Caedmon withdrew from that; and when miraculously song comes to him —he may have sung or he may have intoned his sacred poetry —the translator uses of it the phrase leob singan and the double phrase his song and his /eoð.30 The harp, however, is not mentioned again either in the Latin or in the Old English; and yet it is most unlikely, if only because of King David’s accomplishment which was familiar to the Anglo-Saxons of course, that the harp was thought in some way too profane for pious song. It is more likely that the theopneustia should have extended only to the voice and not to the fingers. In dealing with the alliterative metre o f the Germanic peoples, among them the Anglo-Saxons, schools of prosodic theory have developed. They may be divided broadly into theories which hope to recapture something o f the sound of the original recitation in its rhythms —the melodic line is lost beyond hope of theoretical reconstruction —and those which do not attem pt to go beyond the sorting into systematically used combinations of stressed syllables, long and short, with unstressed syllables. All theorists must of course take the half­ lines as they stand as their starting-point; the difference between the two groups of theories lies in the use made in the theories o f the awareness that anyone now reading aloud, as best he can, Old English verse is, on the basis probably of an ear attuned to modern verse rhythms, inclined to a rhythmic order which goes beyond the evidence provided by the cold page o f modern print with its arrangement of the two half-lines into a long line and, especially in the more elaborate as well as the more elementary editions, the introduc­ tion of length-marks for long vowels. Among the theorists belonging to the former group Heusler and Pope are, to my mind, the most persuasive,31 among 13 the theorists of the latter group Sievers (in his early work) and Bliss are the most widely followed and Kaluza deserves greater attention than he has been given since the First World War.32 29 See T. Miller’s edition, E.E.T.S., O.S. 96 (1891), p. 342 line 22. 30 Miller, op. cit., p. 346 line 3. On the use of pairs of synonymous words in the Old English Bede to render a single Latin word, see D. Whitelock, “The Old English Bede”, Proceedings o f the British Academy, xlviii (1962), p. 76;such doubling is to be re­ garded as ornamentation as much as, and perhaps more than, elucidation. 31 A. Heusler, Deutsche Versgeschichte, I, Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, ed. H. Paul, 8/1, 1925. J.C. Pope, The Rhythm o f Beowulf, New Haven, 1942; revised edition 1966. 32 E. Sievers, “Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses” , Beiträge zur

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J.C. Pope, in The Rhythm o f Beowulf, gives a brilliant account of the history o f metrical theory relevant to Old English verse, and discusses at some length the place of the harp in the delivery o f poetry by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The relative rarity in Old English verse o f rests at the beginning of half-lines occupies an important place in the argument. In Pope’s words, “ If the harp were keeping time, the voice might omit the first accent of a verse at the beginning of a poem, or anywhere else, without causing the slightest con­ fusion . ” 33 Pope believes that the harp continued to be used in the rendering o f poetry among the Anglo-Saxons in historical times, and that its use is to be regarded as part of the first rendering of Beowulf; after all, the harp is alluded . to five times in the poem .3 4 Yet when Caedmon miraculously acquired the gift of song he does not seem also to have gained mastery in playing the harp. Bede’s failure to men­ tion the harp again accords well with his not in any way differentiating the short piece Caedmon ’s Hymn from the longer poems (which, as far as we know, have not survived), listed by Bede in what looks like a catalogue of Caedmon’s oeuvre. It is sometimes thought that Old English book poetry was metrically more exact than popular verse . 35 The nine lines of Caedmon’s Hymn are very ‘exact’ according to the rules evolved by modern scholars from the corpus of extant Old English (and early Germanic) alliterative verse, whereas a poem like the Finnsburg Fragment, which may be o f popular origin, is metric­ ally less exact. The exactness of Caedmon’s Hymn manifests itself also in the absence o f initial rests to which, in verse sung to the harp, the harp would have contributed its sound to fill the measure. Pope says, as he considers the con­ tinued use of harp accompaniment in the performance o f Anglo-Saxon poetry: 14 “ It is hard to believe that the taste o f the entire Germanic world would have changed so suddenly and so radically that what was once a chief means of delight would, as it were over night, have become reprehensible; or that so striking a device as the initial rest, after being developed to a high degree of Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, x (1885), 209-314, 451-545, xii (1887), 454-82. E. Sievers, A lt germanische Metrik, Halle, 1893. M. Kaluza, Der alt­ englische Vers, Studien zum germanischen Alliterationsvers, II, 1894. A.J. Bliss, The Metre o f Beowulf Oxford, 1958. 33 Pope, op. cit., pp. 91-2. 34 Pope refers specifically to Beowulf 89b-90a in this connection, and their central importance is emphasized by placing these lines on the cover of the book. 35 See A. Campbell, “The Old English Epic Style”,’ in English and Medieval Studies Presented toJ.R .R . Tolkien, ed. N. Davis and C.L. Wrenn, London, 1961, see especially p. 16 fn. 1 .

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expressiveness by generations of poets, would have been completely forgotten in a moment.” 36 It is difficult to be sure in such matters; but there is the possibility —to put no more strongly what can be neither proved nor refuted —that by a strange paradox the Anglo-Saxons are indebted to the illiterate neat-herd Caedmon for one of the most striking characteristics o f their book-poetry : its metrical precision. If so, they lost in a dream some of the prosodic features characteris­ tic of the verse of other Germanic languages. The poem runs: Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard, metudaes maecti end his modgidanc, uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes, eci dryctin, or astelidæ. He aerist scop aelda barnum heben til hrofe, haleg scepen; tha middungeard moneynnaes uard, eci dryctin, aefter tiadae firum foldu, frea allm ectig.37

“ Now we must praise the Guardian of the Kingdom o f Heaven, the might of the Lord and the thought of His mind, the work of the glorious Father, even in such measure as He, the eternal Lord, established the beginning o f every wonder. First He created Heaven as a roof for the children of men, the Holy Creator: then the Guardian of mankind, the eternal Lord, thereafter made the earth for men, almighty Lord.” The first half-line of the poem, Afa scylun hergan, is light.38 It is not un­ common for Old English poems to have a light first half-line. A light first half­ line begins the following biblical paraphrases, a literary kind going back to the 15 inspiration of Caedmon (though none is now thought Caedmon’s own work),

36 Pope, op. cit., p. 89. It is probably no mere coincidence, but the direct result of the metrical exactness, by whatever system the poem is scanned, that Heusler uses Caedm on’s Hymn in Deutsche Versgeschichte (§ 186) to exemplify his system which is difficult to apply to less regular verse. Heusler scans only one other poem in the allit­ erative verse of any Germanic language; the same paragraph contains his scansion of a much emended text of the Old High German Wessobrunner Gebet. 37 The text is that of the Moore MS. (on which cf. note 8, above). The d of -gidanc stands for $, and the b of heben would have been w ritten/later. 38 Cf. Sievers, Beiträge, x, pp. 282-90, Bliss, op. cit., chapters 2 and 10. E. Neuner’s Berlin doctoral dissertation, Uber ein- und dreihebige Halbverse in der altenglischen alliterierenden Poesie, 1920, is important on light verses.

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Daniel and Christ and Satan (demonstrably unrelated to the other ‘Caedmonian’ poems in the manuscript). Other long poems with initial light half-line in­ clude Andreas,39 Cynewulf’s Fates o f the Apostles*0 and his Elene, Advent Lyrics II, VIII, IX, X and XI of Christ I,3 94041 perhaps Cynewulf’s Christ 7/,42 Christ III, perhaps Phoenix (though I think transverse alliteration makes it less likely), Cynewulf’s Juliana,43 Seafarer, Fortunes o f Men, Riddles 2, 3, 9, 42, 48, perhaps 51,44 perhaps 52,4S4653, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 66, probably the damaged 72 and 78, perhaps 79,46 Descent into Hell, Alms-Giving, Pharaoh, Aldhelm, Metres 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, probably 12, 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29. It is a goodly list, including probably all Cynewulf’s five poems.47 The effect o f a light half-line to open the poem is to get into it with something of a swing; presumably that is why light half-lines were used so often at the beginning of a poem. It may well be that such an opening was traditional even in Caedmon’s time (though we lack the evidence), and there is nothing to suggest that those who followed Caedmon in time imitated him in this respect. It is even possible that such an opening followed on from some kind of prelude on the harp in days when harps were used; but there is nothing to prove that either. Caed­ m on’s short poem does not elsewhere contain a light half-line: it seems that to some extent light half-lines were felt to be inceptive, and the rest of the short poem requires at no point that a new beginning should be felt to be made. Caedmon’s Hymn consists of two sentences, each of two clauses. There is general agreement on that, even though the rudimentary manuscript punctua­ tion of Anglo-Saxon verse gives no indication that might help with such syn­ tactical analysis, which is editorial. The first clause is the invitation to praise 39 Initial Hwcet is almost certainly unstressed in Old English verse; see E. von Schaubert, Beowulf: 2 Kommentar, Paderborn, 1961, p. 14. 40 Again with unstressed Hwaet. 41 The numbering of the Lyrics is that of J.J. Campbell, The Advent Lyrics o f the Exeter Book, Princeton, 1959. Presumably Eala which begins these Lyrics is no more stressed than Hwaet; but cf. the first line of Metres o f Boethius 20 (A.S.P.R.,V, p. 177), where Eala alliterates in the same position. 42 Whether or not the first half-line is heavy depends on the value attached to -lice. 43 Hwaet again regarded as unstressed. 44 Again dependent on the value attached to -lice. 45 Dependent on the value attached to -ingas. 46 Dependent on the value attached to -linges. 47 This assumes that Hwæt is unstressed (see notes 40 and 43), and that the first syllable of -lice does not take full stress (see note 42). Since the metrical psalms of the Paris Psalter are metrically very inexact I have not included them in the list of poems with a light first half-line.

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16 God the Creator. The subsidiary clause introduced by sue gives the reason why God is to be praised.48 This part of the poem means, “ We must praise God, His might, thought and deed, in measure equal to his establishing the begin­ ning of all.” The second half of the poem amplifies the subsidiary clause of the first sentence of the poem, in terms o f the Creation o f heaven and earth as they affect mankind (who have been granted the grace that they can praise the Creator). Creation was accomplished in the two stages, first, heaven as a roof, secondly, the earth. Nothing could be simpler in structure. The art of historically important but fundamentally simple poems can easily be subjected to over-subtle examination. Such complexity as there is in Cœdmon ’s Hymn, which is a straightforward affirmation that God is to be praised by mankind for the act o f creation, lies in the diction: the poem de­ pends on the variation of nouns for its expression o f some o f the aspects o f creation. Some of the words used are confined to verse: uard ‘Lord’ (other senses of the word occur in prose), metud, uuldurfadur, aelda barnum (a Latinism derived from the biblical account o f the creation), firum, foldu, frea. Some of these words are very common in Old English verse, e.g. aelda barnum and frea allmectig, so that we have to recognize that in Caedmon ’s Hymn we have the first use of formulas that were to become the most ordinary of poetic ornaments or, where not used ornamentally, turns of expression available to Anglo-Saxon Christian poets writing in the vernacular. Those who like to trace formulas find this, the first English Christian poem as far as we know, a string of formulas: it is worth remembering that, since Caedmon used them first, they cannot have been formulas to him, but became formulas for use by those poets who succeeded him. It is worthy of note that there are only four verbs, and that on both occasions when the verb comes in the second half-line it is preceded by eci dryctin in the first half-line. We do not know enough about the nuances of sound-effects and verse structure in Old English poetry to know if such repetition is good or bad; and in such conditions o f uncertain­ ty modern critics (unless they have the strength of mind to eschew altogether appraisement of the poem) may prefer cowardly praise to ignorant censure — and they may take comfort from the fact that Bede praised it too. 17 One thing that is certain, however, is that the impulse that led to the

48 The meaning of sue has been much discussed; see, for example, B. Mitchell, Notes and Queries, ccxii (1967), 203-5. While the clause gives the reason for man’s obligation to praise the Creator, the conjunction is not so much one of cause as of manner; the sense is perhaps ‘to the extent to which’ or ‘in such measure as’; cf. E.E. Ericson, The Use ofSw a in Old English, Hesperia, Ergänzungsreihe 12 (1932), pp. 48-50.

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preservation of the poem was religious rather than literary. It is preserved, like a relic, in the original state, in the original dialect even, Northumbrian, far away from where it was first heard. The text is given in amplification of Bede’s Latin version. Bede in his account of the poet Cædmon excused his rendering in general terms: This is the sense but not the order of the words which he sang as he slept. For it is not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one language to another without some loss of beauty and dignity.49 Perhaps it was this statement acknowledging the loss o f beauty and dignity that led to the inclusion of the original words; and that could be said to be a literary impulse. But when the Northumbrian words were copied faithfully — more or less, depending on scribal accuracy and familiarity with the forms of letters as written in the exemplars which contained the original wording in a language incomprehensible to foreign scribes —that act o f copying by the foreign scribes to whom we are indebted for the majority of copies of the Northumbrian text (though not for the earliest copies) must be seen as an act of piety. That same spirit of pious veneration of a relic led to the preservation in the original Northumbrian dialect o f Bede’s Death Song in continental manuscripts even as far away from Northumbria as the area of dissemination of the Aust­ rian Legendary in which the letter telling o f Bede’s death had a place.50 The poem is, however, quite different in style from Caedmon’s Hymn. The Hymn, though some of its wording is calqued on Latin, is Germanic in poetic manner; the Death Song is not. Alois Brandi was, I believe, the first to grumble at its Latinity and failure to recall and avail itself of the resources of Germanic verse: “ But the five alliterative lines of which [it] consists are constructed like a Latin period rather than like a song suitable for singing; their only pur­ pose is to inculcate that the soul should prepare for death; the minstrel’s fresh quality is alien to them .” 51 The poem consists o f a single period:

49 “sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis” ; I quote Colgrave’s translation, ed. cit., pp. 416-17. 50 For work dealing with this dissemination see note 10, above. 51 “Aber die fünf stabreimenden Zeilen, aus denen letzterer [seil, der Sterbespruch] besteht, sind eher wie eine lateinische Periode gebaut als wie ein sangbares Lied; sie wollen nur Todesvorbereitung für die Seele einschärfen; der frische Zug des Spiel­ manns liegt ihnen ferne.” Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur, in Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, ed. H. Paul, Strassburg, 1908, p. 1032 (= 92).

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18

Fore them neidfaerae naenig uuiurthit thoncsnotturra than him tharf sie to ymbhycggannae aer his hiniongae huaet his gastae godaes aeththa yflaes aefter deothdaege doemid uueorthae.5253

“ Before that inevitable journey [or onset] no one grows wiser in thought than he has need in order to consider before his departure what may be the judge­ ment, good or bad, upon his soul after the day of his death.” Bede uses no ornament to express the single idea that a man will need such wisdom as has been granted to him to prepare for death and the terrible judge­ ment that is to come. He does rely on compounds of a kind more common in verse than in prose, neidfaer (a unique compound the meaning o f which is un­ certain), hiniong, deothdaeg; but it does not amount to much. Old English poetry lives in ornamentation —Cædmon ’s Hymn, of which Bede approved, makes manifold use of poetic variation to adumbrate the range o f divine activ­ ity, and may even in describing heaven as a roof for men depart a little from the purely factual —yet Bede’s handling o f verse seems to spurn this very con­ spicuous element, so that it almost looks as if he wishes the vanity o f poetic adornment to be seen as crumbling to dust before the terror o f the Last Judgement. Brandi expressed that negatively in his account o f the last five lines, “their only purpose is to inculcate that the soul should prepare for death” ; as if anything could, in Bede’s view, have been o f greater importance. What is to be admired in Bede ’s Death Song is its sufficiency for the soul’s great moment as it is about to leave this life, as Cuthbert in his description of Bede’s death bears witness: “ And he used to repeat that sentence from St. Paul ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands o f the living God’ [Hebrews X. 31], and many other verses of Scripture, urging us thereby to awake from the slumber of the soul by thinking in good time o f our last hour.” s 3 In criticizing Bede’s Death Song C uthbert’s words describing Bede’s own

52 The text is that of MS. St. Gall 254. A.H. Smith (op. cit. —note 7, above) and Dobbie, A.S.P.R., VI, especially pp. c-cvii, are to be consulted on the interpretation of some of the major and minor problems of this text. The solutions to the difficulties of form and meaning of them neidfaerae (with them for thaem rather than there for thaere) have been affected by the Hague version’s