Oaks, ships, riddles and the Old English Rune Poem

1990 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 103-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Sorrell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
British Library

The Holme Riddles are a collection of 144 English riddles preserved in London, British Library, Harley 1960. Although the manuscript dates from the mid-seventeenth century, some of these riddles are apparently rooted in ancient Germanic tradition. One of these, an ancient ‘world-riddle’ according to the editor, is a version of the ‘oak-ship’ riddle:Q. wn j lived j fed the liveing now j am dead j beare the live[in]g & with swift speed j walk our the liveingA. a ship mad[e] of oake groweing feeds hogs with acorns now b[e]ars men & swims our fishes.

Francis Junius (1591–1677): copyist or editor?

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
The University ◽  
Made In

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory'sPastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

Habemus Corpora: Reapproaching Philological Problems in the Age of ‘Big’ Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-127
Author(s):  
Mark Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Language ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
British Library ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Major Task ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Primary Focus

Abstract This paper demonstrates the potential of new methodologies for using existing corpora of medieval English to better contextualise linguistic variants, a major task of philology and a key underpinning of our ability to answer major literary-historical questions, such as when, where and to what purpose medieval texts and manuscripts were produced. The primary focus of the article is the assistance these methods can offer in dating the composition of texts, which it illustrates with a case study of the “Old” English Life of St Neot, uniquely preserved in the mid-twelfth-century South-Eastern homiliary, London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, fols. 4–169. While the Life has recently been dated around 1100, examining its orthography, lexis, syntax and style alongside that of all other English-language texts surviving from before 1150 using new techniques for searching the Dictionary of Old English Corpus suggests it is very unlikely to be this late. The article closes with some reflections on what book-historical research should prioritise as it further evolves into the digital age.

The Metrical Epilogue to the Alfredian Pastoral Care: a postscript from Junius

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 43-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Germanic Studies

When Old English studies were in their infancy in the seventeenth century, scholars such as Franciscus junius (1591–1677) had very little to study in print. With no grammar and no dictionary (until Somner's in 1659) they had to teach themselves the language from original sources. Junius, whose interest in Germanic studies became active in the early 1650s, was so proficient, not only at Old English, but also at the cognate languages that he became virtually the founding-father of Germanic philology. Over the years Junius made transcripts in his own distinctive imitation-Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of many Old English texts, transcripts that have subsequently proved invaluable, especially where the original manuscripts have been damaged or lost.

The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Dumville
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

Seventeenth-Century Keyboard Music. Vol. 2: London, British Library MS Add. 40080

Notes ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1288
Author(s):  
Lionel Party ◽  
Alexander Silbiger ◽  
Bruce Gustafson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Keyboard Music

WILLIAM CAMDEN, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ATLASES OF THE BRITISH ISLES AND THE PRINTING OF ANGLO-SAXON

2018 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Peter J Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Text ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Sixth Edition

The sixth edition of Camden’s Britannia was published in 1607 with over fifty county maps printed from engraved plates. It was a pioneering work. In 1611, John Speed published his Theatre of The Empire of Great Britaine, again with over fifty county maps, many of them engraved by Jodocus Hondius from Amsterdam, and with an abridged version of Camden’s text. These books established a model that was followed later in Amsterdam itself in the great atlases of Blaeu and Janssonius. One of the ways Camden sought to augment the authority of his work was by using Anglo-Saxon types in his text for county names and the occasional passage in Anglo-Saxon (Old English). As the practice persisted, the progress of these type-designs is examined in relation to the development of the atlases. While Hondius’ map-making skills were imported to add to the English text, when the English text was brought to Amsterdam to add to the Dutch maps, the Dutch printers had to use their own skills to reproduce the Anglo-Saxon characters.

Two composite texts from Archbishop Wulfstan's ‘commonplace book’: theDe ecclesiastica consuetudineand theInstitutio beati Amalarii de ecclesiasticis officiis

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 233-271
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Editorial Work

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, theRegularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited theConcordiawith its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.

Variant versions of Old English medical remedies and the compilation of Bald's Leechbook

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 235-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey L. Meaney
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Library ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Writings

Over a hundred years ago, T. O. Cockayne published his Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, in which he edited the texts of all the medical writings in Old English he could find. It is massive in its scope, and no modern scholar is ever likely to produce its equal. Yet we, metaphorically standing on Cockaynes's shoulders, and equipped with aids provided by more recent research, are able to examine more closely than he could some of the special features of the field which he revealed to us. Its English substrata have been comparatively neglected, however, and therefore I propose in this paper to examine closely the relationships of the hundred or so medical remedies in Old English which have been preserved – usually in different manuscripts – in two or three versions so close that it is obvious, even on a superficial view, that they either derive from the same English original, or are copied the one from the other. These remedies usually begin by specifying the ailment for which they are recommended, and then go on to set out the ingredients and method of making the appropriate herbal concoction. Nearly all the repeated remedies are found at least once in the Leechbook manuscript, now London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, and so I will begin by describing it, and use it as the basis of the argument. Then I will describe briefly in turn the other manuscripts in which the remedies are found, discussing as I proceed those with minor parallels to Bald's Leechbook; and then, separately and in detail, the important duplications in the two final manuscripts under consideration. It may thereafter be possible to draw some conclusions about the method of compilation of Bald's Leechbook.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document