THE OLD ENGLISH ACCOUNT OF THE SEVEN HEAVENS Nicole Volmering
here is only one ‘seven heavens’ text in Old English; like all but one of the other versions, it does not survive independently. It is preserved in a Tlarger composite homily on Doomsday in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (hereafter CCCC) 41, pp 287–95, the relevant section being on pp 292–5. The homily, often referred to as Homily III or the homily on Doomsday, has been edited only in parts, by Max Förster and Rudolph Willard.1 The division was largely due to the editors’ interests: Förster edited the first half of the homily because it contains a version of the apocryphal text the Apocalypse of Thomas, while Willard edited the second half, containing the ‘Seven Heavens’ section, as part of his ongoing research into the homilies in this manuscript. As a result of these varying priorities, the last paragraph of the homily, which Willard curiously omitted, remained unedited until 2003, when Sharon Rowley printed a diplomatic transcript as an appendix to her discussion of Homily III.2 The edition of the Old English Seven Heavens presented here includes the exordium at the end of the homily and is based on a new reading of the manuscript,3 collated with Willard’s and Rowley’s editions where applicable. The text also now appears in translation for the first time.4
1 M. Förster, ‘A New Version of the Apocalypse of Thomas in Old English’, Anglia 73 (1955) 17–27; R. Willard, ‘The Apocryphon of the Seven Heavens’ in idem, Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies, Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 30 (Leipzig, 1935), pp 1–30 (pp 4–6). 2 S. Rowley, ‘“A wesendan nacodnisse and þa ecan þistru”: Language and Mortality in the Homily for Doomsday in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41’, English Studies 84:6 (2003) 493–510. To date, the homily has not yet been printed as a whole. I plan to publish the full homily else- where. 3 Numbers V–VII according to Willard’s summary of the homily (thus op. cit., p. 2). 4 Parts of the text are translated in the footnotes to Rowley, ‘A wesendan nacodnisse’.