Old English Newsletter

Home , Andy Orchard, Kevin Kiernan (scholar), Roy Liuzza

Published for !e Old English Division of the Modern Language Association of America by !e Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University and its Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies

Editor: R.M. Liuzza Associate Editors: Daniel Donoghue !omas Hall

VOLUME  NUMBER  FALL 

ISSN -

O!" E#$!%&' N()&!(**(+ Volume "# Number $ Fall %&&'

Editor Publisher R. M. Liuzza Paul E. Szarmach Department of English Medieval Institute The University of Tennessee Western Michigan University "&$ McClung Tower $#&" W. Michigan Ave. Knoxville, TN "(##)-&*"& Kalamazoo, MI *#&&+-'*"% Associate Editors Year’s Work in Old English Studies OEN Bibliography Daniel Donoghue Thomas Hall Department of English Department of English (M/C $)%) Harvard University University of Illinois at Chicago Barker Center / $% Quincy St. )&$ S. Morgan Street Cambridge MA &%$"+ Chicago, IL )&)&(-($%&

Assistant to the Editor: Tara Lynn Assistant to the Publisher: David Clark

Subscriptions: The rate for institutions is ,%& -. per volume, current and past volumes, except for volumes $ and %, which are sold as one. The rate for individuals is ,$' -. per volume, but in order to reduce administrative costs the editors ask individuals to pay for two volumes (currently "+ & "#) at one time at the discounted rate of ,%'. Correspondence: General correspondence regarding OEN should be addressed to the Editor; correspondence regarding the Year’s Work and the annual Bibliography should be sent to the respective Associate Editors. Correspondence regarding business matters and subscriptions should be sent to the Publisher. Submissions: The Old English Newsletter is a referreed periodical. Solicited and unsolicited manuscripts (except for independent reports and news items) are reviewed by specialists in anonymous reports. Scholars can assist the work of OEN by sending offprints of articles, and notices of books or monographs, to the Edi- tor. OEN is published for the Old English Division of the Modern Language Association by the Richard Rawlinson Cen- ter for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research at the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. OEN receives no financial support from the MLA; the support of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists and the Department of English at The University of Tennessee are gratefully acknowledged.

Editorial Offices Business Offices email: [email protected] email: [email protected] fax: +)'-#(*-)#%) fax: %)#-"+(-+('& phone: +)'-#(*-)#(& phone: %)#-"+(-++"%

http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/index.php In this Issue

Note from the Editor "

News Call for Papers: Old English Division, %&&) MLA * ISAS at Kalamazoo %&&) * %&&) NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers: ' “Holy Men and Holy Women of Anglo-Saxon England” Summer Seminar on Palaeography and Codicology, University of New Mexico ' Medieval Academy of America %&&), Boston ) International Conference: “Form and content of instruction in Anglo-Saxon ) England in the light of contemporary manuscript evidence” Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Nottingham: Spring Events ( Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, Spring Events ( Call for Papers: “!e Performance of the Past: History and Histrionics + in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.” Call for Papers: !e Twentieth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference + Call for Papers: !e Tenth Cardi/ Conference on the !eory and Practice + of Translation in the Middle Ages Call for Papers: !e Heroic Age $$: “Baghdad, Aachen, and Winchester: # Early Medieval Reforms and Reformers” Call for Papers: “!e Anglo-Saxon Landscape” # Heckman Research Stipends at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library # British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund Awards $& Harvard University: Morton Bloom0eld Visiting Scholar Program $& Brief Notices on Publications $&

Reports ISAS %&&': Munich $' Dictionary of Old English: %&&' Report (Joan Holland) %$

Essays What are Old English Metrical Studies for? (!omas Bredeho1) %' Assuring the E2cacy of Beowulf for Undergraduate Students (Jennifer M. Santos) "(

Circolwyrde : New Electronic Resources for Anglo-Saxon Studies (Edward Christie) *'

Research in Progress Report Form '$

How to Reach OEN inside back cover

OEN is set in $$/$" Adobe Minion Pro Medium, with special characters drawn from the Unicode font Gentium. It is produced on a Macintosh PowerBook G* using Adobe InDesign CS%. 345678 "# 94. $ "

Note from the Editor

In this space one year ago (OEN "+.$) it was announced that the Executive Committee of the Old English Division of the MLA had given its approval to a plan to place the contents of odd-numbered issues of OEN online. In a subsequent issue (OEN "+.", written in September %&&' but not reaching subscribers until January %&&)) appeared a more detailed description of the OEN website and its companion OEN Bibliography database. !e site (http://www. oenewsletter.org/OEN/) was also announced in the spring of %&&' through various channels, such as the internet mailing lists ANSAXNET and MEDTEXT-L and at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. !e sites have been online for almost a year now, and it seems an appropriate time to o/er a 0rst report on their progress. A bewildering variety of statistics on web tra2c are automatically collected by the host server (http://www.ipowerweb.com); herewith, a brief summary of what seems most noteworthy about them.

!ose with experience in the online world advise that one should not measure tra2c to a website in terms of ‘hits’; the number of ‘hits’ is simply a raw count of every single 0le of every type downloaded from the web server, including style sheets, embedded function code, images and whatnot. A single web page can produce ten or more hits each time it is accessed; consequently, hit counts are usually wildly in:ated numbers. A more accurate gauge of a website’s usage, apparently, is the number of pages accessed and, especially, the number of unique visitors (or distinct IP addresses) who viewed the site.

By this measure the launch of the OEN online has been a modest success. !e busiest months for the site were March, April, and May, when it was 0rst announced. Each of these months saw more than $$&& unique visitors and over (&&& pages viewed. Soon the feverish excitement of the 0ckle public cooled, however, and by the end of %&&' the site was receiving a small but steady amount of tra2c, averaging around '&& unique visitors a month (about $) a day, though for some reason Tuesdays and Wednesdays consistently have seen more tra2c than other days of the week) and '&&& pages viewed. !ese numbers suggest that people are returning to the site and navigating through a number of pages per visit—just what one would hope from an online journal. !e average visit to the site, however, is only six minutes long: while we would like to regard this as a tribute to the site’s e2cient design, we hope that readers of the print version of OEN are not so hasty.

Further analysis of these numbers suggests that the site is beginning to establish a place in the online community. More than (' of visitors to the site arrive there by typing the address directly into their browser or using a bookmark; about # come from links on other pages, and the rest via search engines such as Google. An encouraging trend is that, while in its early months most of the search-engine tra2c was the result of very broad and general queries (e.g., ”Anglo-Saxons”) or a search for a personal name (for obscure reasons, “Andy Orchard” was the most popular), the most common search phrases now are “Old English Newsletter,” “OEN online” and “Old English bibliography.” Nearly %& of visitors to the site bookmark it or add it to their “favorites” list. All these indicate that the site is becoming more widely known, and visitors are returning to it regularly; we hope we can conclude from all this data that our readers are 0nding it useful to have the OEN available online.

!e OEN Bibliography Database (http://www.oenewsletter.org/OENDB/) now has "'" registered users, and on average enrolls at least one new user every day during the academic year. !e occasional reports received from these users indicate that they are encountering few problems. Some have taken the time to note errors in entries and suggest improvements in the site’s design, for which we are grateful; all visitors to the site are encouraged to help us improve its accuracy and usefulness. * <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

CALL FOR PAPERS OLD ENGLISH DIVISION 2006 MLA ANNUAL MEETING Philadelphia, PA December %(–"&, %&&) !e Executive Committee of the Old English Division of the Modern Language Association invites papers for its %&&) program. !e committee has planned three sessions: $. Open Session: papers on any Old English topic are welcome. %. Beowulf: papers on any aspect of the poem are welcome ". Place and Space: papers are invited that apply the topic to secular or religious texts, to travel, to buildings or landscape, to bodies, etc.

DEADLINE: Papers or $-page abstracts must be received by $' March %&&) NOTE: All participants must be members of the MLA by $ April %&&) Additional information may be requested from the Program Chair:

Professor Marijane Osborn Department of English University Of California at Davis Davis, CA #')$)-+'+$ email: [email protected] phone: '"&-('%-%'(+ / fax: '"&-('%-'&$" (attn: Professor Osborn)

ISAS at Kalamazoo 2006 *-( May %&&)

!e International Society of Anglo-Saxonists will sponsor one session at the %&&) International Congress on Medi- eval Studies, Western Michigan University. More details, including the time and place of the session, will be available at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/. !e following session has been organized:

New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies (Presider: Elaine Treharne, University of Leicester)

$. Michael Reed, University of York: “Sculpture and Identity in Viking Age Norfolk: !e St. Vedast Cross.” %. Winfried Rudolf, University of Jena: “!e Changing Textual Identities in the Worcester MSS Hatton $$", $$* and Junius $%$ and the Anglo-Saxon Liturgy.” ". Elisa Mangine, Independent Scholar: “Se gyldena organ: !e Pipe Organ in Anglo-Saxon Literature.” 345678 "# 94. $ '

2006 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers: “Holy Men and Holy Women of Anglo-Saxon England” " July–$$ August %&&)

!e Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research will sponsor an NEH Summer Seminar on “Holy Men and Holy Women of Anglo-Saxon England,” to be held July " through August $$, %&&). Based at Cambridge University in association with Corpus Christi College (Parker Library) and !e Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, the seminar will consider the special issues, problems, and methodologies that have arisen in the resurgent interest in the study of Anglo-Saxon hagiography, arguably one of the major parts of the largest corpus of prose literature in the early Middle Ages. A thematic approach will consider translation, the adjustments of a Mediterranean belief system for a Northern European audience, the idea of the hero, the anonymous text and the author, the development of vernacular prose as a medium, gender issues, etc. !ere will be consideration of Latin backgrounds and manuscript foundations. Bede, Ælfric, and Asser will be among the named authors under discussion. Site visits chosen to re:ect the interests of the seminar participants will be a part of the elective schedule.

!e facilities and the supportive environment of the Cambridge University community in general, the facilities and resources of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and those of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College will assist participants in their professional goals. Christopher de Hamel, Rosalind Love, and Teresa Webber will be guest faculty. Invited scholars will o/er special lectures to correspond with the interests of participants.

!e seminar aims to attract teachers and independent scholars from diverse 0elds who wish to deepen and extend their knowledge of a remarkable body of literature and its context. For information and applications, please contact Paul E. Szarmach, Director, %&&) NEH Summer Seminar, !e Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, $#&" W. Michigan Ave. Kalamazoo, MI *#&&+-'*"% (e-mail [email protected]). Full information, including application information and a PDF cover sheet, is available online at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/ rawl/neh%&&). Applicants should 0ll out the application cover sheet, download it, and send it in with the other required materials. Participants will receive a stipend of ,*%&&. !e deadline for applications is March $, %&&).

Summer Seminar on Palaeography and Codicology, University of New Mexico "–%+ July %&&)

Timothy C. Graham will o/er a summer seminar on “Paleography and Codicology,” at the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of New Mexico, July "–%+, %&&). Providing a comprehensive orientation to medieval manuscript studies, the course is targeted at graduate students who do not have the opportunity to receive paleographical training at their own institutions and will also be of interest to junior faculty who wish to improve their background in this 0eld. Participants will learn to recognize and read a broad range of medieval scripts and will receive a detailed introduction to the entire process of manuscript production, from the preparation of parchment and paper through the stages of writing, decorating, correcting and glossing the text to the binding and storage of the completed codex. Medieval conventions of punctuation and abbreviation will receive special attention, as will speci0c genres of manuscripts, including books of hours, maps, calendars, and rolls and scrolls. Participants will also learn how to interpret the types of evidence that can help to establish a manuscript’s origin and provenance and will receive a grounding in the conventions of manuscript cataloguing. A basic knowledge of Latin is essential. To apply, send a letter of intent, a curriculum vitae, and one letter of recommendation from a faculty member familiar with your work to Timothy C. Graham, Director, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of New Mexico, %&*' Mesa Vista Hall, Albuquerque, NM +($"$, or via fax ('&'-%((-$$+") or email ([email protected]). !e Medieval Academy of ) <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

America’s Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) will provide two scholarships covering tuition to graduate students who are members of the Medieval Academy; those wishing to apply for the CARA awards should note this in the letter of intent. !e deadline for applications is April $', %&&). For further information, please contact Professor Graham at the address above, or visit http:// www.unm.edu/~medinst.

Medieval Academy of America 2006, Boston "& March %&&)

!e Medieval Academy of America’s annual meeting in Boston will be co-hosted by Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University, Tu1s University, and Wellesley College. !e conference hotel is the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, MA. A number of papers will be of interest to Anglo-Saxonists; particularly notable is the plenary lecture by Michelle Brown of the British Library, entitled “Logos: the book and the transformation of early medieval society,” to be given on !ursday, March "&, at $:"& p.m. Further information on the meeting and the Medieval Academy can be found online at http://www.medievalacademy.org/.

International Conference: “Form and content of instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the light of contemporary manuscript evidence” )–+ April %&&)

An international conference will be held in April at the Università degli studi de Udine, Italy, on the topic of educational texts, in particular those contained in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts dated between the eighth and twel1h centuries. A distinguished international panel of speakers includes Anne Van Arsdall (University of New Mexico), Luisa Bezzo (University of Udine), Filippa Alcamesi (University of Palermo), Rolf Bremmer (Leiden Universiteit), Sandor Chardonnens (Radboud Universiteit Nijme- gen), Maria Caterina De Bonis (University “La Sapienza”, Rome), Claudia Di Sciacca (University of Turin), Maria D’Aronco (University of Udine), Michael Drout (Wheaton College), Concetta Giliberto (University of Palermo), Joyce Hill (University of Leeds), Loredana Lazzari (LUMSA, Rome), Patriz- ia Lendinara (University of Palermo), Carmela Rizzo (University of Palermo), Alexander R. Rumble (University of Manchester), Hans Sauer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München), and Loredana Teresi (University of Palermo). Papers will be delivered in English.

!e Conference is part of a larger research project, “Form and content of instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the light of contemporary manuscript evidence,” which aims to identify didactic texts in use in Anglo-Saxon England. A survey of manuscripts and their contents is being compiled for entry into a database; the preliminary results of the research project will be presented at the Conference. For more information on the project, see http://www.leornungcrae1.com. For information on the conference, contact Professor Maria Amalia D’Aronco, Dip. di Lingue e Letterature Germaniche e Romanze, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università di Udine, Via Mantica " – ""$&& Udine, Italy (email [email protected]); Professor Loredana Lazzari, Facoltà di Lettere e Filoso0a—Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), Via della Traspontina %$ - &&$#" Roma, Italy (email Loredana.lazzari@ lumsa.it); or Professor Patrizia Lendinara, Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione—Università di Palermo, Edi0cio $', Viale delle Scienze – #&$%+ Palermo, Sicily (email [email protected]). Information on the conference will also be available at http://www.leornungcrae1.com/conference. 345678 "# 94. $ (

Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Nottingham: Spring Events

!e Institute for Medieval Studies (IMS) at the University of Nottingham hosts a number of seminars, lectures and conferences throughout the year. !e full program of activities can be found online at http://www.nottingham. ac.uk/medieval/activities.htm, but the following seminars may be of special interest to Anglo-Saxonists:

Thursday, %& April %&&). Dr Richard Dance, St Catherine’s College, Cambridge: “Things that make you go -mn.”

Wednesday, $& May %&&). NOVIS Seminar: Lesley Abrams, Balliol College, Oxford: “Pagans and Chris- tians: Conversion in the Viking Age.”

Events will begin at ':"& p.m in Room Trent A*), Department of English. All the seminars are public and everyone is welcome to attend. For further information please contact Dr. Sara M. Pons-Sanz, School of English Studies, Uni- versity of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG( %RD, UK, email [email protected].

Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, Spring Events

!e Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS) will host a number of events in the spring of %&&). A full calendar can be found online at http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/mancass/, but the following items are of particular note:

Thursday, $) February %&&), ):&& pm. Room A(, Humanities Building, Lime Grove. Dr Carole Biggam, University of Glasgow: “The Colour Purple in Anglo-Saxon England.”

Monday, ) March %&&), ):&& pm. Arts Theatre, Humanities Building, Lime Grove. The T. Northcote Toll- er Memorial Lecture—Professor Roy Liuzza, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “The Sense of Time in Anglo-Saxon England.” The lecture will be followed by a wine reception in the North Foyer. Dinner (advance bookings only) will be held in the Christie Bistro. Dinner reservations can be made through Dr. Alex Rumble ([email protected]) up to two weeks in advance.

Monday, ) March – Tuesday ( March %&&). MANCASS Second Postgraduate Conference: ”The Lives of Saints in Anglo-Saxon England.” The Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Mary Swan of the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, speaking on “What are Saints’ Lives for in Anglo-Saxon England?” The conference is an interdisciplinary conference for postgraduates interested in palaeography, history, literature, art, and cross-cultural connections. A registration form is available at http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/ mancass/conferences/; all inquiries should be directed to Abdullah Alger, Postgraduate Student, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, The University of Manchester, M$" #PL, UK, email abdullah.alger-%@post- grad.manchester.ac.uk.

Monday, " April – Wednesday ' April %&&). Easter Conference on “Royal Authority: Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England.” Among those presenting papers are Nicholas Brooks, Barbara English, Nick Higham, David Hill, Gareth Williams and Barbara Yorke. Registration forms are available at http://www. arts.manchester.ac.uk/mancass/conferences/; for further information please contact Brian Schneider at [email protected] by $" March %&&). + <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

Call for Papers: “The Performance of the Past: History and Histrionics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.” "$ March %&&)

!e !irty-Sixth Annual Medieval Workshop will be held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, %(–%+ October %&&), on the theme “!e Performance of the Past: History and Histrionics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.” According to the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, “Histriones are those who in female costume imi- tated the gestures of shameless women; they also acted out stories and historical events [historias et res gestas] by dancing. !ey were called histriones either because the genre comes from Histria, or because they expressed complicated plots [perplexas fabulas] in stories [historiis], as if [their name were] historiones” (XVIII, *+). Like Isidore, many in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages recognized some connection between history and performance. Because the present was understood in relation to the past, the new in terms of the old, memory—as recent scholarship has emphasized—was a crucial site of meaning-production. But the memorial production of meaning is always a mediated process. Given that present demands dictated a (re)staging of the past, how did the genres, set- tings, casts, and publics of remembrance (and forgetting) shape historical plot? We invite proposals that explore the relationships between history and performance, historiography and performativity, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Some 0nancial support may be available for graduate students. !e deadline for abstracts or papers is "$ March %&&); papers should not exceed %& minutes. Send an abstract (not more than '&& words) and short CV by email to the organizers, Courtney Booker (History) at [email protected] and Mark Vessey (English) at mvessey@ interchange.ubc.ca.

Call for Papers: The Twentieth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference $' May %&&)

!e Twentieth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference will be held at Barnard College, New York City, on December %, %&&), with the theme “War and Peace in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” !e organizers anticipate sessions in the 0elds of history, military history, and historiography; literature; art history and visual culture; women’s studies; theater; and cultural studies. !ey welcome abstracts related to the topic of war and peace from any discipline or methodology. Please submit abstracts by $' May %&&) to Laurie Postlewate, Conference Organizer, "&&# Broadway, New York, NY $&&%(, or via email to [email protected].

Call for Papers: The Tenth Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages "$ August %&&)

Papers are invited for !e Tenth Cardi/ Conference on the !eory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, entitled “Lost in Translation?”, to be held at the Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, $(–%% July %&&(. !e organizers welcome not only papers which address traditional aspects of the translation of texts with reference to any of the classical, Middle Eastern or vernacular languages of the medieval world, but also those which address the modern translation of medieval texts, and those that interpret the idea of translation more broadly, examining the translation of ideas, images, cultural perceptions, or objects of material culture. Papers should be given in English or in any of the national languages of Switzerland and should be thirty minutes long. Please send one-page abstracts and brief curricum vitae by "$ August %&&) to Christiania Whitehead, Department of English and Comp. Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV* (AL, UK, email [email protected], or Denis Renevey, 345678 "# 94. $ #

Chair in Medieval Literature, English Department, Faculty of Letters, University of Lausanne, BFSH %, CH-$&$' Lausanne, Switzerland, email [email protected]. Following previous practice, a book of selected papers in the peer-reviewed Medieval Translator series (Brepols) will be published following the conference.

Call for Papers: The Heroic Age 11: “Baghdad, Aachen, and Winchester: Early Medieval Reforms and Reformers” $ October %&&)

!e late eighth and ninth centuries saw cultural and intellectual revivals and renaissances that seemed to have pro- ceeded from East to West. All are related in some way to each other, but they are seldom examined in the same context. Harun al-Rachid, Charlemagne, and Alfred all sponsored reforms in their respective societies, were in contact in some way with one another (or in Alfred’s case, with Charlemagne’s grandson), and may have in:uenced one another. !e Heroic Age invites submissions exploring these three rulers, the cultural revivals that occurred under their reigns, the factors leading to those revivals, the long term results, and any possible interplay or in:uence. !is will be !e Heroic Age’s eleventh issue and is planned for January %&&(. Submissions will be received at any time, but no later than $ October %&&). For submission guidelines, see http://www.heroicage.org. Submissions should be sent to Larry Swain, [email protected].

Call for Papers: “The Anglo-Saxon Landscape” $ November %&&)

A multi-disciplinary, residential conference on “!e Anglo-Saxon Landscape” will be held under the auspices of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at the University of Manchester, April $$–$" %&&(. Papers will come from a variety of di/erent disciplines, including Archaeology, Art History, History, Palaeobotany and Historical Geography, and will explore the changing relationships between man and his environment in England from ca. '&&-$&)). Particular themes will include Rural settlement, Making a living o/ the land, Woodland, language and landscape, Towns and their hinterlands, Industry and the landscape, !e landscapes of ritual and worship, Bound- aries, Status and landscape. It is anticipated that the conference proceedings will be published. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please contact Nick Higham, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, M$" #PL, UK, phone &$)$ %(' "$$*, email [email protected]. Proposals (to arrive by $ November %&&)) should take the form of a working title plus summary of the contents ('&–$&& words). Papers will vary between %' and *& mins. Please take note that the number will be strictly limited, so early contact with the or- ganiser is advised.

Heckman Research Stipends at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library $' April %&&)

!e Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML) invites applications for its Heckman Research Stipends, awarded to graduate students or post-doctoral scholars (within three years of completing a terminal master’s or doctoral degree) for research at the Library. !e Committee grants awards every six months; deadlines are April $' for research conducted from July $–December "$, and and November $' for research conducted from January $–June "&. Up to $& stipends in amounts up to ,$,'&& are awarded yearly. !e stipends may be used to defray the cost of travel, room and board, micro0lm reproduction, photo-duplication and other expenses associated with research at HMML. Length of residency may range from two weeks to six months. !e program is speci0cally intended to help scholars who have not yet established themselves professionally and whose research cannot progress satisfactorily without con- sulting materials to be found in the collections of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. To apply, please submit a $& <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

letter of application, c.v., a one-page description of the proposed research project, including length of stay and an explanation of how HMML’s resources will enable you to advance your project, and a con0dential letter of recommendation from your advisor, thesis director, mentor, or, in the case of postdoctoral candidates, a colleague who is a good judge of your work. Please direct all inquiries and materials to !e Committee on Research, Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Box ("&&, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, MN ')"%$-("&&, email [email protected], fax ("%&) ")"-"%%%.

British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund Awards $' April %&&)

Many of the funding opportunities o/ered by the British Academy are restricted to residents of the United King- dom; one of the few that is not may be of special interest to Anglo-Saxonists. !e object of the Neil Ker Memorial Fund, established by the family and friends of Neil R Ker, FBA, is to promote the study of Western medieval manuscripts, in particular those of British interest. Applications are invited from scholars of any nationality engaged on original research intended for publication. Applicants should be of postdoctoral status or have comparable experience. Normally grants will only be given for monographs, secondary works, editions or studies of documents, texts or illustrations, that include substantial analysis of the physical characteristics of original manuscripts. Awards are o/ered to support any aspect of research, including travel and publication, up to a limit of G%&&&. Applications must be received by $' April %&&). Further details and application forms may be obtained from !e Secretary of the British Academy, $& Carlton house Terrace, London SW$Y 'AH, UK, or online at http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/ guide/nkmf.html.

Harvard University: Morton Bloomfield Visiting Scholar Program $' October %&&)

!e Morton W. Bloom0eld Fund at Harvard University, in conjunction with the Medieval Doctoral Conference of the Department of English, welcomes applications to the Bloom0eld Visiting Scholar Program. !e program is intended to assist scholars wishing to conduct research at Harvard over a two- to four-week period during the regular academic year, in any of the 0elds associated with Morton W. Bloom0eld: particularly Old and Middle English, the history of English, the history of Christian thought, and medieval Jewish studies. !e fund o/ers ,"&&& in travel and accommodation subsidy for one or more selected scholars; participants will give a presentation of their work at the Medieval Doctoral Conference and may also be asked to meet with graduate students or attend a student seminar as a temporary member of our community. Applications are open to anyone, but preference will be given to younger scholars whose projects may bene0t from access to Harvard’s resources. To apply, please send a brief curriculum vitae, with a one-page project proposal and the title of a possible talk, to Daniel Donoghue, Department of English, Harvard University, $% Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA &%$"+, USA, by October $'.

Brief Notices of Publications

Mechthild Gretsch, Ælfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England "*. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, %&&)). !e cult of saints was one of the most important aspects of life in the Middle Ages, and it o1en formed the nucleus of developing group identities in a town, a province or a country. !e literature of Anglo-Saxon England is unique among contemporary European literatures in that it features a vast amount of saints’ Lives in the vernacular. Of these Lives, Ælfric is the most important author; in this study, Gretsch analyzes Ælfric’s Lives of 0ve important saints (Gregory, Cuthbert, Benedict, Swithun and 345678 "# 94. $ $$

Æthelthryth) in the light of their cults in Anglo-Saxon England. !is gives the reader fascinating glimpses of Ælfric at work: he adapts the cults and rewrites the received Latin hagiography of these saints, with the result that each of their English Lives conveys a distinct message to the contemporary political elite and to the lay audience at large. "'& pages. ISBN: &-'%$-+''*$-$. ,#&.&& / G'&.&&.

Simon Keynes, Anglo-Saxon Charters: Archives and Single Sheets (Anglo-Saxon Charters Series. Oxford: Oxford UP for the British Academy, %&&') !is guide to the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters presents invaluable information in a form not previously available. A general introduction describes the di/erent ways in which charters were preserved, whether in their original form, or as copies in monastic cartularies, or as copies made by antiquar- ies from manuscripts now lost. !is is followed by a brief account of each of the archives from which Anglo-Saxon charters survive in any form, with a list of all the charters in question. Finally there is a record of all charters extant on single sheets of parchment, classi0ed according to date (or apparent date) of writing. (& pp. ISBN &-$#-(%)&+(- X. ,%%.'& / G#.#'.

S. E. Kelly, Charters of Malmesbury Abbey (Anglo-Saxon Charters Series. Oxford: Oxford UP for the British Acad- emy, %&&') Susan Kelly presents the 0rst scholarly edition of Malmesbury’s pre-Conquest charters. Malmesbury Abbey was one of the few English minsters which had a continuous existence from the seventh to the sixteenth century, and the Malmesbury archive is a particularly important witness to the history of Wessex and the West Saxon church in the pre-Viking period. More than half of the surviving charters purport to date from the seventh and eighth centuries, many of them directly associated with Malmesbury’s most celebrated abbot, Aldhelm. !e Malm- esbury archive poses a particularly di2cult editorial challenge, since the manuscripts are generally late and the abbey’s scribes were prone to forgery. Nevertheless, analysis of the charters has made it possible to build up a fairly coherent picture of Malmesbury’s development in the 0rst four centuries of its existence; this volume provides an important background to William of Malmesbury’s De gestis ponti)corum Anglorum, and includes signi0cant new material for the study of William’s use of historical documents. Kelly edits thirty-0ve charters and a small group of separate boundary surveys, with detailed commentaries on their historical and topographical importance, a lengthy introduction which presents a new synthesis of the history of the abbey, and an extensive bibliography. %#& pages, % black and white hal1ones, $ map. ISBN &-$#-(%)"$(-+. ,$&& / G'&.&&

Magnús Fjalldal, Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts (Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, %&&'). Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. !is new work by Magnús Fjalldal, Professor of English at the University of Iceland, Háskóli Íslands, is the 0rst to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography. Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter þættir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal 0nds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors from the early thirteenth century on- wards (although they were rather poorly informed about England before $&))) created a largely imaginary country where friendly, generous, although rather ine/ective kings living under constant threat welcomed the assistance of saga heroes to solve their problems. !e England of Icelandic medieval texts is more of a stage than a country, and chie:y functions to provide saga heroes with fame abroad. Since many of these texts are rarely examined outside of Iceland or in the English language, Fjalldal’s book is important for scholars of both medieval Norse culture and Anglo-Saxon England. %&& pages, cloth. ISBN &-+&%&-"+"(-#. ,)&.&& / G*&.&&.

Lucian Musset, !e Bayeux Tapestry, trans. Richard Rex (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, %&&'). !is new study by the late Lucien Musset, Emeritus Professor of the University of Caen, examines one of the most extraordinary artefacts to survive from the eleventh century. !e Bayeux Tapestry is an extremely fragile work of art; its unique pic- torial narrative of the events of $&)* to $&)) surrounding the contested accession to the English throne provides $% <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

an irreplaceable picture of eleventh-century life. Musset’s erudite and highly readable study presents the Tapestry frame by frame; every episode is illustrated in color and accompanied by a detailed commentary, which at the same time places the scene in the context of the Tapestry as a whole. %(% pages, #' color and $' b/w illus. ISBN: $-+*"+- "$)"-'. ,*#.#' / G%'.&&.

Andrew Wareham, Lords and Communities in Early Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, %&&'). !e period between the late tenth and late twel1h centuries saw many changes in the structure and composition of the European and English aristocracy. One of the most important is the growth in local power bases and patrimonies at the expense of wider property and kinship ties. Wareham, a Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, uses the organization of aristocracy in East Anglia as a case-study to explore the issue as a whole, considering the extent to which local families adopted national and European values, and investigating the role of local circumstances in the formulation of regional patterns and frameworks. !e book is interdisciplinary in approach, using anthropological, economic and prosopographical research to analyse themes such as marriage and kinship, social mobility, relations between secular and ecclesiastical lords, ethnic groups, and patterns of economic growth amongst social groupings; there is a particular focus too on how di/erent landscapes— fenland, upland, coastal and urban—a/ected the pattern of aristocratic experience. %&+ pages, ' line illus. ISBN: $- +*"+-"$''-*. ,#&.&& USD / G*'.&&.

Francesca Tinti, ed., Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, %&&'). !e tenth and eleventh centuries saw a number of very signi0cant developments in the history of the English Church, perhaps the most important being the proliferation of local churches, which were to form the basis of the modern parochial system. Using evidence from homilies, canon law, saints’ lives, and liturgical and penitential sources, the articles collected in this volume focus on the ways in which such developments were re:ected in pastoral care, considering what it consisted of at this time, how it was provided and by whom. Contents include Francesca Tinti, “Intro- duction”; Julia Barrow, “!e clergy in English dioceses c. #&&-c. $&))”; Francesca Tinti, “!e ‘costs’ of pastoral care: church dues in late Anglo-Saxon England”; Jonathan Wilcox, “Ælfric in Dorset and the landscape of pastoral care”; Helen Gittos, “Is there any evidence for the liturgy of parish churches in late Anglo-Saxon England? !e Red Book of Darley and the Status of Old English”; Sarah Hamilton, “Remedies for ‘great transgressions’: penance and excommunication in late Anglo-Saxon England”; Victoria !ompson, “!e pastoral contract in late Anglo-Saxon England: priest and parishoner in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellaneous *+%”; Dawn M. Hadley and Jo Buckberry, “Caring for the dead in late Anglo-Saxon England.” $)& pages, " b/w and ' line illus. ISBN: $-+*"+-"$')- %. ,#&.&& / G*'.&&.

Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multi-media Study, Edition and Archive (SEENET A.+. Medieval Acad- emy of America/D. S. Brewer, %&&'). Cædmon’s Hymn is a central poem in many crucial debates in Anglo-Saxon studies. It is allegedly the earliest attested Old English verse text, our best-documented example of ostensibly oral composition, and the only surviving poem for which a contemporary record exists of its putative reception. !e most textually complex poem in the corpus, the Hymn has long served as an important test case for textual scholars. !is book is an essential resource for students of the poem: it provides the 0rst comprehensive literary and historical re-examination of the poem in over thirty years and the 0rst complete textual study and edition in nearly seventy. !e book radically revises our understanding of the poem’s transmission and challenges assumptions about its place in Anglo-Saxon poetic history. It o/ers new critical texts and a textual archive with transcriptions and facsimiles of all medieval witnesses. !e edition is also a milestone in the integration of digital and print scholarship. A print volume, designed for ready reference, contains the complete introductory study and essential versions of the critical and diplomatic texts; the accompanying CD-ROM, intended for closer research, supplements the text of the print volume with color digital facsimiles and interactive tools only possible in the electronic medium. %++ pages, + line illus., + CD-ROM. ISBN: $-+*"+-*&**-+. ,#&.&& / G'&.&&. 345678 "# 94. $ $"

John Walmsley, ed., Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell (Oxford: Blackwell, %&&)). Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell contains a series of essays written by prominent international scholars in the 0eld of Anglo-Saxon studies in honor of one of their most eminent and in:uential colleagues. Contents include Fred C. Robinson, “Bruce Mitchell”; John Walmsley, “Introduction”; Alfred Bammesberger, “Eight notes on the Beowulf text”; Daniel Donoghue, “A point well-taken: Manuscript punctuation and Old English poems”; Roberta Frank, “!e incomparable wryness of Old English poetry”; Antonette diPaolo Healey, “Straining words and striving voices: Polysemy and ambiguity and the importance of context in the disclosure of meaning”; Risto Hiltunen, “‘Eala, geferan and gode wyrhtan’: On interjections in Old English”; Susan Irvine, “Speaking one’s mind in !e Wanderer”; Tadao Kubouchi, “Wulfstan’s Scandinavian loanword usage: An aspect of the linguistic situation in the late Old English Danelaw”; Michael Lapidge, “An aspect of Old English poetic diction: !e postpositioning of prepositions”; Bernard J. Muir, “Issues for editors of Anglo-Saxon poetry in manuscript form”; Hiroshi Ogawa, “Language and style in two anonymous Old English Easter homilies”; Matti Rissanen, “Latin in:uence on an Old English idiom: ‘to wit’”; Fred C. Robinson, “Germanic *uargaz (OE wearh) and the Finnish evidence”; John Walmsley, “How the leopard got its spots: English grammatical categories, Latin terms”; “A Bibliography of Writings by Bruce Mitchell, $#')-%&&*.” "%& pages, ill. ISBN: $-*&'-$$*+"-'. ,)#.#' / G'&.&&.

Simon Keynes and Alfred P. Smyth, eds., Anglo-Saxons: studies presented to Cyril Roy Hart (Dublin: Four Courts Press, %&&)). Anglo-Saxon studies generate their fair share of healthy argument and controversy; this volume presents the latest thinking of a group of remarkably learned scholars from every area of the discipline, who have come together to honor Cyril Roy Hart. Contents include Richard Gameson and Fiona Gameson, “From Augustine to Parker: the changing face of the 0rst archbishop of Canterbury”; Janet Bately, “!e language of Ohthere’s report to King Alfred: some problems and some puzzles for historians and linguists”; Paul E. Szarmach, “!e ‘poetic turn of mind’ of the translator of the OE Bede”; Janet L. Nelson, “!e queen in ninth-century Wessex”; Harold Fox, “Fragmented manors and the customs of the Anglo-Saxons”; Susan Kelly, “Lyminge minster and its early charters”; Emma Mason, “Wulfstan of Worcester: patriarch of the English?”; Audrey L. Meaney, “Old English legal and penitential penalties for ‘heathenism’”; D. M. Metcalf, “Monetary circulation in the Danelaw, #("-$&+"”; Susan Oost- huizen, “Sokemen and freemen: tenure, status and landscape conservatism in eleventh-century Cambridgeshire”; Pauline Sta/ord, “Chronicle D, $&)( and women: gendering conquest in eleventh-century England”; Peter Sawyer, “English in:uence on the development of the Norwegian kingdom”; Debby Banham, “A millennium in medicine?: new medical texts and ideas in England in the eleventh century”; Gale R. Owen-Crocker, “Reading the Bayeux tapestry through Canterbury eyes”; Susan Edgington, “!e entrepreneurial activities of Herbert Losinga, abbot of Ramsey ($&+(-#$) and 0rst bishop of Norwich”; Ann Williams, “Meet the antecessores: lords and land in eleventh- century Su/olk”; David Cozens, “!e demise of Ramsey Abbey”; “Cyril Hart: a bibliography.” "'% pages. ISBN: $- +'$+%-#"%-). ,+' / G'' / I('.

Heather Pulliam, Word and Image in the Book of Kells (Dublin: Four Courts Press, %&&)). !e Book of Kells contains almost %&&& decorated initials, the majority of which are formed by human 0gures, beasts, birds and 0sh. As early as $#(*, Françoise Henry commented that perhaps the decorated initials related “to the text, as music does to words of a song.” Word and image in the Book of Kells o/ers an in-depth examination of the smaller decorated initials, script layout, and marginalia. !e display script and full-page images are reconsidered within the context of the manuscript’s minor decoration, suggesting that much of the manuscript’s decoration is self-referential and ar- ticulates the manner in which the gospel text functioned as an instrument of salvation. %"% pages, ill. ISBN: $-+'$+%- #'%-". ,'' / G'& / I''.

Susan E. Wilson, !e Life and A*er-Life of St John of Beverley: !e Evolution of the Cult of an Anglo-Saxon Saint (Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West. Aldershot: Ashgate, %&&)). !is represents the 0rst study devoted to the life and a1er-life of St John of Beverley, bishop of Hexham and York, buried in his own monastery at Beverley $* <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

in (%$. His cult was quickly established and spread to attract pilgrims from all over the British Isles and Europe. It was also established in Brittany by the tenth century, especially in the town of Saint-Jean-Brévelay, which is named a1er him. !e great economic wealth of Beverley in the Middle Ages was largely due to its status as a major ecclesiastical centre focused around the saint’s relics. His reputation as a powerful saint was harnessed not only to protect Beverley and the surrounding areas and to give succour to pilgrims to his shrine, but also to further the ambitions of successive kings of England, to the extent that Henry V raised him to the status of a patron saint of England following the battle of Agincourt. Hagiographic works on the saint extend from that written by Bede c. ("$, to the Vita Sancti Johannis composed by the monk Folcard c. $&)), to four separate collections of post-mortem miracle stories of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and a number of miracles recorded in the fourteenth and 01eenth centuries. Susan Wilson (University of Southampton) uses these sources to examine the ways in which an Anglo-Saxon saint was promoted over a long period of time by di/erent hagiographers, and how the saint was continually re-created in the image which the hagiographers or his community required, depending on their current needs and perceptions. !e volume also includes the 0rst English translations of the Vita and the miracle stories. %)& pages, maps. ISBN: &-('*)-'"%)-#. ,##.#' / G'&.&&.

Jerome Bertram, ed. and trans., !e Chrodegang Rules: !e Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. (Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West. Aldershot: Ashgate, %&&'). !e earliest surviving set of comprehensive rules for canons are those written in the mid-eighth century by Chrodegang (c. ($%-())), Bishop of Metz. Writing initially for secular clergy at Metz Cathedral, this work shows how Chrodegang’s rule borrowed much from the Benedictine tradition, dealing with many of the same concerns such as the housing, feeding and disciplining of members of the community and the daily routine of the divine o2ces. Although his work was soon superseded by the Rule of Aachen, Chrodegang’s Rule had considerable in:uence. Bertram provides Latin texts and English translations of the three surviving versions of Chrodegang’s rule (Regula Originalis Chrode- gangi, Institutio Canonicorum, Regula Longior Canonicorum); substantial introductions to each text provide historical context and bibliographic details. "&* pages, $ b/w illus. ISBN: &-('*)-'%'$-". ,##.#'/G''.&&.

Bruce Holsinger, !e Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of !eory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, %&&'). !is is not a book about Anglo-Saxon England, but it is an important work that deserves close and careful attention from anyone interested in the state of Medieval Studies, the history of the discipline, and the sometimes-troubled interplay between our 0eld and contemporary literary theory. !e Premodern Condition iden- ti0es and explains a surprising a2nity for medievalism and medieval studies among the leading 0gures of critical theory. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, literary-critical, and sociological works produced within the French nouvelle critique of the $#)&s, Holsinger argues for reconceiving these discourses, in part, as a brilliant amalgamation of medievalisms. Holsinger shows that the preoccupation with medieval cultures and practices among Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, and their cohorts was so wide-ranging that it merits recogni- tion as one of the most signi0cant epiphenomena of postwar French thought. Not simply an object of nostalgic longing or an occasional source of literary exempla, the medieval epoch was continually mined by these think- ers for speci0c philosophical vocabularies, social formations, and systems of thought. !e Premodern Condition also contains original essays by Georges Bataille (“Medieval French Literature, Chivalric Morals, and Passion”) and Pierre Bourdieu (“Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism”) translated for the 0rst time into English; these testify to the strange persistence of medievalisms in French postwar avant-garde writings. Elegantly written and persuasively argued, Holsinger’s work will surprise and enlighten both medievalists and modernists alike. %(% pages. ISBN: &-%%)-"*#(%-$ (hb), &-%%)-"*#(*-+ (paper). ,)&.&& / G"+.&& (hb), ,%*.&& / G$'.'& (paper). 345678 "# 94. $ $'

ISAS 2005: Munich

Professor Hans Sauer and the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Munich hosted the Twel1h Biennial Meeting of the International Soci- ety of Anglo-Saxonists at the Amerikahaus in Munich. Some sixty-one speakers presented their work in twenty-six sessions, including several project reports and three plenary speakers. Many of the papers dealt with the conference theme of “England and the Continent,” as did the keynote lectures, Helmut Gneuss on “Anglo-Saxon Studies: Past, present and Future,” Joyce Hill on “An Anglo-Saxon and the Continent: !e Elevation of Bede’s Authority” and John Hines on “No Place Like Home? !e Social Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England in a Continental Perspective.” Reports were given on the following projects: !e Production and Use of English Manuscripts +,-,-+.., (Elaine Treharne, Mary Swan and Orietta Da Rold), An Inventory of Script Categories and Spellings in Eleventh-Century English (Donald G. Scragg and Kath- ryn Powell), Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Micro)che Facsimile (A.N. Doane), Anglo- Saxon England ca. /0,-0.,: !e Chronological Basis (John Hines), !e Alfredian Boethius (Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine), !e Face of the Text: !e Dictionary of Old English (Antonette diPaolo Healey), !e Visionary Cross (Catherine Karkov, Martin Foys, Daniel O’Donnell), Bodleian Digital Texts Series (Bernard Muir). A mid-week excursion to Regensburg a/orded those attending a welcome break from an intense and fast-paced program of sessions. Receptions were hosted by Professor Sauer at the Augustiner in the city centre, and by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek at the opening of the Manuscript Exhibition Angelsächsisches Erbe in München / Anglo- Saxon Heritage in Munich. !e conference dinner was a splendid a/air held at the Vinorant, Alter Hof ", in downtown Munich. Professor Sauer and his fellow-organizers were duly honored, and a newly discovered cache of Anglo-Saxon manuscript fragments bearing inscriptions to the outgoing ISAS o2cers were presented to those in attendance.

The Advisory Board met several times to select new officers, implement the new election procedures for the Advisory Board elections, and consider the business of the society. Nicholas Brooks, Joyce Hill, Kevin Kiernan, and Joseph B. Trahern, Jr. were accorded honorary memberships. Mary Swan was elected to a four-year term as Sec- ond Vice-President, replacing Elaine Treharne in that office. Following the guidelines of the ISAS Constitution, the membership had been solicited prior to the conference for nominations to the Advisory Board. The Board then produced six further nominations, two for each soon-to-be vacant seat. The ballot was subsequently distributed by mail and e-mail to all members of the society. Effective January $, %&&), the officers of ISAS are:

President: Jane Roberts, University of London First Vice-President: William Schipper, Memorial University Second Vice-President: Mary Swan, University of Leeds Executive Director: David F. Johnson, Florida State University

Advisory Board:

Mary Blockley, University of Texas at Austin Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr., University of Leiden !omas N. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago John Hines, Cardi/ University $) <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

Susan Irvine, University College, London Éamonn Ó Carragain, National University of Ireland Jo Story, University of Leicester Leslie Webster, !e British Museum Barbara Yorke, King Alfred’s College Malcolm Godden, University of Oxford, Ed. Anglo-Saxon England Antonette diPaolo Healey, University of Toronto, Ed. Dictionary of Old English Roy Liuzza, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Ed. Old English Newsletter

Advisory Board members whose terms ended December "$, %&&) are Nicholas Howe and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka.

ISAS 

!e %&&( ISAS meeting will be held at the University of London, "& July–* August, hosted by the School of Ad- vanced Studies, !e conference theme is “Anglo-Saxon Traces: Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð.” In London there are many reminders of Anglo-Saxon England, in our streets, libraries, and museums. !e conference will center on remembering and celebrating England’s Anglo-Saxon past. Above all we aim to focus on the Anglo-Saxon understanding of the physical environment as re:ected in its settlements, buildings and artefacts, its books and manuscripts, luxury and everyday objects. We are proposing strands which will address wealth and status; sense of place; buildings (their uses and their relationship to the material remains of the pre-Anglo-Saxon past); rural and urban settlement, and trade; writing and manuscripts; liturgy and worship. With these themes in mind, we look for a fully interdisciplinary conference with a strong evidential focus, and we particularly hope for contributions with this approach from literary and linguistic specialists, historians, art historians, numismatists, archaeologists, and liturgists, seeking to examine common (and not so common) ground.

Call for papers

!e deadline is !" October #$$%, with late submissions accepted until "$ October. Abstracts ('&& words in length), should be submitted electronically at http://link.library.utoronto.ca/isas/conference/. (Please contact Jane Roberts at [email protected] if electronic submission poses a problem.) You must be a member to submit an abstract; for details on how to become a member, see the following page.

ISAS 

One bid to organize the Biennial Conference in %&&# was presented to the Board in Munich, and the venue for the %&&# conference will be Memorial University, Newfoundland. !e theme for the conference will be, provisionally, “Navigating New Worlds: Anglo-Saxon England and the Atlantic.” For preliminary information, contact Professor William Schipper, Department of English, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, A$E $K$, e-mail [email protected].

Publications and Awards

!e Advisory Board established procedures for the publication of themed volumes arising substantially from ISAS conferences. !e 0rst, edited by Matti Kilpio, will be based on the %&&$ conference at the University of Helsinki; the second, to be edited by Nicholas Howe and Catherine Karkov, will be based on the %&&" conference at Arizona State University. !e third, to be edited by Hans Sauer and Joanna Story will be based on the %&&' conference at the Uni- versity of Munich. !e ISAS Executive Committee will oversee and monitor the production of the volumes. 345678 "# 94. $ $(

Jonathan Wilcox, Chair of the Publications Prize Committee, reported on the Advisory Board’s recommendation for the publication prizes, %&&"-%&&'. !e prizes were awarded at the General Meeting:

$. The prize for best article was won by Stacy Klein for “Reading Queenship in Cynewulf’s Elene,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies "".$ (Winter %&&"): )(-+#. %. The prize for best first book was shared by Andrew P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (University of Michigan Press, %&&*) and Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 0/,-20, (Ashgate, %&&"). ". The prize for best scholarly edition was shared by Rosalind Love, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely (Oxford University Press, %&&*) and Martin K. Foys, The Bayeux Tapestry: Digi- tal Edition (Scholarly Digital Editions, %&&").

Members can submit publications for %&&'-%&&(, in any language, for consideration to the Executive Director. Elaine Treharne will chair the Publications Prize Committee for %&&(.

ISAS dues are ,'& or G"& sterling for a two-year membership (,"' or G%& sterling for students and retired members); to join ISAS, send dues to the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, along with professional name, title, e-mail, and correct address (no more than six lines) to:

Professor David F. Johnson Executive Director, ISAS Dept. of English Florida State University Tallahassee, FL "%"&) USA e-mail [email protected]

For further details about the Society, visit the ISAS website at http://www.ISAS.us.

Except where noted, photos on the following pages appear courtesy of Chad Olm Photography, Glasgow, Scotland (http:// www.chadolmphoto.com). $+ <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

Clockwise from Right: Andy Orchard responding to a question; Hans Sauer, president of ISAS and host of the .,,/ conference; Fred C. and Helen Robinson dining al fresco; Sarah Higley enjoying a balanced dinner (photo courtesy of Sarah Higley). 345678 "# 94. $ $#

Clockwise from Le!: Elizabeth Tyler (photo by Roy Liuzza); Helmut Gneuss (photo courtesy of Sarah Hig- ley); Carole Biggam, Debbie Banham, and John Hines; David Johnson and Helene Scheck.

Overleaf: Group Photo, ISAS .,,/, Munich (photo courtesy of ISAS). %& <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F 345678 "# 94. $ %$

Dictionary of Old English: 2005 Progress Report Robarts Library, Room $*%+', University of Toronto $"& St. George St. Toronto, ON M'S "H$ Phone: *$)-#(+-+++" Fax: *$)-#(+-++"' http://www.doe.utoronto.ca

In both the editorial and technological aspects of the was designed by one of our editors, Dorothy Haines, with project, %&&' has been a year of signi0cant productiv- technical production by our systems analyst, Xin Xiang. ity. In February, the project issued a new release of the We are immensely grateful to our English colleagues, Les- Dictionary of Old English Corpus, distributed for us lie Webster and Michelle Brown, who were invaluable in on the Web by the University of Michigan Press. !is helping us obtain the images of artifacts from the British release incorporates the most recent scholarly editions Museum and manuscript pages from the British Library of the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In reproduced on the CD-ROM. preparation for the publication in %&&) of G (now near completion), we began to develop DOEonline, the Web- Technological Advances based Dictionary, a step which parallels our distribution Funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for of the Corpus on the Web. Development of this new tool the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) has allowed has advanced to such a degree that Web access will not us to progress with the development of DOEonline, a tool have to wait for the publication of H, as we initially pro- which will allow more sophisticated searches within a 0eld jected. G will, therefore, be published in three formats: and Boolean searches across 0elds within an entry. For ex- on the Web, on CD-ROM, and (eventually) on micro- ample, DOEonline will allow users to discover all words of 0che. Meanwhile, the dra1ing of entries for H, I/Y and L single occurrence which appear in texts of the twel1h cen- is progressing well. tury and later, or explore the notion of repentance in the texts of Wulfstan or the notion of guilt in the laws. !ese Without question, one of the highlights of the year was are just a few of the productive searches that DOEonline a talk given in May at the Smithsonian by Antonette will enable. Another advance of the past year is the hot- diPaolo Healey as part of the “Great Schools Forum” to linking of the Latin short titles to their bibliographic refer- which the University of Toronto was invited. Her talk ences, a feature parallel to the hotlinking of the Old Eng- was mainly a discussion of four F-words (‘fear’, ‘friend’, lish short titles to their references already in place. A long- ‘freedom’ and ‘0nger’). Despite other competing talks term goal of the project has been the linking of the DOE to that evening, the lecture on Old English words sold out, the Oxford English Dictionary. We are at present in the ear- suggesting how deeply engaged the general public is ly stages of developing this link and expect it will be avail- with questions about the origins of their own language. able for the publication of G on the Web. A preview of this We were especially pleased that four representatives of link is functional at our “Word of the Week” feature on the the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of DOE website. We continue, as always, with our strategy to our granting agencies, attended the talk. In connection preserve and maintain our data and to ensure that our 0les with this event we produced a mini-CD-ROM, A Gate- adhere to the latest standards. We urge users of the DOE: A way to Old English (for distribution at the Smithson- to F on CD-ROM to contact us and suggest improvements ian only), publicizing the research of the project to the for the future. Please send comments to [email protected] broader public. It o/ers a selection of subject areas such ronto.ca. as a basic narrative of the Anglo-Saxon period, medical texts, an audio reading by Andy Orchard from Beowulf, Grants and Gifts and an Old English riddle to be solved. A separate sec- !is year, as ever, we have searched for funds to ensure tion explains some of the aspects of the work of the DOE, the completion of the Dictionary. We are happy to report including a sample entry of the noun gamen. !e CD that, in the course of the year, we were awarded a 0ve-year %% <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F grant (with matching requirement) by the Social Sciences Simon Keynes: University of Cambridge and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our on-site Andy Orchard: University of Toronto assessors included Murray McGillivray (Chair, University Fred C. Robinson: Yale University of Calgary), Mary Blockley (University of Texas at Aus- Eric Stanley: Pembroke College, Oxford tin), Stephen Harris (UMass at Amherst) as well as repre- RESEARCH ASSISTANTS: Emira Bouhafna, Rob Getz, sentatives from SSHRC. We also received a most welcome Rachel Kessler, Patrick McBrine, Connell Monette, one-year grant from the British Academy. Gi1s from the Hilary Wynne International Society of Anglo-Saxonists and from col- STUDENT ASSISTANTS: Lauren Greenwood, Ma’ayan leagues and friends, including an anonymous gi1 of "$( Ana0 (Mentorship Student), Andrew Campara shares of BCE Inc. have been invaluable to us in support- (Mentorship Student) ing our research. Finally, we were delighted and honoured EDITOR, Toronto Old English Series: Andy Orchard when Bruce Mitchell (University of Oxford) o/ered to do- EDITOR, Publications of the Dictionary of Old English: nate to the project his unparalleled collection of books, pa- Andy Orchard pers and research materials on Old English syntax. !is resource will greatly enhance our library, and will, of course, Funding be accessible to the scholars and students from around the world who make use of our collection for their research. A • !e Social Sciences and Humanities Research Coun- list of gi1s to the project in the past year is appended. cil of Canada (formerly the Canada Council): Grants in Aid of Research, $#(&, $#($, $#(%, $#(", $#(*, $#('; Dissemination and Outreach Major Editorial Grants, $#() +$, $#+$-+), $#+)-#$, $##$- Our sta/ continues to represent the project at conferenc- #); Grants from the Federal Matching Funds Policy, es and talks. In May, Antonette diPaolo Healey attended $#++, $#+#, $##&, $##$; Special Presidential Grant, $##"; the *&th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Consortium Support Programme $##)-#+, $##+ %&&&, Western Michigan University. She also attended the an- %&&&-%&&", %&&"-%&&', %&&'- nual board meeting of the Richard Rawlinson Center for • !e British Academy Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research. In August, • Canada Foundation for Innovation (for TAPoR [Text she and Dorothy Haines gave talks at the biennial meet- Analysis Portal for Research]), %&&%- ing of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Mu- • Connaught Fund, University of Toronto, $#+) $##$ nich. In September, Antonette diPaolo Healey spoke about • Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, $##+-##, $###- the project to the Toronto Heliconian Club, the oldest pro- %&&&, %&&&-%&&$, %&&%-%&&", %&&*-%&&' fessional club for women in the city. In December, she at- • Early English Text Society tended the meeting of the MLA in Washington, where she • Marc Fitch Fund gave a report on the project to the Old English Executive • Foundation for Education and Social Development, committee. Boston Joan Holland • Jackman Foundation • Macdonald-Stewart Foundation Staﬀ • McLean Foundation, $##%, $##', $##+, %&&& • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $#+'-#&, $##* ##, EDITOR: Antonette diPaolo Healey %&&&-%&&' REVISING EDITOR: Joan Holland • National Endowment for the Humanities, Research DRAFTING EDITORS: Dorothy Haines, David McDou- Tools Program, $##$-#", $##"-#', $##'-#+, $##+-%&&&, gall, Ian McDougall %&&&-%&&%, %&&%-%&&*, %&&*- EDITORIAL STAFF: Catherine Monahan Picone, Xin • Presidents’ Committee, University of Toronto Xiang (Systems Analyst), Elaine Quanz • Salamander Foundation, $##+-%&&$, %&&$-%&&*, %&&*- INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE: • Salus Mundi Foundation, %&&%, %&&* Roberta Frank: Yale University • University of Toronto Helmut Gneuss: University of Munich • Xerox Corporation University Grants Committee 345678 "# 94. $ %"

Friends of the Dictionary of Old English

We wish to acknowledge the very generous contributions the project has received during the past year. Donors who supported our research in honour of or in memory of individuals are also noted separately at the end of the list. All of us on the project are grateful to each one of you. We were delighted to receive an anonymous donation of "$( shares of BCE Inc. which came into the project in October. We would like to mention also the generous donation of ,$,$&" US from the International Society of An- glo-Saxonists. !e strong support of the most important scholarly organization in our 0eld has been invaluable to us. We are also very grateful to all those scholars who have kindly donated books to the DOE library, especially Bruce Mitchell who has given to the project his invaluable collection of books, pamphlets, and o/prints on Old English syntax. Such contributions of publications, both old and new, enable us to maintain our research collection. We hope to have included all who have so gen- erously supported our work, but must apologize to any of our donors inadvertently le1 o/ this list of acknowledgements. !is list encompasses gi1s given between December $', %&&* and December $', %&&'.

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What are Old English Metrical Studies For? Thomas A Bredehoft, University of Northern Colorado

I never expected to study Old English meter. Like most American Anglo-Saxonists whose training came in an Eng- lish department, I originally saw my work as being concerned primarily with interpretive literary questions (with a subordinate focus on manuscript issues thrown in, mostly to give me an excuse to visit libraries in Britain). But, as things turned out, I kept 0nding that there were certain questions—literary, interpretive questions—that I simply could not answer for myself without spending some time seriously considering issues of meter. To give one familiar example, I wanted to know if the emendation of Beowulf '"b to “Bēow Scyldinga” was metrically “necessary” or not, as it has o1en been described.K In the context of my own work, I wanted to know if all of the passages printed as verse in Plummer’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were truly verse or not.L Another question that might best be approached by metrical study is the relationship between the Ruthwell Cross verses and the Vercelli Book Dream of the Rood. Many similar questions of literary history, I think, demand at least some attention to developments in metrical form across the period. And while I don’t necessarily think that everyone should spend as much time studying Old English meter as I have, it seems worthwhile at least to try to articulate the value of metrical studies.

The most important thing to say about Old English metrical studies is that virtually everything we know about Old English meter is a conclusion drawn from an inductive process. That is, modern scholars have derived the rules of Old English meter by studying a body of evidence and making hypotheses about what “rules” might have generated that evidence. As is well known, Old English manuscripts almost never make meaningful visual distinctions between Old English poetry and prose, so we can only rarely depend upon Anglo-Saxon opinions about which genre a given text belonged to: most often we are forced to judge for ourselves, and virtually the only way to do so is through an understanding of the principles of Old English meter. But because our understanding of Old English meter results from an inductive analytical process, we must first identify examples of Old English verse in order to have a body of evidence from which to derive our inductive conclusions. Metrical studies, therefore, are troubling- ly hampered (or invigorated?) by a methodological circularity, one which ought to encourage us to accept received opinions with a grain of salt. Shifting the focus of the data (from Beowulf, say, to the Metrical Psalms) has the potential to alter radically the metrical rules (i.e., conclusions) that make up our descriptions of Old English verse.M

Of course, we can always refuse to judge for ourselves, which boils down to letting others judge for us: and that, of course, is the best reason for having at least a passing familiarity with some of the questions and methods of Old English metrical study. In the remainder of this essay, I will briefly discuss some of the central questions of metrical inquiry, as well as its methods and forms. If sometimes I allow my own metrical prejudices to shine through a bit too clearly, I hope readers will remember that I will be happiest if they judge for themselves, rather than relying only on my opinions.

What Old English meter is not

Old English metrical study takes the following issues as its primary arena of interest: which half-lines (verses) are allowed and which are disallowed, how half-lines are linked to one another, and how such half-lines correspond to linguistic structures (usually understood as patterns of stress). Discussions of meter generally do not concern themselves much with formulas, formulaic themes (e.g., the “beasts of battle”), or individual words. !us, to the degree that modern interpretive strategies focus on the latter sorts of topics, meter might seem to be of little value to literary readers.

A current trend in metrical studies, however, has begun to explore the relationship between meter and syntax (see, e.g., recent works by, among others, Dan Donoghue, Mary Blockley, Hal Momma, and Calvin Kendall), and %) <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

it seems to me that there is much of interest in such work.N To take just one example, Blockley’s work investigates (among other things) how (or if) we can tell the difference between a statement and a question. If metrical studies can help clarify such issues, then they have obvious relevance to literary interpretation.

In my opinion, though, literary interpreters have too rarely asked some of the key questions which must arise about the relationship between Old English meter and poetics. Metrical linking strategies such as double alliteration, cross alliteration, and rhyme (both internal rhyme and verse rhyme) have been far too poorly understood as metrical options for poets, and the possibility that these sorts of metrical options might have been used for poetic effects has only just begun to be explored.O But in the sense that metrical structures stand as the basic tools of Old English poetics, some knowledge of meter would seem to be of at least potential value for literary interpreters—un- less we understand the formulaic tradition and its conventional expressions as the masters of poets, rather than the other way around.

What does Old English meter measure?

Roman Jakobson quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins in suggesting that verse involves “wholly or partially repeating the same 0gure of sound.”P In the case of Old English, one aspect of such repetition surely lies in alliteration, but for a surprisingly long time, scholars had little if any inkling of what else made an Old English poem poetic. Early critics and editors were o1en able to identify lines of poetry when they published poetic works (thus giving later scholars a data set to work from), but unable to articulate the metrical basis that underlay those lines.Q Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the German scholar Eduard Sievers 0nally o/ered a descriptive account of Old English verse that generated enough consensus to be adopted by the community of Anglo-Saxon scholars at large.R In brief, Sievers suggested that the vast diversity of Old English verse types could be understood as deriving from 0ve basic types, each conceptualized as the juxtaposition of two metrical “feet,” made up of abstract patterns of stress. Marking stress (“/”), half-stress (“\”) and lack of stress (“x”)S allows the Sievers types to be brie:y summa- rized (I use “|” to indicate the boundary between metrical feet):KT

Such an analysis, of course, suggests that, along with alliteration, stress patterns are at the very heart of what is measured in Old English meter, and at least since the work of Sievers, most metricists have suspected that there is such an additional linguistic “measure” at work in Old English verse (although David Hoover argued in $#+' for the essential primacy of alliteration in Old English).KK Given the diversity of speci0c verse types in Old English, J. C. Pope’s idea that Old English meter measured out time itself in an “isochronous” verse style seemed intuitively useful: the poetry had a “rhythm” which, while variable, had a fairly regular “beat” that could be expressed by Pope’s musical notation.KL Perhaps because (in the absence of audio recordings) isochrony cannot be demonstrated, Pope’s work has been more in:uential for his revisions to Sievers’s views of types B, C, and D than for its commitment to isochrony. !omas Cable’s English Alliterative Tradition suggested that Old English is essentially a “syllable counting” meter, although one which clearly “counts” varying numbers of syllables from one verse to another; in this sense, Cable’s system di/ers relatively little from Sievers’s.KM Rick Russom’s word-foot formalism essentially identi- 0es the “counted” or “measured” entities as including exactly two “word stress contours” that combine according to a handful of pretty simple rules: in Russom’s system, a “typical verse” is two words juxtaposed, and atypical verses can be understood as allowed variations on this norm.KN Metrical linguists (or are they linguistic metricists?) have 345678 "# 94. $ %(

suggested that various aspects of meter make a count of “morae,” linguistic constituents at a level smaller than the syllable, but I am not enough of a linguistic metricist to be much more speci0c on this topic.

As this summary should make clear, there is still surprisingly little consensus about what is measured by Old English meter; but each of these preceding positions shapes the kinds of questions we ask about meter and the ways we answer them and, in that sense, all of these perspectives appear to be viable and contribute to our ever-evolving understanding.

Scansion

All descriptive metrical systems for classical Old English verse must account for the same verses, of course, and so they have a great deal in common, although the labels they place on speci0c verses may di/er from one another. Ultimately, though, scansion (the process of labeling speci0c verses according to one system or another) is nothing more than a detailed kind of mark-up system, and, as such, scansion lies at the heart of all metrical descriptions.

In brief, Old English meter (like most English meters) depends upon a general and widespread poetic principle of matching metrical stress to linguistic stress (think of iambic pentameter, in which the alternating metrical stresses are generally, but not exclusively, matched up with items of high and low linguistic stress).KO Here, it is sentence- level stress that is most operative: open class, lexical words (nouns, adjectives, verbs and many adverbs) have high linguistic stress, while closed-class, non-lexical words, prefixes, and particles generally have low linguistic stress.KP Our identification of basic metrical forms relies powerfully on this understanding, and only a couple of additional observations are needed to effectively scan (or mark up) OE verse. First, the last word of every verse is always stressed, regardless of its “natural” class, and the “unmarked” position for unstressed sentence elements (excluding proclitics, unstressed elements like prepositions, prefixes or articles that are attached to a particular word) is before the final stress of the first verse of the clause (when placed elsewhere, such elements usually become marked and stressed). Given these rules, we can scan a passage of verse (Beowulf (''-)$)KQ very straightforwardly (again using “/” “\” and “x” for primary stress, secondary stress, and unstress):KR

Hyge wæs him hinfūs, wolde on heolster flēon / x x x / \ / x x / x / sēcan dēofla gedræg; ne wæs his drohtoð þǣr / x / x / x x x / x / swylce hē on ealderdagum ǣr gemētte. x x x x / x \ x / x / x Gemunde þā se gōda mǣg Higelāces x / x x x / x / / x \ x ǣfensprǣce uplang āstōd / x \ x / \ x / ond him fæste wiðfēng; fingras burston; x x / x x / / x / x eoten wæs ūtweard, eorl furþur stōp. / x x / \ / / x /

All that remains is to match up this preliminary mark-up with your favorite verse-naming system, and the scansion is complete—but that, of course, is far from as simple as it might seem.

The first problem with moving from a mark-up like that given above to a final scansion is that such a mark-up yields a vast number of verse-types: only two of the fourteen verses given here, for example, exhibit identical stress patterns (('(b and ()&b), and even those two place the word-boundaries in different positions (and hence these verses are sometimes identified as belonging to different types). A scansion system that involves hundreds of specific verse types is of very little value for talking about trends or patterns or similarities among verses; what metricists do at this point is to attempt to determine (usually by employing some kind of statistical analysis) what sorts of specific types can be regarded as minor variations of a much smaller number of basic “umbrella” types. %+ <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

As noted above, the most familiar and widely taught metrical system, that of Eduard Sievers, limits the “umbrella types” to five: a great deal of the appeal of Sieversian scansion lies in its explicit promise to bring a remarkable amount of simplifying order to the troublesome diversity of specific types. Does this make Sieversian scansion “right,” however? Not necessarily. The “correctness” of a scansion system can never be proved, I suspect, although it can probably be disproved (for example, a system is “incorrect” if it systematically identifies verse types as “the same” when they clearly do not belong together, for one reason or another; in practice, though, even this criteri- on can be difficult to apply). But certain ways of grouping verses together and certain principles of scansion are so widely agreed-upon that we can take them as reliable givens.

The first is resolution, which allows us to treat a short stressed syllable and its immediate successor as counting the same in our scansion as a long stressed syllable alone.KS In the passage above, resolution results in the following changes:

(''a: Hyge wæs him hinfūs / x x / \ ('(a: swylce hē on ealderdagum x x x x / x \ ('+b: mǣg Higelāces / / \ x ()$a: eoten wæs ūtweard / x / \

!e evidence for resolution in classical Old English verse is fairly clear: in a large number of cases (such as the verse types given), long stressed syllables and sequences of “short-stressed plus unstressed” syllables appear in identical environments, essentially in free variation. In other cases, the only time three unstressed syllables appear together is when one follows a short stress, suggesting that the maximum number of unstressed syllables allowed is two, and the 0rst of the three counts as part of the stress (or “li1”).LT In short, most of the time, there is little or any bene0t to assuming that resolution does not apply, and a great deal of bene0t—considerable simpli0cation of the proposed rule system—to assuming it does (although in some circumstances resolution is blocked or disallowed).LK

Second, metricists regularly allow the parts of compounds to be counted as equivalent to separate elements with primary stress and, conversely, allow an element with primary stress to be “demoted” to metrical secondary stress. That is, in terms of scansion, it is often important that lingustically stressed words be matched with metrically stressed positions, but less important that the levels of stress match exactly. In the given passage, this leads to the following conventional scansions:

('#a: ǣfensprǣce / x / x ()$b: eorl furþur stōp / \ x /LL

Metrically, then, ('#a is considered to be the same type as ('(b and ()&b, and ()$b can be considered the same as ('#b.

Third, naturally unstressed elements can be promoted to full stress or naturally stressed elements can sometimes be treated as unstressed, although both processes are relatively rare—precisely for the reason that the meter seems to prefer a close match between linguistic stress and metrical stress. Too many mismatches would under- mine the viability of the meter; if the metrical patterns are not normally manifest by speech rhythms they would be unintelligible (remember that, unlike iambic pentameter, the listener cannot expect a single underlying metrical ‘beat’). In the passage in question, the double “d” alliteration in (')a, “secan deofla gedraeg,” has often suggested to metricists that the infinitive “secan” here must be treated as unstressed, because otherwise it ought to be expected to alliterate.LM 345678 "# 94. $ %#

Taking these three conventional agreements into account, we arrive at a scansion as follows:

Hyge wæs him hinfūs, wolde on heolster flēon / x x / \ / x x / x / sēcan dēofla gedræg; ne wæs his drohtoð þǣr x x / x / x x x / x / swylce hē on ealderdagum ær gemētte. x x x x / x / / x / x Gemunde þā se gōda mǣg Higelāces x / x x x / x / / \ x ǣfensprǣce uplang āstōd / x / x / \ x / ond him fæste wiðfēng; fingras burston; x x / x x / / x / x eoten wæs ūtweard, eorl furþur stōp. / x / \ / \ x /

As the preceding discussion suggests, these simpli0cations reveal additional similarities, but this still yields eleven di/erent metrical types in only fourteen verses. To simplify things beyond this level of scansion, however, we must adopt a particular scansion system.

Before doing so, it is worthwhile to address the implications of choosing a system. First, why should we move beyond this level? The answer to that question may seem subjective but I hope will be obvious: scanning at this level still leaves us with dozens, if not hundreds, of different allowed forms, and most metricists (and I am one of them) prefer to believe that the large numbers of specific observed forms are simply the “output” of a system that has a much smaller number of conceptually distinct forms. From the point of view of description, as well as for the purposes of interpretation and reconstruction, a smaller number of verse-types is more ‘elegant’ and efficient, and more likely to reflect the realities of composition (so far as these will ever be known). For example, we simplify the system greatly if we see the following verses as minor variations of one basic type, the former differing from the latter by a single additional “extrametrical” syllable:

(''a: Hyge wæs him hinfūs / x | (x) / \ ()$a: eoten wæs ūtweard / x | / \

In this notation, the vertical line has been added simply to point out that the verses both fall easily into two parts, and that, except for “him” in (''a, the verses are otherwise metrically identical in both the 0rst part and the second. !e similarities suggest that both verses can be said to belong to the same basic “type” of verse; they di/er only in a single unstressed syllable. !e major di/erences between scansion systems revolve almost entirely around how they treat such unstressed syllables (or more precisely, syllables that are generally perceived as unstressed). !is being so, choosing among competing scansion systems is a surprisingly di2cult task, as the choice requires attending to the very syllables that are frequently lumped together (o1en by metricists themselves) as an indistinguishable mass.LN

It is at this point in the analysis, then, that metricists tend to depart from one another, each generally preferring his or her own system for his or her own reasons and ends. Sievers-BlissLO analysis, for example, takes the two-part structure noted above, based on the location of stressed syllables, as its central feature, and suggests the following combinations of beginnings and ends, with optional numbers of syllables in various places:

Russom, echoing (in some ways) Pope’s analysis of measures (as well as Bliss’s “light” verses), replaces “/” with “S” and “\” with “s” to mark primary and secondary stress, giving:

Russom’s system, with its clari0cation of foot-boundaries in types B and C, has surprising consequences, the most important of which, perhaps, is the consequence for alliteration. Types A, D, and E, which have two S feet, are generally marked for double alliteration in the a-line, while the “weak-onset” types B and C (having only one S foot each) take double alliteration only optionally. Since alliteration is such a major feature of Old English meter, to my mind Russom’s system o/ers an explanation for something that Sievers’ system cannot clearly explain, and thus it seems worth serious consideration. If you believe that the purpose of scansion is merely to provide the simplest description of the data, the Sievers scansion may be for you. If you believe that a scansion system should provide insight into the poetic system itself, Russom’s system may be superior.

My own scansion system for classical verse modifies Russom’s system to deal more effectively with the problem of finite verbs, which sometimes alliterate at the beginning of verses and sometimes do not. Identifying Old English “finite verb feet” or “s-feet” as including the following, “s” “sx,” “xs” “xsx” “xxs” and “xxsx”, my system allows the following basic types (examples from Beowulf):

Type A (ends with Sx or Ss):

xA (e.g., xx|Sx) Sievers A" $$('a: Mē man sægde sA (e.g., sx|Sx Sievers A or A" #%)a: stōd on stapole SA (e.g., Sx|Sx) Sievers A $%+%a: Grendles mōdor

Type B (ends with Sxs or Sxxs)

xB (e.g., xx|Sxs) Sievers B $"'a: ac ymb āne niht sB (e.g., sx|Sxs) Sievers B or D* "'+a: ēode ellenrōf SB (e.g., S|Sxs) Sievers D* %$+a: flota fāmīgheals

Type C (ends with Sxx or Ssx)

xC (e.g., xx|Ssx) Sievers C "a: hū ðā æþelingas sC (e.g., sx|Ssx) Sievers C or D %"%$a: Hæfde landwara SC (e.g., S|Ssx) Sievers D $)*$a: frome fyrdhwate

Type E

Ssx/S Sievers E )")a: fēondgrāpum fæst 345678 "# 94. $ "$

Because the classical verses described by Sievers-Bliss, Russom, and me are all the same, there is a great deal of over- lap in all three systems: which Sievers type my sA, sB, and sC types correspond to, for example, simply depends on whether or not the 0nite verbs alliterate: for Sievers and Bliss (and Russom), the presence or absence of such alliteration was o1en su2cient to distinguish between di/erent types; in my system alliteration changes the character of the verse (including issues such as where in the clause it might appear), but not the scansion or the type.

I like to tell myself that my system is an improvement over Russom’s because just as his system could better explain double alliteration requirements, my system deals more effectively with unstressed syllables, especially those before alliterating stresses in the first foot (i.e., syllables in what is called anacrusis). But as should be clear by now, my conviction that these little unstressed syllables are of crucial importance may well be no more than a reflection of my investment in my own system.

In the end, it is almost certainly worth repeating that scansions sytems—like all the results of metrical study itself—stand at the end of an inductive process, in which metrists simply try to describe the data before them. The data is complex, and its integrity is unknown—that is, while we know that the surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry were not always copied carefully or precisely, we don’t always know exactly where or when a given scribe may have altered his text, changing its metrical details in ways we may not be able to detect—and the variety of scansion systems available serves as a reminder that bright and well-intentioned people often differ in opinion about the best ways to describe complex phenomena. At their best, scansions systems might indeed help give us insight into the reasons why one type of half-line is common and another rare, but it is equally important to remember that none of the scansion systems we use to describe Old English poetry was likely to have been used as a prescriptive system by Old English poets themselves—poets presumably employed an internalized and instinctive sense of metricality. The complicated functioning of resolution (if nothing else) should powerfully remind us how useless our own internal guidelines and instinctive poetic senses sometimes are in this field. Further, poets are notorious rule break- ers, and the task of metricists is to describe the general system they made use of, not necessarily to account for every single verse.

Each scansion system, then, has its own particular strengths and weaknesses, and in the best-case scenario, the choice of a scansion system should be made on the basis of its strengths and weaknesses, not merely on a basis of popularity, traditionality, or old habit. So before we give up entirely on discussing scansion systems, it seems valuable to look briefly at how each of these systems deals with line ('+a, a notable crux in Beowulf, to briefly consider the strengths and weaknesses of various systems.

Meter and editorial choice

Beowulf ('+a, “Gemunde þā se gōda” is conventionally identi0ed as “Type A with anacrusis”;LQ the following scansions ought to apply in the systems under discussion:

(x) / x x x | / x (Sievers) x x x x x / x (Bliss) (x) Sx | (xx) Sx (Russom) xsx | (xx) Sx (Bredehoft)

Considered in isolation, there are no apparent problems with this verse: the problem arises when we look at ('+b, “mǣg Higelāces,” which ought to demand “m” alliteration in the a-line. For most metricists, then, the single alliteration on the 0nite verb gemunde is problematic—and I have chosen my words carefully in that formulation, so as not to favor any particular system. For Sievers and Russom, verses of this type (“Type A with anacrusis”) demand "% <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

double alliteration: the problem with the verse lies in the fact that “gōda” does not alliterate.LR In Bliss’s system, the alliteration on the 0nite verb is non-functional; he feels that gemunde is completely unstressed and thus that the verse as it stands fails to alliterate at all. Bliss’s solution is to emend metri causa, replacing “gōda” with “mōdga” (%$).LS !e verse then has appropriate (single) alliteration on the adjective. In my formulation, the problem with the verb is an “alliterative mismatch”: Type sA generally alliterates on the A-foot, but here the alliteration falls (only) on the s-foot. Bliss’s emendation (which itself has a long list of supporters) would indeed also resolve the problem(s) for me, Russom, and Sievers. But is it necessary that all anomalies need to be resolved? Only if we believe that every single verse must 0t straightforwardly into the larger system. What is important about this discussion lies not in the identi0cation of anomalies, however, but in how the di/erent scanning systems conceptualize this kind of problem. Bliss’s treatment of the verb as an “unstressed sentence particle” forces him to emend; Sievers and Russom, by treat- ing the verse as Type A with anacrusis, are forced to note the alliterative problem (single alliteration where double alliteration is expected); my system forces me to also note the alliterative anomaly (alliteration only on the s-foot of an sA verse). But for Sievers and Russom, the anomaly is that the type itself demands double alliteration; for me the anomaly lies in where the alliteration falls. It is very much worth considering which kind of constraint the poet is likely to have felt (even if we conclude the poet chose not to be constrained by it). And it is precisely this kind of question that makes the choice of a metrical descriptive system important.

Classical Old English verse and Late Old English verse

Before I leave Beowulf ('+a, however, let me explore how meter helps (or fails to help) us think about such anomalous verses in another way. For Sievers, Bliss, and Russom, the forms (and alliteration patterns) of Old English metrical verses rarely change. If we feel that Beowulf ('+a ought to read “Gemunde þā se mōdga”, we would probably explain the manuscript reading “gōda” by blaming a careless, inept, confused, or dozing scribe. Katherine O’Brien O’Kee/e, however, has powerfully argued that many scribes of Old English verse o1en seem to have functioned as active tradition-bearers, and that when there is evidence for the changes they made in copying poetic texts, the al- terations o1en have the character of allowed and allowable, even formulaic, variations. She labels this sort of scribal activity “formulaic reading”; the existence of such a phenomenon should, perhaps, remind us to blame an anomalous verse line on scribal incompetence only as a last resort.MT

In the case of Beowulf ('+a, in fact, we might see the manuscript reading as a classic, even textbook, example of such formulaic reading. For a parallel example, we might look at the following verse from the Old English Metrical Psalms (PPs +*.'.$a), “Ne wrec þū þīn yrre,” where the b-line clearly indicates “w” alliteration. Here, too, then, we have alliteration on the a 0nite verb (“wrec”) in the 0rst foot of a similarly structured verse (“Type A with anacrusis” or “sA”) in preference to the following fully stressed word. Conventionally, metricists have regarded the frequency of such departures from the metrical norms of Beowulf as evidence that the Psalms are metrically poor or weak—explicitly not up to the high standards of the Beowulf poet. Such a viewpoint, of course, makes implicit claims about which poems deserve to belong to the database from which we derive our rules.

An alternative viewpoint, however, would suggest that the Metrical Psalms belong not to the classical metrical tradition exemplified by Beowulf but to a different, perhaps later, tradition of Old English verse.MK The Psalms are regularly dated to the late tenth century, and within the Psalms verses like “Ne wrec þu þin yrre” are relatively common and absolutely normal. So by the time the Beowulf manuscript was copied—around or shortly after the turn of the century—it is perfectly possible for us to imagine that a scribe might have written a verse like ('+a “Ge- munde þā se gōda,” even if his imagined exemplar might have read something else. A scribe acquainted with the forms and habits of Psalms-style Old English verse might well have felt that what he wrote in the manuscript was a perfectly metrical verse with non-anomalous alliteration. If formulaic reading involves replacing readings in an exemplar with metrically viable alternatives, then at the time of the Beowulf manuscript’s copying, those alternatives 345678 "# 94. $ ""

would have included such “late” Old English verse-patterns (including ones that diverge from the standards we re- construct from Beowulf as a whole), and ('+a suddenly becomes utterly non-problematic—for the scribe, at least, if not for the modern scholar.

As this example suggests, rethinking late Old English meter can even help us rethink some of the problem of earlier poems surviving in eleventh-century manuscripts. In the end, however, the metrical perspectives we take are not merely conclusions about constraints that might have been felt by poets: they also have the potential to con- strain the ways in which we think about the viability of metrical alternatives. To the degree that the editorial deci- sions that lead to the texts we read and use have been constrained by their editors’ thinking about Old English meter, it is of real value for literary interpreters to be able to think through or beyond those constraints. In the context of the verse from Beowulf, for example, we might ask: should an editor attempt to represent an authorial version of the poem, reconfiguring an “anomalous” verse in order to bring it into conformity with the general metrical patterns we find elsewhere in the poem, or should an editor accept line ('+a as it stands, since it is grammatically and logically plausible, and may have been perceived as metrically acceptable by the scribes who produced the poem’s only surviving witness?ML But with a fuller consideration of the late Old English verse tradition, we have a larger and more interesting set of options to consider when we ask such questions.

It may be best to conceptualize Old English verse as a complex system of traditions which changed over time, probably varied across the social spectrum, and probably even countenanced different contemporary opinions about what constituted a “correct” verse or line of poetry. It is only by starting with such an understanding that we have much hope of sorting out the differing contexts of various Old English poems, and how those contexts affected their form and content; without such an understanding, the verse from the Psalms itself is simply one more metrical anomaly to be explained or emended away, or lumped together with a considerable number of other verses as evidence of the endemic metrical irregularity of the Metrical Psalms, further evidence of their poetic inferiority.

Prose-like verse or Verse-like prose?

!e traditional perspective in Old English literary studies suggests that the corpus includes a number of powerful, technically competent poems like Beowulf, an uncertain amount of “poor” or “debased” or “irregular” poetry, some highly rhythmical and even alliterative prose, and even a fair amount of normal, unadorned prose. Into which cat- egory compositions like the Metrical Psalms 0t seems to me to be a matter of at least some uncertainty: most scholars feel more comfortable at the ends of the spectrum, where they 0nd either unadorned prose or the highly regular classical meter of Beowulf. But within Old English literature, some of the most interesting texts fall somewhere in the middle ground. !is state of a/airs, in my opinion, suggests how important it is that we should not refuse to ask the key questions: where should the boundary line between verse and prose be drawn? Where would the Anglo- Saxons have drawn that line? Would the line have been drawn at di/erent places at di/erent times?

The answers to such questions, in my opinion, are far from obvious, and they are made only more difficult by the rarity with which Anglo-Saxon authors indicated their own ideas about what genres they might have been working in. But in the end, the questions all appear (to me) to be metrical questions. If the key distinction between prose and verse is (as I believe, along with Hopkins and Jakobson) that verse is characterized by a repeated “figure of sound,” then the question is very clearly a metrical one. The figures of sound involved in classical Old English verse are clear enough, even if metricists will continue to argue over the details. But the question I have recently attempted to ask about whether there might have been a second, perhaps subsequent, tradition of versifying in the late Old English period is an important one precisely because it imagines the possibility of a differing tradition. If there is indeed a different tradition, we should not expect all surviving Old English verse to be characterized by the traditional features of classical verse (formulas, formulaic themes, formulaic compounding, etc). And if that is the "* <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

case, the only way we will be able to determine the existence or non-existence of a late Old English verse tradition, I think, will be by careful, metrical, analysis.

In the end, although I want to acknowledge again that detailed metrical study is not for everyone, the results of metrical study are, and have always been, of interest to editors and readers of Old English poetry and prose, at least at some level. To the degree that such readers rely upon the conclusions drawn by particular metricists (and their particular metrical theories), especially when these conclusions are used to label one text as “good” and another “bad,” it behooves them to have at least some understanding of the metrical theories on which these value judgments are based. To the extent that readers care about literary history—the ordering of poems as early or late, the possibility of influence between one poem and another, the similarities or differences in style that group different poems together—it is necessary to have some grounding in the conclusions (i.e., “metrical rules”) formulated by metricists, and the differing perspectives that generate those conclusions. And to the extent that they rely upon the integrity of the texts they read, readers must, whether they like it or not, have some informed opinion about Old English meter. I think it matters a great deal whether we have “Bēow Scyldinga” or “Bēowulf Scyldinga” in Beowulf '"b; and if readers hope to choose between these two alternatives, they must attend to questions of meter.

,-*(& $ Cf. A. J. Bliss, !e Metre of Beowulf, rev. ed. (Oxford, $#)%), '+.

% C. Plummer, ed., Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford, $+#%-##). One could say that in Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto, %&&$), I attempted an essentially literary answer to the question posed by Plummer’s line- ations, by tracing literary themes through the Chronicle poems; in “!e Boundaries between Verse and Prose in Old English Literature,” in Joyce Tally Lionarons, ed., Old English Literature in its Manuscript Context (Morgantown, WV, %&&*), $"#-(%, I attempted a “manuscript studies” answer; in Early English Metre (Toronto, %&&'), I 0nally tried a metrical answer.

" !e issue here is that Beowulf and the Metrical Psalms di/er widely in a number of metrical details; historically, the metrical system used in Beowulf has been understood as de0nitive for Old English verse in general, and as a consequence, the Psalms have historically been seen as having a “very general metrical irregularity” (G. P. Krapp, ed., !e Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius, ASPR V [New York, $#"%], xvii). But the decision to place Beowulf at the center of our understandings of Old English meter deserves to be explicitly defended, partly because (from the perspective of the Psalms) we might alternatively interpret Beowulf as departing from the “standard” practice. In this sense, the choice of a data set for our inductive conclusions is of crucial importance, and the conventional choice to place Beowulf at the metrical heart of things is neither obvious nor innocent.

* D. Donoghue, Style in Old English Poetry: !e Test of the Auxiliary (New Haven, CT, $#+(); M. Blockley, Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax: Where Clauses Begin (Urbana, IL, %&&$); H. Momma, !e Composition of Old English Poetry (Cambridge, $##(); and C. B. Kendall, !e Metrical Grammar of Beowulf (Cambridge, $##$).

' Some de0nitions may be in order: double alliteration is the use of two alliterating stresses in the a-line; cross alliteration involves two di/erent alliterators used in both half-lines (e.g., Beowulf $: Hwæt, we Gar-Dena in geardagum, with both “g” alliteration and “d” alliteration); verse rhyme is rhyme that links the last stresses of two half-lines within a line.

) R. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA, $#+(), (%.

( George Ellis’s $+&' Specimens of Ancient Poetry (London, $+&') said of Old English verse that “its mechanism and scheme of versi0cation, notwithstanding all the pain which Hickes has employed in attempting to investigate them, are still completely inexplicable” (+). Cited in R. M. Liuzza, “Lost in Translation: Some Versions of Beowulf in the Nineteenth Century,” English Studies +" (%&&%), %+*.

+ E. Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik (Halle, $+#"). !e general acceptance of Sievers’s arguments, of course, does not suggest that there have not been dissenters to Sievers’s views; indeed, this essay largely concerns itself with those dissenters. But Sievers’s explication of Old English verse was so powerful and persuasive that it remains central to most beginning discussions of Old English meter. 345678 "# 94. $ "'

# It is probably worth clarifying what we mean by stress: in Old English (as in Modern English) two types of stress exist: word- based stressed and sentence-based stress. At the level of the word, every word may be fully stressed (which simply means that every word has a key acoustic peak, which is where the stress falls when a word is stressed). Multisyllabic words may have multiple stresses of varying intensity: in classical Old English verse, three stress levels are of particular signi0cance: primary stress, which falls (in Old English) on the 0rst root syllable of any word; secondary stress, which falls on any secondary elements of compounds; and “unstressed” which characterizes any remaining syllables. (!ere has been a long debate in OE metrical and phonological studies about the possible relevance of “tertiary stress,” a stress level between secondary stress and unstress, but I do not believe it is, in fact, relevant.) In terms of sentence-level stress, many “function” words (e.g., pronouns, copular verbs, conjunctions, and so on) are generally unstressed, leaving “content” words with full stress (i.e., the full value of the “word-based” stress pattern). So, in the most common pronunciation of a modern English sentence like “I will ask the pickpocket,” the “content words” are ask and pickpocket, and thus we would mark the syllables ask and pick- with primary stress; -pock- with secondary stress, and all other syllables as unstressed. See below for additional comments on sentence-level stress in OE verse.

$& Sievers’s system, of course, also notes a number of other features, such as where additional unstressed syllables are allowed, and so on, but these forms are so central to his system that Old English verse continues to frequently be characterized as having 0ve basic types.

$$ D. L. Hoover, A New !eory of Old English Meter (New York, $#+').

$% J. C. Pope, !e Rhythm of Beowulf, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT, $#))).

$" T. Cable, !e English Alliterative Tradition (Philadelphia, $##$).

$* G. Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistic !eory (Cambridge, $#+().

$' Within the tradition of iambic pentameter versi0cation, it may be worth noting that later poets tend to employ the tension between metrical stress and linguistic stress more and more frequently and powerfully as a poetic device: where Chaucer’s iambic pentameter is highly regular, with relatively few disjunctions between poetic and linguistic stress, such disjunctions increase in the works of poets like Shakespeare and Milton. Old English verse operates more like Chaucerian iambic pentameter, in that the number and variety of di/erences between verse stress and speech rhythm are generally minimized.

$) As the preceding passages indicate, any word in Old English can be stressed in poetry, depending on its placement in a verse. And as noted above, for words of more than one syllable, some additional rules apply: the primary stress of any word is on the root syllable (that is, pre0xes and su2xes are unstressed) and compound words have secondary stress (or “half-stress”) on their secondary elements.

$( Cited from F. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh, "rd ed. (Boston, $#'&).

$+ I should note here that in Early English Metre, I hypothesize a di/erent scansion system for late Old English verse, as op- posed to ‘classical’ verse. In classical verse (which is the variety of Old English verse used in Beowulf and a good number of other poems), three stress levels are metrically operative, and we need to mark out secondary stresses. In late Old English verse (which includes the Metrical Psalms, many Chronicle poems and a number of other pieces), there are, on the other hand, only two levels of metrical stress. !us, in practice, even the most basic scansion depends upon correctly identifying whether a passage is classical or late.

$# In general, an Old English syllable is long if it has a long vowel, or if it is “closed” by a syllable-0nal consonant. In a two-syllable word like “hyge” ((''a), the syllable boundary is considered to fall before the “g” as hy-ge; thus both syllables of this word are short. Like many other aspects of Old English phonology, syllable length is something that Modern English speakers have little intuitive feel for, but it is nonetheless a crucial phenomenon.

%& Part of the di2culty of writing about (or explaining) resolution is that, here too, we have very little (if any) intuitive insight into how it might have operated for Anglo-Saxon poets and listeners. But to clarify the logic for resolution, consider verses like the following:

Beowulf ")%a: ofer geofenes begang x x / | x x / Beowulf "&)+a: þurh hwæt his worulde gedāl x x x / | x x /

In Beowulf (and in classical Old English verse in general), these scan as B-type verses, with three syllables between the stresses— but such “trisyllabic dips” only occur with any frequency when (as here) the initial stress falls on a short syllable. !e principle ") <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

of resolution simply explains this distributional pattern by absorbing the 0rst syllable of the trisyllabic dip into the 0rst “li1” (or stress) of the verse, leaving a more typical two-syllable dip, with the resulting (Sieversian) scansions shown as above. So much of classical Old English verse-type distribution is clari0ed or simpli0ed by resolution that it is widely accepted as a feature of classical scansion.

%$ Most accounts of classical Old English meter include some account of where resolution is and is not blocked or suspended. In general, it is o1en the case that resolution is suspended if employing it would result in a thoroughly unmetrical verse, e.g., one with fewer than four metrical (that is, counted) syllables or positions.

%% I have given the conventional reading of ()$b, which scans it as an E-type verse because type D* is understood as being ex- cluded from the b-line. I believe, however, that this conventional position is “wrong” (i.e., not as descriptively valuable as it might be), and that a more apposite scansion here would be / / x \, placing the verb (“stōp”) and modifying adverb (“furþur”) together as a syntactic unit separate from the noun.

%" In the interests of full disclosure, I want again to confess that my own position on stress promotion and demotion (especially with 0nite verbs) di/ers somewhat from most other metricists, who treat 0nite verbs at the beginning of a clause (such as “wolde” in (''b) as always unstressed, or at least only stressed if they alliterate in the a-line. So most metricists, when “marking up” this passage, would have assigned “xx” to “wolde” from the very 0rst step.

%* Sievers’s system simply counts unstressed syllables: di/erences in subtypes depend almost entirely on the number and position of half-stressed or unstressed syllables. For Bliss, the type and location of unstressed syllables leads to his theory of the verse-internal “caesura” and resulting “breath groups.” For Russom, many (but not all) unstressed syllables are “extrametrical” (that is, they are literally not counted by the meter, which “counts” only the two metrical words or word-like stress structures). My scansion system departs from Russom’s by allowing extrametrical syllables only in the medial position.

%' With some hesitation, I treat Sievers and Bliss together here. Bliss himelf claimed his analysis was “a triumphant vindication of Sievers” (v), but he allows one-stress verses, and his theory of the caesura o1en uses a quite di/erent dividing line between the parts of two-stress verses; as such, the details of the two systems are really not especially compatible.

%) Pope had noted that the 0nal three positions of Sieversian types C (x / | / x) and D (/ | / \ x) were o1en 0lled identically, and this insight has generally been accepted, leading to Bliss’s type d (x | / \ x), which replaces many Sievers C types, and Russom’s x|Ssx (which explicitly parallels his S|Ssx).

%( Anacrusis (because it deals with unstressed syllables) is one of the classic di2cult topics in Old English scansion, de0ned in various ways by various metricists. Technically, anacrusis refers to unstressed syllables occurring before the beginning of the verse proper. From such a perspective, ('+a has anacrusis only for the scansions given below in the Sievers and Russom systems. More generally, however, we might de0ne anacrusis as including any unstressed syllables occurring before an alliterating stress in the 0rst foot, in which case my scansion system would also allow ('+a to be counted as featuring anacrusis. Once again, different systems deal with unstressed syllables in o1en surprisingly varied ways.

%+ Such verses “demand” double alliteration. Of course, what this means is that virtually all such verses exhibit double alliteration, and so when we fail to see it in this verse, we must note that it goes against the general trend. But when a “rule” (i.e., observed pattern) like this appears to be “broken,” the traditional response has o1en boiled down to the assertion that the Beowulf poet would never have broken this rule. I hope the numerous assumptions embodied in that traditional response are clear.

%# One should note the implications of this emendation, which explicitly locates the problem in ('+a. But it is also possible that the problem (if there really is one) might lie in ('+b. If “mǣg” were replaced, for example, by a word alliterating on “g”, then the alliterative problem in ('+a would literally disappear. Emending “gōda” to “mōdga” is attractive in part because it changes a minimal number of letters, but the very principle that says the “best” emendation is the one that minimally alters the manuscript text assumes a paradigm of scribal activity that may not apply. Cf. O’Brien O’Kee/e’s very valuable notion of “formulaic reading,” which would allow us to understand a quite radical alteration to ('+b as a quite typical scribal intervention. See also the discussion below.

"& Katherine O’Brien O’Kee/e, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, $##&).

"$ !is viewpoint is argued more fully in my chapters on “Late Old English Verse” in Early English Metre.

"% Klaeber and Dobbie let ('+a stand; Bliss emends it. 345678 "# 94. $ "(

Assuring the Efficacy of Beowulf for Undergraduate Students Jennifer M. Santos, Arizona State University

!e future of Beowulf studies … will not belong to those who just read the text, in the narrow sense of interpreting it. It will lie with those who also use and take pleasure in it, adapting it to their own purposes in the world in which they live, as the poet’s own listeners and readers surely did. — John D. Niles, “Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning”

In “Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning,” Niles envisions a future for Beowulf studies that rests on enjoyment of the poem, an encouraging and yet a troubling claim given that Beowulf has, according to Bruce Murphy, fallen “into the same hole that, for Americans, Moby Dick occupies: being a book that everyone ‘has’ to read” (%$$).K !is stasis provides some security, but the increasing number of university English Departments moving away from speci0c Medieval literature requirements problematizes Beowulf’s place in the canon and culture. Beowulf relies on its readership, and its longevity is contingent upon the continuation of readers’ engagement with—and enjoyment of—the text. To ensure a position for Beowulf within a dynamically evolving canon, it seems wise to solicit and evaluate responses to Beowulf from undergraduates (the upcoming generation of scholars and most stable cohort of new Beowulf readers), probing their reasons for enjoyment and emphasizing these reasons in teaching the poem, while mitigating the confusion that impedes that enjoyment.L My study contributes to the task of compiling and analyzing undergraduate responses to Beowulf in order to point to strategies for securing a wider readership for the poem. To keep Beowulf in existence as a “live” text, encouraging its enjoyment remains an integral, though sometimes neglected, aspect of Beowulf scholarship.M

Methodology

To gather the requisite information, I created and distributed a survey in the Spring %&&* and Spring %&&' “Survey of British Literature I” (ENG %%$) classes at Arizona State University (taught by the same professor both semesters). $"* of $'$ enrolled students responded.N To help ensure honest feedback rather than a perceived “acceptable” intellectual perspective, participation in the survey was voluntary and anonymous. !e greater part of the survey consisted of free-response questions that encouraged students to voice their thoughts and opinions. However, to ensure that subjects of particular interest were addressed, I included a section in which students were asked to rank aspects of the poem in relation to their enjoyment. Ultimately, the responses garnered from this section served to reinforce the validity of initial student responses.

Student reactions: mixed messages

Gender, ethnicity, and age played minimal roles in determining di/erent expectations for and responses to Beowulf. Instead, the majority of the participants who enjoyed their reading experience ((+) of the poem cited its heroism, action, and glory as primary reasons for their positive experience. One respondent enthusiastically explained that he likes Beowulf because of “the action. It reminds me of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.” !e repetition of similar responses suggests that student enjoyment of Anglo Saxon literature emerges from ful0lled expectations for heroic, plot-oriented excitement.O

This initial positive response, however, masks deeper and more troubling issues related to sustained student interest. Although only $# of the participants claimed that their reading experience lacked enjoyment (" remained undecided), a larger portion of the students found certain aspects of the text to be distasteful and confusing. Stu- dents expect to find “beautiful language” in canonical texts, and, while %# found the best features of the poem to "+ <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

be those associated with its language (alliteration emerged as a favorite), an even larger number (*#) asserted that the poetic features of Beowulf—identified, by respondents, as alliteration, rhythm, structure, language, syntax, and punctuation—were their least favorite aspects of it. The students’ frustration is revealed by their attempts to express the crux of their problem: many comments complain of “working hard to understand it” and “trying to figure it out” on a sentence level. Herein may lie the greatest threat to the continued position of Beowulf as a valued part of the canon: the next generation of scholars struggle with the poem’s linguistic structure. In fact, this was the most often- cited reason for not recommending Beowulf to their friends and a major factor in reasons for not liking Beowulf.

A focal point for additional contention was the number of “digressions” in Beowulf. Although one respondent enjoyed “the interlacing stories,” a greater number of students expressed sentiments such as “I would often get lost” and “it [Beowulf] jumps around a lot and can be confusing.” This type of comment suggests that these students approach the episodes in the same manner as early Beowulf scholars: according to Robert E. Bjork, N. F. S. Grundtvig and Henry Bradley characterized the episodes as “tasteless intrusions” and “disruptive additions” ($#", $#*).P

Such comments by early scholars, like those of the participants of this study, reveal an expectation of Aristote- lian unity. They echo Seamus Heaney’s observation that “[t]he poem abounds in passages which will leave an unpre- pared audience bewildered. Just when the narrative seems ready to take another step ahead into the main Beowulf story, it sidesteps. For a moment it is as if we have been channel-surfed into another poem” (xiii).Q Yet the concepts of “channel-surfing” and side-stepping may in fact provide a metaphor to which most undergraduate students can relate, due to the rapidly expanding influence of the Internet. Arguably, the rhyzomatic nature of websites has some parallels to the seemingly digressive structure of Beowulf.R Students expect non-linearity in their web-surfing experiences; the confusion, then, may lie in the fact that such expectations are not applied to their reading of Beowulf. Students expect “classic” literature to have linear unity and are frustrated when they do not find it.

We can assume that these students have, to a certain extent, been schooled in what one expects from a work of literature; their expectations arise from their previous experiences. This may also explain their confusion over the poem’s unfamiliar poetic style. These complaints are likewise not new: issues of syntax, diction and punctuation have troubled scholars for decades. However, the scholars who study these issues are already familiar with the re- cursive and appositive nature of Old English poetry, and their questions are usually directed to the original text of the poem. Focusing on the “gist” of the story in translation, undergraduates have no background in these issues; they bring to the poem a different relationship to popular literary culture, with a strong emphasis on symbolism, character, setting, and “meaning.” As such, undergraduate students and Old English scholars bring very different sets of “cultural competencies” to their respective reading experiences.S

Participating in different discursive fields, undergraduates and seasoned medievalists experience two different Beowulfs. These varying cultural competencies allow readers to take on various “mock reader” positions. Walker Gibson defines the mock reader as “the mask and costume the individual takes on in order to experience the language” (%);KT in other words, the mock reader is the vehicle by which the real reader engages the world presented by the text, which belongs exclusively neither to the text nor the reader. The mock reader’s engagement with the text necessarily involves (and is influenced by) values contemporary to the real reader. The reader engages with (or dis- engages from) the text to the degree that the mock reader position can integrate the multiple worlds associated with the text, the real reader, and the mock reader.

Evaluation of student-oriented translations

Students, not having the scholarly training to read the poem in its original language, must be encouraged to create acceptable mock reader positions through appropriate translations and editions. To explore some of the ways in 345678 "# 94. $ "#

which such mock reader positions are made possible when approaching Beowulf, I will compare three popular verse translations: R. M. Liuzza’s (Broadview, %&&&), Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy’s (Longman, %&&*), and Seamus Heaney’s (Norton, %&&&).KK Liuzza’s translation has been selected for its reputation for literal accuracy; Heaney and Sullivan/Murphy both translate “sense for sense rather than word for word” ($)%).KL To compare the translations with an emphasis on areas of student interest and struggle, I will discuss brief excerpts from an action scene (including a “monster”) and from a scene o1en labeled a “digression.”

For the latter, I have chosen an excerpt from the Unferth episode. While students tend to struggle with the digressions, they tend to enjoy heroism and battle sequences; these aspects combine with issues of language in the Unferth episode, since scholars argue that “the Beowulf-Unferth exchange is an example of Germanic flyting, a ver- bal battle traditional in heroic verse” (Bjork %&(-%&+).KM The combination of these elements in the Unferth episode coalesces with student interests and difficulties, making it particularly relevant for study. Below are brief excerpts in Old English (from the edition of Mitchell and Robinson)KN and three translations of the passage:

Beowulf maþelode, bearn Ecgþeowes: ‘Hwæt, þu worn fela, wine min Unferð, beore druncen ymb Brecan spræce, sægdest from his siðe. Soð ic talige … ’ ('%#-'"%)

Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow: “What a great deal, Unferth my friend, drunk with beer, you have said about Breca, told his adventures! I will tell the truth—” (Liuzza)

Beowulf, Ecgtheow’s son, replied: “Well, friend Unferth, you have had your say about Breca and me but it was mostly beer that was doing the talking. The truth is this:” (Heaney)

Then Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow: “Listen, Unferth, my fuddled friend brimful of beer, you blabber too much about Breca’s venture. I tell you the truth:” (Sullivan/Murphy)

Comparison to the Old English shows that only Liuzza has preserved in its entirety the structure common to speech introductions in Beowulf: identifying speaker and paternal lineage in the clause “[character] spoke, son of [father of character].” Found throughout the poem, this formulaic textual element “allow[s] the poet to express his meaning unerringly in the given metrical form,” which Niles argues is “the primary function of the formulaic system” ($%*).KO !is function is important not only for the text but also for the reader. Since undergraduates experience di2culties with the structure and express delight with the story, preserving such a structure may allow them to grasp more fully that with which they struggle (the structure of language) through that which they enjoy (plot and meaning). Although the repetitive nature of the structure may be uncomfortable for students, the formulaic introduction may encourage students to appreciate Old English syntax by virtue of the heroic characteristics, which students enjoy and which are o1en found in speeches following the formulaic structure.

Sullivan/Murphy likewise preserve the majority of this repeated structure, but add the word “then” at the out- set, contributing to the sense of “flow”—defined by one participant as smooth “transitions in thought and story”— *& <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F valued by a significant portion of survey participants.KP Likewise, Sullivan/Murphy achieve stronger alliteration, another contribution to “flow” as identified by the respondents. However, the word choice used to achieve this alliteration (“fuddled,” “brimful,” “blabber,” and so on) strays far from the Old English “secgan.” The term “blabber,” although admittedly alliterative, reduces Unferth to the level of a drunken dolt and places Beowulf in the role of swashbuckling hero simply by virtue of his obvious superiority to Unferth. The Old English merely implies that Un- ferth’s words are misguided, whereas Sullivan/Murphy’s translation makes explicit certain possible connotations of beore druncen (literally ‘drunk with beer’); in this case, the translation makes Unferth comically simple rather than multifaceted. Doing so may present too clear-cut a perspective on the characters’ social and heroic roles: scholarship shows that Beowulf and Unferth share a highly complex and even somewhat formal relationship. By stressing Unferth’s negative role, the translators minimize the ambiguity of his position and detract from the force of the flyting’s climax in lines '+$b–'#*. While these issues may seem too intricately detailed for an undergraduate audience, removing the option to see the relationship between language and battle minimizes the student reader’s opportunities for critical thinking linked to topics of enjoyment.

Heaney provides an acceptable alternative. Rather than imbuing Beowulf’s speech with an abrasive, brash tone, Heaney refuses to rush Beowulf’s ascendance in the flyting. Heaney also omits the accusatory “you” and the deroga- tory “blabber.” In doing so, he presents Beowulf as a more credible and respectable hero.KQ The value of heroism to the undergraduate respondents is quite clear and likely grows clearer when faced with a more nuanced depiction of the hero. Heaney likewise imputes a sense of “flow” or continuity to his interpretation by including “replied” in line '%#. Clearly connecting Beowulf’s speech to Unferth’s previous accusations, a syntactic link like “replied” not only enhances continuity but also helps to mitigate the repetition that students dislike. Additionally, Heaney clari- fies the meaning of the sentence by rearranging its syntax, giving the lines a familiar look and feel, which allows his reader to engage with the poem without becoming alienated by the language. Heaney’s approach gives his readers an advantage over Liuzza and Sullivan/Murphy, who deal with syntactical problems via clauses and punctuation—a strategy that preserves the complexity of the language but gives the text a less contemporary feel, which contributes to the confusion of undergraduate respondents. Straightening the syntax, in combination with a word choice that emphasizes Beowulf’s heroism, makes Heaney’s translation the most likely to create an appropriate mock reader position capable of encouraging student enjoyment.

Chickering and other reviewers have observed that “[t]he finest passages in Heaney’s rendering are the dramat- ic speeches” ($)%).KR To test his success in those portions of the poem, I turn to a short excerpt from Beowulf’s final battle with the dragon:

Æfter ðam wordum wyrm yrre cwom, atol inwitgæst oðre siðe fyrwylmum fah fionda niosian laðra manna. (%))#-%)(%a)

After these words the worm came angrily, terrible vicious creature, a second time, scorched with surging flames, seeking out his enemies, the hated men. (Liuzza)

After those words, a wildness rose in the dragon again and drove it to attack, heaving up fire, hunting for enemies, the humans it loathed. (Heaney) 345678 "# 94. $ *$

After these words the worm was enraged. For a second time the spiteful specter flew at his foe, and he wreathed in flames the hated human he hungered to harm. (Sullivan/Murphy)

In Heaney’s translation, the diction obscures the meaning of the original text. Heaney distances the dragon’s cog- nitive reaction by attributing its actions to a “wildness”—a term and connotation located nowhere in the Old Eng- lish texts. !e Old English clearly places the dragon in the subject position and connects it with a strong verb—the dragon itself cwom (‘came forward’) to attack; such action is not instigated by a “wildness.” Liuzza’s rendering more closely aligns with the literal meaning of the original Old English: “[a]1er these words the worm came angrily.” By reducing the wyrm’s agency, Heaney dri1s too far from the original text. Chickering observes such tendencies in other passages, particularly noting that at Grendel’s death “Heaney’s exuberant performance is more in evidence here than the passage itself” ($)().KS !e fact that Heaney changes the impetus for attack in a battle scene—an aspect of the text that my participants enjoy—alters an element to which most students relate positively; it minimizes mock reader positions by reducing opportunities for reader identi0cation with the text. While, as Alfred David argues, “one doesn’t need an exact denotation … to catch the spirit” of Beowulf, undergraduate students do value the tension of battle inherent in the clear attribution of agency to the combatants (*).LT

Liuzza’s translation “surging flames, seeking out his enemies” has a more clearly intuitive meaning; each verb in this passage is supported by the only nominatives in the sentence—those relating to the dragon. While the appropriate attribution of agency may encourage student enjoyment and understanding, the syntax, however, may be confusing. Many clauses reside between the various verbs and their object. Note how “a second time” and “with surging flames” separates the wyrm from its search for men. Such clauses, perceived as “interruptions” by students, create a mock reader position difficult for students to embrace because a greater emphasis is placed on understanding word order and sentence structure than on the meaning and values of the story. Sullivan/Murphy are more con- siderate of the modern reader; they break the sentence into two discrete portions, with less distance between the subject, verb, and object. In this way, they minimize difficulties associated with unfamiliar syntax. Furthermore, Sullivan/Murphy’s diction provides an appropriate alliterative translation that also clearly conveys the action of the passage. Although, as Steven Mailloux aptly avers, “[t]ranslation is always an approximation, which is to say the interpretation is always directed,” Sullivan/Murphy, in contrast to Heaney, leave more room for the student’s own “direction” (*&).LK

A clear and precise battle scene that flows smoothly while remaining true to the text and emphasizing compre- hensibility fits student conceptions of an enjoyable text. Yet the students surveyed read Sullivan/Murphy’s version and reported mixed messages. So we are left with the quandary: which translation best addresses the needs of an undergraduate audience? Each translation has its advantages and disadvantages; each is, finally, its own piece in and of itself (Heaney himself spends pages discussing how his heritage informed his translation, clearly expressing a desire to make the text his own). For purposes of undergraduate enjoyment—to make the text palatable and to encourage them to revisit it—I suggest creating a hypertext edition of Beowulf. Doing so might allow undergraduates’ affinity for the non-linear nature of the Internet to encourage their appreciation of similar structures in literature. To be successful, such a hypertext edition might present the poem in short portions that hyperlink both linearly and thematically to allow students to discover that “[e]very piece of the poem can be read alongside every other piece as an adumbration or refraction of some larger theme” (Liuzza "$).LL Viewing the poem in this manner would help students see the relation of each episode to the heroic theme, thus combining a heightened sense of enjoyment with deeper understanding. Further, it may allow new Beowulf students to engage with the best aspects of several versions of the poem: Heaney’s translation could be used for the speeches of the poem, Sullivan/Murphy’s translation for other sections, and so on. While the difficulty of combining copyrighted texts from different publishers makes *% <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

this version more a wish than a practical project, the end result might well cater to a wider variety of student (and teacher) needs.

Conclusion

As we have seen, undergraduates tend to enjoy Beowulf, but o1en struggle to access mock reader positions that encourage an even greater desire to embrace the poem. Providing such positions via careful preparation and choice of translation can only increase the durability of Beowulf in an ever-changing canon. Only a few of the issues regarding undergraduate reception have been explored here; a larger study of students’ reading of various translations would undoubtedly produce additional information. As Jane Tompkins notes, “[r]eader-response critics would argue that a poem cannot be understood apart from its results. Its ‘e/ects,’ psychological and otherwise, are essential to any accurate description of its meaning, since that meaning has no e/ective existence outside of its realization in the mind of a reader” (ix).LM Surely helping the next generation of Beowulf readers 0nd their way into the poem is jus- ti0cation for further exploration.

,-*(& $ John D. Niles, “Introduction: Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning,” in A Beowulf Handbook, eds. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, $##(), $-$%; Bruce Murphy, “Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf,” review of Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, Poetry, $((.% (%&&&): %$$-$), Academic Search Premier, EBSCO Publishing, "+"'(((.

% One may question the choice to focus on undergraduate readers, considering the recent resurgence of popular interest in Beowulf associated with Seamus Heaney’s %&&& translation (Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation [New York: W. W. Norton, %&&&]). However, Heaney, himself, notes that “the poem is now generally read in translation and mostly in English courses at schools and universities” (ix).

" Given the possibility that a lay audience was meant to hear Beowulf for entertainment, as Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier suggest, the focus on undergraduate students gains additional credence, as undergraduate students might be considered the “laypersons” of academia. Also, the ultimate and overarching questions regarding the intended audience for Beowulf and the rami0cations of the ambiguous conclusions about the intended audience remind us, as scholars, that we should take care not to ignore the various modern readerships of Beowulf. See Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier “Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences,” in Bjork and Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook, $"-"*.

* I am indebted to O.M. Brack for sharing his class time and his students for this project. I surveyed his %&&* class during the large lecture; in %&&", the surveys were distributed to two of the three discussion sections. A copy of the survey follows these notes.

' Added to this positive response is the fact that "" express interest in reading Beowulf in Old English.

) Robert E. Bjork, “Digressions and Episodes,” in Bjork and Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook, $#"-%$%.

( Seamus Heaney, introduction to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, ix-xxx.

+ Some aspects of the channel-sur0ng and web-sur0ng analogies deviate from the structure of Beowulf since, as Adrien Bonjour argues in !e Digressions in Beowulf (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, $#)'), “behind all the episodes is found a de0nite artistic design, clear enough to allow us to say that each one plays a useful part—however minute or important—in the composition of the poem” ((%). However, my channel-sur0ng analogy is presented here as a means of bridging the gap between student perceptions of non-linearity in Beowulf and student competencies.

# I borrow the notion of cultural competencies from Pierre Bourdieu’s introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, $#+*), $-(. Bourdieu explains that, “[a] work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is en- coded” (%). 345678 "# 94. $ *"

$& Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post- Structuralism, ed. Jane Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, $#+&), $-).

$$ See R. M. Liuzza, ed. and trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, %&&&); Allan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, trans., Beowulf, ed. Sarah Anderson (New York: Pearson/Longman, %&&*); Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, Bilingual ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, %&&&).

$% Howell Chickering, “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf’,” review of Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, !e Kenyon Review, %*:$ (%&&%): $)&-$(+, Academic Search Premier, EBSCO Publishing, '+)&''#.

$" Robert E. Bjork, “Digressions and Episodes,” in Bjork and Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook, $#"-%$%.

$* Old English excerpts come from Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, eds., Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Oxford: Blackwell, $##+).

$' John D. Niles, “Formula and Formulaic System,” in Beowulf: !e Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, $#+"), $%$-$"(.

$) Students o1en use the vague and problematic term “:ow” to articulate their displeasure with the story. !eir elaboration on this term returns to “interruptions” of the main story (lack of :ow) as well as continuity and connectivity (:ow).

$( !e alliterative emphasis on wine ‘friend’ in line '"& emphasizes perceived friendship that dovetails with Beowulf’s willing- ness to de:ect o/ense from Unferth’s speech by blaming the beer (an interpretation alluded to in all three translations, although one might argue that each does so with di/erent connotations).

$+ Howell Chickering, “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf.’”

$# Ibid.

%& Alfred David, “!e Nationalities of Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes,” in Beowulf in Our Time: Teaching Beowulf in Translation, ed. Mary K. Ramsey (Old English Newsletter Subsidia "$. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, %&&%), "-%$.

%$ Steven Mailloux, “Interpretation and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” in Reception Study: From Literary !eory to Cultural Studies, ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, %&&$), "#-)&.

%% R. M. Liuzza, introduction to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, $$-*#.

%" Jane Tompkins, “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism,” in Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ix-xxvi. ** <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

Assuring the Efficacy of Beowulf: Undergraduate Survey

Age: ______Ethnicity: ______Gender (circle one): Male Female

$) What is/are your Major(s)? ______%) What is/are your Minor(s)? ______") What do you plan to do with your degree (circle one)?

Teach Attend Graduate School Work as an editor Attend Law School Work in the business world Other (please describe): ______

*) Have you ever read Beowulf before (circle one)? Yes No

') What did you expect the poem to be like BEFORE you read it?

)) How did it di/er from your expectations? Why do you think that is? If you’ve read Beowulf previously, how did your expectations change on this reading?

() What did you like BEST about Beowulf? Why?

+) What did you like LEAST about Beowulf? Why?

#) In general, did you enjoy reading Beowulf? Why or Why not?

$&) Do you think your non-English major/minor peers might enjoy Beowulf? Why or why not?

$$) Based on your knowledge of recent books and movies (contemporary/popular culture), do you see any relationship between Beowulf and these books and/or movies?

$%) Which of the following had the most in:uence on your enjoyment of Beowulf: ($ = greatly increased enjoyment, % = somewhat increased enjoyment, " = did not in:uence enjoyment, * = somewhat detracted from enjoyment, ' = greatly detracted from enjoyment)

Character $ % " * ' Plot $ % " * ' Language $ % " * ' Form (poetry) $ % " * ' Setting $ % " * ' Instructor Lectures $ % " * ' Instructor Handouts $ % " * ' Pictures/Maps from Text $ % " * ' Websites about Beowulf $ % " * '

$") Would you be interested in learning to read Beowulf in the original Old English? (circle one) Yes No

$*) Have you had other classes in which you read Medieval Literature? If so, which one(s)? 345678 "# 94. $ *'

Circolwyrde 2005: New Electronic Resources for Anglo-Saxon Studies Edward Christie, Columbia College, Missouri

Circolwyrde is an annual OEN feature which considers digital resources that have been developed or substantially revised in the past year or so, or that have not been mentioned in previous surveys. !e title Circolwyrde is a hapax legomenon from Byrhtferth’s Manual that means “mathematician” (literally “the state or event of cycles”). Carl Berkhout reinvents the term as “computer” in his neologized lexicon of Old English technology terms (Circolwyrde Wordhord, http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ctb/wordhord.html), and thus renders it an apt embodiment of the form and content of Anglo-Saxon digital resources. Circolwyrde’s coverage has no pretensions to comprehensiveness, and welcomes notices of any other new or substantially revised electronic materials or commercial products. Please send any such notices to Eddie Christie at [email protected].

Online Publications

OEN is now available online at http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/; the site, like the print version, contains news, announcements, calls for papers, notices of publications, abstracts and notes of research in progress, as well as essays, annual reports of ongoing projects, and memorials of scholars who have recently died. !e online version of OEN has many enhancements over the print version: “Events” contains not only the information found in the 0rst section of OEN, but also a section for New Announcements, frequently updated, which have appeared too late for the current issue or too soon for the next. “Publications” has a link that searches the online Medieval Review for books on Anglo-Saxon topics; notices of individual books contain links to publishers’ web sites. In addition to the project reports printed in OEN, the “Reports” section contains searchable versions of recent Research in Progress lists (compiled by Heide Estes) and a searchable database of conference abstracts from %&&& to the present (collected by Robert Butler). Essays can be read in on-screen or downloaded as .pdf 0les for greater clarity and quality; reports and essays are also collected in an online Archive (currently going back to OEN "*). !e site also o/ers a collection of links to various sites, information on subscriptions and OEN Subsidia, and a link to the OEN Bibliog- raphy Database (see below).

Archaeology

!e Museum of London website (http://www.museumo:ondon.org.uk/; click on “Collections”) features a catalog of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval ceramic and glass bowls, crucibles, jars, jugs, and pitchers. !e catalog includes enlargeable images of #( of the museum’s $') items and lists the dimensions, production date, and collection place of each item.

!e Archaeology Data Service (ADS), http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/index.html, whose mission is to provide dependable digital resources for research and teaching in Archaeology, continues to add to their online archive and report breaking archaeological news, as well as hosting the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). !rough Arch- search, one may search using key words (a straightforward search for “Anglo-Saxon” yields %#% hits), or use a click- able map to search for 0nds by region. Many of these hits are linked to information archived online by ADS.

Recent additions to the ADS include Birte Brugman’s archive of beads from Anglo-Saxon graves (http://ads.ahds. ac.uk/catalogue/search/fr.cfm?rcn=BEADS&"-$). !is archive takes the form of a downloadable spreadsheet, but was also published as an appendix to Brugman’s Glass Beads from Early Anglo-Saxon Graves. A study of the provenance and chronology of Glass Beads from Anglo-Saxon Graves (Oxford, %&&*). *) <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

!ough not new, the British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography, http://www.biab.ac.uk/online/, is now free. !e online database contains over %&&,&&& entries covering publications from $)#' to the present on archaeology, en- vironmental history, and the conservation of material culture. A straightforward search for “Anglo-Saxon” returns %&#& results, including journal articles from as recently as %&&& and as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.

Jeremy Hugget maintains the Anglo-Saxon Archaeology website at the University of Glasgow (http://www.gla.ac.uk/ Acad/Archaeology/resources/Anglo-Saxon/index.html), which in addition to his own research on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, collects links to a wide range of resources, including a good number of regional reports and reports on speci0c excavations.

Cultural/Historical Resources

In May %&&', the 0rst phase of the impressive Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) database went online. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and directed by Janet Nelson (King’s College, London) and Simon Keynes (University of Cambridge), PASE (http://www.pase.ac.uk) is a relational database that accounts for, “in principle, every recorded individual who lived in, or was closely connected with Anglo-Saxon England from '#( to $&*%.” !us, from Alfred the Great, to Alfred, Reeve at Bath, who is known to us only from a single brief reference (in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) to his death, any Anglo-Saxon ever mentioned in the historical record can be com- pared or connected to his folk. !e attractively presented and highly functional database can be searched by means of nine di/erent indices: Persons, Status, Source, Locations, Events, O2ces, Occupations, Relationships, and Pos- sessions. Although, as a prosopography, the ‘Person Record’ is presumably the kernel of information, persons can nonetheless be understood refracted through other 0elds and connections, either to each other, or to documents, events and so forth. !e ‘Person Record’ comprises a list of ‘factoids’ (“an assertion that a source says something about a person”), including links to other categories named by the search indices, but also to personal pro0les including ethnicity, language competence, religion, stated health, as well moral, intellectual, and psychological qualities. Following links to these personal qualities directs one to primary sources where the character of the individual in question is attested. Complex enquiries may be built, for example, to 0nd only Kings connected with london, and the database includes a feature to search speci0cally for linked persons. My brief attempt to relay the depth and breadth of this potent tool necessarily fails; !is is an extraordinary resource which will soon be augmented and completed by PASE%.

!e Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/langscape/) is funded by the AHRC %&&*-%&&( and based in the Center for Humanities Computing at King’s College, London. Although still developing, the project proposes to produce an electronic corpus of Anglo-Saxon boundary clauses with extensive XML markup, to be made accessible over the World Wide Web. !e information of the corpus serves a variety of areas of study, from dialect studies to the examination of social and economic conditions in Anglo- Saxon England.

Dictionaries and %esauri

!e !esaurus of Old English Online (http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/), hosted by the University of Glasgow and created by Flora Edmonds, Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, and Irené Wotherspoon, is an electronic version of A !esaurus of Old English, by Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy (% vols; London: King’s College London Medieval Studies XI, $##'. Second impression Amsterdam: Rodopi, %&&&). !is remarkable and well-designed site provides new ways to access this rich reference work. A detailed explanation of the scope and :exibility of the online database has been given by Christian Kay in a report for OEN "+." (%&&'): ")–*&; the report itself is online at http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/reports.php?0le=reports/kay"+_".txt. 345678 "# 94. $ *(

%&&' was a big year for the Rev. Joseph Bosworth and T. Nortcote Toller; the digitized version of the Bosworth- Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, $+#+; revised and enlarged edition $#%$) is available online at http://beowulf. engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/BT/Bosworth-Toller.htm and http://dontgohere.nu/oe/as-bt/. David Finucane has created a free desktop version of the Dictionary (for Macintosh OS X only), available from http://www.david0nucane.com/ bosworthToller.html. !e text of the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary is only one of many early dictionaries and gram- mars found at Sean Crist’s Germanic Lexicon Project (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/aa_texts.html), which continues to grow and improve.

Electronic texts and editions

!e Dictionary of Old English Project has released an updated version of its Corpus of Old English on CD-ROM; further information is available at http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pub/corpus.html.

!e Wul)la Project (http://www.wul0la.be/), though not yet complete, provides online facsimiles of Eduard Sievers’ $+(+ edition of Old Saxon Heliand as well as the text of the Gothic Bible with interlinear translations from a choice of KJV and Clementine Vulgate, as well as Greek or French translations.

Tony Jebson has signi0cantly updated his online edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, available at http://jebbo. home.texas.net/asc/asc.html. !e site is still developing, but promises to be an extraordinarily useful tool for study of this complex text.

Jonathan Herold’s “Early Medieval Record-Keeping and the Nero-Middleton Cartulary” (http://individual.utoronto. ca/emrecordkeeping/index.htm) contains parallel transcriptions of two related collections, the Liber Wigornensis (London, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius A. xiii, fols. $r–$$+v) and the Nero-Middleton Cartulary (BL MS Cotton Nero E. i., part %, fols. $+$–$+* + BL Additional MS *)%&*), along with images of the two cartulary manuscripts, introductions, a select bibliography, and related supporting material drawn from a variety of early printed sources.

!e Societa International per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL) o/ers CD-ROM texts in its Edizioni del Gal- luzo, including a complete facsimile of the Codex Amiatinus (Ms. Firenze, Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana, Amia- tino $) edited by L.G.G. Ricci et al. (%&&&). !e Society o/ers several electronic editions, texts, and translations on CD-ROM including the Legenda Aurea, Medieval Latin Poetry )'&-$%'&, and Classics of !e Latin Middle Ages. !e brief catalog can be searched at http://www.sismel.it/. Additionally, the Society will hold an international conference on “Digital Philology and Medieval Texts” in January %&&), at Arezzo (http://www.sismel0renze.it/attivita/ ita/digitalphilology.htm). Kevin Kiernan will speak on the Electronic Beowulf and Edition Production and Presenta- tion Technology (a free so1ware platform and supporting documents for the production of image-based electronic editions, http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~e1/EPPT-Demo.html).

Catalogs, Archives, and Libraries

Under the direction of Christoph Flüeler (Mediävistiches Institut, Universität Miséricorde, Fribourg) and Ernst Tremp (Sti1sbibliothek, St. Gallen), the Abbey Library of St. Gall presents the Codices Electronici Sangallensis (http://www.cesg.unifr.ch/en/index.htm—the site is also available in German, French, and Italian), a virtual library containing high-resolution digital facsimiles of St. Gall manuscripts. With over %&&& codices, *&& of which were written prior to $&&& Z.[., the St. Gall Library is one of the oldest and most important manuscript libraries in the world; many of its items will be of interest to Anglo-Saxonists. Currently the virtual library contains )& manuscripts, but will be continually expanded until the target of $"& illuminated manuscripts is reached. !is impressive and thoughtfully-constructed project is a welcome companion to the Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensi project *+ <5= >9?5@AB C8DA58EE8F

reported last year (http://www.ceec.uni-koeln.de/), presenting digital facsimiles of the manuscripts in the Diözesan- und Dombibliothek in Cologne.

Music

!e Digital Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), a collaboration between scholars at the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, creates an electronic archive of digital images of European sources of medieval music. !e Archive, http://www.diamm.ac.uk/index.html, contains detailed records, including manuscript descriptions of all the complete and fragmentary sources of polyphony up to $''& in the UK (e.g. the mid-eleventh century ‘Wincester Troper’, CCCC *(") as well as representative manuscripts from the continent. !e wide geo- graphical spread and fragmentary nature of many of these sources have contributed to their relative neglect, but their newfound electronic accessibility represents an extraordinary resource for the study of the repertory as a whole.

Beowulf

Among the many rumored and reported screen versions of Beowulf, the 0lm Beowulf and Grendel, directed by Stur- la Gunnarsson, has attracted the most attention from the academic community for its location 0lming in Iceland, its respected international cast and its apparently serious intentions (despite the liberties it takes with the story and its insistence on pronouncing the word Geat as if it rhymed with ‘meat’). !e 0lm had its world premiere at the To- ronto International Film Festival in August %&&' and its U.S. premiere at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January %&&). !e 0lm’s website, noted in the last Circolwyrde (http://www.beowulf-movie.com), contains trailers, photos, press information, and much more.

Bibliographies

!e Old English Newsletter Bibliography database, a searchable version of the annual bibliography published in OEN, is now online at http://www.oenewsletter.org/OENDB/. !e database contains more than $(,'&& entries and ',&&& reviews, drawn from the annual OEN Bibliographies from $#(" to %&&%; it will be updated annually to incor- porate new OEN Bibliographies as they are published. Items can be searched by almost any combination of subject heading, keywords, author, title, journal, date, language, or type of item; search results can be saved, printed, or sent by email. !e database is free, but registration is required for use.

!e Royal Historical Society Bibliography (http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/dataset.asp), now presented in association with Irish History Online and London’s Past Online, underwent signi0cant improvements in %&&'. In addition to providing expansions and updates to the material published in !e Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD- ROM (Oxford: Oxford University Press, $##+) and the annual printed RHS Bibliographies, with thousands of new and carefully cross-referenced records added annually, the site now o/ers links to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the British National Register of Archives. It can also, in most cases, automatically detect whether a user is on a network with access to full-text collections such as Project MUSE or EDINA, and provide links to articles themselves, or to libraries containing books and journals.

Jim Marchand’s compendious list “What Every Medievalist Should Know,” or WEMSK, is mounted on the Online Reference Book (ORB) for Medieval Studies by Stephen M. Carey, http://www.the-orb.net/wemsk/wemskmenu. html. WEMSK was originally posted serially to the listserv MEDTEXT-L and is intended to “help the beginning or semi-advanced graduate student work up a new 0eld.” WEMSK "&, “Old English Literature,” appended by Tom Hill, includes essential bibliography to help students orient themselves in the 0eld. Related WEMSKs include Celtic, Norse, Gothic, Slavic languages and literatures, as well as Linguistics, History, Iconography, and Medieval Latin. 345678 "# 94. $ *#

In %&&*, Larry Swain compliled an extensive bibliography of “Saints on the Web,” which can be accessed at Western Michigan University’s website for the %&&) NEH Summer Seminar “Holy Men and Holy Women of Anglo-Saxon England” (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/academic/courses/&*sts/main.htm).

Drawing on the annual Bibliographies of the MLA, YWES, OEN, and Anglo-Saxon England, William Klein presents an online bibliography of the Exeter Book Riddles at http://www%.kenyon.edu/AngloSaxonRiddles/listing.htm.

Edward Pettit, editor and translator of Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library MS /2/: !e ‘Lacnunga’ (% vols. Mellen Critical Editions and Translations )a and )b. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, %&&$), provides a frequently-updated “Supplementary Bibliography for the Lacnunga and Anglo-Saxon Medicine and Magic” at http://www.yggdrasill.plus.com/html/lacnunga.html.

Important Indices

Most of the following resources are not actually new, but because of their utility each year’s Circolwyrde ends with such a list. !ough dozens of Anglo-Saxon hyper-indices may be found on the Web, few are as comprehensive or as mindfully updated (i.e., with fewer broken links, though the evolving nature of the internet makes these unavoid- able to some degree) as those listed below. If you are looking for a particular aspect of Anglo-Saxon language, history, culture or literature, start with these trusted indices.

!e Old English Pages are now a part of the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies (ORB); the Anglo-Saxon section of ORB (http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/early/pre$&&&/asindex.html) contains original essays, a substantial list of on-line texts and editions, and a broad range of teaching materials, other indices, and Old English Societies. ORB encourages submissions, and users should contact the site’s new Editor, Kathryn Talarico, at Editor@the-orb. net for further information.

Ansaxdat (http://www.mun.ca/Ansaxdat/) is the full-text database for the Listserv discussion group ANSAXNET; it allows one to search through thousands of postings from the past 01een years for speci0c discussions of Anglo- Saxon studies.

!e on-line journal !e Heroic Age maintains a sizable collection of Anglo-Saxon links (http://members.aol.com/ heroicage$/as.htm), ranging from scholarly to local levels, and including hyperindices of bibliography, history, archaeology, literature, education, art, manuscripts, religion, research projects and journals.

!e Labyrinth Library provides a basic but useful set of Old English links (http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/; choose “English, Old”); some links are in need of updating. !e Labyrinth has indexed its resources in a database, allowing for quick and concise searching of its architecture. Additionally, !e Labyrinth’s alphabetical index to Old English poetry (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/alpha.html) provides quick access to almost every poem in Old English.

!ough the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) Web Resources Page (http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/ toebi/www.html) includes textual and cultural catalogues similar to the indices described above, TOEBI’s strength lies in its list of on-line teaching materials.

Finally, Simon Keynes’s “Anglo-Saxon Index at Trinity College, Cambridge” (http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/sdk$"/ asindex.html) is so extensive and so well-maintained that it deserves a place on any list of 0rst-resort references.

OLD ENGLISH NEWSLETTER Research in Progress Report

Each year, the editors of the Old English Newsletter solicit information concerning current research, work completed, and forthcoming publications. !e Research in Progress reports are an important collaborative enterprise, recording information of common interest to our colleagues. Please complete the form below (type or print clearly) and return it to Heide Estes, Department of English, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ &(()* (or via email to [email protected]). If the subject of your project is not obvious from the title, please add a note indi- cating its best classi0cation. For dissertations, please provide the name of the director.

Name

Address

Academic A2liation (if not given above)

a=article, b=book or monograph, d=dissertation; IP=in progress, C=completed, TBP=to be published in/by.

.. Research in progress (aIP, bIP, dIP):

/. Research completed (aC, bC, dC):

0. Research forthcoming (TBP):

How to reach the Old English Newsletter

For all business correspondence, including publication information, subscriptions, back orders, Subsidia information, or to notify OEN of a change of address, please contact:

Publisher, Old English Newsletter Medieval Institute Western Michigan University $#&" W. Michigan Avenue Kalamazoo, MI *#&&+-'*"% phone: %)#-"+(-++"% / fax: %)#-"+(-+('& e-mail: [email protected] website: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/oen/index.html

As of volume "(, the editorial operations of OEN have moved to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. All correspondence regarding the editing of OEN, including submissions, should be sent to:

R. M. Liuzza Editor, Old English Newsletter Department of English, University of Tennessee "&$ McClung Tower Knoxville TN "(##)-&*"& phone: +)'-#(*-)#(& / fax: +)'-#(*-)#%) e-mail: [email protected]

Communications about the Year’s Work in Old English Studies should be sent to: Daniel Donoghue Department of English Barker Center, Harvard University Cambridge MA &%$"+ phone: )$(-*#'-%'&' / fax )$( *#)-+("( email: [email protected]

Communications about the Old English Bibliography, including citations and offprints, should be sent to:

Thomas N. Hall Department of English (M/C $)%) University of Illinois at Chicago )&$ S. Morgan Street Chicago, IL )&)&(-($%& e-mail: [email protected]

To submit abstracts of papers given at conferences for the annual appendix in the spring issue write to:

Robert M. Butler Dept. of English and Foreign Languages $&&& ASU Drive \$%& Alcorn State University Alcorn State, MS "#&#)-('&& phone: )&$-+((-)*&$ email: [email protected]

Send Research in Progress information (current research, work completed, and forthcoming publications) to:

Heide Estes Department of English Monmouth University West Long Branch, NJ &(()* fax: ("%-%)"-'%*% email: [email protected] OLD ENGLISH NEWSLETTER MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE NON-PROFIT WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY U.S. POSTAGE 1903 W. MICHGAN AVE. PAID KALAMAZOO, MI 490085432 PERMIT 478 KALAMAZOO, MI