A Little-Known Variant Text of the Old English Metrical Psalms

Abstract

fragment of Old English poetry edited here for the first time since 1889 parallels the text of the Paris 90.16.1-95.2.1.' It is found in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.17.1, Eadwine's Psalter, a-lavishly decorated and illustrated codex from twelfth-century Christ Church, Canterbury, that presents parallel texts of the Gallican, Roman, and Hebrew psalters. Between the lines of the Roman version is a contemporary interlinear gloss in Old English.2 N. R. Ker describes it: The gloss is word for word, except on ff. 164/25-170v, where a metrical translation covers Pss. 9015 Eripiam-952 nomen (except Ps. 921,2). This translation, which begins 'Ic hine generie' and ends 'naemaen', agrees closely with no. 367 [the Paris Psalter] (ed. Krapp 63/4-68/3). fact that it is in a different hand from the gloss immediately before and after it suggests that the glossator's immediate exemplar was defective at this point and that the gap in the OE translation was supplied slightly later from another manuscript.3 unusual circumstances of this fragment's preservation explain how it escaped the attention of all four editors of the Paris Psalter: one does not ordinarily look for Old English poetry between the lines of a Latin psalter. Kenneth and Celia Sisam discussed the fragment (here called EP; I call the manuscript itself E) briefly but intelligently in their portion of the introduction to the facsimile of the Paris Psalter (p. 17), but for the most part notices of EP have tended to be dismissive. Harsley's transcript is detailed and careful (his notes remain valuable because they record features difficult to see in the otherwise excellent facsimile by James), but it is little more than a