Griffith, Mark. 2024. The Battle of Maldon: A New Critical Edition. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pp. xiv + 308. ISBN 9781835538067.

J.R.R. Tolkien, (trans.), <i>The Battle of Maldon: together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth</i>Mark Griffith (ed.), <i>The Battle of Maldon: A New Critical Edition</i>

Reviewed by: The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader Jane Chance The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader, edited by Turgon (David E. Smith) . Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004. 400 pp. $14.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1593600119. Foreword by Verlyn Flieger . Finally, someone has had the excellent sense to put together a collection of the medieval literary works most important to J. R. R. Tolkien, both as scholar and as fantasy writer, written in the translations of his day that he most likely knew. The Tolkien Fan's Medieval Reader was astutely collected by Turgon (David E. Smith) of TheOneRing.net, responsible for book reviews and interviews in the Green Books section and a co-author of The People's Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien (2003). This useful anthology presents mainly prose selections from Old English, Middle English, [End Page 271] Old Norse, Celtic (Welsh), and Finnish works in a variety of medieval genres—epic, lyric, chronicle, romance, dream vision, fabliau, beast fable, Breton lay, and saga. These works are a must-read for the educated reader of Tolkien, the university student, and the scholar who wants quick access to what Tolkien taught and spent his career researching. To have them—all out of print—available in one convenient paperback is a great boon. Although I do not have the space here to analyze why and how the selections in each section are appropriate to the study and understanding of Tolkien, I can single out the Old and Middle English as especially significant, and suggestive of Turgon's approach in the other sections. The Old English section begins with the all-important Beowulf, about which Tolkien wrote a seminal and groundbreaking essay that changed the study of Anglo-Saxon and coincided with Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit. As epic it surely helped charge Tolkien's own version in The Lord of the Rings. The translation is by John Clark Hall (1911), as is the unfinished Finnsburg Fragment that follows; Tolkien wrote a foreword to Clark Hall's translation that praises it for being literally accurate rather than figurative, and, therefore, more faithful to the original Anglo-Saxon and the intent of the poet. "The Wanderer" (whose "ubi sunt" passage is paraphrased by Aragorn when the fellowship reaches Anglo-Saxon-shaped Rohan) and "The Seafarer" (a figure that repeatedly appears in the Silmarillion mythology in characters such as Aelfwine and Earendil) have been translated by Nora Kershaw (1922)—the Old Norse scholar Nora K. Chadwick, who also translated the Saga of King Heidrek the Wise later in the volume. "The Battle of Maldon" appears, too, for which Tolkien wrote the verse-drama sequel, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son" (1953). Middle English begins, equally appropriately for Tolkien, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Jessie L. Weston (1898). Weston's book on the origins of the Grail Quest, From Ritual to Romance (1920), was indebted to the ideas of Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough. The romance of Sir Gawain Tolkien himself coedited, with E.V. Gordon, in a critical edition (1925) that remains standard today. Tolkien also translated both it and the dream vision poem Pearl (1975) (here, translated by Charles G. Osgood, Jr.) and delivered a lecture about the former in Scotland (1953). Of the Chaucerian Canterbury Tales selected, the Reeve's Tale isimportant because of Tolkien's influential philological essay on the northern and southern dialects of Middle English used by the two country-bumpkin clerks and the wily miller (1934), which most likely helped shape Tolkien's treatment of rustics in his own fairy-tales.So also the Breton lay Franklin's Tale, with its emphasis on courtly love in marriage, influenced Tolkien's "Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (1945). [End Page 272] In the remainder of the volume, two Old Norse sagas appear, from Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, translated by famed Beowulf scholar Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), and a "saga of ancient times" with a riddle-match reminiscent of Bilbo's with Gollum, again, by Chadwick (1921); five tales from the Welsh Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1849);and the extremely important Finnish tale of the...

<i>Scholarly Milton</i>. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

222 Reviews Bullock: 'The advantage to this kind of constraint based approach over rule based approaches is that it obviates the need forderivations in phonology' (p. 55). Such opposing assertions prove that, happily, aftermore than a decade, something is starting to move in phonological theory. But, if they keep within the domain of untestable formal constructs, they are little more than rhetorical exercises of fittingdata into theories?instead of searching for a theory to fitthe data. The clearest conclusion from this book may be, perhaps, that phonological theory has much to gain from contact with Italian dialectology. It is true that most dialectologists have tried to work in isolation from modern (generativist) theories. This has been regrettable for dialectologists themselves, who may have missed important generalizations, but also for theoreticians, who have tended to produce increasingly abstract artefacts. But, as this volume proves, even if Italian generative dialectologists may be considered small in number, that is not coextensive with saying that Italian theory-oriented dialectologists are not many. Let us hope that this book might be a step on the road for Romance dialectology to regain the leading role in theoretical innovation that it had a century ago, at the time of Gillieron and Gauchat. University of Salamanca Carmen Pensado Two Spanish Songbooks: The 'Cancionero Capitular de la Colombina' (SV2) and the 'Cancionero de Egerton' (LB3). Ed. by Dorothy Sherman Severin; editorial assistant Fiona Maguire. (Hispanic Studies TRAC, 11) Liverpool and Seville: Liverpool University Press and Institucion Colombina. 2000. 438 pp. ?47.95 (pbk ?22.95). ISBN 0-85323-650-x (pbk 0-85323-109-5). This edition oftwo fifteenth-centurycancioneros provides wider access to manuscripts until now available only in the partial edition of Brian Dutton (El cancionero del siglo XV (c. 1360-1520), ed. by Brian Dutton, musical cancioneros ed. by Jineen Krogstad, 7 vols (Salamanca: Biblioteca Espanola del Siglo XV and Universidad de Salamanca, 1990, 1991), where incomplete editions of SV2 and LB3 appear in vols iv, 301-14, and 1,359-72, respectively. The Introduction (pp. 1-34) consists of a description and brief analysis of the contents of both manuscripts, followed by an index which supplies the Dutton ID number foreach composition, details of its metrical structure (if appropriate), author, title (where relevant), and first line or first stanza. Next comes an account of the genealogical relationship of the two cancioneros derived from earlier criticism. In the Norms of Transcription the editor expresses the aim of providing 'a diplomatic, readable version ofthe two texts and not a critical edition with extensive critical apparatus' (p. 31). This section concludes with a bibliography. The nucleus of the edition consists of the texts of SV2 (pp. 35-276) and LB3 (pp. 277-430). Both texts are provided with abundant palaeographic notes at the end of each section. An Author Index (pp. 431-34) and an index of first lines or first stanzas completes the volume. In the form in which they are presented, the texts represent an adequate fulfilment ofthe objectives articulated by the editor: 'to make a corpus of hitherto unedited texts of cancioneros available to students and scholars' (p. 31). The question arises, however, as to whether an edition directed not only at scholars but also at students might not also profitably include a minimum number of footnotes devoted to the lexical, histor? ical, and literary background, since it is improbable that all students will be familiar with terms such as adarve, blanchetes, or xorginos, or able to place either Macias or Juan de Merlo in a precise context. The editorial method seems more directed at the experienced medievalist than the beginner. MLR, 98.1, 2003 223 Greater attention to these considerations would have allowed the editor to avoid some inexactitudes, e.g. in the faulty placing ofthe reference [ID0091 P0050]. Dut? ton' s reference is to Santillana's prose prologue to his Proverbios, and not to Pero Diaz de Toledo's preface to his commentary on Santillana's poem. Severin appears to confuse the two, however, misplacing the Dutton reference, which should appear on page 47 of the edition before the paragraph which heads Santillana's work '[S][ere]nisymo &bienaventuradoprincipe[. ..]', rather than on page...

Books Received Mark I. West Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London. Edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Rees-man. New York: Modern Language Association, 2015. Although Jack London is not known primarily as a children's author, he regularly published short stories in children's magazines, and a few of his works are often classified as children's books, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Several of the contributors to this volume provide insights into teaching these two novels as well as some of London's other works that appeal to child readers. Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald. By Edward Prime-Stevenson. Edited by Eric L. Tribunella. Richmond, VA: Valancourt, 2016. In this critical edition, Eric L. Tribunella provides a scholarly introduction, explanatory notes, and five appendices. As Tribunella explains in his introduction, the original publication of Left to Themselves in 1891 marked the beginning of gay literature for young adults. Roald Dahl's Marvellous Medicine. By Tom Solomon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Tom Solomon is a physician and a professor of neurological science. He and Roald Dahl met in 1990 when Dahl was one of his patients at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The two became friends and often discussed their shared interest in medical science. In this memoir, Solomon recounts his relationship with Dahl and discusses the latter's fascination with the medical world. South African Young Adult Literature in English, 2000-2014. By Sandra Stadler. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. Sandra Stadler places South African young adult literature within the country's contemporary cultural, social, and political context. She explores how issues related to race, gender, and class are reflected in South African novels for adolescent readers. [End Page 345] Copyright © 2017 Children's Literature Association

The Battle of Maldon: A New Critical Edition, by Mark Griffith

Moral and social geographies of modern Liverpool - John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. xxi + 298pp. 17 figures. 10 tables. 1 map. Bibliography. £80.00 hbk. £19.99 pbk. - Peter Adey, David J. Cox and Barry Godfrey, Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz: Protecting the Population of Bombed Cities, London:

Journal Article The excitable cortex in conscious man. By Wilder Penfield, O.M., C.M.G., Litt.B., M.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.S., Hon. F.R.C.P., F.R.S., Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The Sherrington Lectures, No. 5. 8½ × 5 ½ in. Pp. 42 + x, with 15 illustrations. 1958. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. IOS. 6d Get access The excitable cortex in conscious man. By WilderPenfield, O.M., C.M.G., Litt.B., M.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.S., Hon. F.R.C.P., F.R.S., Director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The Sherrington Lectures, No. 5. 8½ × 5 ½ in. Pp. 42 + x, with 15 illustrations. 1958. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. IOS. 6d British Journal of Surgery, Volume 46, Issue 196, September 1958, Page 187, https://doi.org/10.1002/bjs.18004619627 Published: 05 December 2005

The project is part of a larger body of work and collection of photographs and writing, which responds to the landmarks and sites cited or alluded to in Malcolm Lowry's novel In Ballast to the White Sea. A methodology which is rooted in autoethnographic artist practices and journey retraces the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry over the Wirral to Liverpool, across the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man, to Vancouver and elsewhere. The events and encounters are recorded in a practice, which traverses the same terrain or one which stands in for the same as well as encompassing the potential for a detour which leads to new experience and what in psychogepgraphic terms is referred to as a derive. From the Liverpool University Press website: An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. ‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLS This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjorn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’. ‘Remaking the Voyage makes a major contribution to Lowry studies, perhaps unsurprisingly given the strength of the academic contributors. It genuinely advances humanistic knowledge of Lowry’s In Ballast, additionally offering an intriguing identity politics argument or interpretive nexus, comprising cultural and geographical location, class and political awareness/affiliation.’ - Professor Richard J. Lane, Vancouver Island University Author Information Helen Tookey teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published two poetry collections with Carcanet Press: Missel-Child (2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize 2015) and City of Departures (2019, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019). She is the author of Anais Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford University Press, 2003) and co-editor, with Bryan Biggs, of Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press, 2009). Bryan Biggs has worked at Bluecoat, Liverpool’s contemporary arts centre, for over four decades, curating numerous exhibitions, and live art programmes. In 2017 he directed Bluecoat’s tercentenary year. He writes on contemporary culture and is co-editor, with Julie Sheldon of Art in a City Revisited (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and, with John Belchem, of Liverpool City of Radicals (Liverpool University Press, 2011).

THE LIFE AND WORK OF THOMAS PORTER McMURRAY. By Bryan McFarland, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the University of Liverpool. 8½ x 5½ in. Pp. 12, with portrait photograph frontispiece. 1958. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Paper cover. Price 5s

Constantine and Christendom, The oration to the saints. The Greek and Latin accounts of the discovery of the cross. The edict of Constantine to Pope Silvester. Translated with introduction and notes by Mark Edwards. (Translated Texts for Historians, 39.) Pp. xlvii+143. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. £12.95 (paper). 0 85323 648 8 - Volume 55 Issue 2

From Colony to Nation Rebecca Earle (bio) Simón Bolívar: A Life. By John Lynch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 350. $35.00 paper. South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text. By Catherine Davies, Claire Brewster, and Hilary Owen. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Pp. 321. £50.00 cloth. Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations. By Matthew Brown. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Pp. 266. £50.00 cloth. Freedom's Mercenaries: British Volunteers in the Wars of Independence of Latin America, Volume I: Northern South America. By Moisés Enrique Rodríguez. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. 426. $58.00 paper. Freedom's Mercenaries: British Volunteers in the Wars of Independence of Latin America, Volume II: Southern South America. By Moisés Enrique Rodríguez. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. 524. $58.00 paper. El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808–1824: Una revisión historiográfica del liberalismo hispánico. By Roberto Breña. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2006. Pp. 580. $37.00 cloth. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. By Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Pp. 296 $39.95 cloth. Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin-American Intellectual Tradition: A Reader. Edited and translated by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007. Pp. 366. $47.95 cloth. What caused the Spanish-American wars of independence? Was it the philosophical influence of the Enlightenment, the disruptive impact of the Bourbon reforms, the slow development of Creole patriotism, the destabilization provoked by the Peninsular War or some combination of these and other factors? Many nineteenth-century savants were quite certain that the answer lay in the distinctive Iberian heritage introduced into the continent [End Page 241] by its Spanish colonizers. Independence, wrote the Argentine historian president Bartolomé Mitre, originated in the "individualistic spirit" that the conquistadors "bequeathed through their blood to their descendants, together with their instincts for independence." Creoles, the heirs to this legacy, were therefore the authors of independence: "they invented Spanish-American independence and they alone founded the republic and alone they made it triumph," he wrote in 1859.1 "Intimations of our independence palpitated in the innermost desires of the first conquistadors," agreed the Mexican scholar and politician Justo Sierra.2 While the Creoles, drawing on this Hispanic essence, championed the cause of independence, other sectors of the population were declared either to have stood aloof from this apogee of national self-expression or to have supported the Spanish crown. In either case, such indifference to patriotic sentiments surely resulted from some grave defect that impeded active participation in national politics. Indians in particular had failed to play an "active and intelligent part" in the Peruvian independence process because of their "mental backwardness," in the view of the conservative priest Bartolomé Herrera.3 Current understandings of how different sectors of society engaged with the independence process naturally eschew explanations based on mental inadequacy, and scholars have also questioned the view that nonelites viewed independence uniquely with hostility. A number of innovative works have probed the independence-era activities of indigenous villagers, free people of color, and other subaltern groups, and a growing number of studies—including one reviewed here—consider the role of women in promoting independence.4 The significance of the Creole elite to the independence process remains, however, undisputed. Leaders such as Simón Bolívar continue to occupy the position of honor they were accorded by nineteenth-century historia patria, although interpretations of their actions have altered significantly. In John Lynch's magnificent new biography [End Page 242] of the liberator, the origins of Bolívar's commitment to independence are located not in his innate Spanish heritage, but rather in the Bourbon monarchy's "deconstruction of the creole state" (29) and the subsequent alienation of the Creole elite. Bolívar's extensive familiarity with Enlightenment texts infused his rhetoric, but, Lynch stresses, ideology alone was not the motor that powered Bolívar's vision of an independent America...

ANNE WOLFF, How Many Miles to Babylon? Travels and Adventures to Egypt and Beyond, from 1300 to 1640 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003). Pp. 311, £40.00 cloth; £12.50 paper - Volume 37 Issue 1

Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II, A plea made in 1395 for peace between England and France, Original Text and English Version of Epistre au roi Richart, introduced and translated by G. W. Coopland, Liverpool University Press, 1975, XXXIV–152 p. - Volume 33 Issue 1

Saeko Yoshikawa. William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940. Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850 12. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $120.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 3