On the Punctuation of Juliana 114b

Abstract

In his1 attempt to prove that contemporary readers of Old English poetic manuscripts were aware of a principle requiring light auxiliaries2 to appear nowhere but in the first half-line of a clause, Daniel Donoghue draws attention to a ‘revealing mistake’ allegedly made by the scribe who copied Juliana 114b into the Exeter Book3. However, there is reason to believe that the ‘revealing mistake’ is no mistake at all and hence cannot serve the ends intended by Donoghue. I reproduce below the relevant verses (114b–6b) as rendered by Donoghue (Anglo-Saxons, p. 95), with manuscript punctuation but modern word division and lineation; the translation is Donoghue’s.4 Modern editors5 ignore the scribe’s punctuation as well as Donoghue’s principle of verse syntax and place sceal in the second half-line of the clause beginning with he þa. The punctus, Donoghue writes, ‘was likely conditioned by a scribe’s expectation that the verb (like every other sceal) should appear in the first half-line of a clause, and at the moment of copying he þa brydlufan sceal may have seemed like a plausible verse’ (Anglo-Saxons, p. 95). He goes on to argue that this half-line would, however, be metrically irregular ‘because a type B does not allow secondary stress between bryd and sceal’ (Anglo-Saxons, p. 96). The pointing leads Donoghue to suggest that the posited principle of verse syntax was so deeply ingrained in the scribe’s mind that they were completely unwilling to give it up even if that meant putting down an unmetrical half-line, the decision being of particular interest because scribes writing Old English verse almost never had to choose between the retention of metricality and acceptable verse syntax (Anglo-Saxons, p. 96).