THE DANGERS OF DISGUISE: OLD ENGLISH TEXTS IN MODERN PUNCTUATION

Abstract

I. THE author of The Seafarer observed that it is uncertain which one of three things-disease, old age, or violence-will take a man's life. Even the most profound pessimist must take comfort in the fact that, in this respect at any rate, things have not got worse. But the most determined optimist needs all his resolution as he contemplates the three things which are certain about punctuation in manuscripts of Old English: there is often not much of it; there is little agreement about its significance; it is not the punctuation of modern English or of modern German. For the rest there is uncertainty, dispute, and difference of opinion, about its naturesyntactical and grammatical or rhythmical and rhetorical?and about how OE texts should be punctuated today. So we have scholarly disagreement, with each writer interpreting the same facts differently and too often believing that he or she alone is right-a dilemma in which Skeat and Murray once found themselves during and after a tandem tricycle ride to Eynsham and from which they were rescued only by the intervention of Mrs Murray. But is the intervention of modern editors of OE texts always helpful or necessary? It is clear that modern readers cannot always grasp the exact nuance an Anglo-Saxon author, reader, or reciter, conveyed to his hearers. Even if we assume that there is only one such nuance and that the modern editor has grasped it, he cannot always convey it to others by modern punctuation, which is concerned with modern English as a written rather than as a spoken language, whereas in Old English (one ventures to think) we may sometimes have to do with the rhythms and clause terminals of something closer to speech than to writing. We all know the interchange which runs 'X is his own worst enemy'. 'Not while I'm alive!' I am beginning to think that the worst enemy of those trying to appreciate OE prose and poetry is the unmodified use by editors of a system of punctuation designed for an entirely different language, either modern German (as in Klaeber's Beowulf) or modern English (as in Dobbie's Beowulf). I am increasingly coming to believe that the use of modern punctuationthe function of which is syntactical-is forcing editors into unnecessary