BRUCE MITCHELL richly deserves a volume to honour his achievement in the field of Old English syntax: John Walmsley (ed.), Inside Old English, Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell. Introductory items include a foreword and introduction by the editor, and a tribute to Mitchell by Fred C. Robinson; both the editor and Robinson also contribute chapters to the book. The festschrift concludes with a bibliography of Mitchell's writings; and covering the whole book, select bibliography, list of editions used, index of names, index of Old English words and phrases, and index of subjects. These compilations make the book specially useful as a work of reference. Alfred Bammesberger provides ‘Eight Notes on the Beowulf Text’, some of them going back to earlier suggestions, others new. Daniel Donoghue contrasts manuscript punctuation with modern punctuation including the various suggested punctuations by Mitchell himself. Roberta Frank writes on rhetorical ways in verse, Old English and in related languages, chiefly by understating. Antonette diP. Healey deals with semantic problems as lexicographers and others face them. Risto Hiltunen rescues interjections from being considered marginal by linguists. Susan Irvine expounds in context and in relation to what she calls ‘the fiction of orality’, The Wanderer, line 54a, fleotendra ferð. Tadao Kubouchi, analysing Wulfstan's Scandinavianisms, places them in the ‘linguistic situation’ of the Danelaw. Michael Lapidge considers the problems connected with categorizing the incidence in Old English verse of hyperbaton (such as in later English ‘the cock … struts his dames before’ (L’Allegro, 49–52)); his philological approach to these postpositions is like that of syntacticians when analysing postpositions in Virgil in accordance with traditional philological practice. Bernard J. Muir touches on the many subjects relevant to Anglo-Saxon manuscript ‘anthologies’ with verse texts (not including Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 201 on which it would have been interesting to read Muir). Hiroshi Ogawa compares and contrasts two Easter homilies. Matti Rissanen shows how to witenne, frequent in non-legal texts, but, in fact, not recorded in any early legal text (as Rissanen shows in his full listing) underlies present-day English to wit, and is probably calqued on Latin. Fred C. Robinson deals once again with wearh in the light of a borrowing into Finnish; he corrects errors and misconceptions, but does not mention Michael Jacoby's relevant study (Upsala, 1974). John Walmsley's relates English grammatical categories to Latin terminology. Bruce Mitchell is referred to more than twenty times in this volume, so the index of names reveals: and no wonder, this book is dedicated to him, and much of what he has done underlies much subsequent work on Old English.