Vercelli Book Research Articles

The Musical Devil Revisited

Abstract This article argues that modern examples of the Devil as a player of plucked and bowed stringed instruments extend early medieval representations of the Devil’s music as a powerfully persuasive force that can be used to draw souls toward Satan and, conversely, to defend against his musical machinations. By examining Homily X of the Vercelli Book (c. tenth century) in relation to early medieval music theory, the legend of St. Dunstan, and modern examples of the fiddle-playing Devil, this article demonstrates that the musical Devil and his opponents show every sign of sustaining the motif’s power into the future.

IIOld English

Abstract This chapter has ten sections: 1. Manuscript Studies; 2. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 3. Literature: General; 4. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 5. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 6. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 7. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 8. Other Poems; 9. Prose; 10. Reception. Section 1 is by Rachel A. Burns; sections 2 and 9 are by Margaret Tedford; section 3 is by Margaret Tedford with contributions by Rachel A. Burns; section 4 is by Niamh Kehoe; sections 5 and 7 are by Rafael J. Pascual; section 6 is by Emma Knowles; sections 8 and 10 are by Eleni Ponirakis.

Preaching to the Choir Fantastic: Conversion and Racial Liminality in Elene

ABSTRACT In Cynewulf’s Elene — an Old English verse narrative in the Inventio Crucis tradition, which survives in the Vercelli Book — the figure of Judas stands out among the Jews of Jerusalem as the only person present who can answer Helena’s questions about the location of the True Cross. Although critical consensus has considered Judas to be an archetypal representative of the Jewish population of the city, this article argues that the poem actually constructs the religious race of Judas as a strangely liminal one, shifting him back and forth between the categories of Jew and Christian. Drawing upon concepts from medieval critical race studies and work on Jewish-Christian relations, it examines how Judas’s racial liminality lays the groundwork for the narrative’s culminating anti-Semitic fantasy of effortless universal conversion; furthermore, it offers a critique of allegorical reading practices in medievalist scholarship, and underscores the need for deliberate distancing between the medieval text and the modern reader.

Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions

Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions

MANUSCRIPTS OF ANGLO-SAXON PROSE AND POETRY

There are actually four manuscripts in which Old English or Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved. The vast majority of all extant Old English poetry is contained in these four books. Though damaged partially, they are safe today at various places. These manuscripts are mainly known as The Exeter Book, Junius Manuscript, Nowell Codex and Vercelli Book. These books are unique in their own way. These manuscripts are the only sources by which we would know something of Old English poetry or prose today. In this paper, I would try to give brief explanation of how significant these manuscripts are in connection with Old English literature. The Old English Period or the AngloSaxon Period begins from the fifth century till 1066 i.e. from the arrival of Jutes, Angles and Saxons into England around 450 AD until the Norman Conquest in 1066. During this period, lot of literature was written anonymously; most of the poems were not titled; lot many works were burnt; some works were also lost due to invasions; everything had to be written manually due to lack of printing press; until first printing press was introduced in England by William Caxton in 1476, there was hardly any guaranty for the survival of any work; so survival of any text should be treated as a ‘luck’. Despite all these problems, there are some important works which could survive and are preserved in four manuscripts, which I will discuss in this paper.

II Old English

AbstractThis chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 9, and 11 are by Eleni Ponirakis; section 2 is by Rachel Burns and Colleen Curran; sections 3, 4, and 10 are by Margaret Tedford; section 5 is by Niamh Kehoe; section 6 is by Rafael J. Pascual; section 7 is by Emma Knowles; section 8 is by Rachel Burns and Kaifan Yang.

The Ruthwell Cross Inscription and The Dream of the Rood line 58

ABSTRACT This article examines the divergence between line 58a of the text of The Dream of the Rood preserved in the Vercelli Book (tō þām æðelinge) and the corresponding verse in the text inscribed on the Ruthwell Cross (æþþilæ til anum). Scholars have tended to regard these variants as a pair of equally meritorious readings, which are metrically acceptable and contextually plausible. It is here argued, to the contrary, that the verse preserved on the Ruthwell Cross is the decidedly superior reading on account of its conformity to subtle regularities in the diction applied to Christ and his retainers. For various reasons, the verse tō þām æðelinge should be regarded as a scribal corruption of æþþilæ til anum, the anterior and superior reading.

Edition Visualization Technology Project

Reviewed by: Edition Visualization Technology Project Hannelore Segers Edition Visualization Technology Project. http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/ With the establishment of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and its straightforward guidelines, scholars and organizations have gained access to a useful and popular standard for creating digital editions. These guidelines have proven to be particularly helpful for researchers in the field of digital manuscript studies, not least because even people who are relatively inexperienced with coding languages can quickly learn the tagging process for marking up their own text. Yet while TEI is an approachable option for the creation of an edition, it does not offer standard ways to publish that edition or to leverage the full potential of the initiative’s customizability. Once a markup has been completed, many scholars must still turn to specialist assistance as they attempt to visualize and publish their edition, whether that be on a single device or on a website. This situation may be about to change, thanks to the Edition Visualization Technology Project (EVT). The initiative is an offshoot of another project, the Digital Vercelli Book, an online digital edition of the tenth-century Codex Vercellensis, which is currently being developed by a team of student researchers at the University of Pisa, under the supervision of Professor Roberto Rosselli Del Turco. EVT’s goal is to create a lightweight, open-source tool that can bridge the gap between TEI markup and web visualization, and its user base would be editors and scholars who may not be familiar with web programming or do not have access to host resources for digital editions. At present, there are two versions of the tool: the first iteration, EVT 1, which is still supported and available for download; and EVT 2, which introduces new features but is currently in beta. EVT 1 was specifically designed to give users the ability to create an image-based digital edition combining manuscript images and a TEI-encoded transcription. One of its most attractive features is its power to integrate images of the manuscript into a digital edition. Not only does it facilitate distribution of both the images and the edition to a wide audience of researchers, but it can be easily employed in an educational context—for example, in discussions on paleography or codicology. Particularly impressive is its image-text linking function, inspired by Martin Holmes’s Image Markup Tool, which highlights parallel lines in both the image and the TEI-encoded text. [End Page 340] Unfortunately, EVT 1, while able to create a diplomatic and diplomatic-interpretative edition, cannot produce a critical edition of the text. For scholars who want to create traditional critical editions of texts rather than focus on the transcription of individual codices, this presents a crucial limitation. To remedy that issue, the creators developed EVT 2, which allows uses to construct a critical apparatus, a sources apparatus, a variant heat map, witness collation, and other features of the TEI parallel segmentation method allowing variants of a text to be expressed with an <app> element. We can see this critical edition in action in the experimental encoding of the Edizione Logica Avicennae, which encodes all variants of the text. (A sample edition extract was accessed through the EVT download.) Importantly, EVT 2 lets users customize their interaction with the witnesses; for instance, scholars may choose to access the different witnesses in a synoptic view or to focus on one witness and display the apparatus either within or separately from the text. In the case of the Edizione Logica Avicennae, the apparatus can also distinguish and separate variants that are orthographic in nature. (Of course, the encoding also makes this possible.) Both EVT 1 and EVT 2 offer many customizable features, and I will mention a few that in my view have especially great potential. Available in both versions is support for named entities and integration of the VisColl software tool. This is important for two reasons. First, for ease of searchability, most TEI users avail themselves of the many possible tags for names of places, persons, and organizations. EVT offers them the possibility of displaying the editor-created lists of named entities on the eventual webpage, thereby establishing...

Asceticism in Old English and Syriac Soul and Body Narratives

A great deal of scholarship on Old English soul-body poetry centers on whether or not the presence of dualist elements in the poems are unorthodox in their implication that the body, as a material object, is not only wicked but seems to possess more agency in the world than the soul. I argue that the Old English soul-body poetry is not heterodox or dualist, but is best understood, as Allen J. Frantzen suggests, within the “context of penitential practice.” The seemingly unorthodox elements are resolved when read against the backdrop of pre-Conquest English monastic reform culture, which was very much concerned with penance, asceticism, death, and judgment. Focusing especially on two anonymous 10th-century Old English poems, Soul and Body I in the Vercelli Book and Soul and Body II in the Exeter Book, I argue that that both body and soul bear equal responsibility in achieving salvation and that the work of salvation must be performed before death, a position that was reinforced in early English monastic literature that was inspired, at least in part, by Eastern ascetics such as fourth-century Syrian hymnologist and theologian, St. Ephraim.

II Old English

Abstract This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 9, and 11 are by Eleni Ponirakis; section 2 is by Rachel Burns and Colleen Curran, with contributions by Eleni Ponirakis; sections 3, 4, and 10 are by Margaret Tedford, with contributions from Eleni Ponirakis in section 3; section 5 is by Niamh Kehoe; section 6 is by Rebecca Hardie; section 7 is by Emma Knowles; section 8 is by Kaifan Yang.

How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems. Daniel Donoghue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 238.

<i>How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems</i>. Daniel Donoghue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 238.

Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text ed. by Charles Insley and Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Reviewed by: Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text ed. by Charles Insley and Gale R. Owen-Crocker Greg Waite Insley, Charles, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, eds, Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, Oxford and Philadelphia, Oxbow Books, 2017; paperback; pp. xviii, 136; 30 colour and 16 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £38.00; ISBN 9781785704970. This volume contains five lectures delivered at Manchester University between 2009 and 2014, with an introduction by Gale Owen-Crocker, and an index. As proclaimed in the title, 'transformation' is a key theme explored in the lectures, highlighting the Anglo-Saxon capacity for 'adaptation to new circumstances' (p. xv). All contributors have long and distinguished careers and the experience and breadth of vision necessary to explore successfully such a theme. In different ways, each lecture provides a window into and a summation of their respective research interests. John Hines's contribution is titled 'A New Chronology and New Agenda: The Problematic Sixth Century'. This lecture arises out of the large-scale, multi-authored research report edited by Hines and Alex Bayliss, Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries ad: A Chronological Framework (England Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2013). Hines discusses the team's revision of major material-cultural dates bounding the period of particular types of furnished burial, previously placed with the period c. 570–720, but, under the revised chronology, considered to span the period c. 530–680. Within the first half of this period, observed shifts in material culture in both male and female graves raise new questions about the environmental and sociopolitical circumstances that may lie behind the steep decline in burial with grave-goods around 570, followed [End Page 261] by a resurgence, particularly for female graves, after the first quarter of the seventh century. In 'Anglo-Saxon Art: Tradition and Transformation', Leslie Webster draws on themes explored in her major study, Anglo-Saxon Art (Cornell University Press, 2012). Ranging over six centuries of Anglo-Saxon art, from zoomorphic decoration and figural decoration on the earliest metalwork (and the brooding pottery figure on a cremation urn lid from Spong Hill) to the Bayeux Tapestry, Webster focuses on the nature of visual literacy and the decoding (as in riddles) of artistic motifs in the pagan period, running through their adaptation and fusion with imported traditions mainly introduced with the advent of Christianity. Both before and after this watershed in artistic traditions, the Anglo-Saxons succeeded in transforming traditions unique to their particular insular environment. Barbara Yorke's 'King Alfred and Weland: Tradition and Transformation at the Court of King Alfred' assesses the degree to which Alfred had transformed himself into a philosopher king (as his biographer Asser portrays him) in relation to the traditional expectations of a war leader. The appeal to Alfred of heroic and martial figures like Weland and Hercules, either already present or inserted into his translations, and his idiosyncratic treatment of free will in the translation of Boethius suggest (together with his portrayal in the Chronicle) that he wished to present himself as a martial figure as much as if not more than an intellectual one. Michelle Brown, in a wide-ranging lecture titled 'Strategies of Visual Literacy in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Book Culture', explores the 'complex cognitive challenges of fully integrated word, sound and image' (p. 99) initiated in book culture in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Brown's mastery of her field is evident in, for example, her exegesis of the Ezra portrait in Codex Amiatinus as encapsulating the dynamics of scholarship and pastoral care in early book production. In 'The Vercelli Book as a Context for The Dream of the Rood', Éamonn Ó'Carragáin examines how the poem fits into a context of thematically selected texts dealing with approaching death and Judgement. He considers the manuscript to be an old-fashioned one, reflecting the culture of pre-Benedictine reform houses of canons. Equally interesting is the author's discussion of the other two texts of the Dream in context: that is, on the Brussels Cross and the Ruthwell Cross respectively. This book will be essential...

Представление о душе и теле в древнеанглийской традиции

The author examines the 10 th century ancient English poem Soul and Body through the prism of the soul, spirit and body in the Old English tradition, which has survived in two versions. The first, which was part of the poetry book Exeter Book, is a short version of the conversion of the unfortunate soul to the flesh. The second version is an expanded version of the poem, listed in the Vercelli Book along with Christian sermons and poems, also represents the con- version of the tormented soul to the flesh, as well as a monologue of the saved soul. However, unfortunately, the speech of the redeemed soul was not fully preserved due to damage to the Vercelli Book collection. This article provides an author's translation of the second version of the poem. The article focuses on the dualism of René Descartes. Thus, an extended version of the Old English poem Soul and Body precedes the dualism of René Descartes, whose main ideas are the duality of the ideal and the material, the independence of the soul and body. The philosophy of René Descartes is to accept a common source – God as the creator who forms these two independent principles that we find in this poem. The spirit, as shown in the work, is the divine principle in man, created in the image and likeness of God, and appears as the highest part of the soul, and the soul, in turn, is the immortal spiritual principle. In the framework of the Judeo- Christian culture, a central doctrine of the presence of the soul arose, suggesting the elevation of man over all other living beings due to the presence of it. According to religious ideology, a person’s position in the dolly and mountain worlds directly depends on the purity of the believer’s soul, on his refusal from sinful thoughts and deeds. As soon as the Judeo-Christian teaching is fixed as the main religion, a person endowed with a soul is considered as the only ration- al creature created in the image and likeness of God. The existence of the soul is not limited only to the Judeo-Christian idea of the world around us, for example, the Quran also contains the idea of the unity of man and soul, and, undoubtedly, the soul of a righteous Muslim ascends to heaven after death.

'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England by Ciaran Arthur

Reviewed by: 'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England by Ciaran Arthur Ilona Tuomi Keywords Anglo-Saxon magic, divination, Anglo-Saxon charms, galdor, Christianity, paganism, the Exeter Book, Beowulf, Vercelli Book, Vitellius Psalter, liturgy, gibberish charms, early medieval England ciaran arthur. 'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 252; 3 illustrations. Having heard Ciaran Arthur present his studies on Anglo-Saxon charms (back then without the scare quotes), I was very excited to learn that he has published a full monograph on the topic. And I, for one, am very pleased by the result: Arthur's new publication is fresh, original, provocative, and well presented. It is also timely; for even if charm studies are very much alive and strong at the moment, and one hardly sees a medieval charms paper without the manuscript context being discussed, Arthur's work develops the study of the manuscript contexts into a full argument about textual genres. One might wonder why Arthur has chosen to include those scare quotes around the word "charm" in his title. This becomes very evident already in the Introduction as Arthur states that his book "offers a re-evaluation of the concept of'charms' in Anglo-Saxon culture and proposes an alternative reading of these rituals as mainstream Christian rites." He then lists three principal issues that his publication engages with: 1) "the translation of the Old English noun 'galdor' as 'charm'"; 2) "the manuscript contexts of rituals that are included in this corpus"; and 3) "the phenomenon of'gibberish' writing that is used as a defining characteristic of'charms'" (2). Plenty of water has flowed under the bridge since the antiquarian Thomas Oswald Cockayne completed his three-volume work Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England in 1866. As Arthur relates, Cockayne identified a total of thirty-two rituals from ten Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as belonging to the "charm" tradition (3). After this, as is shown in Arthur's overview of the historiography of the genre, scholars have added more rituals to this corpus. In short, traditional "understandings of'charms' have imposed connotations of magic, paganism, occultism, and superstition onto definitions of the Old English galdor" (17). Arthur endeavours to set the record straight by going back to the primary texts and contexts—both the manuscript contexts and the greater historical milieu in which these texts were written down by the medieval scribes—in order to argue that "'charms' were written down as experimental Christian rituals in late Anglo-Saxon England." According to Arthur, once these texts are read in their proper manuscript contexts, they "raise critical questions about Anglo-Saxon paganism, and they offer important insights into early English Christianity" (2). Arthur's book is divided into three parts according to the three core issues ofhis study, the first ofwhich engages with the translation ofthe Old English noun galdor (pl. galdru) as "charm." In Chapter 1, "Kill or Cure: Anglo-Saxon [End Page 164] Understanding of Galdor," Arthur explores the different non-ritual texts which use this word. Given that the Toronto Dictionary of Old English offers a wealth of definitions for the word galdor (including "poem," "song," "incantation," "charm," "spell," "illusion," "deception," "snake-charmer," "enchanter," "wizard," "divination," "soothsaying," "prophesying," "necromancy," "communication with the dead," "sorcery," and "sound/call of a horn"), I salute Arthur for having risen to the challenge of thoroughly investigating the instances in which the word actually appears and how the AngloSaxon scribes used it (21). This emic approach is not always covered in scholarship—even though, in my opinion, it is crucial in studying charms (or "charms") in any given language group at an any given time period. Arthur thus ploughs through examples in which the word galdor appears. The non-condemnatory instances of using the word (outside the actual ritual use) are found in saints' lives, wisdom poems, two riddles, and in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, where galdor is used to describe "the sound of a horn in battle and a supernatural barrier that protects the dragon's hoard" (24). According to Arthur, most surviving appearances of galdor (this means over one hundred...

II Old English

Abstract This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 5, and 9 are by Simon Thomson and Eric Lacey; sections 2, 6, 7, and 8 are by Simon Thomson; sections 3, 4, 10, and 11 are by Eric Lacey.

Male and Female Devotion in Three Texts of the Vercelli Book: Vercelli VII, XVII and Elene

ABSTRACTIn this article, I propose that the interaction of male and female devotion is a significant concern in three texts of the Vercelli Book, Vercelli Homily VII, Vercelli XVII and Cynewulf’s Elene. I consider the repetition of theme and trends in the adaptation of source material across these three texts to show how they each emphasise women’s obedience to God and generosity towards the church. Studies of the Vercelli Book have conventionally assumed a male audience. In this article, I argue that Vercelli VII, Vercelli XVII and Elene could have been read with considerable effect in a context commensurate with their internal evidence, where male and female devotion had shared economic and spiritual goals. In this article I re-evaluate evidence for the interaction of male and female religious in Anglo-Saxon England and propose that the selection of texts in the Vercelli Book reflects this mixed gender context.

IIOld English

This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Cultural and Intellectual Contexts; 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 5, and 9 are by Victoria Symons; sections 2, 6, 7, and 8 are by Simon Thomson; sections 3, 4, 10, and 11 are by Eric Lacey.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (review)

Reviewed by: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman Peter Fields Neil Gaiman. Norse Mythology. New York & London: Norton, 2017. 299p. Neil Gaiman has been in the vanguard of what might be called—or dismissed as—young adult fantasy literature. Now read by all ages, this genre spans J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. With his Sandman graphic novel, Gaiman first caught the attention of a young audience and quickly moved to the forefront of what fantasy is doing in our time. Norse Mythology evidences his growth as a writer whose stories may be read aloud to children at bedtime, but whose resonance meets [End Page 324] the criteria of serious literature. He fully captures the outrageous and the awful, the hilarious and the poignant qualities of the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda in a superbly paced style with telling detail and humorous dialogue. It is strikingly effective, both for young people whose minds are open to wonder or for college students alert to the Northern legacy that permeates the Early English tradition: Beowulf, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book, Caxton’s Mallory, or even (or especially) Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essential volume allows us to grasp—under one cover in a few sittings—the full power and range of what we sometimes call the “Northern” influence on English literature and popular culture. Indeed, what drew Gaiman’s interest to Norse mythology was the discrepancy between the latter day Norse heroes as depicted in Marvel comic books and their original forbears who were more complicated and idiosyncratic. One of the difficult things about the original stories is precisely their penchant for odd details, desultory adventures and journeys, and other disparate motifs that are handled with surprising grace. The author interprets as he retells the stories, highlighting the eccentric folklore details with a significance that feels true and authentic. The reader takes away an impression of a vast, tragic panorama of gods whose time in this world is cyclical. They will pass away: “In addition, I learned, the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die” (12). Loki is especially galling—and compelling—as a character whose fraught relationship with fellow immortals appalls and fascinates in equal measures. His first act of mischief (apparently, for no particular reason) is to rob Thor’s wife of her beautiful brown-golden hair: “Her fingers reached up to her bare pink scalp and touched it, exploring it tentatively. She look at Thor, horrified” (51). Gaiman excels with visual cues and surgical detail, describing Loki’s comeuppance for destroying her hair. The dwarf who helped make Thor’s hammer does the deed with Odin’s permission: “Brokk grunted and produced an awl, a pointed spike used in leatherwork, and he jabbed it through the leather, punching holes through Loki’s lips. Then he took a strong thread and he sewed Loki’s lips together with it” (66). Importantly, the author takes his time culminating the history of the gods. We are reminded of impending destruction with increasing insistence, but we are treated along the way to a cumulative cornucopia of finely wrought moments of character and description. Neil Gaiman’s powerful prose is smooth and glassy, flowing gently from one sentence into another. Yet he knows just the right word to drive home the situation he is describing—like the awl that the dwarf jabs through Loki’s lips. We see, hear, and feel a completeness of sensorium—a flavor of [End Page 325] Northern tone and allusion—that we have experienced before in so many stories, but could not quite put our finger on. Norse Mythology restores the glory of the North, and we realize why these gods have never left our imagination. Peter Fields Midwestern State University Copyright © 2018 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

IIOld English

This chapter has eleven sections: 1. Bibliography; 2. Manuscript Studies, Palaeography, and Facsimiles; 3. Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Contexts: 4. Literature: General; 5. The Poems of the Exeter Book; 6. The Poems of the Vercelli Book; 7. The Poems of the Junius Manuscript; 8. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript; 9. Other Poems; 10. Prose; 11. Reception. Sections 1, 2, 7, and 8 are by Simon Thomson; sections 3, 4, 10, and 11 are by Eric Lacey; sections 5, 6, and 9 are by Victoria Symons.

A ninth-century Old English homily from Northumbria

AbstractA careful consideration of a ‘scribble’ in English in the margin of a page of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, a ninth-century Latin manuscript, yields a number of important conclusions: that the English material is homiletic, that it was written before the Latin, that the manuscript is certainly of Northumbrian origin and the English shows traces of Northumbrian dialect, and that therefore at least one vernacular homily in Old English was available for copying in Northumbria in the ninth century. It also adds to the evidence that a group of homilies in the Vercelli Book were drawn from an early and a non-West Saxon source-book.