Essay question:
Using at least three editions and/or translations of
Cædmon’s Hymn as your evidence, explore the main debates about editorial and/or
translation theory current in Anglo-Saxon Studies.
Within this essay I wish to explore some of the current debates in editorial and translating theory in Anglo-Saxon Studies. I will look at a number of editions and translations of Cædmon’s Hymn, both recent and from the past century or so, and explore how ideas about editing have changed or are changing, particularly in light of the electronic advances that have influenced modern editing. I have looked at a number of articles on the subject and tried to construct an idea of the choices editors face when presented with a text such as the Hymn.
I’ll begin by introducing this ‘first English poet’, as he was called by Robert Spence Watson in 1875[1]. Like St. Benezet, the legendary builder of the Pont d’Avignon, Cædmon was an unlettered farmhand who received divine inspiration, a gift from God. It is primarily through the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis that his story, as well as his Hymn, comes down to us. He tells us that at drinking parties, when the harp would be passed around for people to sing songs, Cædmon would shy away, being unskilled in poetry. One night while sleeping a visitor appeared in a dream, requesting that he sing him something. He responded with a song praising God’s Creation, which Bede paraphrases in Latin as:
‘nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis, potentiam creatoris et consilium illius, facta patris gloriae; quomodo ille, cum sit aeternus deus, omnium miraculorum auctor extitit, qui primo filiis hominum caelum pro culmine tecti, dehinc terram custos humani generis omnipotens creauit.’[2]
Bede himself acknowledges that he can only give the sense, ‘but not the actual words…for verses, however masterly, cannot be translated literally from one language to another without losing much of their beauty and dignity’[3]. It is a short, nine-line piece, but it was an important first step for the Northumbrian cowherd, and also for English poetry (Benjamin Thorpe in 1832 even called him “the Father of English Song”[4]). Cædmon, we are told, soon after became a monk at Hild’s abbey at Whitby (or Steonæshalch), composing many works of great piety. It is not altogether clear from where Bede has got his source, but since the poem is likely to have been written about sixty years before Bede’s work it was probably a fairly well known story and commonly sung hymn. The matter of Bede’s paraphrasing is interesting as it makes him the first known editor of the Hymn.
Cædmon’s place as the ‘originator’ of Anglo-Saxon poetry, or rather English Christian poetry, is well established. As Clare Lees puts it: “This was the moment when native (Germanic) traditions of oral song-making are allied with the subject of Christianity and harnessed for the faith”[5]. Debates have raged, however, among scholars as to how ‘original’ his Hymn actually is, not in terms of whether or not he wrote it but in terms of its style and in particular its use of traditional oral formula. Francis P. Magoun jnr, in his Speculum article of 1955, identified well-established formulas in eleven verses: 1a, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4a, 4b, 5a, 5b, 7a, 8a, 9a[6]. Magoun did not believe that Cædmon (or Cædman as he calls him) had received divine assistance, arguing that “formulas are created only slowly and no one singer ever invents many, often none at all…consequentially it is to be supposed that Cædman had heard and learned enough of these to be sufficient to his purpose in the Hymn and subsequent songs”[7]. According to Magoun, the Hymn contains so many formulas that could not have been in use in pre-Christian England, such as ‘heofonrices Weard’ and ‘Metodes meahte’, that it is virtually impossible for Cædmon to have composed them himself, and there must have existed other Christian poetry in the vernacular. His argument ultimately rests on his study of Serbian oral poets, noting that oral formulas tend to be learnt only very slowly; he has little time for the notion of the ‘miracle’.
Alexandra Hennessy Olsen calls Cædmon “one of the main sources for evidence of an oral tradition in Anglo-Saxon England”, but also quotes N. F. Blake as saying that rather than Cædmon borrowing from other heroic poems, “later poets borrowed from Cædmon’s Hymn”[8]. However, the use of a pre-existing vocabulary to praise in the new concept of Christianity was not uncommon. When the continental Saxons were converted by Frankish monks, their local Germanic religion was at diametric odds with the Christian faith. It was not just the places of worship and rituals that had to be absorbed into Christianity, but also the vocabulary that went with it. The missionaries had to therefore “subvert old words to convey new meanings”[9]. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s Guide to Old English shows how Cædmon successfully adapts the formula, transferring old Germanic expressions for Woden such as “Father of Armies” into the more Christian “Father of Glory”, ‘wuldorfæder’[10]. J.B. Bessinger Jr.’s Homage to Cædmon and others: a Beowulfian praise song constructs a new version of the Hymn using vocabulary from Beowulf. He simply uses the Hymn as a frame, which he believes he has done successfully, “for it is already basically that kind of poem, a preislied auf Gott, in Klaeber’s pregnant definition.”[11] He replaces such verses as heofonrices weard (1a) with heall-ærnes weard, and heofon to hrofe (6a) with Heorot to hrofe, replacing heaven in this instance with Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar. Bessinger is very interested that Cædmon, despite all his praise for the Almighty, never actually uses the name ‘God’, “but rather is referred to by a famous series of heroic periphrases in a pleonastic tour de force.”[12]
So although Cædmon may not necessarily have been the actual first Christian poet to sing in English, based on the evidence we have he is certainly the first one that we are aware of and sits firmly on the threshold of two cultural epochs for the Anglo-Saxons.
Writing in 1937, E.V.K. Dobbie identified seventeen known copies of the Hymn, four of which are in the Northumbrian dialect. The rest are in West Saxon, five as part of King Alfred’s translation of Bede, the rest found in Latin manuscripts of the Historia[13]. The most important of the Northumbrian variants are the so-called “Moore manuscript” (MS. Kk.v.16, University Library, Cambridge), which he states was written in around 737 on the Continent, and the “Leningrad manuscript” (MS Lat. Q.v.I.18), held in the Public Library in St. Petersburg. These both date from the eighth century. Dobbie identifies two groups that divide the different versions of the text. With reference to verse 5b (‘aelda barnum’ in Moore MS), he calls them the ælda (or ylda in West Saxon) group and the eorðu (eorðan in WS) group. Cædmon (and Bede) being from Northumberland, it is usually assumed that the Northumbrian versions are closest to the original poem. C.W. Kennedy supposed that since Bede’s Latin paraphrase and the Northumbrian have so much in common, it “must be considered a faithful rather than free rendering”[14].
The ælda - eorðu debate crops up in many texts. It must be explained that the former means ‘sons/children of men’ where the latter means ‘children of earth’. A.H. Smith wrote that ‘aelda barnum’ must surely have been the version that Bede knew, for the proof is his in paraphrase (‘filiis hominum’), however he concedes that “each has equal claims to represent Cædmon’s actual composition”[15]. Sometimes though an editor is faced with the task of not choosing a particular text to present, but to actually re-construct a text using the ‘best’ parts of several. Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, for example, presents us with the West Saxon version of the poem, as well as the Northumbrian, but the West Saxon text does appear to be a reconstruction of various sources. He uses the phrase ‘eorðan bearnum’, in line with many West Saxon manuscripts, but in the first line he clearly prefers the Northumbrian style[16]. What editorial process was involved here?
The choice an editor faces, when publishing an old text, is whether to try to reconstruct the ‘original’ text, and divine the intent of the author, or to present a particular text from a particular manuscript. The former of these is the approach often called ‘Lachmannian’, after German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851). He devised a system whereby he would compare manuscripts and sort them into ‘families’, creating a ‘stemma’ or tree diagram showing their relationships. He concluded that “a common error implies a common origin, a principle which is still regarded as fundamental”[17]. He would thus reconstruct a text based on hypothesis, in much the same fashion as philologists have reconstructed, to a certain degree, proto-Germanic and proto-Indo-European. Lachmann’s method was much criticized by French scholar Joseph Bédier. In a 1928 article in Romania he favoured fidelity to manuscripts and scribes over any editorial judgement or interference[18]. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, in the introduction to Reading Old English Texts, states that “the difference between attempting an ‘ideal’ (or ‘authorial’) version and pursuing a material text…is in part a function of the editor’s (and the reading community’s) judgement on the value of variance”[19]. Paul Szarmach’s essay The Recovery of Texts, in the same book, divides the two traditions into ‘optimist’, which would be Bédier’s side, and ‘recensionist’. He says that “since recensionists often produce eclectic texts, that is, they attempt to recreate the author’s text by choosing readings from various witnesses, they become liable to the optimist’s charge that a recensionist text finally has no manuscript authority.”[20] Szarmach does point out that while this editorial debate is virtually unnecessary with many Old English texts, due to the “paucity of manuscript sources for most Anglo-Saxon poetical texts” (to quote Dobbie)[21], the exception is Cædmon’s Hymn, whose versions span both dialect and centuries[22].
The Hymn, with its many variations, is inherently unstable. There has been a tendency toward recensionist editing among many who have tackled it. Mitchell and Robinson’s textbook states that they are presenting the text of the Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10, which is in the West Saxon and dates from the tenth century. Yet in the first line – Nū wē sculon herigean – they adopt a reading from another manuscript, adding wē when, according to Dobbie’s version, it is not there in the Tanner:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, (Dobbie)[23]
Mitchell and Robinson make it clear that the inclusion of wē is “preferable to Tanner”[24], for the sole reason that it appears on most of the other West Saxon manuscripts, but they fail to list the alternative readings, as Dobbie does. The addition of this pronoun has caused a debate among editors. A.H. Smith, writing in 1933, notes that both the Moore and the Leningrad manuscripts omit it, but the later (twelfth and fifteenth centuries) Northumbrian manuscripts of Paris and Dijon include it. He concludes that though it is more likely that we was not in the ultimate prototype of the Old English Bede, “we must suppose that addition or omission of we depended largely upon individual scribes.”[25] In the pre-Gutenberg manuscript culture of Europe, the scribe held a lot of artistic sway. Fred C. Robinson states in The Editing of Old English that “as long as literary works were preserved from extinction only through successive copyings by individual scribes, these works were the property of the scribes.”[26] Interestingly, as touched on above, Henry Sweet opted to omit the wē from the West Saxon version, stating in the notes that “its omission from (the Tanner MS) agrees with the Northumbrian version”[27]. This appears to be in concordance with the editing rule difficilior lectio, which tells us that if there is more than one manuscript reading, then you should err towards the unusual, not the ‘expected’ one[28]; Mitchell and Robinson do the opposite.
In her article on Orality and the Developing Text of Cædmon’s Hymn, which first appeared in Speculum in 1987, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe tells us that although the Hymn has been the basis for analysis into dialect and oral formula, there has not been a lot of research into the ways the text has been set out[29]. These days we see the visual layout of text as highly important, particularly with poetry. Where in an oral culture such as that of Anglo-Saxon England texts had to focus on the ear, once a written culture becomes established, one in which more people can read rather than be read to, then texts must have a visual appeal as well. “The movement from orality to literacy,” O’Brien O’Keeffe goes on, “involves a gradual shift from aural to visual reception and such a shift is reflected in the increasing spatialization of a written text.”[30]. The art of writing was generally learned from Latin, and being an almost entirely textual language it is unsurprising that there were more ‘visual cues’ than in Old English, to which writing was relatively new. We in the present have become so accustomed to such givens as the use of punctuation and capitalization as well as the notion of poetic layout that we forget that earlier scribes were not bound to such formalities.
Let us look at one twentieth century translation of the Hymn, that of C.W. Kennedy, written in 1916.
Praise we the Lord
Of the heavenly kingdom,
God’s power and wisdom,
The works of His hand ;
As the Father of glory,
Eternal Lord,
Wrought the beginning
Of all His wonders!
Holy Creator!
Warden of men!
First, for a roof,
O’er the children of earth,
He stablished the heavens
And founded the world,
And spread the dry land
For the living to dwell in.
Lord Everlasting!
Almighty God![31]
The first thing we notice is that he has abandoned what we see as the traditional Anglo-Saxon layout for a more contemporary style. Old English lines of poetry tended to be made up of two half-lines or verses, separated by a ‘caesura’ or pause[32]. Actually, says Stephen Reimer, “the use of ‘layout’ to punctuate verse is an invention of the later Middle Ages, probably introduced to the English by the French, from whom the English learned rhyming and stanzaic forms”[33]. Why has Kennedy done this? Since the original (in the Latin Bede certainly) was written in continuous, prose form, and later changed to suit contemporary tastes, it makes sense for Kennedy to do the same. Kennedy does play with the composition of the poem, though. He places Holy Creator! and Warden of Men! side by side, where in the Moore manuscript haleg scepen and moncynnæs uard are a little further apart. There is also debate about the punctuation that editors insert to precede verse 7a, tha middungeard. Mary Blockley gives much thought to the subject: “Some modern editors precede the Þa in Cædmon’s Hymn 7a with heavy punctuation, making it sentence-initial. Others, like A.H. Smith, point to indicate that the syntax of this verse elliptically parallels that of the clause immediately preceeding it. This difference of opinion suggests that it may be difficult to determine for Old English the distinctions conveyed by modern punctuation.”[34]
Incidentally, Dobbie throws open a debate about the word scepen (meaning ‘creator’). He asks whether it is merely a scribal error, for the usual sceppend (found in the Leningrad, Paris and Dijon manuscripts), or does it mean another word entirely? He connects it with the Dutch word schepen, which means ‘judge’ or ‘sheriff’[35], where the Dutch word scheppen means ‘to create’. Does this then mean we can read ‘holy judge’ instead of ‘holy creator’? It seems unlikely, considering that the poem is essentially about the act of creation.
What strikes the novice when they first become acquainted with Cædmon’s Hymn is not its brevity or the importance placed upon it by the scholarly world, but the sheer number of variant translations into Modern English that it has produced. It is like a game of Chinese Whispers, and no two seem to be the same. Former Beatle Paul McCartney claimed to have had an experience not too dissimilar to that of Cædmon in 1965, when he awoke from a dream in which he had been given, fully formed, the song Yesterday. Although his band gave it little regard at the time – McCartney himself was convinced at first that it was simply an old Jazz number he’d subconsciously remembered, not an original piece – it has since become the most covered song of all time. More singers and groups have translated Yesterday than any other pop composition. Of course, any comparison with the translations of Cædmon’s Hymn is unwise, as the ‘translation’ of a pop-song does not mean the same thing as the translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem into modern English. Although Old English is the direct ancestor of the language we speak today, it is still as alien to most of us as Dutch or German or Icelandic, so we need the medium of the translator to help us understand what the author is trying to say. Of course, to translate poetry skillfully the translator is faced with many dilemmas. How faithful can they be to the original? What conventions should they use?
In an article published in English Studies, R. M. Liuzza illustrates that when Beowulf was translated into modern English in the nineteenth century by John Josiah Conybeare, it was presented in “graceful Miltonic blank verse”, for the translator saw it as “a species of epic…with a classical rather than romantic horizon of expectations”[36]. It was noted, Liuzza tells us, by Chauncey Tinker that Coneybeare did not want to “offend a nation of readers revelling in the medievalism of Scott and Byron”. It was clear then that, having judged the poem to be ‘epic’, Conybeare decided on his own interpretation to be the most appropriate. Beowulf – which exists in but one manuscript – was re-translated many times over the course of the following century in a variety of styles. J. M. Kemble, for example, chose to turn the poem into a prose text, to avoid “problems of finding an equivalent for the meter and tone of Old English poetry”[37]. Clearly for him, to enjoy the actual poetry you would really need to learn Old English and read the original.
We have looked at Kennedy’s translation of the Hymn. As I have discussed, he places the poem into a much more contemporary frame, to make it a little less alien to early twentieth century readers. There are other factors to take into consideration, however. Kennedy’s punctuation is decidedly evangelical, in particular his use of exclamation marks in lines 8, 9, 10, 17 and 18. They are used whenever the Lord is described, as if to announce his majesty with heavenly glory: ‘Holy Creator! Warden of men!’ He does not use it after ‘Father of glory’ and ‘Eternal Lord’, however. He places the exclaimed lines either in the middle or the end of the text, as if to break the poem into two. His use of capitalization is interesting, as he not only places a capital at the beginning of each line, fairly common in contemporary poetry, but also whenever he uses a word to describe God. This, again, is not altogether unusual in Christian society, but is apparently absent in the manuscripts. In his Old English editions, Dobbie does not capitalize the deity, nor does Smith. Mitchell and Robinson, on the other hand, clearly do not wish to offend their Christian readers, preferring to print ‘weorc Wuldurfæder’, ‘ēce Drihten’ and ‘hālig Scyppend’[38]. Sweet also capitalizes in both the West Saxon and the Northumbrian versions: ‘Frēa ælmihtig’, ‘Frēa allmectig’[39]. Peter S. Baker tells us: “Some scribes capitalized the word for God but most did not do this with any consistency. Those editors who modernize punctuation usually do the same with capitalization.”[40] Apart from the Nu at the beginning of the poem, none of the Old English versions mentioned here capitalize in any other place.
There is interesting use of capitalization in the translations provided by S.B. Greenfield in A Critical History of Old English Literature. He cites both the Northumbrian Moore and the West Saxon Tanner manuscripts without capitalizing. He then gives a literal translation, which is almost in prose form, and a poetic version by Burton Raffel. Raffel’s re-creation does capitalize at the beginning of every line, as well as with any reference to the deity. Greenfield’s own literal translation, however, appears to capitalize nouns at random. He uses capitals as much as possible for God’s names, such as ‘Keeper of the Heavenly Kingdom’, and ‘Holy Shaper’, but in sentences such as ‘the Work of the glorious Father’ the first noun is capitalized, unlike many other nouns in the text, but the adjective referring to God, unlike in the other examples given, is not:
(Now let us praise the Keeper of the Heavenly Kingdom, the Might of the Creator and His Thought, the Work of the glorious Father, how He each of his wonders, Eternal Lord, established the beginning. He first created for the sons of men [Nthn.] / for the children of earth [WS] heaven as a roof, the Holy Shaper; then middle-earth the Keeper of Mankind, Eternal Lord, afterwards made for men, [made] earth, the Lord Almighty.)
Incidentally, Greenfield does in the prose distinguish between the Northumbrian ‘for the sons of men’ and the West Saxon ‘for the children of earth’, giving both examples[41]. Another translation which keeps the Hymn in the same prose format as Bede gave us is the Everyman edition of 1910, by D. Knowles. He too capitalizes the deity, but otherwise it is a straight translation of the Latin text[42]
C.W. Kennedy is very happy to use words that help with the poem’s meter, such as ‘stablished’ and ‘o’er’, but one thing he does not do is alliterate. It was common practice among Anglo-Saxon poetry to follow rules of alliteration. Being a primarily oral style, this was a highly effective method to use when composing texts. However, these rules were a lot more complicated than the spasmodic alliteration of today, such as that commonly found in tabloid headlines, and included vowel alliteration as well as initial consonant. Elaine Treharne has called Cædmon’s Hymn the first recorded example of alliterative poetry in Anglo-Saxon[43]. You might call Cædmon the illiterate alliterate.
In his translation, which forms part of Transport For London’s Poems on the Underground collection, Paul Muldoon attempts to recreate some of the alliterative power of the Old English, although he is not very consistent:
Now we must praise to the skies the
keeper of the
heavenly kingdom,
The might of the measurer, all he has in
mind,
The work of the Father of Glory, of all
manner
of marvel,
Our eternal Master, the main mover.
It was he who first summoned up, on our behalf,
Heaven as a roof, the holy Maker.
Then this middle-earth, the Watcher over
humankind,
Our eternal master, would later assign
The precinct of men, the Lord Almighty.[44]
His thirst for alliteration, particularly for m-words, is apparent; his translation (or supplantation) of verse 4b as ‘the main mover’ would certainly be ironic to anybody reading it while stuck on the Northern Line. He also uses capitalization inconsistently (see ‘eternal Master/master’), but this may be the fault of the TfL editor. He does on the other hand make use of a comma in lines where we would expect to find an Anglo-Saxon caesura. One thing that is important to remember is that Muldoon is writing for a reading audience; his inclusion of the poem in a collection of original work (titled Moy Sand and Gravel) and the use of it in such an everyday forum as the London Underground indicate that it is not primarily aimed at those who need a guide with the Old English, as Greenfield’s version is.
*
From reading the more recent articles in Anglo-Saxon studies, it appears that there is much to be said for the use of newer technologies within the field of editing. Peter S. Baker, in his article ‘Old English and Computing: a Guided Tour’, he discusses the electronic Dictionary of Old English project, the online forum known as Ansaxnet, and other internet resources such as The Labyrinth, based at Georgetown University. Baker, who has also put together an online ‘E-intro to Old English’, believes that “the computer is in the process of reorganizing the way we conduct our research”[45], but how much use can it be when editing a text such as the Hymn? Clare Lees says that “the real value of electronic editions is their interactive nature, which enables us to be more fully aware of our often conflicting interests in reconstructing a text at the same time as mapping the interests of others”[46]. This should mean that one could construct an electronic version of Cædmon where one could automatically construct a version they feel comfortable with, giving freedom of choice to the reader. Such a hypertext application exists, according to Baker, with the Beowulf Workstation, which students can use to create personalized versions of the poem. Daniel O’Donnell, founder of website www.digitalmedievalist.org, edited the Electronic Cædmon’s Hymn on CD-Rom for the Society for Old English and Norse Electronic Texts. He claims that “if editors can be reduced to a set of programming instructions, then it ought to be possible, in an electronic edition, to automate the manipulations necessary to produce various kinds of critical texts”[47]. So not only can such technology give editors freedom to present as many versions of the text as they choose, the same can be said for the reader.
From all of this we can conclude that the process involved in editing and in translating can not be complete without consideration of not only your own views, but that of your audience. TV producers who update Chaucer and Shakespeare into stories that the general public can chew are doing just that. The internet has become such a valuable source for research nowadays that the advent of electronic editing is a natural progression.
[1] Robert Spence Watson, ‘Cædmon, the First English Poet’, (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1875)
[2] J. Mayor and J. Lumby, ‘Bedae Historiae Ecclesiasticae Gentis Anglorum, Libri III+IV’, 4th ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1893)
[3] Bede, ‘A History of the English Church and People’, transl. Leo Sherley-Price, (New York, 1968)
[4] Benjamin Thorpe, ‘Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrases: an English Translation’, (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1832); preface
[5] Clare A.
Lees and Gillian Overing, ‘Birthing Bishops and Fathering Poets: Bede, Hild
and the Relations of Cultural Production’ in Liuzza pp125-156
[6] Francis P. Magoun Jr, ‘Bede’s Story of Cædman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer’ (Speculum 30, 1955) p54
[7] Ibid, p58
[8] Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, ‘Oral-Formulaic Research in Old English Studies’, in Oral Tradition, 1987, pp552-53
[9] James E. Cathey, ed., ‘Hêliand: Text and Commentary’, (Morgantown: West Virginia UP, 2002) p13
[10] Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, ‘A Guide to Old English’, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p220
[11] J.B. Bessinger Jr, ‘Homage to Cædmon and others: a Beowulfian praise song’, in ‘Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope’, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, (Univ. Toronto Press, 1974) p91
[12] Ibid, p92
[13] E. V. K. Dobbie, ‘Cædmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death Song’, (Columbia U. P., New York, 1937)
[14] ‘The Cædmon Poems’, trans. C.W. Kennedy, (Routledge, London, 1916) pxxii
[15] A.H. Smith, ed., ‘Three Northumbrian Poems’, (Methuen, London, 1933) p4
[16] ‘Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader’, 15th ed. Dorothy Whitelock, (Oxford UP, 1975) pp46-7
[17] See http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/acquaintance/gallery/lachmann.html
[18] Joseph Bédier, ‘La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’Ombre: réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes’, Romania 54 (1928); see http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/cse/ETEbib.htm, an annotated bibliography of key works in the theory of textual editing
[19] Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., ‘Reading Old English Texts’¸ (Cambridge U.P., 1997) p14
[20] Paul E.
Szarmach, ‘The Recovery of Texts’, in O’Brien O’Keeffe, 1997; p125
[21] E. V. K. Dobbie, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems’, (Columbia U. P., New York, 1942) pxciv
[22] Szarmach (see above), p126
[23] Dobbie, 1942 (see above), p106
[24] Mitchell and Robinson, 1992, p221
[25] A.H. Smith, 1933; p4
[26] Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Editing of Old English’, (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994)
[27] ‘Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader’, 15th ed. Dorothy Whitelock, (Oxford UP, 1975) p46
[28] Described by Stephen R. Reimer (1998) as “the more difficult the reading the more likely it is [to be authorial]”; see http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/scbl-err.htm
[29] Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Orality and the Developing Text of Cædmon’s Hymn’, in Speculum, 1987; p1
[30] Ibid, p3
[31] ‘The
Cædmon Poems’, trans. C.W. Kennedy, (Routledge, London, 1916)
[32] Mitchell and Robinson, 1992; p161
[33] Reimer, 1998 (see above for URL)
[34] Mary Blockley, ‘Cædmon’s Conjunction: Cædmon’s Hymn 7a Revisited’ (Speculum 73, 1998); p2
[35] Dobbie, 1937; p13
[36] R. M. Liuzza, ‘Lost in Translation: Some Nineteenth Century versions of Beowulf’, in English Studies 83,(2002)
[37] Ibid
[38] Mitchell & Robinson, 1992; p222
[39] Sweet, p47, p182
[40] See ‘E-intro to Old English’, Peter S. Baker, 2003; ch.16: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/mss.html
[41] S.B.Greenfield, ‘A Critical History of Old English Literature’, (NYU Press, New York, 1965) p170
[42] D. Knowles, ‘Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation’ (Everyman, 1910); p206
[43] Elaine Treharne, ed., ‘Old and Middle English: c.890-c.1400 – an Anthology (2nd ed)’, (Blackwell, Oxford, 2004)
[44] Transl. Paul Muldoon, recreated as produced from TFL’s website: http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/content/poems/default.asp?DID=142; also found in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Moy Sand and Gravel’, New York, 2002
[45] Peter S. Baker, ‘Old English and Computing: a Guided Tour’, in O’Brien O’Keeffe, (1997); p211
[46] Clare A. Lees, ‘Whose Text Is It Anyway: Contexts for Editing Old English Prose’, in ‘The Editing of Old English’, D. Scragg and P. Szarmach, (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1994); p112
[47] Daniel P. O’Donnell, "Editorial Method". In: The Electronic Caedmon’s Hymn. (Lethbridge: University of Lethbridge, 1998); source from Mats Dahlström, ‘Drowning By Versions’, URL: http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/4-00/md.htm#not28, 2000
Written January 2005