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The lexical and syntactic variants shared by two of the later manuscripts of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Dorothy M. Horgan
Dorothy M. Horgan
Affiliation:
Oxford, England
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Extract

The purpose of this article is to analyse the different categories of the lexical and syntactic variation which is common to two unpublished manuscripts of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 22 (717), fols. 72–158, and Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 2. 4, referred to henceforth as T and U respectively. These manuscripts are an obvious choice for the following reasons: the relationship of the tenth- (or early-eleventh-)century T to the eleventh-century U (almost certainly written at Exeter) can be at least tentatively established as far as the history of the transmission of the test is concerned; the work has the status of royal origin and one can therefore expect it to have been treated with due respect by later copyists; and the work is of considerable length. My study is based on a complete collation of both manuscripts, since, in any analysis of this kind, numerical weight of evidence lends conviction to the conclusions, but the material, because of its quantity, cannot be presented here in its entirety. What I have attempted to do is to demonstrate, with selected examples as evidence, the clear pattern of variation that emerges. It is hoped that as a result some light is thrown upon linguistic developments within West Saxon and upon the scribal practices involved in the copying and recopying of earlier texts in late Old English times.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 9 , December 1980 , pp. 213 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 For a full description of the manuscripts, see Ker, N. R., Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar, nos. 87 and 19.

2 For a discussion of this subject, see my ‘The Relationship between the O.E. MSS. of King Alfred's Translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care’, Anglia 91 (1973), 153–69Google Scholar, and The Pastoral Care, Edited from British Museum MS. Cotton Otbo B. ii… Part I (ff. 1–25/4), ed. I. Carlson (Stockholm, 1975), pp. 26–33.Google Scholar

3 Some of this material appears in my’ West Saxon Dialect Criteria in the Extant MSS. of King Alfred's Translation of Gregory's Regula Pastoralis and Orosius's Historiae adversus Paganos' (unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Manchester Univ., 1963).Google Scholar

4 References are to King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS o.s. 45 and 50 (London, 1871; repr. 1958Google Scholar), by page and line. Sweet's text is from H. Where H and J are both cited and correspond, the spelling I quote is H's. Where T and U correspond, the spelling I quote is U's. Carlson's edition does not quote variants in T and U.

5 Cf. the word-lists, Bischof Warfertbs von Worcester Übersitzung der Dialoge Gregon des Groisen, ed. H. Hecht (Hamburg, 1900–1907) 11, 136–80Google Scholar. The revision of vocabulary in T and U is not so extensive as that in the eleventh-century manuscript of Gregory's Dialogues, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 76. A few of the ‘new’ words accord with the ‘Winchester’ words listed by H. Gneuss (‘The Origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold's School at Winchester’, ASE 1 (1972), 63–83Google Scholar): e.g. 217–19 TU weofod(HJ alter, Lataltari); 231–3 TU geefenlœceon(HJ onhyrigen, Lat imitamur); 231.6 TU geefenlæceað (HJ onhyrigeað, Lat imitarf); 231.15 TU geefenlacean (HJ onbyrigean, Lat imitari); 417.2 TU blissað (H gefihð, Lat gaudet).

6 The Latin is quoted only when the Old English translation is close enough for the Latin to be an equivalent.

7 These are in general what we should expect from previous studies of Old English syntax, such as Quirk, R. and Wrenn, C. L., An Old English Grammar (London, 1955Google Scholar); Mitchell, B., A Guide to Old English (Oxford, 1965Google Scholar); Andrew, S. O., Syntax and Style in Old English (Cambridge, 1940Google Scholar); Marckwardt, A. H., ‘Verb Inflections in Late Old English’, Philologica: the Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. Kirby, T. A. and Woolf, H. B. (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 79–88Google Scholar; Barrett, C. R., Studies in the Word-Order of Ælfric's Catholic Homilies and Lives of the Saints (Cambridge, 1953Google Scholar); Funke, O., ‘Some Remarks on Late Old English Word-Order’, ES 37 (1956), 99–104Google Scholar; Carlton, C., Descriptive Syntax of the Old English Charters (The Hague, 1970CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Tinkler, J. D., Vocabulary and Syntax of the Old English Version in the Paris Psalter (The Hague, 1971CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Sprockel, C., The Language of the Parker Chronicle II, Word-Formation and Syntax (The Hague, 1973CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Specialist studies of Alfredian syntax take no account of the unpublished manuscripts. Wülfing, E., Die Syntax in den Werken Alfreds des Grossen (Bonn, 1894–1901Google Scholar), deals extensively with parts of speech, but not with sentence structure; Brown, W. H. Jr, A Syntax of King Alfred's Pastoral Care (The Hague, 1970CrossRefGoogle Scholar), is based on H. Sweet's edition, citing H throughout, and is limited to approximately 2000 out of 7200 lines. Carlson, in his edition, does not examine syntax.

8 ‘The Relationship between the O. E. MSS. of King Alfred's Translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care’, pp. 163–4.

9 Catalogue, no. 30.