In a brief discussion of the Vespasian Psalter in 1898, Albert S. Cook offered a statement that set the tone for subsequent debate about the relationship between the Old English gloss of the Vespasian Psalter (A = London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i) and that of the junius Psalter (B = Oxford, Bodleian Library, junius 27): ‘It seems not improbable that it [i.e. the gloss to the Vespasian Psalter] is the original from which all later Old English glosses on the Psalms have been derived, undergoing in the process such modifications as were due to the language of the particular dialect or epoch.’ With regard to the Junius gloss specifically, Cook printed the text of Psalm XCIX [C] from the Vespasian Psalter, which he collated with the Junius, Cambridge (C = Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1.23), Regius (D = London, British Library, Royal 2. B.V), and Eadwine (E = Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17.1) psalters; he concluded that ‘B stands nearest to A, but is carelessly written, and changes Anglian peculiarities in the direction of West Saxon (in to on, all to eall, &c.) while retaining, in general, a comparatively early and Anglian cast (weotað, scep, leswe, &c.)’. Although Otto Heinzel, writing in 1926, disagreed with Cook's assertion that the Vespasian gloss was the source from which all other psalters ultimately derived their glosses, he reiterated, after a fashion, the idea that the Junius gloss is related to that of the Vespasian Psalter, although, like Cook, he did not argue for a direct relationship between these two works. In Heinzel's stemma, from the Urtext*0 derive *α, which stands as the model for B, and *β, which in turn stands as the model for both A and C. The stemma, in its full form, taking the Dtype (Regius Psalter) tradition into account, has justly been termed ‘fanciful’ by Kenneth Sisam. The relationship between the glosses in these two psalters formed the subject of an extended study by Uno Lindelöf published in 1901.

Two masterpieces stand out of the mass of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry: The Dream of the Rood and the sequence of liturgical lyrics in the Exeter Book variously known as Christ I, the Advent Lyrics or simply Advent. The two works are similar in focus and technique as well as in quality. Both express the mystery of Incarnation in terms of a riddle: how can it be that Deus and Homo make their impossible contact? What terms can make this meeting graspable by the imagination? Both give eloquent voice to human suffering and human hope, and seem to recognize that it is only through appealing to these feelings that theology can come to life for us by being experienced.

Connections between Andreas and Beowulf have been the subject of much scholarly discussion. This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that the account of the Mermedonians’ discovery of and response to the loss of their prisoners in Andreas fitt X, which corresponds to chapters 22–3 of the poet’s putative Latin source, has been deliberately recast in ways intended to recall the account in fitt II of Beowulf of Grendel’s first attack on Heorot and the reactions of the Danish community. The connection argued for here is based not on verbal correspondences, but on embedded structural and thematic parallels. The Andreas-poet emerges as a careful and sophisticated reader, notable for their specifically literate and textual engagement with Beowulf. This observation has implications not only for our appreciation of the Andreas-poet’s art, but also for the transmission of Beowulf and for our understanding of Old English poetic practices more generally.

Discussions of the structure of Beowulf that consider the sections of the poem disposed according to specific mathematical ratios are among the most frequently contested and least accepted by the larger scholarly community. This article examines several theories advocating numerical composition in light of both scholarship that describes structural patterns in the poem and editorial practice. Much agreement is found among theories from widely differing theoretical camps, clustering particularly around the first sections of the poem; however, such agreement does not consistently extend to specific numerical ratios. Further, the significance of such numerical correspondences as can be shown to exist has not been reliably demonstrated.

In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, the Latin manuscripts of the National Széchényi Museum in Budapest were in the process of being catalogued by Dr Emma Bartoniek. The collection includes a large number of fragments taken from bindings of printed books, and among these fragments is a single bifolium, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of apparent eighth-century date, containing part of Bede's metrical Vita S. Cudbercti (lines 95–128 and 340–75).

In the period from Alfred's reign to the Norman Conquest scribes and artists in southern England once more achieved a high standard in bookmaking, comparable to the brilliant tradition which had been established in both the north and the south in the eighth century. Some codices survive which are rough in execution, written on poorly prepared membrane by unskilled hands, but the majority – by no means chiefly service books produced for ecclesiastical and royal patrons – demonstrate that by the end of the tenth century a large number of scribes understood the techniques of careful preparation of membranes and inks, had mastered the letter-forms of two scripts, Caroline minuscule and Anglo-Saxon square minuscule, and were disciplined to follow consistently a hierarchy of scripts for the openings of texts and major divisions, chapter titles, incipits and explicits. What remains must be only a fragment of the production of Benedictine monks and nuns, secular clerks and lay scribes. But however incomplete and unbalanced the evidence, the over-all level of accomplishment cannot be doubted.

A poem by a French monk named Herbert petitions Wulfgar Abbot of Abingdon for a gift of warm clothing. The poem, a mock epic employing alliteration and hermeneutic vocabulary, presents the seasons as warring deities. Using similar technique in the final eight lines of the poem, Wulfgar denies Herbert with a humourous response. This article contains an edition, translation, and analysis of the poem, along with brief biographies of the two authors. Another work by Herbert, a prosimetric letter requesting an allowance of fish, is edited and translated in an appendix.

Many of the minsters founded and generously endowed in the first century and a half of Anglo-Saxon christianity were evidently failing as efficient managers of their estates by the late eighth century, if we judge by the actions of the bishops in whose dioceses they sat. In the diocese of Worcester bishops can be seen transferring the administration of the lands of such minsters to the cathedral community, and then seeking ratification from the Mercian kings whose direct ancestors or royal predecessors had often been involved in the original acts of foundation. When ninth-century kings were acutely short of land, they alleviated the problem by engineering forced loans of the lands concerned from the see of Worcester. These processes are well exemplified in the history of the minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) and its landed endowment, for which particularly good contemporary evidence survives.

The chapters in Bede's De temporum ratione begin with an etymology for the name of the subject to be examined. Sources and analogues for some have not hitherto been identified. This article shows that some of these etymologies of words for the divisions of time come ultimately, though perhaps not directly, from bk XI of Virgil the Grammarian's Epitomae. These accounts of the origins of calendrical and cosmological terms wound their way through early western computistical works and eventually into Bede's De temporum ratione. The article identifies examples of Virgil's influence on anonymous early medieval biblical commentaries and discusses their significance as pointers towards their place of composition.

In the dramatic confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh that preceded the Israelites' departure from Egypt, Pharaoh's magicians played a prominent role: they turned their rods into serpents, if only to have them devoured by Moses's serpent, and then matched the first two plagues brought down on the Egyptians before failing to perform the third (Ex. VII. 11–VIII. 19). Although not named here or elsewhere in the Old Testament, they were identified in II Timothy III.8 as ' ιανν⋯ς and ιαμβρ⋯ς (the Latin forms are usually ‘Iannes’ or ‘Iamnes’ and ‘Mambres’) in a remark that suggests that a considerable tradition had already arisen concerning them: ‘Now just as jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith.’ Two fragmentary Greek papyri (Pap. Vindob. G 29456 verso, in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; and Pap. XVI, in the Chester Beatty Library and Gallery of Oriental Art, Dublin), dated to the third and fourth centuries respectively, confirm the existence of at least one early apocryphon about the brothers. The problem of interpreting these fragments, however, is complicated by a bewildering array of references to the two in various languages, which results from both the importance of Exodus to Jews and Christians, and the connection of the brothers to magic. Albert Pietersma and R. Theodore Lutz note that ‘the precise relationship between the loose traditions and the written composition’ is ‘not yet entirely clear’.

To offer a solution to Riddle 57 must seem to many like a fool rushing swiftly in where others have swallowed gnats – and raindrops, hailstones, thunderclouds, musical notes, bees and more. Yet for a long time I have been convinced that everyone else had got it wrong, and that the answer could only be ‘swifts’. On further investigation, it turned out that some scholars, indeed, had had the same idea – it was Moritz Trautmann's final solution, and Cyril Brett thought of swifts but rejected them in favour of starlings – and that it was only (as it were) half-right. However, it still seems worthwhile attempting to demonstrate that, at least on the literal level, swifts are the only possible answer. I shall therefore dissect Riddle 57, discussing the identity of its subject under four headings: appearance, locomotion, habitat and call. Though initially ignoring the riddle's last half-line, I shall not forget it.

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite.

London, British Library, Harley 3271 is a composite manuscript designed for use in teaching Latin, and contains Ælfric's Grammar beside other pedagogical works. The book also contains a large number of miscellaneous items, and fourteen scribal hands. Many of the texts point to the usual interests of the Anglo-Saxon scholar in computus and prognostics, while others suggest an interest in the tradition of numerical notes. The items written by Scribe C, the only one whose stints are spread throughout the blank space of the composite volume, point to a combined interest in education, numbers and the Jewish people.

The village recluse, avowed to remain in his or her cell, was a feature of the later medieval landscape, but in what circumstances did recluses and the notion of a distinct reclusive vocation emerge? Examining the earliest recluses identifiable, this article contends that reclusion as such, though not without precedent, gained popularity in England in the third quarter of the eleventh century and acquired a terminology (already current on the Continent) in its last third as an expression of the ascetic movement within the emerging parish.

The enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

The Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early eighth century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred. Aldred's colophon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers of the manuscript, at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary colophon is Aldred's purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a voice to address ‘all the brothers’ – particularly the Latinless. We propose new interpretations of three OE words (gihamadi, inlad, ora) misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through the Fathers to contemporary texts.

This article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, æppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem.

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

In this, my third article on the sources of Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, the fourteenth-century Icelandic saga of Edward the Confessor, I hope to cover all the material that I have not dealt with previously. In my first article, on the hagiographical sources, I suggested that the saga writer used two specific texts, a service book containing the lections for St Edward's day and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. In my second one, on the saga's version of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium, I showed that this account was very closely related to the one in the anonymous and unpublished Chronicon Laudunensis. Here I wish to show the full extent of the saga's debt to CL. In doing this I also need to show how the saga writer used Scandinavian sources, a range of material that he acknowledges when he refers us to what is said í æfi Noregskonunga. The specific saga which he has utilized most fully is that of Harald Hardrada, Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar. Since he was compiling JS in the fourteenth century, HS would have been available to him in a number of recensions. Extant ones include the early-thirteenth-century Msk and Fsk, both of which may have been utilized by Snorri Sturluson in Hkr later in that century. Some of the later manuscripts of Hkr, such as Eirspennill, include interpolations and there are compilations, such as the fourteenth-century Hulda, which combine material from Msk and Hkr. The evidence indicates that the compiler of JS knew HS in more than one of these redactions.

In a letter written to King Æthelred of Northumbria in or soon after 793, Alcuin bewails the appalling aftermath of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne. He writes, ‘vineam electam vulpes depredarunt, hereditas Domini data est populo non suo. Et ubi laus Domini, ibi ludus gentium. Festivitas sancta versa est in luctum.’1 Alcuin's horror at Viking merriment is shared by a great many other medieval historians in their accounts of the depredations of the Norsemen. Adam of Bremen, for instance, laments the Vikings' assault upon the Franks in 882, in which they made so bold as to attack King Charles III himself, and generally ‘made sport of our people‘.2 Florence of Worcester similarly deplores the brutality of Sveinn Forkbeard's men, who invaded East Mercia in 1013, all the while ‘revelling in acts of savagery‘.3 William of Malmesbury remarks on the ungentle sense of humour of Cnut the Great, who, after inviting Earl Uhtred of Northumbria to surrender himself into his custody, promptly had his hostage put to death, as William puts it, ‘with inhuman levity‘.4 In short, it is not unusual to find medieval chroniclers expressing their distaste for the evident pleasure invading Scandinavians occasionally derived from committing acts of atrocity.