These literary forms, as given, are found in the earliest texts. But a mere casual reading of the texts will reveal also many variants; this makes evident the fact that a succession of stages or steps was gone through before the above forms were adopted as the regular ones. The simplest method to be followed in discovering what these successive stages of development were must be to begin with the earliest texts in which the variants were sometimes the rule, and follow the occurence of these variants in chronological order down into those texts in which they are exceptions; thus finally arriving at literary monuments in which no variants occur, but where they have been merged completely into the prevailing literary forms.

(a) Few subjects connected with Anglo-Saxon prose have been so persistently slighted as that of the position of words and clauses. The grammars either omit it entirely or touch upon it only in the most vague and general terms. No monographs treating the whole subject in all its periods and aspects have yet appeared, Kube's dissertation1 being the only attempt, so far as I know, to investigate the word-order of even a single monument of Anglo-Saxon literature. But this work, though valuable, is awkwardly arranged, and devotes too little proportionate space to the subject of dependent clauses, the element of Anglo-Saxon word-order which offers the greatest contrast to modern English and which is therefore the most interesting as well as the most important. Kube's results are further vitiated by his having selected a monument written at long intervals apart and therefore incapable, if treated as a single synchronous work, of exhibiting any successive changes in word-order, or the word-order of any fixed date.