Editing of Old English

The study and the understanding of Anglo-Saxon history, literature and culture depends on the presentation of unique manuscripts as modern printed editions. This transformation raises problems of interpetation. The reader studying a printed edition cannot know what "the text" is without some understanding of the editorial process by which the work came into being. How much, for example, of the language, punctuation and spacing has authorial foundation, and how much is scribal or editorial accretion? How much of the original manuscript context has been lost - and with it its share of the text's meaning - in the course of preparing the text for the printed form? Fred Robinson addresses these questions and provides a critical and practical account of possible solutions to them. The book is divided into four parts. The first reflects on the relationship between a modern edition and the original manuscript or manuscripts in which it is preserved, and on how much the former may lose of the latter's meaning and integrity. The second exemplifies a variety of textual problems that arise in the editing of Old English poetry and displays some of the methods that may prove useful in dealing with them. The third considers and confronts the uncertainties in scholarly emendations of what may either be scribal error and shorthand or obscure linguistic variants. Three exemplary editions of texts comprise the book's final part. In the first the author tries to provide an edition which, in presenting the text, acknowledges its contextual interaction with adjacent items in the original manuscript. The two subsequent editions address the problems, for the editor and for the reader, of identifying the integrity of the text amid the interventions of the medieval scribes.