Pro

attres of breath and venom ='of venomous breath'. fessor Cook believes that Aldhelm was the source of the phrase in Beowulf. The parallels must be more extensive than this, however, before many will be convinced that there is any literary relationship between Aldhelm and Beowulf.

In Bitter Beer-drinking (Mod. Lang. Notes, May) Professor Cook goes to the trouble of proving that bitre beorpegu in Andreas (line 1533) cannot mean 'drinking of bitter beer', because beer in England was not made bitter by the use of hops until the sixteenth century. This was surely obvious without the evidence of the hops; syntactically it would be difficult to make the bitterness a quality of the beer, and in the context such an interpretation would be extremely perverse. The bitre beor pegu of the heavy-drinking Myrmidonians is naturally understood as a sarcastic description of their drowning in the flood.

Further notes on Old English poems are contributed by Mr. R. S. Mackie (Mod. Lang. Notes, Feb.). Among other observations, Mr. Mackie states that in The Wanderer, line 85, the manuscript reads ypde, not ypte, as the various editors of the poem have believed. In line 29 he thinks the manuscript has wēman attract, allure', not wenian. This reading had already been noted, and appears in Köhler and Holthausen's revised edition of Grein's Sprachschatz der ags. Dichter; but it is necessarily an uncertain one. In the Exeter Book ni cannot usually be distinguished with certainty from m, except when the context gives clear indication; and here wenian gives better sense.

In The Cadmon Poems (Anglia, July) Mr. S. J. Crawford assumes that Cadmon is the author of the Old English metrical version of Genesis, and examines his method of treating the biblical narrative. He notes that the order of events in the poem follows that of the traditional Classification of Topics taught by the Church, beginning with God the Creator and His Nature, then describing the empyrean heaven, the fall of the angels, the creation of the world, and so on, leading up to the birth and life of Christ, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the last judgement. This traditional classification of events also forms the design of cycles of miracle plays in the Middle

Ages. The relatively large amount of space (apart altogether from Genesis B) devoted to angelology' and the absence of references to Christ support Mr. Crawford's suggestion that the author was following the traditional order of events, and had perhaps planned to make the whole series the basis of a long epic. Mr. Crawford concludes that 'the information supplied by Cadmon's instructors was sufficient to enable him to treat on his own lines the chief articles in the Faith, and that he was not confined to the actual text of scripture'. The examination of the Genesis poem and its sources is of interest, but the confident assumption of Cadmon's authorship is unexpected. There may be no strong reason against assuming that Cadmon was the author, but neither is there any good reason for making the assumption. The burden of proof lies with those who seek to establish Cædmon's authorship; but only general considerations favour the assumption, which apply equally to Exodus. Why is it not claimed for Cædmon?

Dr. O. B. Schlutter continues his lexicographical notes on Old English words-Weitere Beiträge zur ae. Wortforschung-in Anglia, Dec. 1924 and July 1925. He exorcises several 'ghostwords', such as uma, which represents misreadings of unian 'onion', and shows his customary skill in unravelling tangled lexicographical history.

A close study of the many versions of Cadmon's hymn by Mr. M. G. Frampton (Mod. Phil., Aug. 1924) establishes the text of the Moore MS. as 'not only the oldest in date, but as representing with authority the actual reading of the Hymn itself'. Wuest, who discovered two late copies of another (lost) Northumbrian text, thought that this lost text, which he was able to reconstruct without much difficulty from the two faithful copies, was older than the Moore MS. Mr. Frampton's arguments in favour of the Moore text are convincing, even though they include some inaccuracies. The form end for normal and, for example, he dismisses as a misspelling, whereas it is well attested in the oldest English texts and in other Germanic dialects. Incidentally Wuest's reconstructed version contains forms of interest to the student of Old Northumbrian: scuilun, in which ui is the i-mutation of u; in the last line firum on foldu supports foldu

as the interpretation of fold in the Moore MS.; but sceppend in line 6 raises doubts about the isolated form scepen in the Moore MS. If the form scepen is genuine, its single p shows that it is a distinct word from sceppend; it is perhaps from Germanic *skapinaz, with the same suffix as Old English dryhten.

Four articles in the Anglica-Festschrift presented to Professor A. Brandl (see above, p. 32) are on Old English subjects: Some Place-Name Identifications in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, by Professor A. Mawer; Zu den altenglischen Lehnwörtern, by K. Luick; A note on the Battle of Brunanburh, by F. Klaeber; Die spätaltenglische Marienpredigt aus Vespasian D. XIV, by M. Foerster. The two most important of these, by Luick and by Mawer, have been discussed above in Chapter II, pp. 40 and 50.

Professor W. A. Craigie (J. E. G. P., July) discusses the question of The Nationality of King Alfred's Wulfstan, who is usually assumed to have been a Norseman. Professor Craigie thinks that he may have been an Anglo-Saxon. He points out that in the narrative of Wulfstan's voyage Anglian verbal forms are more frequent than in the account of Ohthere's voyage; and so for the narrative of Wulfstan'we must either assume an Anglian scribe, whose hand is not prominent elsewhere in the book, or suppose that the difference in language is due to following pretty closely Wulfstan's own fashion of speech'. As Wulfstan's narrative is in the first person, Professor Craigie favours the second alternative, and suggests that Wulfstan was 'an Angle by birth and origin'. In this argument possibly too much importance is attached to the uncontracted verbal forms of Wulfstan's narrative; some of these were used in West Saxon as well as Anglian. Moreover, they occur elsewhere in the manuscript. In Chapter VI of Bosworth's edition there are four uncontracted forms of the third singular of the present tense, and only one contracted form; in the three following chapters are many contracted forms and no uncontracted forms. Must an Anglian scribe or dictator be assumed for Chapter VI? The distribution of such forms in a late manuscript is apt to be haphazard.

Professor G. H. Gerould (J. E. G. P., April), describes Elfric's use of his sources in writing his two versions of the Life of St. Martin. In the main Elfric followed Sulpicius Severus and a passage in the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, but in his second (the alliterative) version he drew from a further source, Gregory of Tours' De Virtutibus S. Martini. In another article, Abbot Elfric's Rhythmic Prose, published in Modern Philology, May, Professor Gerould attempts to account historically for the peculiarities of Ælfric's alliterative rhythmic prose. He notes that in the Latin literature which Elfric read there are numerous rhetorical devices which often give an effect which resembles that of Elfric's rhythmic prose. These devices are rhyme, parallelism, antithesis, and rhythmic endings of sentences. He suggests that Elfric formed his peculiar style under the influence of such ornate Latin prose as was written by Abbo of Fleury and Sulpicius Severus, that he substituted alliteration for their rhyme and gave a rhythmic ending to every clause, not merely to the final one. When one makes a test with the actual work of Elfric, however, one finds that most of the endings of his rhythmic groups do not correspond to the cursus of Latin sentence-endings. In the first rhythmic sentence of King Eadmund, for example, the pauses divide the sentence into groups containing two stresses like alliterative verse, and only two of the six groups in any way resemble Latin cursus. It may be conceded to Professor Gerould that it is unlikely that Elfric was actually trying to write verse; but it seems still more unlikely that he was trying to compose in cursus.

IV

MIDDLE ENGLISH

[BY DOROTHY EVERETT]

IN an account of this year's work in Middle English there seems good reason for neglecting chronological order and beginning with the study of Chaucer. Not only does he receive, as usual, the lion's share of attention, but his writings are the subject of Dr. Aage Brusendorff's book,' easily the most important piece of work in the Middle English field.

Dr. Brusendorff's aim is to examine the way in which our knowledge of Chaucer's writings has been handed down, and so to determine how far our MSS. contain what Chaucer actually wrote. There are two sides to this problem; to discover how much of Chaucer's work we have left and in what state he left it. This is a bibliographical inquiry in the true sense of that term '.

The successful results of this inquiry are in part due to the author's readiness to use the work of earlier scholars, but his own scholarship is everywhere apparent. His knowledge of Chaucerian and other fifteenth-century MSS. often enables him to suggest convincingly which manuscript variant represents Chaucer's own version, which a revision by the poet himself, and which is due to a scribe or early editor. He throws light on the general conditions of fifteenth-century book production, carrying further Miss Hammond's work in this direction. His passion and ability for collecting evidence have led him to collate all the available MSS. of Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae to prove, against most other authorities, the correctness of the reading 'which that he rauysshed out of Ethna' (E 2230) in some MSS. of The Canterbury Tales. He has sound views on the relative value of different kinds of evidence (see pp. 50, 393), and only very occasionally, in a book full of new suggestions, is the evidence strained or conjecture treated as fact. A few instances there are which must be mentioned. Chaucer 1 The Chaucer Tradition, by Aage Brusendorff. O.U.P. pp. 510. 16s.net.