Philological Essays : Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt

Granted an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, Meritt spent the period 1931-33 in Europe, living mainly in Munich but visiting many of the important European libraries. Here he made the acquaintance of manuscripts glossed in Old English which he has since returned on a number of occasions to study anew. He also studied Old Church Slavonic at the University of Munich. Upon his homecoming, he accepted a Sterling Fellowship in linguistics at Yale University and read Germanic philology and Sanskrit under Edward Prokosch and Franklin Edgerton. Beginning in 1934, he was instructor in English at his Alma GLOSSARY (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 144), the EPINAL GLOSSARY (Bibliothèque Municipale, Épinal, MS 72), and the ERFURT GLOSSARY (Amplonian Library, Erfurt, MS 42). All three are glossaries of difficult Latin words and phrases, with explanations or synonyms usually in Latin but occasionally in English. The body of Old English material provided in this way is small, 3 but it constitutes the most extensive that we have for the earliest period. Of the three texts, the latest is Erf., an early ninth-century copy of an English exemplar. It was made by a scribe with a High German background, which causes him at times to substitute Old High German words for the OE, and at other times to write hybrid forms which are basically OE but contain one or more graphs used in the OHG manner. There are compensations, however: when the OE gloss did not suggest any OHG equivalent, this scribe copied very cautiously, often it would seem preserving the archaic spellings of his exemplar exactly as he found them. The earliest of the three texts orthographically is Ep., which preserves many archaic spellings and seems to be closer Linguistically to A.D. 700 than either of the other MSS. There are lacunae in Ep., a large part of the c-section, a little of u-v, and all of d, e, x, y, and z having been lost from the MS. Corp. is approximately twice as long as Erf. It contains nearly all of the matter found in the other two glossaries, plus extensive additions, and all of the items have been rearranged in a more nearly alphabetic order. The compiler of Corp. was an innovator, and his innovations extend to the spellings, which he frequently modernized. In other words, his text is the latest of the three, linguistically and orthographically. Both Ep. and Corp. are eighth-century MSS. 4 1.3. The relationship of the three glossaries can be shown, with the aid of two hypothetical MSS (Archetype II, the ancestor of Ep. and Erf., and Archetype I, the ancestor of Arch. II and Corp.), as in Table I. If this stemma is correct (and it is supported by abundant evidence), 5 any form in which all three glossaries agree, or 8 Ep. contains only about 951 English entries, about 149 having been lost through destruction of one leaf of the MS. Erf. fills this gap, but its approximately 1186 English entries include about 186 that are in supplementary sections not paralleled in either Ep. or Corp. Corp. contains about 2176 English entries, but nearly half are not paralleled in the other glossaries and represent material added to the original, presumably when Corp. was compiled. Allowing for corrupt forms, accidental omissions of individual words, etc., we have only about 900 English words available as evidence of the state of the language when Arch. I was written. ## TABLE II. Old English Consonants, c 700. Labial Dental Palato-velar-glottal Voiceless stops IPI [ri M [t] M [k, k'] Voiced stops /b/ [b, b] Idl [d] /g/ [g, g, g'l Spirants /f/ [f, v] /W [t>, 8] /h/ [h, X. X'] Liquids N P. H M [r, r] Nasals /m/ [m, ip] /n/ [n, n, q] Sibilants N t s > z] ./ §/ m Semi-vowels Ml [w] lël [j] Voceless affricate /¿/ W] Voiced affricate /g/ [d 3 ] Length: Usualy indicated by doubling of the consonant, /pp/, etc. Later changes and dialectal variations in the OE consonants will be noted in the discussions of individual phonemes, but a systematic treatment dialect by dialect is probably unnecessary, inasmuch as dialectal variations in the consonants are much less significant and much harder to determine precisely than are those in the vowels.® 2.2. Structuralists who have dealt with OE consonants sometimes differ from this table, as well as from one another, in the symbols used for transcribing the phonemes. There should be no misunderstanding if the following variant usages are kept in mind PREFACE TABLE OF CONTENTS HERBERT DEAN MERITT: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF HERBERT DEAN MERITT ON THE CONSONANTAL PHONEMES OF OLD ENGLISH MUCH AND MANY: THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A MODERN ENGLISH DISTRIBUTIONAL PATTERN BEOWULF'S OLD AGE DESTINY AND THE HEROIC WARRIOR IN BEOWULF DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION : GUTHLAC B* VERSE INFLUENCES IN OLD ENGLISH PROSE1 LEXICOGRAPHY AND LITERARY CRITICISM : A CAVEAT THE RHETORICAL LORE OF THE BOCERAS IN BYHRTFERTH's MANUAL THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE ACCOUNT OF KING EDGAR'S ESTABLISHMENT OF MONASTERIES SIX WORDS IN THE BUCKLING HOMILIES SOME NOTES ON THE LIBER SCINTILLA RUM AND ITS OLD ENGLISH GLOSS (B.M., Ms. Royal 7 C iv) A.S. NAPIER, 1853-1916 THE VENUS OF ALANUS DE INSULIS AND THE VENUS OF CHAUCER "THE TALE OF GARETH" AND THE UNITY OF LE MORTE DARTHUR

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