Band 118, Heft 4

The article gives a transcription of the recently discovered manuscripts of Caedmon's Hymn examined by Humphreys and Ross in 1975 and printed in facsimile by Robinson and Stanley in 1991, and locates the texts within the groups proposed by Dobbie. By comparing the readings of the various manuscripts, some questions of transmission are resolved. The article goes on to examine the manuscript and linguistic evidence as a whole to determine the relationship between the different traditions and their texts. Making use of the evidence of spelling conventions, substantive variants in the texts, and the textual representation of oral tradition, a radically new stemma is proposed.

Lines 3074–75 in Beowulf have been among the most vexing lines for editors, readers, and translators of the poem. The lines' tricky lexicon, syntax, and seemingly odd location in context have generated many commentaries and emendations, but what is often overlooked or understated in these treatments is the way that features of the Beowulf -manuscript contribute to the purpose and sense of the lines. By addressing aspects of the manuscript text as crucial to our understanding of lines 3074–75, this paper draws attention to the way that the lines emphasize Beowulf's coming to a concrete knowledge of Christian order in the world. However, this paper is also interested in the procedures and processes that make possible the possibility of interpretation; for this reason, two Old English renderings and a modern English translation of lines 3074–75 in their immediate context are presented here. These different readings seek to situate the lines in the narrative of Beowulf -scholarship as much as in the narrative of the poem.

This paper looks at the background against which Thomas Hoccleve's Remonstrance against Oldcastle was written. It draws on unprinted material from British Library MS Harley 431 to demonstrate close links between the Office of the Privy Seal, where Hoccleve was employed, and Sir John Oldcastle and his wife. A re-examination of the Remonstrance , known as a “furiously orthodox” poem, suggests the possibility of ironical readings at some points.

This paper explores additional functions that can be attached to pauses in speech. While traditional concepts have focused on pauses as boundary markers for delimiting purposes and hesitation pauses as signalling the process of planning on the speaker's side, it is worth assuming that pauses can also be used as stylistic devices in order to increase the sense of anticipation on the hearer's side with regard to the information to follow. Drawing on an innovative descriptive model which is based on the identification of the prosodic and syntactic status at tone unit boundaries in the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC), this type of pause will be exemplified and functionally analysed. Thus it will be shown that those pauses in speech which are not mere hesitation pauses may, on the one hand, fulfill a segmenting function, but also, on the other hand, a distinctive non-segmenting communicative function: this second function is subsumed under the notion of anticipation pauses .

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