Volume 121, Issue 2

The Old English adaptation of Augustine's Soliloquia , traditionally attributed to King Alfred, is quite the most ambitious undertaking of the whole Alfredian project, and the third and final book of that work is easily the most ambitious part of it, but the textual confusion of Book III in the only surviving copy of the work makes it hard to come to a proper appreciation of the work. Karl Jost in 1920 demonstrated that the confusion could in part be explained by dislocation of leaves in an earlier manuscript. This article argues that the dislocation of text goes further than this, and that a closer analysis suggests a substantial rearrangement which offers a more coherent structure to the text. It goes on to explore the eschatology of Book III in the light of this rearrangement, and demonstrates that the Alfredian argument shows familiarity with traditional positions on the nature of the after-life but takes a radically more expansive view of the kinds of knowledge available after death.

In this study we explore the Anglo-Saxon understanding of and translations for ‘amen’ and ‘doxology’ as they are found at the end of homiletic, scriptural and above all, liturgical texts of the period. In some traditions, ‘amen’ is mereley repeated without translation as a closure marker in its own language, while in others it is rendered in several different ways; these are notably a ‘correct’ version using a subjunctive which indicates knowledge of ‘amen’s literal significance, and an ‘incorrect’ form that confuses the vernacular adverbial discourse marker ‘soðlice’ with the closure marker proper. In poetry, both ‘amen’ and any version of a closing doxological formula are frequently amplified, and comparison of these provides a new perception of the way in which Anglo-Saxons apprehended and used traditional liturgical closure markers.

Consideration of whether there was any pre-Conquest social legislation, whether, in fact, the Anglo-Saxons had a social conscience, are questions that arose from discussion after a paper on aspects of Anglo-Saxon law I had given without attending to such matters of importance in legal and administrative institutions as are now current, and to the thinking that underlies them: social awareness, manifesting itself in Old English expressions of such concepts as pity, compassion, mercy, as being wretched or poor, and therefore deserving of support, of almsgiving, and of bewailing the lot of those in need. The evidence is to be found in the religious writings and in the laws and charitable provisions of the Anglo-Saxons. Compassionate expressions occur variously in their writings. What emerges clearly is that the acts of charity, to which the Anglo-Saxons were exhorted, are forcefully connected with the hope of eternal reward, whereas a lack of charitable compassion is seen to carry with it the fear of eternal damnation. It follows that, though the Anglo-Saxons show in their writings that they have a social conscience, it is different in essentials from the kind that informs modern ideas. Their social conscience is not like ours.

Auf der Ostseite des Ruthwellkreuzes sind ab etwa der Mitte der ersten Zeile die Runen für gere und unter dem zweiten e am rechten Rand (Nordost) die Runen für dæ auch jetzt noch klar lesbar. Vor dem g von gere ist der Stein stark beschädigt, der Platz würde für etwa vier bis fünf Runenzeichen reichen. Ebenso wie der linke Rand (Südost) enthält auch der rechte Rand weiterhin untereinander Gruppen von meist zwei Runen, in sechs Zeilen stehen je drei Runen nebeneinander.

Words: Structure, Meaning, Function. A Festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky, ed. Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Nikolaus Ritt; Words, Lexemes, Concepts: Approaches to the Lexicon. Studies in Honour of Leonhard Lipka, ed. Wolfgang Falkner and Hans-Jörg Schmid (Doris Schönefeld) A Dictionary of European Anglicisms, ed. Manfred Görlach; An Annotated Bibliography of European Anglicismus, ed. Manfred Görlach; English in Europe, ed. Manfred Görlach (Hortensia Pârlog) Reinhard Heuberger, Monolingual Dictionaries for Foreign Learners of English: A Constructive Evaluation of the State-of-the-art. Reference Works in Book Form and on CD-ROM (Thomas Herbst) Kurt Rydland, The Orton Corpus: A Dictionary of Northumbrian Pronunciation 1928–1939 (Beat Glauser) Amei Koll-Stobbe, Konkrete Lexikologie des Englischen: Entwurf einer Theorie des Sprachkönnens (Thomas Herbst) Laurie Bauer, Morphological Productivity (Manfred Markus) Bertil Sundby, ‘Its Appeal is To The Middlebrow’: A Study in Text Strategy (Manuela Pinsky) Joybrato Mukherjee, Form and Function of Parasyntactic Presentation Structures: A Corpus-based Study of Talk Units in Spoken English (Brigitte Halford) Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oliver M. Traxel) A Companion to Chaucer , ed. Peter Brown; Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders; Chaucer's Church: A Dictionary of Religious Terms in Chaucer , ed. Edward E. Foster and David H. Carey; Andrew James Johnston, Clerks and Courtiers: Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process (Fritz Kemmler) Christoph Bode, Einführung in die Lyrikanalyse (Peter Wenzel) Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Dirk Vanderbeke) Re-mapping Romanticism: Gender – Text – Context, ed. Christoph Bode and Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann (Neville Plaice) Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Merle Tönnies) Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900 , ed. Joanne Shattock (Martina Stange) Laurence Kitzan, Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire: The Rose-Colored Vision (Michael Meyer) Earl G. Ingersoll, D. H. Lawrence, Desire, and Narrative; Robert Burden, Radicalizing Lawrence: Critical Interventions in the Reading and Reception of D. H. Lawrence's Narrative Fiction (Cornelia Schulze) Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Gabriele Rippl) Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Horst Breuer) Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, ed. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (Ewald Mengel) Angela Krewani, Hybride Formen: New British Cinema – Television Drama – Hypermedia (Jörg Helbig) Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Coral Ann Howells)