Volume 131, Issue 4

The Exeter Book poem, 102 lines long, traditionally and appropriately called The Wonder(s) of Creation, was renamed in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, III, 163-6, The Order of the World. This article traces the tradition (since 1842) and shows the inappropriateness of the new name. The whole poem is edited and translated in the article. The sentence structure is complex, and the unit of discourse is the sentence paragraph, rather than the gnome. Two thoughtful personae open the poem, one far-travelled and experienced, the other about to set out on his journey. The first twenty lines are about the intellectual grasp of the mystery of creation. There is a long eulogy of God the Creator and the wonder of his creation, Cædmonian and psalmodic in spirit. Line 46b, unemended þurh þa miclan gemynd, is shown to be pivotal, and the emendation gecynd, to avoid double alliteration in the second half-line, is rejected. The human mind is insufficient to grasp the greatness of God, as Creator and as Judge. The sun is glorified as the best of God’s Creation, reminiscent of Psalmody. The lability of initial /h/ in Old English may lead to subtle wordplay. Towards the end of the poem thought turns to heaven, the eorðwerud ‘that household originally on earth’ may form the heorðwerud ‘inhabitants of (God’s) homestead’ in heaven. Throughout, the paper stresses that rules established by prosodists from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first have frequent exceptions, and should not be used by editors in the hope of regularizing the transmitted texts of Old English poetry. A substantial appendix confirms manuscript readings rejected by martinetish editors; it ranges more widely than The Wonder of Creation, and the ‘impossible’ second half-line þurh þa miclan gemynd is at the centre of this appendix.

In the thirteenth-century English “Judas” ballad, Judas is sent to buy the Passover meal, loses his coins, and in desperation, sells Jesus to Pilate for the necessary money. This article argues that the poem’s chain of unequal exchanges evokes contemporary concerns about usury and its abuse of the needy, and that the ballad’s portrayal of Judas incurring a debt for which Christ is the payment also dramatizes Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of redemption. The ballad fuses mercantile and theological ideas of debt into a compact and pedagogically accessible exploration of sin.

The fourteenth-century romance The Erle of Tolous stands out among the corpus of tried-heroine narratives from medieval England, best known to modern readers in the form of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. In nearly all cases, the protagonist of these stories is an emblem of purity and piety. By contrast, the married heroine of The Erle grants an audience and one of her rings to the nobleman who loves her. After she is framed with adultery, he undertakes an ordeal to vindicate her and the two are finally wed upon the death of her husband, the Emperor of Almayn. Weaving together the account of this tender affection with the drama of the Empress’ false accusation and, furthermore, the territorial disputes between the Earl and the Emperor, the romance continually shifts its perspective on these characters, their mutual dealings, and the values that inform them. By analyzing the twists and turns of its plot and comparing it with analogous narratives of calumny, in particular Susanna and the Elders (Daniel 13 in the Vulgate numbering), I argue that The Erle replaces their conception of virtue as God-sanctioned righteousness with a pragmatic ethics that stresses the importance of fostering benevolent relations among human beings in changing circumstances. Whereas this romance departs significantly from the worldview of the biblical story, their close thematic and structural parallels suggest deliberate revision. The Erle is therefore a chapter in the largely uncharted reception history of Susanna and the Elders in the late Middle Ages.1

This paper discusses the role of prestige in the contact of English with its most important donor languages, Celtic, Old Norse, French, and Latin, in this order. It shows that the prestige of a donor language can only partly be correlated with its stratal relation to the recipient language. Moreover, it demonstrates that by focussing on the stratal relation of a donor language with its recipient language under specific historical and social conditions, the likely motivations for borrowing can be ascertained with greater explanatory precision. The arguments presented are based on various kinds of comparative assessments of the evidence for language contact, namely (1) evidence from different donor languages of English, (2) evidence from one and the same donor language in different periods, and (3) evidence from English and other recipient languages in response to the same donor language.

Usage-based models of grammar claim that, in a nutshell, speakers glean their tacit knowledge about language from their linguistic experience in communicative exchanges. Verbal compounding can be considered a challenge to usage-based models: on the one hand, genuine verbal compounding is generally regarded as not being a productive pattern for the formation of new English words; on the other hand, complex lexemes which could very well be the result of such a process, but were created by means of back-formation or conversion, e.g. to dry-clean, to babysit or to house-train, exist in non-negligible quantities. From a usage-based perspective, then, the question arises as to why speakers of English apparently do not have a productive schema for the creation of genuine verbal compounds at their disposal, even though they are confronted with linguistic input that seems to suggest, at least on the surface, that verbal compounding is indeed a productive process. Given that speakers with no training in linguistics are unlikely to be aware of the formation history of existing verbal compounds, what is the nature of the tacit knowledge they do seem to have that generally prevents them from creating new genuine verbal compounds and from judging them as acceptable when they come across them? This is the question addressed in the present paper. We offer findings from a systematic dictionary-cum-corpus analysis and from an acceptability and comprehension task which strongly suggest that hearers actually do not process novel genuine verbal compounds as compounds, but rely on different processing strategies instead, trying to take recourse to possible base nouns or adjectives and interpreting meanings on the basis of analogies to similar lexical items in the network. A check for the nameworthiness of the concepts denoted by the verbal compounds also seems to be involved. The paper concludes with a set of models representing the processing of different types of genuine verbal compounds and verbal pseudo-compounds, and showing that the ways in which these forms are processed are not conducive to the formation of a productive schema.