more detailed explanation

16 Reading Old English Manuscripts

If you continue long enough in your study of Old English, you will sooner or later want to consult one or more of the roughly four hundred manuscripts (complete books and fragments) in which the language is recorded. Some sixty-five percent of these manuscripts are owned by just three libraries: the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. These and most other libraries will grant you access to their collections if you come with the proper credentials and have a legitimate research interest in Old English manuscripts. A great many manuscripts have been published in facsimile editions: these include all of the poetic manuscripts along with some of the most important of the prose ones. Eventually the series Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile will include every manuscript that contains even a word of Old English (see Further Reading for references). The availability of so many facsimiles means that you can work with Old English manuscripts even if your circumstances do not allow you to consult the real thing.

16.1. Construction of the manuscript

Most Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were written on vellum (Old English fell) made of calf skin. This was stretched, scraped smooth, whitened with chalk, cut into sheets, ruled with a stylus, and folded into quires of eight leaves (four sheets), or sixteen pages. After the scribes had done their work, the quires were sewn together and bound.

16.2. The Old English alphabet

The Anglo-Saxons adopted the styles of script employed by the Irish missionaries who had been instrumental in the conversion of the northern kingdoms. These styles included Insular half-uncial, used for fine books in Latin, and the less formal minuscule, used for both Latin and the vernacular. Beginning in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon scribes began to use caroline minuscule (developed in Francia during the reign of Charlemagne) for Latin while continuing to write Old English in Insular minuscule. Thereafter Old English script was increasingly influenced by caroline minuscule even as it retained certain distinctively Insular letter-forms. Once you have learned these letter-forms you will be able to read Old English manuscripts of all periods without difficulty.

Here are the basic letter-forms of Old English script, illustrated in a late Old English style:

Take particular note of these features:

the rounded shape of d;
the f that extends below the baseline instead of sitting on top of it;
the distinctive Insular g;
the dotless i;
the r that extends below the baseline;
the three shapes of s, of which the first two (the Insular long s and the high s,) are most common;
the t that does not extend above the cross-stroke;
the ƿ ("wynn"), usually transliterated as w but sometimes retained in print, derived from the runic letter ᚹ;
the y, usually dotted, which comes in several different shapes.

Old English has no use for q or z. J and v do not have the status of separate letters but are occasional variant shapes of i and u (more common in roman numbers than elsewhere). Old English scribes used k rarely, and only to represent the [k] sound, never the [ʧ] (ċ).

16.3. Abbreviations

Old English scribes used only a few abbreviations, of which the most common is ( = and, ond), a sign (Latin nota) from the shorthand system developed by Cicero's assistant M. Tullius Tiro, and hence called the Tironian nota. Another common abbreviation is for þæt. A stroke over a letter often signals that an m or n has been omitted; thus stands for bocum and for guman. The ġe- prefix can also be abbreviated with a stroke (), as can þonne ().

16.4. Punctuation and capitalization

Writers of Modern English follow a rather strict set of rules for punctuation--for example, placing a semicolon between independent clauses that are not coordinated with and and a comma between independent clauses that are so coordinated. Such punctuation guides the reader through the syntax of the sentence. Where the rules give us a choice, say, among comma, semicolon and dash, we use punctuation as a rhetorical device, marking the intensity of a pause or the formality of a clause boundary.

Old English scribes did not have so strict a set of rules to follow, and usage varies widely even among books produced at the same time and place. Some scribes used punctuation with fair reliability to mark clause- and sentence-boundaries, while others punctuated so lightly that their work is, for practical purposes, unpunctuated. To meet the expectations of readers accustomed to modern rules of punctuation, it has long been the practice of editors to modernize the punctuation of Old English works. Editors have debated how heavy this editorial punctuation should be, how much it should be influenced by the punctuation of the manuscript, and whether modern punctuation is adequate for representing Old English syntax.

Here is a passage from a manuscript of Ælfric's homilies, illustrating the punctuation used by one good scribe. [Cambridge, University Library, MS. Gg. 3. 28, fol. 255r. A facsimile of this page is printed as the frontispiece to Heinrich Henel, ed., Aelfric's De Temporibus Anni, Early English Text Society, o.s. 213 (Oxford, 1942). The passage is printed as in the manuscript, except that word- and line-division have been normalized (see Word- and line-division). In this and the other quotations in this chapter, the style of script is not intended to reproduce that of the manuscripts being quoted.]

[I thank the almighty Creator with all my heart that he has granted to me, a sinful one, that I have, in praise and worship of him, revealed these two books to the unlearned English nation; the learned have no need of these books because their own learning can suffice for them.]

The most common mark of punctuation is the point, which sometimes is placed on the baseline (as in Modern English) and sometimes, as here, somewhat above the line. The semicolon is used where a heavier syntactical or rhetorical break is indicated (here at the end of a pair of related sentences, which the translation coordinates with a semicolon). You may also occasionally see punctus elevatus (the punctus elevatus, marking a lighter pause than the semicolon but a heavier one than the point), and sometimes the punctus interrogativus (the punctus interrogativus or question mark--but marking the end of a question is optional). At the ends of sections you may see some combination of punctuation marks used as an ornament.

The function of acute accents, such as those in the preceding and following quotations, is uncertain. They are more often than not found over long vowels, but they also appear over short ones. They are especially common on one-syllable words.

In some poetic manuscripts punctuation is used to separate verses and lines--a convenience to modern readers, since scribes always wrote poetry from margin to margin, as if it were prose. Here are the first lines of The Battle of Brunanburh from the oldest manuscript of that poem [Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 173, fol. 26r. This is the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see the reading "Cynewulf and Cyneheard" in Old English Aerobics), in which the poem is the entry for the year 937. For a facsimile of this manuscript see Robin Flower and Hugh Smith, ed., The Parker Chronicle and Laws, Early English Text Society, o.s. 208 (Oxford, 1941).] (the original line-breaks have been retained here):

[Anno 937. Here King Æthelstan, lord of warriors, ring-giver of men, and also his brother, Prince Edmund, struck life-long glory in battle with the edges of swords near Brunanburh.]

As you can see from these passages, proper names are not capitalized. Some scribes capitalized words for God and the beginnings of sentences, but most did not do so with any consistency. Those editors who modernize punctuation usually do the same with capitalization.

16.5. Word- and line-division

Word-division is far less consistent in Old English than in Modern English; it is, in fact, less consistent in Old English manuscripts than in Latin written by Anglo-Saxon scribes. You may expect to see the following peculiarities: [Most of the examples in the following list are from the reading "Cynewulf and Cyneheard" in Old English Aerobics.]

spaces between the elements of compounds, e.g. ;
spaces between words and their prefixes and suffixes, e.g. ;
spaces at syllable divisions, e.g. ;
prepositions, adverbs and pronouns attached to the following words, e.g. ;
many words, especially short ones, run together, e.g. .

The width of the spaces between words and word-elements is quite variable in most Old English manuscripts, and it is often difficult to decide whether a scribe intended a space. "Diplomatic" editions, which sometimes attempt to reproduce the word-division of manuscripts, cannot represent in print the variability of the spacing on a hand-written page.

Most scribes broke words freely at the ends of lines. Usually the break takes place at a syllable boundary, e.g. ofslae-gen (= ofslægen), sum-ne (= sumne), heo-fenum . Occasionally, however, a scribe broke a word elsewhere, e.g. forhaef-dnesse . Some scribes marked word-breaks with a hyphen, but many did not mark them in any way.

16.6. Errors and corrections

Everyone who writes makes mistakes, and it is probably safe to say that every Old English text of any length at all contains errors. Most manuscripts also contain corrections, either by the scribe himself or by a later corrector. But the correction of texts was often inconsistently carried out, and may not have taken into account errors already present in the copy from which corrections were being entered. In general you should not assume that a corrected text retains no uncorrected errors.

When a corrector added words to a text, he usually placed a comma below the line at the insertion point and wrote the addition above the line; longer additions might be written in the margin, very long ones on an added leaf. To delete a letter, the scribe would place a point under it; to delete a word or phrase he would underline it. Some correctors erased text, but erasure roughened the vellum, making it difficult to write on; so erasure was most suitable when no substitute text was to be supplied.