The Transmission of Old English Poetry.
P. Orton, Peter Orton,
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 2503510728
Edition: Hardcover; 2000-12-01
Summary:
No detailed study of Old English poems surviving in multiple (two or
more) contemporary manuscripts has yet been published, in spite of a
recognition as early as 1946 (by Kenneth Sisam) of the potential
value of a monograph comparing the various versions of these poems.
This book fills that gap. Of some 185 extant Old English poems or
fragments, twenty are preserved, either wholly or in part, in
multiple manuscript versions, involving a total overlap of about 679
verse-lines (2.2% of the total surviving poetic corpus of 30,535
lines). The various versions of each poem are here compared in close
detail with a view to discovering as much as possible about the
influences to which Old English poetry was exposed in the course of
its transmission. Among questions addressed here are the authority of
late texts of Old English poems; the accuracy of copyists and the
extent of their understanding of the texts they reproduced; the
degree of freedom with which they treated their exemplar texts; the
significance of the deliberate modifications that they imposed; and
the question of oral versus literary transmission. Prof. Tom Shippey
(St Louis Univ.) writes: 'Peter Orton's study is an impressive work.
It examines and refutes two views about OE poetry which have become
accepted, or canonical. The first is Kenneth Sisam's statement from
1953 that a few cases where OE poems exist in two manuscripts show a
laxity of phrasing and a percentage of variation which suggests oral
transmission rather than literate; the second, Katherine O'Keeffe's
more modern and more nuanced argument, from 1991, that such poems are
the product of "formulaic reading" and demonstrate a state of
"residual orality". Orton convincingly demonstrates that the variants
represent (more or less) judicious editing. A further corollary is
that current editorial practice of accepting manuscript readings is a
gullible one - with two versions to compare, one can see the kind of
transmission errors
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