Word order in Old English prose and poetry: the

Word order in Old English prose and poetry: the position of finite verb and adverbs

Ans van Kemenade, University of Nijmegen, Dept. of English

1.

Introduction1

In this paper I reopen the question concerning the differences between the word order of Old English prose and that of the poetry, in relation to the dating of the poetry. I will identify with some precision a genuine syntactic difference between prose and poetry: negative-initial sentences in Beowulf exhibit on a rather large scale a word order pattern that is not attested at all in prose: this is a pattern in which an initial negative element is not immediately followed by the finite verb. This pattern is attested in varying degrees in most of the other poetry in Old English as well. This shows at least one real syntactic difference between prose and poetry. The existence of this pattern raises a number of questions, which revolve around a combination of two issues: first, there is no consensus in the literature on the notion that there are genuine syntactic differences between Old English prose and poetry. For instance, Mitchell (1985: § 3959) observes that Old English poetry contains many more verb-final word orders than the prose, but emphasizes that the difference is one of frequency more than anything else. Getty (1998; 2000) gives a metrical variant of this assessment and makes a case that differences with respect to the finite verb placement are differences in frequency, arguing that they result from metrical considerations rather than syntactic differences. Second, there is a tendency to ascribe differences between prose and poetry to the archaic character of the poetry (van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1991). It is, however, difficult to establish a composition date for the poetry. While the language of the alliterative poetry is thought to be archaic, as it was presumably compiled after centuries of oral transmission, the manuscripts themselves date from around AD 1000 (Fulk 1992; Kiernan 1996; Bjork and Niles 1997). The weight of the philological evidence does, however, support an early composition date (Fulk 1992). Whatever the precise further differences between prose and poetry, the pattern presented in section 2 involves a genuinely qualitative difference between prose and poetry and cannot straightforwardly be attributed to metrical considerations. I will suggest, with some crosslinguistic support, that the poetic word order pattern reflects an earlier stage of the

language, in which finite verb movement was not yet canonical in negative-initial clauses. I will then, in section 3, go on to embed this discussion in a broader comparison between poetry and prose, taking Beowulf as a focal point. In ongoing work on Old English word order, I am considering the position of short adverbs, arriving at some remarkably solid generalizations which yield precise and independent word order tests. I will then apply these tests to Beowulf. They show up a consistent difference between the word order of prose and poetry: fronting of the finite verb is a good deal more frequent in prose than in poetry. This itself is in line with the findings in Getty (1998; 2000), in that it accounts for differences in frequency, though not for the existence of a pattern in the poetry that is not otherwise attested. Finally, I will consider whether Getty’s (1998) metrical analysis offers insights with respect to the choice of negation pattern in Beowulf.

2.

A word order pattern in Beowulf

I will limit the discussion here to negated root clauses. For a broader discussion of sentential negation in Beowulf, the reader is referred to van Kemenade (2000: 58 ff.). There are various reasons for focussing on Beowulf: the first is that it contains a substantial number of instances of the negation pattern under discussion. Furthermore, it is the longest poem we have and although the only ms. we have of the poem was written somewhere around AD 1000, there is some consensus that the version we have must have been composed in the course of the 8th century.2 This would put the poem rather earlier than any of the large prose texts we have. Moreover, it was presumably compiled and written down in the form as we know it after centuries of oral transmission, which makes it likely that archaic linguistic features have been preserved in it. Against this background, it is tempting to consider as archaic those syntactic patterns that are different from the norm apparent in the ninth and tenth century prose texts. Let us first consider, as a point of reference, the standard strategy for sentential negation in Old English root clauses generally.3 Negated root clauses in Old English very dominantly conform to the pattern: negated finite verb – subject - ... . Separation of ne and finite verb is not attested at all. This is illustrated in (1):

(1) a ne sende se deofol ða fyr of heofenum, þeah þe hit ufan come ÆCHom.i.6.13

not sent the devil then fire from heaven,

though that it from-above came

'the devil sent not fire from heaven, though it came from above' b Nolde se Hælend for his bene swaþeah hym fram gewitan ÆHom.XIV.199 not-wanted the Lord for his prayer however him from depart ‘However, the Lord did not want to depart from him because of his prayer’

Beowulf shares with other Old English texts this standard strategy for sentential negation of fronting a negative adverb +finite verb to clause-initial position, as in (1a).4 The pattern as in (1) is found in Beowulf as well and is exemplified in (2), but there is also an alternative pattern as in (3):

(2)

| Nolde eorla hleo / ænige þinga | þone cwealmcuman / cwicne forlætan Beowulf.791 not-wanted of-earls protector any thing the kill-comer alive release 'The protector of earls was minded in no way to release the deadly visitant alive'

(3) a / No he wiht fram me | flodyþum feor / fleotan meahte,| hraþor on holme,/ no ic fram him wolde.|

Beowulf.541

Not he thing from me on waves far swim could, quicker in water; not I from him wanted 'In no way could he swim far from me on the waves of the flood, more quickly on the sea; I would not consent to leave him' b

| no ic me an herewæsmun / hnagran talige | guþgeweorca, / þonne Grendel hine | Beowulf.677 not I myself in war-strength inferior count, battledeeds, than Grendel himself 'I do not count myself less in war-strength, in battle deeds, than Grendel does himself'

There are 124 negative-initial clauses in Beowulf, 73 of which conform to the pattern (2), and 51 to pattern (3). That is, 59% of the negative-initial root clauses have a preposed finite verb, or, more significantly in the context of Old English word order, a substantial 41% of the negative-initial clauses do not have a preposed finite verb. There are several points of note about the facts in (3). First, the sentences are negativeinitial, like the standard Old English ones in (1); second, the initial negative element is spelled

with a distinctive vowel, not as ne and is not procliticized as n- (an anonymous referee observes that no contains a heavy vowel); third, the initial negative element is not incorporated with the finite verb: while no is in first position, the finite verb, meahte in (3a), talige in (3b), does not seem to have been moved at all from its sentence-final position. A final observation is that the patterns in (2) and (3) are in complementary distribution: an unreduced form like no (but also nē, næfre) does not go together with movement of the finite verb, but the reduced form ne or the procliticized form does.5 Given the fact that the pattern (3) without V-movement is not attested in the Old English prose texts of the 9th and 10th centuries, we seem to be looking at a real difference between poetry and prose. The question how these two patterns are related synchronically within any given text is therefore an interesting one. My answer to this question is the following: the two root patterns of sentential negation in Beowulf represent different stages of historical development; since Beowulf may represent some of the earliest Old English, the two root negation patterns might be competing patterns resulting from a change in progress: the rise of finite V-movement to C in negative-initial sentences. Beside questions, negative-initial sentences constitute a grammatical environment in which English throughout its further history has had V-movement to C, with canonical subject - finite V – inversion (where the finite V later became restricted to finite auxiliaries). There are pieces of circumstantial evidence for this idea, in the absence of earlier texts. The first of these is that the putatively early pattern without movement (3) is found with any frequency only in poetry thought to be the oldest: examples can be found, for instance, in Widsith, Genesis A, Daniel. Some representative examples from these early poems are given in (4):

(4)a.

No þy sel dyde, ac þam æðelinge oferhygd gesceod

Daniel 488

b. / no ðu of deaðe hine | swa þrymlice, / þeoda wealdend | aweahte for weoredum / Elene, 779 not you of the dead him so gloriously of-men ruler raised before people ‘you, ruler of men, would not have raised him from the dead so gloriously before the people’ This might lead us to think that it is a pattern of poetry rather than prose, but this is not the case: the putatively oldest poems have it in varying degrees, but the one poem which we know

is late, The Battle of Maldon, written up close to its late tenth century composition date, soon after the battle it relates (991), has no example of the pattern (3) in 13 negated root clauses. There is also some crosslinguistic evidence in that Latin (as in Adams 1994) and Gothic (as in Ferraresi 1991) have known a similar rise of V-movement triggered by negative constituents. I will therefore conclude that we are looking at the rise of V-movement here, and that the language of Beowulf and other older poems affords a glimpse of a stage that contains at least one older word order pattern not attested in Old English prose. A consequence of this approach is that at least in some contexts the Old English negator ne has its origin in phonological weakening of na/no as negative adverbs6 This point is defended in some detail in van Kemenade (1997; 2000), where a general approach to the diachrony of sentential negation markers in English is developed, making a crucial distinction between negative constituents (na/no) and negative heads (ne/n-finite verb), with negative constituents often developing (by phonological/syntactic reduction) into negative heads over time. In those contexts in which the negative adverb immediately precedes the finite verb, it is procliticized to the finite verb, with concomitant vowel reduction. In this sense, then, ne is synchronically related to na/no at the stage of Beowulf and other early poetry, in as far as these represent one synchronic stage. This does not imply that there is no syntactic distinction between them: in the prose of the 9th an 10th centuries na/no are full negative adverbs in most contexts, whereas ne is quite clearly a negative proclitic in most contexts (beside its function as negative conjunction). My claim here is that the cooccurrence of these two patterns in one poetic text, most extensively in Beowulf, gives us a glimpse of the syntactic change that was responsible for the transition between one stage and the next. My account likewise does not imply that there is no metrical distinction between the two poetic patterns. A referee notes that the metrical behaviour of ne suggests that it might represent a different strategy for negation. I will come back to this point below. Having established these two word order patterns (2) and (3) in root negatives in Beowulf, having pinpointed the difference between them as one of finite verb placement, and having attributed the availability of one of them (3) to an early date for Beowulf, I should add that this leaves open the possibility that the synchronic choice between them in any given context could still be due to metrical considerations such as those identified by Getty (1998; 2000). The next step then is to set out Getty’s ideas about the nature of finite verb placement in the poetry, and

to see how we can find further evidence for the notion that word order distinctions between poetry and prose are to an important extent differences in verb placement triggered by metrical considerations.

3.

Further comparisons with respect to finite V-placement.

It has often been observed that the poetry contains a good deal more verb-final clauses than the prose (cf. Mitchell 1985: § 3945). Getty (1998; 2000) nuances this observation, and makes a good case that, while verb-final and non-verb-final word order were both grammatical options in Old English (cf. Pintzuk 1991), the precise choice in any given case is dictated by the mutual compatibility of the prosodic make-up of the finite verb on the one hand, and the demands of the meter on the other. The result of this is a relatively low rate of verb-fronting constructions in the poetry, and those in which verb-fronting does occur largely feature modal verbs, which, so Getty argues, exhibit varying degrees of prosodic deficiency. While Getty’s theoretical framework has little to say on the availability per se of the negative-initial pattern illustrated by (3), which I have hypothesized is one essentially predating the rest of Old English, it may be promising in accounting for the choice between the two patterns in any given case. Before I go on to do this, however, I want to pull back a step, and try to find out more about the question whether some of the important differences between the word order of the prose and the poetry, are really differences in finite verb-placement. In order to achieve this, I will start from recent research reported in van Kemenade (1999; forthcoming), on adverb placement in relation to finite verb movement. This yields some word order tests which I will then go on to apply to the syntax of Beowulf, to see whether prose and poetry pattern in the same way in this respect. The advantage of this approach is that it gives us a “check” on the word order that is independent of the factors conditioning finite verb placement.

3.1. Finite verb placement in the prose The discussion on this topic has been conducted under the label “Verb Second”, although it has emerged by now that this term is not entirely appropriate. It has been inspired, however, by the

similarities between the phenomenon in a large number of the contemporary (West-)Germanic languages in which the finite verb is found as the second constituent in the root clause. While in Old English wh-questions and (in the prose) negative-inital clauses closely conform to this same phenomenon, as illustrated by the examples in (4), those constructions in which the first constituent in the root clause is a non-subject show some differential behaviour: subject-verbinversion only occurs when the subject is a full NP; personal pronoun subjects occur on the left of a fronted finite verb. This is illustrated in (5):

(4)a for hwam noldest þu ðe sylfe me gecyðan þæt ... (LS 7(Euphr) 305) for what not-wanted you yourself me make-known that ... `wherefore would you not want to make known to me yourself that...' b Ne sceal he naht unaliefedes don (CP 10.61.14) Not shall he nothing unlawful do `He shall not do anything unlawful'

(5)a On twam þingum hæfde God þæs mannes sawle gegodod (ÆCHom i, 1.20.1) in two things had God the man's soul endowed `With two things God had endowed man's soul' b Be ðæm we magon suiðe swutule oncnawan ðæt ... (CP 26.181.16) By that we may very clearly perceive that ... `By that, we may perceive very clearly that ...'

For full discussion of the issues, the reader is referred to Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman and van der Wurff (2000: chapter 4) and references cited there. In van Kemenade (1999), it is shown that the position of the finite verb is presumably the same in (5a) and (5b); it is the position of the various types of subject that is truly different. This is brought home once again by their position relative to short adverbs when they are in a sentence-internal position. Van Kemenade (1999) reveals a minority pattern with multiple sentential negation in Old English. The relevant clauses are introduced by the negated finite verb (which crucially involves movement of the finite verb to the highest functional head position in CP, with concomitant subject-Vf-inversion, regardless of the type of subject), just

like (1) and (2) above, but there is a reinforcing sentential negator: the short negative adverb na (or no):

(6)a þonne ne miht þu na þæt mot ut ateon of ðæs mannes eagan (ÆCHomi.14.153) then not could you not the speck out draw of the man's eye `Then you could not draw the speck out of man's eye' b Ne bið na se leorningcniht furðor þonne his lareow (ÆCHomi. 14.134) Not-is not the apprentice further than his master `The apprentice is not ahead of his master'

What is striking is that the reinforcing sentential negator na systematically occurs in a position lower than than the pronominal subject (as in (6a)) and higher than the nominal subject (as in (6b)). In clauses without a negative adverb, this discrepancy is invisible: abstracting from the reinforcing sentential negator na, (6a) and (6b) simply involve subject-finite verb-inversion. These facts show that the position of the finite verb in the constructions in (5) must be one that is lower than in the constructions in (6). Assuming that the position of the pronominal and nominal subjects is the same in (5) and (6), the position of the finite verb in (5) is higher than that of the nominal subject in (5a), and lower than that of the pronominal subject in (5b). This is discussed in detail in Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman and van der Wurff (2000). The position of the negative adverb is therefore rather revealing as a word order diagnostic. This is true for some other adverbs as well. I will turn to this in the next section.

3.2. The position of short adverbs

The fixed position for the reinforcing negative adverb is shared by a multitude of other short adverbs (when in a sentence-internal position) including þa ‘then’; þonne ‘then’; nu ‘now’; eac ‘also’ la ‘lo’ and so on. These do not all occur with any frequency in the same text; individual texts have distinct preferences.7 But when any of these adverbs is used, it patterns in exactly the same way as the reinforcing sentential negator in (6): regardless of the precise position of the finite verb, which is most variable in root clauses introduced by a subject NP (as discussed in van Kemenade forthcoming), pronominal subjects invariably appear on the left of the

adverb, whereas nominal subjects appear on the right. An illustration of this is afforded by the use of ðonne in relation to the finite verb and various types of subject in the 9th century Cura Pastoralis, a text which is rather fond of ðonne. In (7) it is shown that the position of ðonne with respect to the finite verb in subject-initial root clauses shows some preferences, but is by no means clear:

(7)

Nominal subject

Personal pronoun subject

ðonne preverbal

7

8

ðonne postverbal

3

19

Subject-initial root clauses with sentence-internal ðonne in Cura Pastoralis

In (8), on the other hand, I abstract away from the position of the finite verb by considering only root questions, an environment in which the finite verb is always in the highest functional head position in CP. In this context, the position of ðonne with respect to the various types of subject is entirely clearcut:

(8)

Nominal subject

Personal pronoun subject or object

subject left of ðonne

0

10

subject right of ðonne

17

0

Root questions with sentence-internal subject and sentence-internal ðonne in Cura Pastoralis

What seems to be fixed then, is the position of the adverb and the various types of subject, while the position of the finite verb is more variable, most clearly so in subject-initial root clauses (where initial subjects in root clauses are assumed to be in the first constituent position).8 Similar observations are made for the interjection la ‘lo’ when in a sentence-internal position, in Kato (1995). The particular value of these observations concerning the position of adverbs and subjects is twofold: the first is that they form a very robust word order generalization; the second is the fact that they are completely independent of the position of the finite verb. This gives us an

independent perspective with which we can approach the word order of the poetry, to see if the patterns there show any similarity to those in the prose. The only one among the short adverbs that is robustly attested in Beowulf is ða ‘then’. I have looked at all the attestations of ða in the machine-readable version of the text in the Toronto text corpus. It should be borne in mind that ða is a multi-functional word in Old English: it can be used as a demonstrative pronoun (in the nominative and accusative plural); as a conjunction; as an adverb. As an adverb it is often employed as the first constituent in the sentence, or it can be used in a sentence-internal position, as discussed above for the use of ðonne in Cura Pastoralis. Of all these uses, only the last is relevant for our purposes here. I have discounted those cases in which a subject is left implicit for some reason. This leaves 48 examples, which pattern as follows:

(9)

Nominal subject subject left of ða

0

subject right of ða

4017

Personal pronoun subject or object 810 0

Clauses with sentence-internal subject and sentence-internal ða in Beowulf

Two illustrations are given in (10) and (11):

(10)

Hylde hine

þa heaþodeor, hleorbolster onfeng eorles andwlitan, Beowulf 688

Inclined himself then the battle-brave, pillow received warrior’s countenance ‘the bold warrior then laid himself down, his (the earl’s) face touched the pillow’

(11) Gespræc þa se goda/ gylpworda sum, / Beowulf Geata, / ær he on bed stige: Beowulf 675 spoke then the good boastful-words some, Beowulf of the Geats, before he to bed went ‘ the good Beowulf of the Geats then made a boastful speech before lying down on his bed.’

These facts suggest a close similarity between the poetry and the prose with respect to the positioning of sentence-internal subjects and adverbs. This is further confirmed by the rather more restricted occurrences of other short adverbs in sentence-internal position. For instance, there are 6 occurrences of ðonne in a sentence-internal position (excluding two cases without

an overt subject and one impersonal case). The basic pattern is the same, as the following examples show:

(12) gyf þonne Frysna

hwylc frecnan spræce ðæs morþorhetes myndgiend wære Beowulf 1104

if then of-the-Frisians any by daring speech the murder-hostilities calling to mind were ‘if then any of the Frisians should call to mind by daring speech the murderous hostilities’

(13)

Gif ic þonne on eorþan owihte mæg þinre modlufan maran tilian, Beowulf 1822 if I

then on earth any

may your love

better earn

‘if I can in any way on earth win a greater love from you,...’

The occurrence of the other short adverbs is really too limited to base conclusions on. However, the facts concerning the positioning of þa and þonne seem to be sufficiently robust to establish what seems to be a substantial word order generalization for Beowulf, parallel to that for the prose: the position of sentence-internal subjects and short adverbs is fixed; what is variable is the position of the finite verb.

4. The trigger for verb fronting

It was established in the previous sections that Old English poetry has at least one word order pattern that is unattested in the prose: negative-initial clauses without verb fronting. While this fact is new, it does add further weight to the observations in Mitchell (1985) and Getty (1998; 2000) that the poetry contains more V-final word orders, i.e. less verb fronting, than the prose. This may to some extent be a question of dating, but Getty (1998; 2000), with respect to verb placement in contexts other than negative-initial ones, makes a case that, where alternative grammatical options are available (such as verb-fronting vs. non-verb-fronting), the prosodic make-up of the finite verb determines its placement. In effect, when verb fronting does take place, it mostly involves prosodically weak (often monosyllabic) verbs, such as copulas and modal verbs.9 When verb fronting does not take place, this mostly involves lexical verbs. Given that we have now established another case in early Old English where there is competition between a construction with and one without verb fronting: the case of negative-

initial clauses in Beowulf, it seems worthwhile to explore whether Getty’s insights apply here as well. The conclusion is that they hold up to a large extent. It was observed above that Beowulf contains 73 examples of negative-initial clauses with a preposed finite verb, and 51 that are verbfinal. Of the 73 examples with a preposed finite verb, no less than 62 contain a verb that is a copula, a modal verb, or a monosyllabic lexical verb, which amounts to well over 80%. On the other hand, the 51 verb-final clauses include only 12 with a copula or a modal verb, only one of which is monosyllabic. I conclude therefore, that Getty’s metrical analysis carries over to this particular case as well. There is one aspect of the metrical analysis in Getty (2000) that is contradicted by the facts of Beowulf. This links in with a point made by an anonymous referee: this referee notes that in Getty’s system, ne should be treated as prefixal to the finite verb. Getty’s theory then predicts that ne+finite verb is more frequent in line-internal positions as opposed to line-initial positions, since he treats line-initial prefixes as deficient metrical feet. This prediction is clearly false: while the gist of this comment may be numerically right, the choice between initial and internal ne+finite verb is determined to a large extent by the character of the clause, root or nonroot (cf. van Kemenade (2000)). As noted above, there are 73 cases of root clauses negated by ne+finite verb in initial position, and 59 with the no ... finite verb pattern. Together, these constitute 85% of the negated root clauses. The cases with ne+finite verb in line-internal position largely represent nonroot clauses. This fact supports my account here in the sense that syntactic factors seem to underly the choice of negation pattern. Where the grammatical options leave this open, the choice between patterns may be dictated by metrical considerations such as those in Getty (2000). What I have done in this paper then, is to give some further and precise substantiation to the general observation in Mitchell (1985) that the poetry contains a good deal more verb-final word order than the prose. More specifically, I have established that Beowulf contains one verbfinal pattern that is not attested at all in the later Old English prose: negative-initial clauses fail to have verb-fronting in 41% of the cases. This forces us to the conclusion that this pattern must have represented a grammatical option, perhaps competing with the verb-fronting option, at the time when Beowulf was composed. I have hypothesized that the time of composition must have been one predating the Old English prose. Given that these grammatical options were available, the choice between them can plausibly be accounted for in terms of the metrical proposal advanced in Getty (1998; 2000).

Endnotes 1

I thank the editors of this volume and two anonymous referees for comments on an

earlier version of this paper. 2

By “some consensus”, I mean that the dating of Beowulf is still controversial. The arguments

for dating it to the 8th century are based on the content of the poem as well as its linguistic features. There is a marked Christian element in the poem, which indicates that it was composed after the christianization of England, putting it no earlier than about 700. Moreover, it is thoroughly Scandinavian in subject matter, in a way so sympathetic to Danish affairs that it must have been composed before the Scandinavians became the enemies of the English at the end of the 8th century. The morphological and phonological characteristics of the language are consistent with this rough date of composition. For a dissenting view, see Kiernan (1996). 3

By sentential negation, I mean clauses in which one or more negators negate the whole

clause. Old English is a negative concord language in which there is no principled limit on the number of constituents in a sentence that can be negated. Multiple sentential negation (where more than one negator negates the whole clause) has not received much attention in the literature. Mourek (1903) makes a distinction between qualitative (sentential) and quantitative (constituent) negation. Mitchell (1985) follows Einenkel (1912) in wondering whether the distinction reflects a reality in OE grammar and scraps it altogether, thereby glossing over the distinction, like most other standard grammars. For more discussion, see van Kemenade (1999), who attempts to isolate multiple sentential negation from negative concord (multiple constituent negation). 4

This is not the only negation pattern in root clauses, although it is the clearly dominant

one, amounting to about 85% of the cases. Other patterns are consistent with those of single sentential negation in later Old English. 5

There are three “counterexamples” to this, all three a combination of the no-initial

pattern and ...ne Vf. (i) is a representative example (the others are ll. 862, 2466): ... / no ðu ymb mines ne þearft/ lices feorme lenge sorgian. Beowulf, 450 not you about my not need body's disposal long worry 'in which case you will not need to trouble long over the disposal of my body'

6

An anonymous referee objects that the view that ne is a phonologically reduced variant

of of na/no wrongly implies a process of vowel reduction for which there is no further independent evidence during the Old English period, and that it would make more sense to say that the two patterns in Beowulf represent different negative adverbs. Note, however, that the vowel reduction hypothesized here is a byproduct of procliticization of the negative adverb to the preposed finite verb. It is therefore tied to this particular context, not to a general process of vowel reduction. The referee’s assumption that the two pattern in Beowulf represent truly different negation strategies would imply that there is no relationship whatever between the two patterns, and allows no account at all for the no ... finite verb pattern, which has no analogue in later Old English. On the account here, it is the negative character of the first constituent that draws the finite verb to C, which results in phonological procliticization of the negative element to the finite verb, resulting in reduction or elimination of the vowel (to ne or n-). For further discussion, see van Kemenade (1997; 2000). It is, I believe, uncontroversial to assume that ne represents an unstressed syllable. 7

The examples of the adverb pattern discussed here are representative of an exhaustive

examination of the following texts: The Old English Orosius, ed. Bately; King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies, ed. Carnicelli, King Alfred's Old English version of Boethius' 'De Consolatione Philosophiae', ed. Sedgefield; King Alfred's West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet; the early part of the Parker ms. of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, from Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. Plummer; volume I of the Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Thorpe; both volumes of Ælfric's Lives of Saints, ed. Skeat; both volumes of the Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope; the Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum; the later part of the Parker ms. of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, ed. Plummer.

References Text references ÆCHomi = B. Thorpe (ed.) 1844-46 The Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Ælfric I, London: Ælfric Society.

ÆHom = J. C. Pope (ed.) 1967-68 Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection (EETS 259, 260) Beowulf = Fr. Klaeber (ed.) 1922 Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company. CP = H. Sweet (ed) 1871 King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care (EETS 45, 50). LS = W. W. Skeat (ed) 1881-1900. Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (EETS 76, 82, 94, 114) (repr. as 2 vols. 1966).

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