A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature

Description

My thanks are due to Peter Godman, my colleague at Pembroke College, Oxford, for suggesting to me that I should bring out in a volume my published papers on Old English literature not all of which are in readily accessible journals and symposia, and to Roberta Frank, of the University of Toronto, for her active part in arranging the publication of the volume, and for accepting into it some unpublished papers. It is a vanity to hope to be read, and an even greater vanity for a writer to reread his own writings, some of them in my case now more than thirty years old: alas, it is not wholly a pleasure. Misprints leap out from too many pages; inconsistencies are found to be common; there are errors of fact, not all of them revealed only by subsequent work in the subject. I have corrected in this reprinting all the original misprints I have noticed; and I have corrected inaccurate references. Minor stylistic improvements have been made, especially where the original seemed unclear. No uniformity has, however, been imposed on these papers which made their first appearance in a wide range of publications in several countries. A few cross-references have been introduced; and where new scholarship has had the result of making unacceptable some statements of mine I have drawn attention to the new work in a way which will, I hope, be clearly seen as additions of 1985.