Angus Fraser Cameron, 1941-1983

Angus Eraser Cameron 1941-1983 123 ANGUS FRASER CAMERON Angus Eraser Cameron, Professor of English and Editor of the Dictionary of Old English, died on May 27, 1 982, at home, of cancer, at the age of forty-two. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1941. Like James Murray, he had an interest in collecting, and he traced his later interest in lexicography back to his early fascination with a stamp collection and finding different systems of setting it in order. He went to Mount Allison University, and upon graduating in 1961 was awarded the Tweedie Medal for highest standing in arts, and a Rhodes Scholarship (for Jesus College). At Oxford he read English and took another B.A. in 1 963. After two years teaching at Mount Allison, he returned to Oxford to complete a B.Litt, thesis; he defended the thesis in 1968 and accepted an appointment that year in the English Department at University College at the University of Toronto. Within weeks of his arrival he proposed the preparation of a Dictionary of Old English to replace the one edited in the nineteenth century by Bosworth and Toller. He began his work on the Dictionary of Old English at the age of twenty-eight. As he has said, sheer frustration drove him to it. In writing his thesis, a semantic study of the Old English nouns of color, hiw and bleo, he read through the entire corpus ofOld English and came away with a keen sense of both the inadequacies of the current dictionaries and the possibilities for the writing of a new one. The proposed Dictionary was planned in consultation with many of the leading Old English scholars at a conference in March 1 969. The proceedings on that conference, Computers and Old English Concordances (1970) provided a preliminary sketch for the project, characteristic from the very beginning in two things—in its concern that scholars and students in the field be consulted so that the Dictionary would, in the end, serve its users, and in its incorporation of computer processing as a central part of its design. A 124 Angus Eraser Cameron125 second conference in the following year saw the formal appointment of Angus Cameron and Christopher Ball as editors of the Dictionary, and set up an International Advisory Board of four scholars to supervise the progress of the Dictionary. In the course of the next decade Angus Cameron built archives that were the envy of other lexicographers who came to see the project. Because of the convenient size of the Old English corpus, it was possible to build a computer corpus of all surviving Old English, with a library of copies of all Old English manuscripts and editions. With the help of Professor Richard Venezky, then at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and now at the University of Delaware, he produced concordances to every Old English text, with slips for every occurrence ofalmost every word in the surviving corpus. Christopher Ball was forced by the pressure of administrative work to resign in 1976, and Angus Cameron continued as sole Editor of the Dictionary. Because of his concern that the materials he had collected be generally accessible to everyone in the field, Angus Cameron distributed copies of the Old English corpus in computer-readable form—more than ten computer centres around the world now have copies ofthe corpus— and arranged for the publication of the concordances to all Old English on microfiche. The resulting merged concordance marks a quiet revolution in language studies. To our knowledge it is the first time all the surviving linguistic records (where these are substantial) ofa period of any language are available to scholars in easily accessible form. Angus Cameron said he chose the carving which has appeared on many of his publications, the wyrm of Wamphrey, as a kind of warning—the wyrm appears to be eating itself, the dictionaries can become voracious in their demands. But Angus Cameron was a man of many facets, and the Dictionary of Old English never became his whole life. He carried heavy and important adminis- 1 26Angus Fraser Cameron trative responsibilities at the University of Toronto, and played a key...