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Middle-earth, the eternal Lord, For earth’s inhabitants, the almighty King. Many of the verses or half-lines, separated by extra space at midline in most editions, are variations on oWords that recur elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition of poetry. Given his skill with this specialized language, Caedmon is best understood as an oral poet highly adept at navigating the pathways of this medieval English web of multiform language. He was fluent in the lingua franca of the oAgora, and knew how to deploy its poetic idiom, an open-source code that he shared with the poets who composed Beowulf and other Old English poetry. Indeed, he was so fluent that he caused oral poetry to do something new, to assume a social function that it had not supported in the past. Whether we explain his remarkable innovativeness and verbal dexterity as the gift of a visiting angel or as reflecting changes in a poetic tradition that took on new duties as the Christian conversion proceeded, we can confidently credit Caedmon with knowing how to manage successful transactions in his oral marketplace. But that’s not the end of this miraculous tale. Recent research has established that the five extant versions of Caedmon’s Hymn included with the Anglo-Saxon (rather than the Latin) texts of Bede’s History of the English Church and People behave quite curiously. They don’t fit the usual tAgora mold. These variants collectively exhibit option-driven, rule-governed variation typical not of tAgora replication , but rather of oAgora navigation. Such a phenomenon can be explained only as the work of scribes—copyists physically scrawling ink on vellum manuscripts , we should keep in mind—who were recomposing even as they “copied.” Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe109 puts it very clearly and straightforwardly: “In such a process, reading and copying have actually become conflated with composing.” Like Nikola Vujnović, who recomposed the oral epic performance by Halil Bajgorić as he transcribed the audio recording, these scribes worked within the flexible, systemic (Systems versus Things) idiom of the oral poetic tradition. They weren’t doing what we tAgora denizens assume scribes do—namely, reproduce the item verbatim, with the copy nothing less than an exact replica of the original . No, they were writing under oAgora rules, remaking as they went, navigating the OT web (Online with OT). It may seem counterintuitive to us, but these scribes—whose job it was to produce documents—were singing on the page. L Spectrum of Texts: Five Types Both over its relatively brief history and at the present time, the tAgora has proven a complex arena for communicative exchange (Arena of the Text). To reflect that complexity, this node briefly examines five major species of text that have lived and thrived within its confines: Symbols of/on clay, Greek letters on Spectrum of Texts . 225 papyrus, Latin and runic letters on sheepskin, Typography on paper, and Static eFiles in pixels. Symbols of/on clay Within the tAgora we focus exclusively on what transpired from November 22 onward in Homo sapiens’ calendar year, the maximum time frame for textual concerns (Texts and Intertextuality). Recently the much-debated connection between numeracy110 and the origins of literacy has grown considerably clearer, thanks in great measure to the groundbreaking work of Denise SchmandtBesserat .111 In books such as Before Writing and How Writing Came About, she offers much more than a new view of ancient artifacts and their usability. She constructs a coherent explanation of how a simple counting mechanism evolved into an inscribed tablet surface, a surface that amounts to the precursor of papyrus , sheepskin, page, and LED screen, all of which are essentially later avatars of a radical ancient invention. Here’s one view of the story:112 About 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, small clay tokens of different geometrical shapes begin to turn up as a fledgling system for keeping track of quantities of grain, jars of oil, and other exchangeable, tangible goods. Evidence indicates a one-to-one correspondence between a token and what it stood for; three cones, for example, symbolized three small measures of grain, whereas five ovoids indicated five jars of oil. At first there were, in other words, no counters that symbolized abstract numbers as distinct from the actual things they represented. The next step was to devise a method for storing and organizing ever-changing collections of tokens, and one popular solution proved to be the clay envelope or hollowed...

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