The Transmission of Old English Poetry (review)

Reviews 221 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Orton, Peter, The Transmission of Old English Poetry (Westfield Publications in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12), Turnhout, Brepols, 2000; cloth; pp. xvii, 223; RRP EUR50.00; ISBN 2503510728. In this detailed study of those Old English poems which occur in more than one manuscript (about 2% of the total extant corpus), Peter Orton hopes to ‘[shed] light on the processes of transmission and the practices of scribes’ (p. 7) of these verse texts, and more broadly to suggest some of the influences to which all Old English poetry has been subjected by copyists. Orton’s larger objective is to inform modern editors of Old English poetry to consider how accurately texts have been copied and thereby to make more informed and less conservative decisions relating to textual emendation. Prompted by Kenneth Sisam’s now quite elderly desideratum (Studies in the History of Old English Literature [Oxford, 1953]) for a monograph treating the accuracy of Old English poetic transmission, Orton attempts to collate evidence and develop a procedure for identifying and interpreting apparent textual corruptions and deducing superior readings. One useful element of this study is a full list on pp. 1-2 of those texts which exist in multiple manuscript versions, though the author does not explain why the three shortest texts are omitted from his list; the abbreviations for two of these – BDS (Bede’s Death Song) and LEP (Latin-English Proverbs) – are not on his list of abbreviations, nor are explained elsewhere. The detailed contents page, summary introduction, and ‘Index of Lines Referred to’ are useful for those who wish to dip this book into rather than read it in full, a reading strategy enabled by the organisation of the book, with evidence laid out in a regular fashion and interpretive analysis kept until the brief concluding chapter. The real strength of this study is its attempt to identity and classify the ways in which scribes deviated from their exemplars and why they might have done so, both consciously and accidentally. The existence of two or more copies of the same text allows Orton the scope to compare scribal practices and speculate on the reasons for any deviations, an opportunity missing in the case of single manuscript witnesses. Orton collects and, perhaps less successfully, interprets such evidence of textual accuracy and corruption, on topics such as the kinds of words open to misinterpretation; attitudes to metrical regularity; the regularised spelling of poetic vocabulary; letter forms; punctuation and abbreviations; and what aspects of texts appear to have been less likely to have been changed during transmission. Looking at transpositions, substitutions, omissions, additions of words and verbal groups, and changes to vocabulary 222 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) and syntax, he concludes that the relative talents of poets and copyists were polarised: ‘bad’ readings are the copyist’s, while ‘good’ ones are the poet’s. An understanding of this divergence frees the modern editor to emend wisely, unlike the medieval copyist, whose attempts ‘were often embarrassingly bad’ (p. 207). The book is organised by type of changes made by copyists, starting with the least to the most conscious types of scribal alterations: from mechanical errors, to those imposed by the scribe in the mode of editor, improver, and ‘poetaster’. Orton calls this method the ‘overall classification of variants according to their probable causes’(p.9),butonewondershowhecansoconfidentlyconjecturehowcorruptions occurred or even were likely to have been produced. We simply do not know, and perhaps will never know, enough about vernacular scribal practices and extratextual factors to make these sorts of judgements. Orton’s classification introduces a tendentious aspect to the discussion which places less emphasis than one might expect on scribal nodding, carelessness, or even poor eyesight (Old English manuscripts were produced prior to the use of spectacles from the late-thirteenth century). Orton addresses how oral transmission might be responsible for variations, though rejects the briefly-considered hypothesis of ‘formulaic reading’ developed by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse [Cambridge, 1990]), that poems, even after they had been inscribed, were still subject to variation as a result of their oral transmission outside the written version/s of the...