Christ and Satan: A Critical Edition ed. by Robert Emmett Finnegan (review)

HUMANITIES 401 says, is an unfortunate but perhaps necessary crutch. She insists from the beginning, with an understanding of the art of the skalds that cannot be resisted, that the word order is inseparable from the poetry. She also provides an excellent glossary, with cross-referencing of uruememberable irregular forms, and linking of the elements of kennings. Two appendices , one giving the words of the stanzas in prose order and the other a list of items for further reading, and a full index complete her book. Frank's scholarship is wide-ranging and exact, but she carries it easily and with an enthusiasm for poetry that makes her book particularly valuable. I cannot praise it too highly. For all its learning it brings the skalds before us from the preserves of the scholars and makes them available to us English readers, in their own tongue, as poets once again. (GEORGE JOHNSTON) Robert Emmett Finnegan, editor. Christ and Satan: A Critical Edition Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xi, 169. $7.00 cloth, $4.50 paper Christ and Salan, an Old English poem of some 730 lines, occupies the last seventeen pages of the early eleventh-century manuscript known as Junius XI or the C:edmon Manuscript. The poem with its companion pieces was last edited in "93", in George P. Krapp's first volume of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records; the most recent separate edition with glossary was done by Merrel D. Clubb in 1925. Chrisl and Satan is extremely difficult verse and, after fifty years of progress in Old English scholarship , the time for a new critical edition was ripe. Finnegan's edition, derived from his 1969 dissertation, consists of introductory material, text, explanatory notes, glossary, an appendix on rhetoric, and a bibliography. The author's description of the manuscript is adequate,. although he seems to have missed Clubb's convincing refutation (MLN, 43 [1928]) of Gollancz's belief that the folding of the seventeenth quire occurred before the poem was copied. The section on 'The Problem of Unity' is, as Finnegan acknowledges, a reduced version of a long article of his (Classica el MediiEValia, 30 [19691, 490- 551) bearing the more accurate title 'Chrisl and Salan: Structure and Theme'; the abridgment has resulted in a considerable increase in proofreading errors . Finnegan's chapter on sources, his search for what he repeatedly calls 'the ideational atmosphere' of the poem, is competent, repetitious, and occasionally contradictory: the two sentences that begin identically 'Max Forster believed that the Pseudo-Augustine Sermon 160 .. .' (pp 50 and 53) appear to have different conclusions. The section on language is muddled and does not bring out the philological treasures of a poetic text handled by three scribes, an Old English annotator, and an individual known as 'the Late West Saxon Corrector.' Finnegan dates Chrisl and 402 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 Satan to 792-820 on theological grounds, arguing that the Christocentricity of the poem was an indirect response to the Adoptionist dispute of those decades. This argument is so flimsy as to seem silly, but- to be fair - so are most of the arguments previously used to date the poem. I can forgive the printers at Wilfrid Laurier for not being able to find an italic ('j or j> in their font, but the editors and designers should not be excused for their eccentric presentation of the Old English text: the normally contiguous half-line pairs composing the verse line are made to peer strangely and myopically at each other across a two-inch no man's land. The transcript itself is fairly accurate, although it is no advance over the two previous editions: I found one misprint (for line 421 hierde, read hirede) and one textual error (in line 351 Finnegan inserts the word scir between hu and sunnu and reports it as the manuscript reading, whereas it actually is an emendation first proposed by C.W.M. Grein, 1857). Finnegan does not regularly record the variant readings of earlier scholars , apparently regarding them as 'the dead leaves of Anglo-Saxon scholarship' (p v). His own emendations are given in bold type: most follow Clubb or Krapp or early suggestions rightly rejected by them (see line...