Four Centuries of Old English Scholarship

Reviews Four Centuries of Old English Scholarship ROBERTA FRANK Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson (using the collections ofE.E. Ericson). A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature from the Beginnings to the End of '972 Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980. xxii, 437. $75.00, $30.00 paper Thanks to the efforts of Professors Greenfield and Robinson, students of Old English literature no longer face a tedious and frustrating search through various annual and selective bibliographies for everything written on a given poem or homily. The compilers have attempted to cite every book, article, note, and review published on Old English literature since the invention of printing. Their list contains more than six thousand items, of which the earliest is John Bale's Illu,trium maioris Britanniae Scriptorum ... Summarium (1548). The bibliography is divided into three parts: general works on Old English literature; Old English poetry; and Old English prose. Listings are chronological within each section; there is an index of authors and reviewers, and an index of subjects. Historians of the study of Old English literature will now be able to trace in close detail the changing goals (and rapidly increasing volume) of Old English studies over the course of more than four centuries. The fuUlisting of reviews allows one to find out, for example, what continental scholars thought of Hickes's Thesaurus when it appeared in '703-5 (item 268), or how Oxford scholars in the 1830S reacted to contemporary studies on the other side of the Channel (item 279)' There is something new to be learned on each page of this bibliography. The scholar with the greatest number of entries after his name is Ferdinand Holthausen, credited with some 125 books, articles, and notes, and more than]oo reviews. Close behind are three prolificAmericans: Kemp Malone, AlbertS. Cook, and Frederick Klaeber. The ranks of Anglo-Saxonists include '4 Smiths (plus 6 Schmidts, 4 Schmitts, and 2 Schmitzes), 12 Thompsons (6 without the p), 11 Browns, ] 0 Andersons, 10 Joneses, 9 Meyers, 8 Miillers, 3 Naganos, 2 Saitos, and 2Shimizus. Of 6, works published between '955 and '972 on the style, language, and grammar of Beowulf, 28 are by Japanese scholars. The bibliography has about 3800 entries for verse and about 1400 for prose, even though far more prose than verse has come down to us. About 72 pages or 1600 entries are concerned with UNIVERSIlY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1983 0042-D247I8Y0500-0Joz-Q303$ot.501o Cl UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Beowulf, approximately one-quarter of the total for verse and prose. The first Arabic translation of Beowulfappeared in Cairo in 1964; the Canadian debut of the poem occurred in 1872 when Eustace H. Jones paraphrased portions in the Canadian Monthly and National Review. Some fourteen past and present professors at the University of Toronto are listed in the bibliography, along with Richard Hakluyt, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Isaac and Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and James Murray. Thomas Jefferson, a fervent advocate of Anglo-Saxon studies, is represented by An Essay towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon, written in the 17605. In 1832 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was enthusiastic about recent advances in the field; in 1849 the poet William Barnes extolled the copiousness and richness of the Old English language. Twentieth-century appreciators include Ezra Pound, Sean O'Faolain, Kingsley Amis, andJorge Borges. Alas, the William H. Faulkner who wrote on The Subjunctive Mood in the Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (item 5564) is not the novelist. The new bibliography is a model of accuracy and completeness. Errors are hard to find: two proper names are misspelled (Finnur J6nsson, Nicolas Jacobs); Cyril Hart and Cyril R. Hart are one person; printers' gremlins have done mischief to item 4'04 (pp 435-4 should be 453- 4) and to item 6471 (volume number and date are repeated); add 'v. 2 (1914), 1-14' to item 4"0; the author of items 4353- 4 is Thomas D. Hill, not Elemire Zolla; Mrs Alison Kingsmill of the Dictionary of Old English project tells me that in item 5512 Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society should be...