Old English Shorter Poems, Volume II: Wisdom and Lyric ed. and trans. by Robert E. Bjork (review)

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML), which was launched in 2010 and now runs to almost forty volumes, aims to provide accessible dual-language, facing-page translations of Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, and Old English texts, with limited commentary. Such editions, according to the DOML website, will ‘make the written achievements of medieval and Byzantine culture available to both scholars and general readers in the English-speaking world’. The series insists on comparatively good quality materials: maroon cloth binding with gold lettering, dense cream paper stock with a pleasurable smoothness to its touch, and a bound-in ribbon bookmark in royal blue.

This particular volume is the sixth of the DOML translations from Old English, and the second of shorter poems: the first was published in May 2012 and was explicitly concerned with religious and didactic poems. This volume is a translation of a selection of twenty-four poems and twelve metrical charms sourced from two volumes of the mid-twentieth-century edition, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition: from the 1936 volume, The Exeter Book; and from the 1942 volume, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. The Introduction does not provide an explanation as to why certain poems were selected from these editions, while others were excluded, although Robert Bjork’s division into four generic categories – metrical charms, gnomic and proverbial poetry, wisdom poetry, and lyric and elegy – reveals a default selection scheme. This is a collection of well-managed and sound translations of many of the important shorter poems in the Old English corpus, such as ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’, ‘Widsith’, ‘Deor’, and ‘The Wife’s Lament’, in addition to a wide array of proverbial material and charms for easing the trials and tribulations of (and perhaps indicating social anxieties within) everyday Anglo-Saxon life.

Newly translated editions are important for increasing the awareness of this literature, for student, teacher, and general reader alike. But this is a popular and pretty, rather than a critical, edition. Alas, there is a litany of absences from this volume (and I assume this to be editorial policy across the DOML series) that will frustrate the scholar in her or his engagement with this poetry. There are no footnotes in the main body of the work, and the reader is obliged to flip back and forth between the translation and the ‘Notes to the Text’ section while reading. The Index lacks page numbers (except when the indexed item is mentioned in the Introduction), instead indexing by poem-name abbreviation and line number. This requires the reader to flip back to the Table of Contents to find the poem. Worse still, if the indexed item is in the ‘Notes to the Text’ section (there are two types of such notes: ordinary notes signified by the letter ‘n’ after the line number, and headnotes signified by the letters ‘hn’ after the poem title), the reader is obliged to search the Table of Contents not for a page number but for the relative position of the poem in relation to the others in the volume, and then leaf through the notes section until the notes for that particular poem can be found. References can be found within the footnotes that are not included in the Index, and the bibliography is framed as ‘selected’, but ‘incomplete’ would be more precise. Citations can be found (such as to Vǫlundarkviða and Þiðreks saga in the annotations to the poem ‘Deor’ on p. 255, in an important discussion of analogues of the Welund myth) that have not been incorporated into the bibliography.

Recent developments in the study of the medieval text, with greater focus on the manuscript as the starting point, appear to have been ignored in this edition. In fact, basing a new translation on an older, published edition rather than...