The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (review)

Robert J. Menner's The Poetical Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (1941) is one of the great monuments of twentieth-century Old English scholarship and remains one of the most learned and thorough scholarly editions of any Old English text. Daniel Anlezark's new edition departs from and supplements Menner's in a variety of ways. Menner had argued that the dialogues were originally Anglian and acquired their predominantly West-Saxon forms in the course of transmission, but Anlezark argues that they were originally West-Saxon. Anlezark introduces several new emendations, the boldest of which (an ingenious conjecture) is at Solomon and Saturn I, line 44a: where MS A reads dream and MS B reads dry, Anlezark conjectures dr<os> as part of a metallurgical metaphor he discusses at length in his note on the line (pp. 102-3). Anlezark also provides a facing-page English translation of the entire group of dialogues. His introduction and commentary incorporate (with a few significant omissions) the scholarship subsequent to Menner and propose a number of new sources and analogues (some more compelling than others, though all valuable as comparanda). In one case, however, a new source (the Versus cuiusdam Scotti de Alphabeto) is claimed on the basis of a questionable textual emendation, which in turn is justified by the putative source: in Solomon and Saturn I, line 136b, Anlezark restores the missing letter B in the sequence of letters from the opening verses of the Latin Pater Noster. His restoration makes B "the third letter" (se ðridda / stæf), and Anlezark explains this awkwardly enjambed epithet with reference to the Hiberno-Latin poem's statement that K is used (instead of C) before A (pp. 30-31 and 109).

In a number of other cases I still prefer Menner's interpretation of specific words, lines, or passages (and his commentary is often fuller and should still always be consulted). Yet Anlezark's edition is a major advance on Menner's for more comprehensive reasons that have to do with the editorial implications of the word "Poetical" in Menner's title. For in the primary surviving manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422 [B] (the other manuscript, CCCC 41 [A], transmits only the opening 94 lines of Solomon and Saturn I), there is an extended fragment of a prose dialogue between Solomon and Saturn that follows the first of the two poetic dialogues without a break in the manuscript. Menner addressed the question of the relation of the prose dialogue to Solomon and Saturn I, but he doubted that they were directly connected and he relegated the prose dialogue to an appendix. Obscured in this way, the prose dialogue was one of the very few OE texts of any kind that was omitted from the initial List of Old English Texts (1973; it was later added with the number B5.3 and the short title Sol II). An edition that respects that manuscript context has long been a desideratum, and this is perhaps the most important service of Anlezark's, which accordingly dispenses with the work "poetical" in its title. One might quibble that Anlezark's own editorial division between the poetic and the prose dialogues, enhanced not just by distinct titles (Solomon and Saturn I and Solomon and Saturn Prose Pater Noster Dialogue) and noncontinuous lineation but also by a graphic separator and a (possibly serendipitous) page-break, is still an excessive intervention; but Anlezark's typographical border-crossing signals are a major improvement over Menner's quarantine zone for the prose dialogue.

Anlezark himself justifies this new edition not only as providing a more accurate representation of the texts of the dialogues in their manuscript context but also as reflecting in its commentary a fundamental shift in the understanding of the dialogues' sources and cultural affinities. Anlezark argues (p. viii) that the "interpretive framework" established by J. M. Kemble's edition of 1845-48 puts undue emphasis on what...