Appendix C
Further Reading
1. General works
For a well-illustrated general account of the Anglo-Saxons, consult Campbell et al. 1982. If you have a specific query, consult Lapidge et al. 1999, which is also good for browsing.
2. Grammars
Several scholarly grammars will give you far more information about Old English than this book does. Campbell 1959 is the standard grammar of Old English for English speakers; although a bit dated, it is still a mine of information, especially on the pre-history of the language. For those who know German, Brunner 1965 is also invaluable, especially for its information on Old English dialects. A more recent grammar than either of these, Hogg 1992 is informed by recent linguistic theory; only vol. 1 (Phonology) has appeared so far. For Old English syntax, the standard reference is Mitchell 1985.
Lass 1994 is a well written tour of the history of Old English for students who know at least a little about linguistics. For a survey of the other Germanic languages, see Robinson 1992.
3. Dictionaries and concordances
The standard dictionary of Old English is Bosworth-Toller. Its quality is uneven, largely because Bosworth, who was responsible for the letters A-G, was not quite up to the job of compiling an Old English dictionary. However, Toller was an excellent lexicographer, and if one remembers always to check his Supplement for words beginning A-G, the dictionary is still quite serviceable (Campbell's contribution is a thin supplement published about fifty years afer the dictionary was complete). This venerable dictionary is being superseded by Cameron et al., 1986-, now complete through E; it has so far been issued on microfiche, but will soon be issued on CD-ROM instead. Clark Hall and Meritt 1960 is an excellent compact dictionary for students. The standard etymological dictionary is Holthausen 1963.
The entire corpus of Old English was concorded by the Dictionary of Old English Project at the University of Toronto; the result is Healey and Venezky 1980, published on microfiche. Those whose libraries subscribe to the Old English Corpus on line, however, should generally prefer that as a much more flexible tool for researching the language. If you want a concordance of the poetry only, consult Bessinger 1978.
4. Bibliographies
Greenfield and Robinson 1980 is a comprehensive bibliography of publications on Old English literature up to 1972. For annotated bibliographies of Beowulf scholarship, see Short 1980 and Hasenfratz 1993. For a bibliography of Anglo-Saxon history, see Keynes 1987. The home page of the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research has several useful bibliographies, including an on-line version of Keynes and "A Bibliography of The Battle of Maldon" by Wendy E.~J. Collier.
Comprehensive annual bibliographies are published in two journals, Old English Newsletter and Anglo-Saxon England. The literature section of the bibliography in Old English Newsletter is classified by work and therefore very useful for literary research.
5. Old English texts and translations
Several published collections contain texts for students of Old English. Especially good ones are Mitchell and Robinson 1992, Whitelock 1975 and Pope and Fulk 2000. Methuen's Old English Library, which published student-oriented editions of prose and poetry, has been discontinued, but its editions have been reissued (with additional bibliography) in the series Exeter Medieval English Texts, which has also published several Old English editions of its own. Mitchell and Robinson 1998 is a good edition of Beowulf for students. Old English Aerobics includes a growing collection of on-line texts of Old English prose and poetry with complete glossaries and full grammatical information about each word and clause.
To locate scholarly editions of Old English texts, see Greenfield and Robinson 1980. For editions published after 1972, consult the annual bibliographies listed above. The standard edition of almost all the Old English poetry is Krapp and Dobbie 1931-53. For the poems of the Exeter Book, see also Muir 1994, and for Beowulf see Klaeber 1950 (the standard scholarly edition, now showing its age).
Several series have published significant numbers of Old English texts. The Early English Text Society has been publishing Old English and Middle English texts since 1864; most Old English editions published up to around 1900 are accompanied by translations. A German series, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, published editions of Old English prose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; several of these are still useful.
In addition to the translations included with some of the editions mentioned above, the student should know of two important collections, Bradley 1982 for poetry (supersedes Gordon 1954, which is nevertheless still useful) and Swanton 1993 for prose.
6. Literary criticism; sources and analogues; meter
To get started reading about Old English literature, you may wish to begin with a general work such as Greenfield and Calder 1986 or Alexander 1983. Godden and Lapidge 1991 and O'Keeffe 1997 are collections of essays usefully broken down by topic. All of these books contain bibliographies.
The series Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England collects useful essays on individual topics, authors and works: see Baker 2000, O'Keeffe 1994, Bjork 1996. Fulk 1991 is a good collection of criticism on Beowulf, and Bjork and Niles 1997 surveys the history of Beowulf scholarship.
Sources and analogues of Old English poetry have been conveniently collected in Calder and Allen 1976 and Calder et al. 1983; for analogues of Beowulf, see Garmonsway and Simpson 1969.
If you are interested in reading about meter, consult these books: Bliss 1967, Russom 1987, Cable 1991 and Fulk 1992.
7. History and culture
Readers interested in Anglo-Saxon history should consult Keynes 1987. Here we list a few works of general interest. The standard history of Anglo-Saxon England (if there is such a thing) is Stenton 1971. Two good general introductions to the history and culture are Hunter Blair 1977 and Campbell et al. 1982. See Fell 1984 for an account of women in Anglo-Saxon England.
8. Manuscripts, art and archaeology
The indispensable guide to the manuscripts containing Old English is Ker 1957; see also Ker 1976, the supplement to his Catalogue. For a survey of illuminated manuscripts, see Alexander 1978 and Temple 1976, and for a collection of useful essays, Richards 1994.
The series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile has published twenty-six volumes of high-quality facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Pulsiano et al. 1994 aims to produce descriptions and microfiche facsimiles of all manuscripts containing Old English. Important facsimiles of individual manuscripts and works include Zupitza 1967 for Beowulf, Chambers et al. 1933 for the Exeter Book, Gollancz 1927 for the Junius Manuscript and Flower and Smith 1941 for the oldest manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
A good (and copiously illustrated) introduction to the art of Anglo-Saxon England is Wilson 1984. For the archaeology, see Wilson 1981, and the essays in Karkov 1999.
Kiernan 2000 is especially notable as a pioneering electronic edition and facsimile containing not only the Beowulf manuscript, but also the "Thorkelin Transcripts" of Beowulf, from which editors restore damaged passages in that poem, and the collations of early nineteenth-century editors.
9. On-line aids
For World Wide Web browsing, you should add several pages to your list of bookmarks:
- www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/old_english.html
- Cathy Ball's "Old English Pages" offers a wide-ranging collection of links to Anglo-Saxon sites.
- info.ox.ac.uk/departments/humanities/toebi/www.html
- "Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland" is similar, and may load faster for European users.
- www.trin.cam.ac.uk/sdk13/sdk13home.html
- Simon Keynes's homepage contains a comprehensive collection of links for historians.
- www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl401/
- Murray McGillivray of the University of Calgary offers an on-line course in Old English; the site for the course contains a good bit of publicly available material.
- www.georgetown.edu/cball/hwaet/hwaet_toc.html
- Cathy Ball's "Hwæt" is a basic vocabulary drill.
- labyrinth.georgetown.edu/
- "The Labyrinth" is a collection of links and materials for medievalists; it offers a good collection of Old English electronic texts.
- www.wmich.edu/medieval/rawl/index.html
- The Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research at Western Michigan University has published several original on-line editions of Old English texts on its site and is the home of or has links to a number of other scholarly projects.