| The glossing of the Latin hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church in the latter half of the tenth century reveals the richness of Old English measured against the Latin of the hymns. The unexpected capacity of this early form of English to reproduce grammatical niceties as well as tropes, figures, allusions, and other poetic devices is demonstrated in the line-by-line analysis of the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon gloss. The ten hymns of this study cover such overlapping categories as doctrine, solemn occasions in the rites of the Church, and hymns prescribed in the Regularis concordia for the "little hours" of the daily Office, as well as a historical overview from the fourth to the early tenth centuries. For the most part, all the hymns appear more or less intact in the Hymnals 1940 and 1982 of the Episcopal Church in America. Background notes include literature in which references to the hymns have appeared, from the writings of Ambrose (340-397), Augustine of Canterbury (d. 605), and Bede (673-735) to nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as A. S. Walpole, Helmut Gneuss, and Gussie Hecht Tanenhaus. The text furnishes copies of the hymns as they were printed in The Anglo-Saxon Hymnarium, the Surtees Society's project for 1851, and dual translations of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon for reference and comparison. Also included are explanations of the scribal abbreviations, some pertinent examples of grammatical oddities or rarities in both the Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and comments upon the possible psychological responses of the glossator to the content of the hymns as evidenced in his word-choices. The bibliography is limited to the most useful sources. |
