Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/146

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

140 Reviews and Notes C.D. V 164, 32, is vitiated by Kemble's inaccuracies. Under both headings the passage should read as printed in Birch Cart. II 290, 3-4: gyf hit on lencten ge byrige ]) pee ponne pare flczscun ge weorfi on fisce gestriene buton f> }>is forgenge sie. Observe the MS. accents whose presence is entirely obfuscated by the Supplement's practice of printing quotations. Observe also the peculiar form of the gen. pi. fl&scun, not adverted to in the Supplement. It has its par in munekan and clerican attested to by the 10th century charter of Eadgar, B.C. Ill 381 15 =Thorpe p. 215 7 , of pare munekan anwalde eft on clerican hand getyrnafi. Thorpe, to mention this in passing by, marks the charter as spurious by the affixion of an asterisk; Birch, however, does not seem to doubt its genuineness. At any rate, he is silent on that point. As to the last quotation in the Supplement for efes, efesc from C.D. V 184, 11, 13, it should be noted that the afisc, efisc exhibited in brackets, evidently as variant readings of cefise, efise, from Birch's Cart. II 304, is actually the true reading of the MS., while czfise, efise is in this instance a mere inaccuracy of Kemble's print, or may be a deliberate deviation from the MS. It is worth while mentioning, too, that in the above quotation the Supplement omits sceaftes between Innan and hangran, without marking the place of omission. A similar omission is left unmarked in the quotation for adfynig from C.D. V 194, 2 after eastan and after pyte. The whole passage ought to be correctly quoted from B.C. II 357,7th l.f.b., thus: be eastan bunteles pyte foffi to pam ealdan ad fini. of pam finie up to pam ealdan ele bedme. The last sentence of this passage is quoted sub elebedm from C.D. V 194, 3 with the result that the Supplement propagates Kemble's unwarranted fidm for the pam of the MS. Notice also that the bled-, exhibited in brackets after bladhorn in the quotation from Thorpe p. 559, 29 sub blfedhorn, is not, as the uninitiated might suppose, a variant, but a mere blunder of Kemble's print C.D. Ill 362, 22. The MS. has clearly blad horn, as Sanders' facsimile shows (Ordnance Survey Facsimiles of Anglo- Saxon MSS. part III, plate 38). In a quotation from C.D. Ill 61, 12 sub begitan the Supplement takes note in the brackets after begyteneoi a difference in the text as printed by Birch Cart. Ill 561, 29, in such a way as to give the uninitiated the impression t hat Birch's betytene must be the editor's or printer's mistake for begy- tene. As a matter of fact , however, it is the undoubted reading of the MS. and ought to have been characterized as such. I have taken the trouble to closely examine the facsimile (Ordn. Survey Facs. of Anglo-Saxon MSS., Part III, Plate 32) at that place and find Mr. Birch's print correct. The scribe evidently wrote a t for a g. And the establishment of such scribal errors in the MS. is of importance. Kemble's begytene is, of course, the proper

emendation of it, but attention ought to have been drawn to the