do not tell him where he ought to feel exclamatory, he must suffer the consequences. Secondly, I have attempted to make the punctuation logical, especially by the use of pairs of commas wherever the sequence of a sentence is interrupted by parallelisms. This may be made clearer by a reference to ll. 1235–7, 1283–4, 3051–2. But, on the other hand, I have as far as possible avoided breaking up the metrical unit of the half line with a comma.
Foot-notes. The chief peculiarity of the footnotes is that, unlike Wülcker’s (to which I am greatly indebted), they are not intended to he read by the next “Beowulf” editor only. Therefore they are not lumbered with a mass of antiquated and impossible emendations, which no one but a “painful and studious” literary chiffonnier would think of collecting and perpetuating. Their main intention has been already referred to—to call attention to every departure in the text from the readings of the MS. If they have any influence towards making readers intolerant of the shameless, silent alterations of MS. readings which disfigure some O. E. texts—alterations such as have been banished from the best editions of the Latin and Greek classics—great indeed will he my reward.
A word or two of explanation must be added. “A” and “B” refer to the transcripts or copies of the poem, which the Danish scholar Thorkelin made (one himself, the other by a scribe ignorant of O. E.) in 1786, and which ere of great value for parts now defective. “Grein 1” is Grein’s Bibliothek der A. S. Poesie; “Grein 2” is his seperate edition of Beowulf. “Grein-Wülcker” and “Wülcker” refer to the latter’s new edition of the Bibliothek, which very rarely departs from Grein’s own readings. “Heyne 5” and “Heyne and Socin” refer to the 5th edition of Heyne’s
