Publisher's Synopsis
This work is attributed to Venerable Bede. Each item is given in English, Old English and Latin THE poems contained in this volume form part of a MS. in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now numbered CCI., but marked in the old Catalogue and in Wanley as S.lS. The portion of the MS. here printed commences at page 161, and is written in a different hand from that part of the volume which precedes it. A complete list of the contents of this valuable MS. is given in Wanley's Catalogue, pp. 137 seqq., and need not be repeated. The first two pieces here printed have never been put forth before, with the exception of the few lines given in Wanley, some of which were copied into Conybeare's Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (p. Ixxx of the introductory Catalogue), but with the mistakes which are in Wanley exactly repeated. Prof. Conybeare had evidently never seen the MS., or he would have given the lines as they are now printed. In sending forth these texts the sole aim of the Editor has been to put into the reader's hands as complete a representation of the words of the MS. as a printed text can furnish. Either in the text or in the margin the reader will find every letter of the original supplied to him. Very few notes have been added, but a copious index verborum is appended. This seemed likely to be of more service than notes. The first of these five poems is an Old English version of what is variously represented as Bede's, or as Alcuin's Latin poem, "De Die Judicii." The Latin text which is herewith printed is taken from the collection of writings attributed to Bede, and appended to the genuine works of that father published in !Iigne's Patrologia. But a large portion of the same poem will be found among the works ascribed to Alcuin. In Frobenius' edition of Alcuin, 1777, it is given, with sixteen lines of introduction, at page 616, vol. iii., among the Addenda et Supplenda. The Old English version is of course much later than the date of either of these writers. The second poem, which the editor has entitled Lar, follows in the MS. immediately after the first, and appears to be an exhortation designed to supplement the former poem. Wanley has printed the other three poems in extenso, and they have been published by Grein among the specimens in his Bibliothek. A few errors which occur in Wanley, and which in some places Grein has emended conjecturally, have been corrected in the present reprint of the poems, and to the whole a rendering in modern English, as literal as was possible, has been supplied. It will be seen that the poems are, defective in many places, as shown by the faulty alliteration in some lines, and here and there by the absence of half a line or more at a time, especially in that curious medley, the Oratio' Poetica. The Editor leaves to others the labour of conjectural emendations. He has to thank many friends for suggestions while the sheets have been going through the press, and the authorities of Corpus Christi College for the kindness with which they arranged that he might have access to the MS. To one of their number, the Rev. W. M. Snell, he is also indebted for a careful final reading of the printed text with the MS.
