A Second Anglo-saxon Reader

A SECOND ANGLO-SAXON READER SWEET HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C. frm A SECOND ANGLO-SAXON READER ARCHAIC AND DIALECTAL BY HENRY SWEET, BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD '. M.A. HON. PH. D. HEIDELBERG AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1887 [ All rights reserved ] PE 137 PREFACE. MY First Anglo-Saxon Reader is, West- Saxon dialect. for practical English dialects are of equal if reasons, But the other Old- restricted to the not even more value to the historical student of English. Hence the necessity of a suparchaic and dialectal Reader. The primary object plementary of the present book as is, accordingly, to give the student the often scanty materials will allow the means of making himself acquainted with the leading features of the far as non- West-Saxon dialects of Old English. the texts are intended mainly for linguistic students, they are taken exclusively from those which are preserved in contemporary (or practically contemporary, as in the case of As the Erfurt glossary) for MSS. advanced students, the texts therefore I As this book have thought is it of no use except advisable to print exactly as they appear in the MSS., and have refrained from adding any theoretical accents. Letters not contractions are printed in italics. are enclosed in []. Erasures are marked by(:). prefixed star calls attention to an erroneous or anomalous In the glossaries form, being thus equivalent to 'sic/ Expanded in the MSS. A corrections of the Latin forms are added in ( ). Another object of this book is to serve as a cheap and 1 handy abridgment of my Oldest English Texts' a work whose bulk and costliness puts it beyond the reach of the It is this consideration which has induced ordinary student. me to include the whole of the Epinal-Erfurt and Corpus , glossaries, unsuited as they undoubtedly are for the purpose of an ordinary Reader. Students whose object is merely to get a general idea of the dialects, are therefore advised not to attempt to read these glossaries through, but to pick out those 1 Early English Text Society Publications, no. 83, 1885 (Trubner Co., London). & PREFACE. iv words which they easily recognize in the first twenty pages or Note that the so, and concentrate their attention on them. English words in the Erfurt glossary printed in italics are partial or complete Germanisms of the Old High German scribe. All the texts are complete in themselves with the exception of the extracts from the Liber Vitae (4) and the Durham and Rushworth glosses (8). The Hymns in the Vespasian Psalter are given in full, no extract