Junius's knowledge of the Old Englishpoem Durham

Extract

Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have been copied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). C has been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. V was almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version is known to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).

In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a third medieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ version is now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - in this case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V, however, Junius's copy is our only record of this manuscript's existence. No other transcripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.