The landscape of the epic poem Beowulf is a fantasy construct in which incompatible features coexist, but while it is an unprofitable exercise to attempt a reconstruction of a coherent topography in which Beowulf's exploits took place, the poet's choice of individual landscape terms is not likely to be random. Where this choice is not influenced by alliteration, each term may have been intended to convey a specific image appropriate to its immediate context. Several of the landscape terms used in the poem are otherwise unrecorded or only found rarely in other literary sources. This applies to hlið, hop and gelad; but by contrast with their rarity in literature these words are well evidenced in place-names, and an understanding of the place-name usage may have some relevance to the interpretation of their occurrences in the poem.

The primary purpose of this article is to draw attention to a little-known Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early ninth century, now Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 10861, a collection of Latin saints' lives or passions. My interest was first drawn to this manuscript by the brief remarks of J. J. G. Alexander and J. E. Cross (the latter incorporating the personal communication of Bernhard Bischoff), both of whom associated the manuscript with the more famous Book of Cerne (Cambridge, University Library, Ll. 1.10) by virtue of its script and decoration. Closer examination of the manuscript reveals far more complex connections and implications. In particular, the script of BN lat. 10861, which incorporates several distinctive calligraphic features, relates it closely to a group of charters produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, and dated between c. 805 and c. 825. There have hitherto been few attempts to link Anglo-Saxon documentary and book hands, with the notable exceptions of the link between Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 426 (Philippus, Expositio in Iob), which has been dated to the mid-ninth century on the basis of its association with two charters (London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii. 37, dated 838, and Cotton Charter viii. 36, dated 847) thought to have been written in Wessex, probably at Sherborne or Winchester, and the association of London, BL, Royal 1. E. VI and BL, Add. Ch. 19789, a ninth-century forgery of a document dated 759, recently advanced by Mildred Budny. The establishment of such relationships offers potential for a firmer assessment of the date and place of origin of a particular manuscript than might otherwise be possible; it may also provide a valuable insight into the workings of the scriptorium in question. If, as I believe, a reasonably accurate dating may be advanced for BN lat. 10861 through its association with charter material, further chronological implications may arise, for the decoration of this manuscript places it firmly within the ‘Canterbury’ or ‘Tiberius’ group of manuscripts, and the dating of any one member of the group offers scope for the relative dating of others.

Exeter Riddle 40 presents two related problems as a translation of one of Aldhelm's Enigmata (no. c: ‘Creatura’): its dislocation, in an otherwise accurate translation, of six lines from their position in the Latin text; and its connection with the so-called ‘Lorica’ of Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. lat. Q. 106, the only other surviving Old English translation of an Aldhelmian enigma. In his edition of the Exeter Riddles, Tupper addressed these problems by postulating that both Old English riddles were the work of one translator and that Exeter Riddle 40 was revised from an earlier version of Aldhelm's enigma now lost to us. Although Tupper's view has been widely accepted, it presents a number of difficulties. It is the purpose of the present article to suggest an alternate interpretation of the evidence: that Exeter Riddle 40 – a much later poem than the ‘Leiden Riddle’, a Northumbrian poem perhaps of the eighth century – was translated from a ninth-century continental manuscript with tenth-century English corrections: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697.

Modern scholars can sometimes reconstruct the methods of medieval glossary-makers by tracking individual glosses along the path from the textual source to the final destination in the glossarial list. Here I wish to pursue a trail of clues through two early-eleventh-century manuscripts of the Excerptiones de Prisciano (‘Excerpts of Priscian’), a Latin grammatical treatise which has been identified as the source for Ælfric's bilingual Grammar. Viewed singly, the manuscripts of this work offer partial views of glossatorial activity; viewed together, these fragmentary glimpses snap into perspective, rendering a dynamic picture of glossary-making as a corporate enterprise undertaken by a group of Anglo-Saxon schoolmen working in several manuscripts simultaneously.

In Alfred's famous Preface to his translation of the Regula pastoralis, the king writes that he translated ‘hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete’ (7.19–20); a similar phrase occurs in the proem to the Boethius (1.2–3). Yet words in different languages are rarely exact equivalents. Translators select words which they feel capture the primary sense of source words and match secondary meanings and connotations only if they can. Similarities between two terms in different languages can reveal where the conceptual systems of the source and target cultures overlap and which denotations and connotations of a complex word were most important to the translator. Differences can indicate how cultures differ and what other conceptual systems might have influenced the translator. In a well-established system of translation, certain terms become accepted as standard equivalents to particular terms in other languages. Alfred, however, was in the position not of employing accepted equivalidents but of trying to create them. By the time he worked on the Boethius, Wærferth had probably translated Gregory's Dialogi, and Alfred's own Regula pastoralis was most likely complete, but no other models were availabel. As one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon translators, producing translations of the De consolatione, Gregory's Regula pastoralis, Augustine's Soliloquia and the first fifty psalms, Alfred had to solve translation problems himself.

Many of the homilies preserved in manuscripts of Old English are composite; that is, they are made up largely of passages drawn with little change from other Old English writings (usually homilies) and not freshly composed or translated from Latin. Most of them exist in only one copy, compared with the several surviving copies of most original homilies, and they were probably not given wide circulation. But such homilies can tell us a great deal about the homiletic tradition in England: about attitudes towards homiletic form and content; about the interests of those who read and plundered the homilies of Æfric and Wulfstan; and about the availability of particular texts in particular areas, and the form in which they were known.

This supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runif Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971). It contains twenty-eight entries, including all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions which have come to my notice since the publication of the first supplement. The entries are followed by the Bibliography. This gives in full the references quoted in abbreviated form throughout this second supplement unless they have already appeared in the General Bibliography of the Hand-List or of the first supplement. This is followed by Addenda to the Hand-List and to the first supplement, where additional information about several inscriptions is given. Then follows a list of Corrigenda to the Hand-List and to the first supplement and, finally, a list of Addenda to the bibliographies of the entries in the Hand-List and the first supplement, to bring them up to date.

In the definitive publication of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford comments that the figural scenes on the purse-lid may be thought to have had a special significance known to those who commissioned them and to those who saw the purse, because they appear as part of the design on an important item of the regalia. However, the meaning of the pair of plaques which show a bird of prey grasping a smaller bird (pl. VIIa) has not yet been satisfactorily analysed. Bruce-Mitford states that no close parallels to the scene can be cited. Haseloff, in a study of the purse plaques, considers that they show the general influence of Mediterranean representational art upon the Germanic tendency towards abstraction, with the bird pairs being the adoption and stylization of a foreign theme. Werner, in a discussion of Lombardic shield mounts, suggests that the Sutton Hoo birds represent Christian ornament and therefore associates the purse with the other supposedly Christian elements in the burial. But no really convincing background for the birds has been found. This is in contrast to the other figural plaques, the man between beasts and the interlacing quadrupeds, which both belong to groups of designs of more familiar type. It is the purpose of this article to provide some sources for the bird plaques and to attempt to interpret the special significance behind the use of this design on an item of the regalia.

This article aims to evaluate the likelihood that whelk dye was known in Anglo-Saxon England, either in the form of imported cloth and textile products, and/or as an activity carried out in England. The nature of whelk dye and the likely processing options available to early societies are considered in the light of extant records and modern experimentation in Israel and Britain. The currently available ‘hard’ evidence is then presented from archaeology, manuscript studies, and the chemical analysis of textiles. Finally, the semantic and literary evidence is considered, including three passages from texts by Bede and Aldhelm, and a new interpretation of OE cornwurma.

Manuscripts can be studied, first, and most obviously, as objects of material culture. Such study may provide valuable information concerning the parchment, the arrangement of quires, the type of script, the letter forms, the decoration, and so on. Manuscripts can also be studied as witnesses to the intellectual preoccupations of the scholars who compiled and copied them: such preoccupations are most apparent in the selection and glossing of the texts which manuscripts from various periods transmit. There is yet a third class of information to be gleaned, from some manuscripts at least, by a combined study of both their physical appearance and of the texts they contain: this information pertains to the time when, the place where, and the reasons why a collection of texts (which is preserved only in a later book) was first put together. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 is a manuscript which invites such an approach. The book, its physical appearance (including its numerous later additions), the texts it presents, and the way it was used in late Anglo-Saxon England have been thoroughly and competently studied, and such studies are invaluable for what I shall attempt to do here: to uncover the ambience in which the ultimate exemplar of Corpus 57 was compiled and used, and to uncover the reason why this exemplar was copied into Corpus 57 and why it was copied in the fashion in which it appears there.

The belief that monsters had a human genealogy originating at a point of transgressive sexual behaviour is something attested to in early medieval texts that either circulated or were written in Anglo-Saxon England. The Hiberno-Latin Reference Bible, a widely known text of the period, and the Old English poem Genesis A both suggest that the sexual deviancy of the progenitors of monsters is perceivable as reiterated stigmata on the monstrous bodies of their progeny. It is within this context of theological exegesis and poetic imagination that the Anglo-Saxon drawings of monsters in The Wonders of the East were produced. What one sees in the depiction of monsters therein is a performance of sexual monstrosity that links monsters to their human forbears; but also, by means of the illustrated interaction of monster and human, the monster is brought perilously close to the here-and-now of the Anglo-Saxon reader-viewer's imagined world.

For much of the ninth century, Anglo-Saxon interest in literary culture was apparently not as great as it could have been. Medieval and modern commentators have spoken of a pronounced early-ninth-century neglect of English libraries, which seems to have affected contemporary literature as well as the literary legacy which had been inherited from the seventh and eighth centuries. It appears that fewer books and texts were produced; the Latin texts produced may to some extent have been of inferior linguistic quality, and were, so it would seem, used with greater difficulties by a smaller and less educated readership. Comparatively fewer books seem to have survived the ninth century than any other period of Anglo-Saxon history.

The ‘Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100’, which appeared twenty years ago in vol. 9 of this periodical, was a first attempt to bring together, in a concise inventory, what was then known about surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments written in, or imported into, England from the end of the sixth to the end of the eleventh century. This has now been superseded by the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, published as vol. 241 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series in 2001. Like the ‘Preliminary List’, the Handlist cannot possibly claim to be perfect or complete, but it is hoped that it may serve some useful purposes as a reference work and, once again, as a searchlist.

The editio princeps of the works of the Venerable Bede was published in 1563 by Johann Herwagen the Younger († 1564) in Basel; the edition had been begun by his father, the well-known printer and publisher, Johann Herwagen (†1557), who was active first in Strasbourg, then in Basel, and was a friend and associate of Johann Froben. In his edition of Bede's De temporum ratione and De natura rerum, Herwagen printed glosses on these two works under the name of Byrhtferth of Ramsey along with Bede's texts. To date, no manuscript of these glosses has ever been found, so our knowledge of them depends entirely upon Herwagen's edition.

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.

Riddle 74 is one of a handful of Old English riddles of the Exeter Book that have stubbornly resisted a solution. As Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson remark, ‘scholars have suggested answers…but none satisfies all the conditions set forth in the poem’. Peter Clemoes finds the attributes that are ascribed to this particular riddle-subject to be ‘so paradoxical that it seems impossible to name their possessor at all’. Riddles normally do have answers, however, and this one is no exception. My first aim in this article is to offer an answer to Riddle 74 that will put debate to rest as to its intended solution.

Julian Brown's famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles. Ever since, the best hope for students of palaeography seeking to date and localize examples of early Insular minuscule has been to follow Brown's classification and identify them as Type A or B, Northumbrian or Southumbrian, and Phase I or II. Brown's schema, however, offered orientation rather than a map. As with any typology, it depends on a very few fixed points, themselves unusual because of their lack of anonymity: gospelbooks from Ireland and Northumbria dated by the survival of rare colophons, manuscripts connected with St Boniface which show the operation of a unique editorial mind. Although Brown's system has been successfully applied to the output of scriptoria whose influences, practices, connections, even locations remain mostly unknown, complications inevitably arise. This article concerns one of them, the recycling in Phase II of a type of minuscule displaying the cursiveness and capriciousness characteristic of Phase I: Type B minuscule as illustrated by the script of St Boniface.

It has been recognized that in late Anglo-Saxon England one writer, Wulfstan the Cantor, knew the poems of Venantius Fortunatus well, but hitherto no manuscript of Fortunatus's poetry of English origin or provenance in this period has been known. The discovery of a leaf of such a manuscript in a collection of fragments at Badminton set me enquiring. It has turned out that there is more manuscript evidence than I expected to find.

The document printed below, an early- or mid-seventeenth-century copy of a hitherto unrecorded charter of 963 by which King Edgar granted 5 hides at Ballidon in Derbyshire to a certain Æthelferth (see pl. XIV), came to light early in 1983 among some manuscripts on temporary deposit at the Staffordshire Record Office. It is published by kind permission of the depositor. The account of the provenance of the charter and of the history of the estate, which follows, is the work of one author (D.A.J.), whilst another (N.P.B.) is responsible for the edition and the topographical analysis, and the third (M.G.) has contributed the discussion of the place-name forms.

The ‘Galba Psalter’ (London, British Library, Cotton Galba A. xviii) is a pocket-sized (128 × 88 mm.), early-ninth-century Carolingian book, perhaps made in the region of Liège, that was originally decorated with only ornamental initials. By the early tenth century the manuscript had reached England, where an Anglo-Saxon scriptorium added two prefatory quires (1r–19v) containing a metrical calendar illuminated with zodiac signs, KL monograms and single figures (pls. IX–X), and five full-page pictures. Two miniatures of Christ and the saints on 2v and 21r (pls. X–XI) preface the calendar and a series of prayers respectively, and three New Testament pictures marked the customary threefold division of the Psalms. Facing Ps. I was a miniature of the Nativity (pl. XII), now detached from the manuscript and inserted into an unrelated book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B. 484, 85r). The Ascension on 120v (pl. XIII) prefaces Ps. CI. A third picture before Ps. LI has been lost, but almost certainly it represented the Crucifixion. The placement of an image of this theme between the Nativity and the Ascension would have been appropriate from a narrative standpoint, and some later Anglo-Saxon and Irish psalters preface this psalm with a full-page picture of the Crucifixion. Obits for King Alfred (d. 899) and his consort Ealhswith (d. 902) provide a terminus post quem for the calendar and the coeval illumination. The Insular minuscule script of the calendar indicates a West Saxon origin during the first decade of the tenth century. On the grounds of the Psalter's style and later provenance, the additions were very likely made at Winchester.