Foreword to the Third Edition

Plates 1–2 and the ‘cover’ image here tell a story: The Exeter Anthology, Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, has suffered different kinds of damage over the past eleven hundred years and has also attracted the attention of scholars since early modern times. The image of this folio on the cover shows water stains and an early modern interlinear gloss, an attempt to make its texts intelligible. The closing folios suffered severe fire damage when a fiery brand was set down upon it at a time when its protective covering boards had been removed so that they could be re-used on a more relevant, understandable manuscript when Old English was becoming a ‘foreign language’ for most readers. The manuscript seems to have lacked covers for an extended period and was only preserved because it was used in the scriptorium to store sheets of valuable gold leaf that would decorate more valuable and apparently relevant texts. If they had realised the value of its contents for readers a thousand years later, it would perhaps have been treated better – the treasures it contains are more valuable than any amount of gold. In the scriptorium, lacking its protective boards, it was subsequently used as a cutting board, so that its present first folio is defaced by knife slashings. Today, when the manuscript is opened in direct sunlight, speckles of the gold leaf on its folios glimmer and catch readers’ attention and remind them of the true value of the manuscript’s contents as one of only three surviving anthologies of pre-1000 Anglo-Saxon collections of Christian poetry.

This revised edition of The Exeter Anthology was undertaken primarily because thirty years ago when I first completed the edition I had not yet studied the two other anthologies of pre-1000 Christian poetry in great detail. But I now have, and these studies have appeared as The Cædmon Manuscript (Anthem Press, 2022) and The Vercelli Codex (Evellum, 2023). The revised commentary and apparatus now contain numerous cross references to each of these and underscore the commonalities in their ideologies and in the verbal expression of their shared Christian faith. The new approach developed for the presentation of those collections, intended essentially to make them more accessible to future readers, has been applied here in the recasting of the present manuscript so that the three editions form a set.

The recasting of The Exeter Anthology also offered the opportunity to correct some literals and other small errors I have detected in it during the past thirty years; I can only hope that I have not inadvertently introduced any new blemishes while removing the old.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Roy Liuzza for reviewing the Introduction for me.

This book is dedicated to Kerry Greenwood.

Bernard J Muir, from The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, Revised Third Edition (Evellum Digital Publishing, 2024). Reproduced from the front matter of the Third Edition PDF.