Guthlac A IV

The fifth installment of Guthlac A is now complete. I have been experimenting with ways to organize the vocabulary in a database, so that had slowed progress for a few days.

I know that there are a lot of computer people amongst you Anglo-Saxonists, so any suggestions of how to manipulate data in MS Excel would be greatly appreciated: I want to create a wordlist that preserves each form a word takes, but that swiftly eliminates duplicates and extremely common words, so I don't have to wade through them when I need to look for a word. For Guthlac, I can just use Roberts's glossary, but I'm looking ahead to a bigger poem like Genesis.

Update to Elene

I've added about thirty lines to the Elene translation that were lying about. I don't really mean to do two poems at the same time--and Lord knows I have enough to do without it--but I did want to get everything I have out on the table.

I have not been satisfied with the sound of Elene so far, and so I have pushed it aside until I can digest a few more translations. There is something very different about the voice of the poem--Andreas and Guthlac A just don't have it-- and I need to get my mind around expressing it that voice.

Updates to Guthlac

The first four sections of Guthlac A are now complete, so please come and visit to check things out. I recently stumbled across Jane Roberts's 1979 edition and remembered that Bernard Muir's edition of the Exeter Book existed, so I now have a much more up-to-date edition to use in the translation. A relief, but one that will necessitate some revisiting of the notes so far, I fear.

Consequently a bibliographic list of editions and translations has been added to the start of the Notes section, just to help you all play along at home.

More Guthlac

The first three parts of Guthlac A are posted, and the notes sections is struggling along behind it. I feel that I am starting to get a feel for the poem's unique qualities: its heavily periodic structure that depends on very dense repetition, its unusual meter (Sievers types don't really help very much in many of the lines), and the poem's obsession with state and condition (as evidenced by the constant use of had, and the frequent use of legal terminology).

I hope you are enjoying the evolution of the translation as much as I am.

On another note, ASNPP just broke a minor landmark today. The page has had 1,005 hits, with 756 unique visitors. I still have a long way to go to catch up with In The Middle, and the guinea pig cartoon page has still had 8 times as many hits, but I am very proud this project has received so much interest. Thank you all!