Finnsburh: Fragment and Episode

This edition of the Finnsburh Episode and Fragment incorporates several innovations which I hope will find favour and further use among Anglo-Saxon scholars. First, all textual variants are fully glossed. Variants prove useless to the reader unless he can translate them, and even the most experienced scholar might have difficulty with entries such as Trautmann's coinage *'swinsað'. Second, glossary entries record the word’s meanings in the language as a whole, not just in the immediate context, so that readers can see the possible range of denotations and connotations, appreciate word play and puns, and escape some of the danger of contextual glossing becoming a form of covert editorial interpretation. Third, glossary entries record literal meanings in so far as possible, especially in compounds. (One editor glossed Elene 651a 'dareð-lacende' as 'warrior', thus dropping two vivid images, the spear and its 'player', from the reader's consciousness.) To facilitate diction studies, the glossary cross-references second elements of compounds, and notes which elements occur only in poetry. ("Preface")