The Manuscripts of Caedmon's ‘Hymn’

Abstract

The article gives a transcription of the recently discovered manuscripts of Caedmon's Hymn examined by Humphreys and Ross in 1975 and printed in facsimile by Robinson and Stanley in 1991, and locates the texts within the groups proposed by Dobbie. By comparing the readings of the various manuscripts, some questions of transmission are resolved. The article goes on to examine the manuscript and linguistic evidence as a whole to determine the relationship between the different traditions and their texts. Making use of the evidence of spelling conventions, substantive variants in the texts, and the textual representation of oral tradition, a radically new stemma is proposed.

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