ABSTRACT
London, British Library, Cotton Otho E. i comprises thirteen leaves of an alphabetically arranged ("a-order") Latin-Old English glossary. The manuscript was severely damaged in the Cotton fire of 1731. As a result, the leaves are in a fragmentary, discolored, and shrunken state; a fragment, for example, may contain ca. twenty-eight Latin lines arranged in four columns with Old English glosses written above the lemmata, with additional glosses and explanations running continuously across the columns at either the top or bottom of the leaf. The best of the leaves measure ca. 21 x 6.5 em., although the upper fragment of the three fragments comprising fol. 3 shows a width of 8.2 em. Initial letters of the Latin headwords are in red ink, while black is generally used for added entries. Wanley (1705: 238) notes that the glossary extended from the letters Ap, and he cites the now lost initial entries Anhelantium, Agnostica: oret maxga, Agens: wrecende drifende, Auida: pagifran. The incipit agrees with that of British Library, Cotton Cleopatra A. iii, fols. 5-75, which appears to be the direct source of the Otho glossary. Both manuscripts were produced in Canterbury, Otho E. i at Christ Church, and Cleopatra A. iii at St. Augustine's (see Bishop 1959-63: 93; Brooks 1984: 267). Ker (1957: 180, 238) dates the Cleopatra glossary to the mid-tenth century and the Otho glossary to the beginning of the eleventh century.
