ABSTRACT
The O ld English gloss entered above the Romanum version of the psalms in the tripartite de luxe manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17. 1, has never found particular favour among glossographers perhaps because it falls outside the traditional chronology of Old English (to c. 1100). The gloss, copied by m ultiple hands using a number of different models, comprises a hodgepodge of morphological and phonological features. Some of these must be judged to be idiosyncratic, others the result of grappling with a source-gloss that, by the m id -1 16 0 s, combined a number of earlier strata and was understood in places with difficulty. O ther features are due to evident misreadings of the Latin in the gloss as transm itted, and still others resulted from combining word-for-word glossing with syntactical glossing. There are certainly additional explana tions that can be offered for the overall complex and at times peculiar nature of the gloss in this manuscript. Herbert Dean M eritt remarked that the glosses ‘are among the most inaccurate in Old English’ and that some of the manuscript’s glosses ‘can be interpreted only in the light of the oddest vagaries in OE glossing ’.1 Sherman M. Kuhn called it ‘a remarkable linguistic gallimaufry, containing forms similar to those of several periods and dialects’.2 For Kenneth Sisam, the gloss ‘defies historical analysis’, and he rightly dismisses it ‘as useless for the analysis of other glosses’, leaving it to historians of education to sort out ‘[h]ow such a gloss came to be w ritten into a splendid manuscript at the
1 H. D. Meritt, Fact and Lore About Old English Words (Stanford and London, 1954), pp. 20 and 23 .
