ABSTRACT
The "Werden Glossary" is one of the earliest and most important witnesses to the Anglo-Saxon glossary tradition. However, its parlous physical condition, the ongoing saga of its mysterious epistemologic status, and its checkered editorial history have hampered its proper study. In the 1980s the situation was improved somewhat by the publication of a good facsimile, along with its sister glossaries, the Epinal, Erfurt, and Corpus glossaries, but even this was fatally hampered by fragmentation and sudden appearances and disappearances.2 Since the 1850s scholars at various times have reported the existence of a total of twenty-six leaves. N. R. Ker3 described it as a fragmentary ninth-century volume of alphabetical glossaries, consisting of twenty-five leaves: six leaves in the Universitatsbibliothek, Munster, Paulinus 271; four leaves in the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Cgm. 187 III (e.4); seven leaves in the Pfarrhof, Werden; and eight leaves, formerly belonging to Ferdinand Deycks but "not found since his death in 1867." In other words, as far as Ker knew in 1957, there were seventeen located leaves and eight missing.
