A much more complex and technical version of this material will appear in a forthcoming critical
edition of Kentish liturgical poetry, co-authored with Patricia Hollahan of the University of Illinois
Press.
1. The Kentish Hymn was last edited by E. Dobbie in The Anglo-Saxon Minor
Poems, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records VI (New York, 1942), 87-88. From his bibliography (p.
clxviii), we can see that it has been either included as an "example" in collections or examined in
terms of its dialect. Apart from a two-page note which identifies but does not expand upon some
of the more immediate liturgical sources (Geoffrey Shepherd, "The Sources of the Old English
Kentish Hymn," MLN, 67 [1952], 395-97), there has to date been no literary or
critical edition attempted of either the Kentish Hymn or the Kentish Psalm 50.
2. G. E Krapp (The Vercelli Book, ASPR II [1932]) discusses the late tenth-century dating of Vercelli on p. xvi; N. R. Ker (Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon [Oxford, 1957]) dates it "s. X2" on p. 460. Krapp and Dobbie (The Exeter
Book, ASPR III [1936]) discuss the hand which compiled the poetry on pp. xiii-xiv,
concluding with Keller and Flower that it could be "about the same date as the Vercelli Book, that
is, about 960-980" (p. xiv); Ker dates it, like the Vercelli Book, "s.X2" (p. 153).
3. Krapp (The Junius Manuscript, ASPR I [1931]) identifies the four hands of
Junius 11 as dating from 1000, and "less than a generation later" (p. x); in like fashion, Ker
designates the Junius manuscript as "s.X/XI, XI1" (p. 406), doubtless accounting like Krapp for
the different scribal hands. Dobbie (Beowulf and Judith, ASPR IV [1953]) notes that this
part of Cotton Vitellius A.xv was written "by two scribes, at about the end of the tenth century"
(p. ix); E Klaeber (Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. [Lexington, Mass., 1950])
dates it "about the end of the tenth century (p. xcvi), and Ker also designates it "s.X/XI" (p. 281).
4. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London, 1982), pp. 112-14.
5. H. Logeman, ed., The Rule of St. Benet (London, 1888), pp. 39, 42, 43, and
passim.
6. Canon 10 of the Council of Clofesho in 747 provides that clergy "must know the
vernacular translations of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and of the offices of mass and baptism, so
that they may expound them to the laity" (trans. G. G. Willis, Further Essays in Early Roman
Liturgy [London,
page 39
1968], p. 231). We should
also remember Alfred's interest in translating Latin texts into Old English (set out in his preface to
the Liber Regulae Pastoralis), which may well echo the acts of Clofesho, as do other
proposals in this letter (Whitelock, in Sweet' s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse,
15th ed., cited by E G. Cassidy and R. N. Ringler, Bright's Old English Grammar and
Reader, 3rd ed. [New York, 1971], p. 181).
7. The transition from an Italic to a Germanic member of the Indo-European language
family would constitute a far greater shifting of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics
than would a translation within a single family member, as in Latin to Norman French.
8. In The Presence of the Word (New Haven, 1967), Walter J. Ong discusses the
use, restricted to the educated (usually male) class, of Latin as opposed to the vernaculars which
were common to all, and the relationship between these two forms of "word' on pp. 57-63, 76-79,
and 241-52.
9. These are preserved either as partial or complete translations above the Latin psalm-texts in glossed psalters A-M; a complete list of these sigla, derived from A. S. Cook (Biblical
Quotations in Old English Prose Writers [London, 1898]) and Uno Lindelöf
(Studien zu altenglischen Psalterglossen [Bonn, 1914]) can be found on p. xi of Sarah
Larratt Keefer, The Old English Metrical Psalter (New York, 1979).
10 Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds Latin 8824, edited by G. E Krapp
(The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius, ASPR V [1932]).
11. Described in F. J. E. Raby, Christian-Latin Poetry (Oxford, 1953), pp. 33-34;
H. Gneuss, Hymnar und Hymnen (T¨bingen, 1968), pp. 15 and 30-40; and most
recently by Gernot Wieland, The Canterbury Hymnal (Toronto, 1982), pp. 10-12.
12. Ker, p. 269.
13. Ker, pp. 268-69.
14. This is evident throughout the Regularis Concordia (ed. and trans. Dom
Thomas Symons [New York, 1953]) and The Rule of St. Benet.
15. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London, 1945), p. 457; and
Pierre Battifol, Histoire du breviare romain (translated as History of the Roman
Breviary by A. M. Y. Baylay [London, 1912]), p. 186.
16. See Gneuss, p. 14, and Battifol, in Baylay, p. 184. The placing of the Te
Deum is evident both in Logeman (p. 41) and in a more modern version, The Rule of St.
Benedict, translated by Richard Crotty (Nedlands, Australia, 1963), p. 29.
17. The Te Deum is said at the Christmas Nocturns (Reg. Conc., p. 28);
because the Gloria in excelsis "is said at Mass ... between the feast of the Innocents and
the Octave of Christmas" (Reg. Conc., p. 29), we can assume that it too was said at Mass
for Christmas Day.
18. "Advent," The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. E L. Cross
(London, 1974), p. 20.
19. The following is a single example of lines showing "shuttling":
page 40
in lines 2-6, the last word of each line picks up or
anticipates the alliteration of a line nearby: "weard" (2b) reflects the w-alliteration of line
1; "agend" (3b) predicts the vowel alliteration of line 5; "wuldor" (4b) refers back to 1b again, as
does "willan" (6b); and "sibb" (5b) takes up the s-alliteration in line 4.
20. The following is a single example of "fluctuation": starting from the central line 22,
where we find the poem's only double alliteration, lines 23 and 24 have only two stressed words;
these lines "generalize" about the Son's redeeming activities. Lines 25-26 each contain three
stress-bearers, as the poet slows to take a closer look at what the Son did to redeem humanity.
21. Ong, Presence of the Word, pp. 78-79.
22. Three distinct thematic subsections in the central division of the poem (11. 15-31)
run from lines 15-21, 22-28, and 29-31.
23. The evident influential verses are 3 ("ut unum deum in trinitate, et trinitatem in
unitate veneremur") and 27 ("et trinitas in unitate et unitas in trinitate veneranda sit"), here taken
from D, the glossed psalter most likely to be contemporary with the Reform period (E Roeder,
ed., Der Altenglische Regius-Psalter [Halle, 1904, reprinted Tübingen, 1973], pp.
297, 299).
24. Luke 2:14. All biblical references are to Robert Weber, ed., Biblia Sacra
Vulgata (Stuttgart, 1983). 25. John 1:4. 26. Isaiah 53:7.
27. This expression, which ultimately derives from John 2:36, also appears in the
Gloria in excelsis.
28. This notion of two realms, formerly in strife but reconciled by the Incarnation, also
appears in the "weall wið wealle" section of the Christ I poem(Exeter Book, p.
4), and is discussed by A. S. Cook in The Christ of Cynewulf (Boston, 1900), p. 75. Other
similarities of theme and language between the Kentish Hymn and the Christ I
poems will be examined in a future study.
29. I see the Kentish Psalm 50, the Old English Metrical Psalter fragments, and
the Creed, Gloria, and Pater Noster poems as all contributing to a further understanding of
Reform-period poetic philosophy, and certainly some of these as being valuable and skilled
examples of poetic techne in themselves.
