Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell

Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell gives readers a comprehensive insight into the world of Old English. Consisting of a series of original essays written by prominent specialists in the field, Inside Old English enables readers to engage with the literary, cultural, intellectual, religious and historical discourses of Old English. It gives them an appreciation of the relationship between Old English authors and scribes, and of how language and usage have changed and developed over time, thus helping them to understand the problems modern–day scholars face in interpreting and editing Old English texts. Each of the contributors writes in a straightforward and authoritative style, drawing out connections between different contexts and pointing readers towards the essential secondary literature for each topic.

Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Foreword. Bruce Mitchell. (Fred C. Robinson). Introduction. (John Walmsley). 1 Eight Notes on the Beowulf Text. (Alfred Bammesberger). 2 A Point Well–Taken: Manuscript Punctuation and Old English Poems. (Daniel Donoghue). 3 The Incomparable Wryness of Old English Poetry. (Roberta Frank). 4 Straining Words and Striving Voices: Polysemy and Ambiguity and the Importance of Context in the Disclosure of Meaning. (Antonette diPaolo Healey). 5 "Eala, Geferan and Gode Wyrhtan": On Interjections in Old English. (Risto Hiltunen). 6 Speaking One′s Mind in The Wanderer. (Susan Irvine). 7 Wulfstan′s Scandinavian Loanword Usage: An aspect of the linguistic situation in the late Old English Danelaw. (Tadao Kubouchi). 8 An Aspect of Old English Poetic Diction: The Postpositioning of Prepositions. (Michael Lapidge). 9 Issues for Editors of Anglo–Saxon Poetry in Manuscript Form. (Bernard J. Muir). 10 Language and style in two anonymous Old English Easter homilies. (Hiroshi Ogawa). 11 Latin influence on an Old English idiom: ′to wit′. (Matti Rissanen). 12 Germanic ∗Uargaz (O.E. Wearh) and the Finnish evidence. (Fred C. Robinson). 13 How the Leopard Got its Spots. English Grammatical. Categories, Latin terms. (John Walmsley). A Bibliography of Writings by Bruce Mitchell 1956–2004. Select Bibliography. List of Editions used. Index of Names. Index of Old English Words and Phrases. Index of Subjects.

John Walmsley studied English Language and Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and General Linguistics, and History of Education, at Edinburgh and Durham respectively. He held teaching posts at Hamburg University and St Mary’s College, Newcastle–upon–Tyne, before being appointed Professor of English at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His publications cover topics in linguistics, applied linguistics and foreign language teaching, and the history of linguistics. Current interests include the role of linguistics in education. From 1993 to 1994 he was Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (RCEAL), Cambridge, UK.