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The Cambridge Old English Reader. Edited by Richard Marsden.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xxxiv +
532. $85 (cloth); $32.99 (paper).
This book promises two things to teachers and students of Old English:
a wide variety of reading material and a user-friendly format that is
up to "modern standards" (p. ix). A substantial volume with forty headings
divided into six thematic sections, the Cambridge Old English Reader
presents "a range of texts far wider than the narrow canon available in
the primers and readers in print" (p. ix). Students who have completed
an introductory course will welcome such new texts as the "Fonthill Letter,"
the Durham Proverbs, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle,
Wulfstan's De falsis deis, and Ælfric's grammatical work.
Teachers will be glad that the Reader also represents "the established
canon," with such staples of Old English literature as "Cynewulf and Cyneheard,"
Alfred's prefaces, Ælfric's Colloquy and his preface to
the translation of Genesis, the Sermo Lupi, excerpts from Beowulf,
and shorter poems like The Dream of the Rood, The Battle
of Maldon, and elegies. Even here, however, editor Richard Marsden
endeavors to shed new light on the familiar texts. For instance, he has
placed The Seafarer in a section called "Example and Exhortation,"
while assigning The Wanderer to the section "Reflection and Lament"
together with Deor, The Ruin, and some other Exeter short poems.
In the introduction to The Seafarer, Marsden argues that interpretations
of the poem "have suffered much from its being pigeon-holed almost invariably
with The Wanderer … as an 'elegy,'" even though "[t]here
is in fact little that is elegiac about it" (p. 221). By juxtaposing it
with texts like Bede's Death Song, Ælfric's homily for Easter
Sunday, and Wulfstan's writing, Marsden tries to bring home to his readers
the view that The Seafarer is "an exhortatory and didactic poem,
in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the
challenge faced by the committed Christian" (p. 221).
Haruko Momma
New York University
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