SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE
By R. W. Chambers
Many years have passed since the publication of Ker’s volume in the Home University Library, yet there is hardly a paragraph in it which demands any serious addition or alteration. It is a classic of English criticism, and any attempt to alter it, or ‘bring it up to date’, either now or in future years, would be futile.
Ker deliberately refused to add an elaborate bibliography. But his Note on Books reminds us how, though his own work remains unimpaired, the whole field of study has been altered, largely as a result of that work.
Sweet’s books mark an epoch in Anglo-Saxon study, and have not lost their practical value: to his Primer and Reader (Clarendon Press) must be added the Anglo-Saxon Reader of A. J. Wyatt (Cambridge University Press, 1919, etc.). The earlier portion of Morris’s Specimens of Early English, Part I (1150-1300), has been replaced by Joseph Hall’s Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1920); Part II, Specimens (1298-1393), edited by Morris and Skeat, has been replaced by Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, edited by Kenneth Sisam (Clarendon Press, 1921). To Wyld’s Study of the Mother Tongue must now be added his History of Modern Colloquial English and Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language (Blackwell, 1938).
The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, edited by G. P. Krapp and others (Columbia Univ. Press and Routledge, 6 vols, 1931, etc.), provide a corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
It is impossible to review editions of, or monographs on, individual poems or authors, but some work done on Beowulf and Chaucer may be noted: editions of Beowulf, by Sedgefield (Manchester Univ. Press, 1910, etc.), by Wyatt and Chambers (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914, etc.) and by Klaeber (Heath & Co., 1922, etc.); R. W. Chambers, Beowulf, an Introduction (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921, etc.), and W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (Harvard Univ. Press, 1928, etc.); G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press, 1915); J. L. Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford Univ. Press, 1934); F. N. Robinson, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford Univ. Press, 1933).
Fresh aspects of medieval literature are dealt with in G. R. Owst’s Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926) and Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933); R. W. Chambers, The Continuity of English Prose (Oxford Univ. Press, 1932); C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love (Clarendon Press, 1936); Mr. Owst’s books serve to remind us that Ker’s work can still be supplemented by minute study of fields which he, with his vast range over the literatures of all Western Europe, had of necessity to leave unexplored, when he closed his little book with Chaucer. The two most startling new discoveries in Medieval English Literature fall outside the limits which Ker set himself; they are The Book of Margery Kempe, edited in 1940 for the Early English Text Society by Prof. S. B. Meech and Miss Hope Emily Allen, and the Winchester manuscript of Malory’s Morte Darthur, upon which Prof. Eugene Vinaver is now engaged.
The student will find particulars of the books he wants by consulting the new bibliography of the Cambridge History of English Literature or A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400, by Prof. J. E. Wells (Yale and Oxford Univ. Presses, 1916, with supplements).