‘My first impulse was to print the text of the poem as it appears in the manuscript, with a literal translation in parallel columns, placing all conjectural emendations at the foot of each page; but, on comparing the text with the version in this juxta-position, so numerous and so enormous and puerile did the blunders of the copyist appear, and, consequently, so great the discrepance between the text and the translation, that I found myself compelled to admit into the text the greater number of the conjectural emendations, consigning to the foot of the page the corresponding readings of the manuscript. In every case which I thought might by others be considered questionable, I have followed the more usual course, of retaining in the text the reading of the manuscript, and placing the proposed correction at foot. . . .
‘Very shortly after I had collated it, the manuscript suffered still further detriment.
‘In forming this edition I resolved to proceed independently of the version or views of every preceding editor.’ —Pages vii, viii, xii, xiii.
[ Criticism of Thorpe’s Text.]
Considering the amount of time that had elapsed between this and the edition of Kemble[1], Thorpe can hardly be said to have made a satisfactory advance. In some respects his edition is actually inferior to Kemble’s. It is probable, for example, that the collation of which the author speaks in his introduction was the one which he had made twenty years before, and that, in taking up his work a second time, he did not trouble himself to revise it. At any rate, the MS. did not receive from Thorpe that respectful attention that it had had from Kemble. Thorpe was more clever than the former scholar in deciphering faded lines of the MS., but he was not always careful to indicate those letters which he actually found there, and those he himself supplied from conjecture. Yet these readings were often of sufficient importance to affect an entire passage, and later scholarship has in many cases deciphered readings whose sense is entirely different from Thorpe’s. Thus his edition presents striking divergences from later texts, while no explanation of them is offered in the footnotes. Not only does he frequently incorporate his own readings in the text without noting the MS. forms, but he even makes mistakes in the MS. forms which he does note. A collation of Thorpe’s text with the MS. has revealed a carelessness which was all the more reprehensible in that it came from a scholar who was thought to be well-nigh infallible. A few examples of this carelessness are given:—
| Line 319 (158)[2], | banan (misreads MS. in footnote). |
| 487 (241), | Ic (word emended from le without noting MS. form). |
| 1160 (578), | hwæþere (emends without noting the MS. form). |
| 1207 (601), | ac him (omits a word). |
| 4408 (2201), | hilde hlemmum (MS. misread in a footnote. Emendation unnecessary). |
At line 2218 the MS., badly mutilated at this point, reads,
. . . slæpende be syre . . . de þeofes cræfte.
[In Thorpe’s edition] the line reads (4443),
... slæpende be fire, fyrena hyrde þeófes cræfte.