John Richardson Old Papers About Old English: Some Odd Ramblings of an Old-Style

The essays in this little volume, with the exception of the poetic translation of "The Ruin" which first appeared in a shortlived literary magazine in Edmonton and two previously unpublished pieces, were originally printed in peerreviewed scholarly publications over a period of about twenty years from 1983, when I was still an undergraduate just out of my teens, to 2001, when I had longsince left formal academia behind for the "real" world of business and parenthood. These papers are the product of of my philologist magpie habits of mind and of the tremendous privilege I have enjoyed to pursue my own interests wherever they may lead. And they are more than anything else, the product of a time of less hasty thought and speech than seems to prevail today. This "Philology" to which I refer has for some time been something of a runt of the academic litter, particularly with the rise to dominance of Literary Theory (over actually reading the poetry) and PostModernism (over pretty much everything). In 1997 Roberta Frank, in her delightful, and delightfully titled "The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist" (Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 [1997], 486513)., while chronicling the decades of obituaries spoken and published concerning Philology, reminds us that to fully understand literature, particularly the literature of the past, we need to know and understand the full context in which the words we read were assembled. Professor Frank writes, "the past is... | John Richardson Old Papers About Old English: Some Odd Ramblings of an Old-Style