Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Part 2: Notes
General
Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Part 2: Notes
English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500
Some references in the older literature should be noticed. Ælfric (Hom.
Cath. ii. 332) calls the legend a lying composition, and proceeds to
tell that of Fursey as true. The writer of the Blickling Homilies (43,
45) relates the episode of the wicked bishop, following a text closely
resembling the oldest Latin version, which differs little from the Greek
at this point. In a second passage, 209/29-211/7, he has combined vague
recollections of the legend with scenery drawn from Beowulf (see the
Preface to BH, pp. vi, vii).
The first part of the present article differs from B iv and agrees with
F iii in substituting smoke (‘smorðer,’ l. 26) for fulgur; with F iii it
omits the Fiery Wheel and the Bridge of Dread, and the punishment of
usurers by name. It is therefore possible that it and F iii had a common
source. But our author has exercised a free choice in details; he says
nothing of the punishment of the unchaste child murderers, of the
oppressors of widows and orphans, of those who broke their fast before
due time, and of those in the pit; nothing of the vision of sinful and
righteous souls borne through the air; all of which are in B iv. His own
fantasy is probably responsible for the division of the torments of the
furnace, l. 24, between the furnace, the fount of fire and the sea of
hell, and for the pleading of S. Paul in ll. 56-72, which are without
parallel in any of the other versions.
(2) The Sunday Letter was a fiction which originated in the south of
France or northern Spain towards the end of the sixth century. It
purported to be a letter, which had fallen from heaven, written in Latin
by Christ’s own hand, denouncing judgement on those who did not observe
Sunday rightly. It had great vogue in England before the Conquest, and
furnished material for the homilies printed in Wulfstan, ed. Napier,
nos. 43, 44, 45, 47, in Otia Merseiana i. 129, and in An Eng.
Miscellany, 357. Latin versions are printed in the two last-named. Our
author makes only general reference to it in 78/75-85, but ll. 85-91 are
taken directly from a Dignatio diei Dominicae which is sometimes
associated with it, and is found separately in the Pseudo-Augustine
Sermons clxvii, cclxxx, and Alcuin, ed. Froben, ii. 487. It is also
added to one MS. of the Visio Pauli (Brandes, 102), and it precedes the
German version which he prints at p. 83. It also forms the subject of
the fourteenth homily in OEH i. 139.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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