Finnsburh Fragment and Episode

by Donald K. Fry (Editor)

This edition of the Finnsburh Episode and Fragment incorporates several innovations which I hope will find favour and further use among Anglo-Saxon scholars. First, all textual variants are fully glossed. Variants prove useless to the reader unless he can translate them, and even the most experienced scholar might have difficulty with entries such as Trautmann's coinage *'swinsað'. Second, glossary entries record the word’s meanings in the language as a whole, not just in the immediate context, so that readers can see the possible range of denotations and connotations, appreciate word play and puns, and escape some of the danger of contextual glossing becoming a form of covert editorial interpretation. Third, glossary entries record literal meanings in so far as possible, especially in compounds. (One editor glossed Elene 651a 'dareð-lacende' as 'warrior', thus dropping two vivid images, the spear and its 'player', from the reader's consciousness.) To facilitate diction studies, the glossary cross-references second elements of compounds, and notes which elements occur only in poetry. ("Preface")

83 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Finnesburh Fragment is an Old English fragment of a poem that tells the story of a fight in which the Danish prince Hnæf and his retainers are besieged at Finnesburh in Friesland and their attempt to fend off their attackers. The Episode is a section of Beowulf in which a Scop recites the Freswæle (Frisian slaughter) which tells the allusive story of the aftermath of the story contained in the Fragment.

This Methuen edition give an introduction to the text of the Finnesburh Fragment and Episode, in which Fry gives a short summery of past scholarship and reconstructions, then gives his own opinions and his own reconstruction of the events.

Next comes Fry's excellent edition of the text of both the Fragment and the Episode. While the fragment is actually lost and is only contained in George Hickes's Thesaurus and needs a vast amount of editorship to allow it to make sense. At one important point in the first line of the text, Fry, thankfully allows the text to speak for itself and does not make the unnecessary emendation of the first line of the text from næfre (adverb, meaning never) to Hnæf (personal name), so that "hornas byrnad næfre" still retains the sense of "gables will never burn. Then the battle-young king made a speech." Both Klaeber's third edition and Tolkien's Fragment and Episode amend the text to Hnæf, with the Bliss translation in Tolkien's fragment and Episode being forced to say "gables are burning." Hnæf spoke, the warlike young king." Curiously, the new fourth edition Klaeber and the new Fulk Beowulf Manuscript retain the word næfre in the same way that Fry does.

Like all Methuen editions this book includes a vast amount of useful notes and a complete word glossary to the text, in which all problematic words such as eotan are given all variant meanings like Jute or giant/monster, leaving the reader to judge the meaning for themselves. An added bonus to this volume is the geographical map and the print of the transcript from Hickes's Thesaurus.