The Ormulum consists of metrical English sermons, composed and phonetically written by a late twelfth-century priest, Orm, in the East Midlands, and surviving in his autograph manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1, and now newly edited from a fresh transcription, The text has previously only been available for study in Holt and White's edition, now over 140 years old. The editors have been able to recover all known missing parts of the manuscript from Jan van Vliet's seventeenth-century copy (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), and place them in context. These two manuscripts have now been combined in a single edition, and the result gives a new and fuller picture of the Ormulum than ever before. The Ormulum is the sole witness to a unique transitional dialect, long recognized for its importance in understanding the developments between Old and Middle English. It provides essential information for linguists, philologists, students of literature, and historians of religion. New fonts have been specially designed to represent Orm's elaborate spellings and punctuation. 

In passages copied by Jan van Vliet from the Orrmulum manuscript in 1659 Orrm claims that the twelve Patriarchs serve as examples of various virtues. Van Vliet copied no expository text, only lists of virtues and vices, from these pages, but he did supply the heading ‘De XII Patriarchis’ in his notebook (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS. 783). Searches of the Patrologia Latina database fail to turn up a Latin text that might have been Orrm’s source for such claims.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, by contrast, provides a discussion of all the vices and virtues that Orrm needed to make up his lists and ascribe them to the Patriarchs. This is a pseudepigraphical Jewish text with Christian interpolations, presumably finalized in the second century A.D. The text purports to be the dying speeches of the twelve sons of Jacob to their gathered offspring, containing much moral exhortation, apocalyptic visions, and prophecies about the coming of the Messiah and his passion and resurrection (‘Testaments’ 2012). In the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, acquired a manuscript copy of the Greek text from Athens, a text which he translated into Latin in 1242 (H. J. de Jonge 1975: 100–01).

This article will demonstrate the correspondences between the Orrmulum passages in question and the text of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and in addition discuss the possibility for that text (or a summary of it) to have been available to Orrm long before Grosseteste made his translation. If we can trust the evidence of van Vliet’s copy in MS 783, then the reception history of The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Western Europe will have to be modified.

Work on a new edition of Orrmulum, the vast 12th century homiletic work surviving in the author’s holograph (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1), and in some parts, lost from MS Junius 1, in a 17th century copy by Jan van Vliet (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), has yielded various by-products, such as analyses of Orrm’s scriptural interpretations (Johannesson 2007a,b, 2008a–c, 2012), studies of semantic fields (Johannesson 2006b), variation studies (Johannesson 2000, 2006a), and studies of individual words (Johannesson 2004, 2015). The purpose of the last two papers was to provide alternative interpretations and/or etymologies of a small number of individual words. The proposed paper, by contrast, will adopt a wider perspective of groups of words of different origins. Preparing the glossary for the new edition of Orrmulum has provided an opportunity to take a bird’s-eye view of the lexis used by Orrm in his homiletic work. In this paper I will present some reflections on the status of native English vocabulary, Old Norse borrowings, Old French borrowings, and Middle Dutch borrowings. An analysis of erased (but identifiable) words in the manuscript can give an indication of what kind of words Orrm had second thoughts about and eventually decided to exclude from his text. Orrm occasionally provides comments on the status of words as in (1), where the Scandinavian borrowings brodd ‘shoot’ and blome ‘flower’ were obviously sufficiently integrated to count as examples of ‘ennglissh’.

This paper deals with a phenomenon in Old English syntax labelled ‘verb attraction’. In an Old English clause with two verbs, such as an auxiliary verb and the following non-finite verb, or an object-control verb such as hatan ‘to command’ plus the infinitive verb form in the infinitive clause governed by hatan, verb attraction makes the non-finite verb form leave its canonical syntactic position to become adjoined to the higher finite verb. The paper explores some properties of clauses where verb attraction is at work, and ends with a consideration of the usefulness of verb attraction in poetry.

Between 1659 (when he purchased the Orrmulum manuscript) and 1666 (when he died), Jan van Vliet, Dutch local administrator and antiquarian, worked on a glossary for Orrmulum. A draft of this glossary, together with transcripts of parts of the text of Orrmulum, is preserved in his notebook, now London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783. In his 1961 study, Robert Burchfield presented an analysis of those words in van Vliet’s material that derived from folios since lost from the Orrmulum manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1). A problem with Burchfield’s analysis is that he discusses problematic words out of context, which in some cases leads to infelicitous interpretations. Since the folios where the words occurred have been lost, this may seem to be the only approach possible. But some context which may support (or disprove) an interpretation is provided by van Vliet’s transcripts of text passages; his notebook as a whole also provides a context which may aid interpretation. It is also possible to construct a more general context for a word by considering the content of the text before and after the lacunae in order to determine what Orrm in all likelihood wrote on the missing folios.

This article will present a re-interpretation of a few problematic words in this material, based on the context in which they appear.

The 2008 Stockholm Metaphor Festival attracted some 30 participants from 15 countries throughout the world: Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Nigeria,

Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the USA. The ten papers included in this volume consist of the two keynote lectures and eight out of the 19 session papers.

From the outset, the Metaphor Festival has welcomed contributions discussing metaphor and metonymy as well as other types of figurative language within different theoretical frameworks and with literary as well as linguistic approaches.

The papers included in this collection reflect some of the breadth of the presentations at the 2008 Festival.

Of the two keynote speakers, Antonio Barcelona presents an anatomy of metonymy at all linguistic levels, from phonology to discourse, while Gerard Steen explores the conditions required for the use of metaphor to be considered deliberate (as opposed to conventional, automatic and unconscious).

In the remaining contributions, A’Beckett studies an extended metaphor running through a Tom Sharpe novel, Alm-Arvius explores iconicity and poeticity in the discourse functions of schemes and tropes, Eizaga Rebollar discusses the representation and storage of conceptual information underlying idioms as well as the retrieval and use of idioms in communication, Hsieh and Kolodkina present expressions for hands and eyes as metaphors for emotion in Chinese, Russian and English, Kryvenko investigates animal metaphors in Ukrainian and English sports terminology, Roldán-Riejos charts the role of medical metaphors in engineering discourse, Taiwo traces the use of metaphorical expressions in Nigerian political discourse, and Twardzicz provides a scrutiny of metaphors in commercial contracts.

This volume is a tribute to our friend and colleague Philip Shaw, Professor of English linguistics at the Department of English, Stockholm University, on the occasion of his 65th birthday.

The 22 contributions to this volume by friends and colleagues worldwide bear witness to Philip’s academic versatility as well as his interests beyond academia. The first paper, ‘Narratives of Nature in English and Swedish: Butterfly books and the case of Argynnis paphia’, a genre study by Annelie Ädel and John Swales, is illustrated by Philip devoting himself to one of his favourite activities. It is followed by four other genre analyses, based on very different texts: Trine Dahl, ‘Telling it Like it Is or Strategic Writing? A portrait of the economist writer’, Paul Gillaerts, ‘Move Analysis of Abstracts from a Diachronic Perspective: A case study’, Maurizio Gotti, ‘Investigating the Generic Structure of Mediation Processes’, and Nils-Lennart Johannesson, ‘Orrmulum: Genre membership and text organisation’.

The following five papers all relate to Philip’s work in the fields of English as a Second Language (ESL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The ESL study by Britt Erman and Margareta Lewis is titled ‘Vocabulary in Advanced L2 English Speech’, and ELF is represented by Beyza Björkman’s ‘Peer Assessment of Spoken Lingua Franca English in Tertiary Education in Sweden: Criterion-referenced versus norm-referenced assessment’. The three following papers relate to Philip’s work on academic writing: Magnus Gustafsson & Hans Malmström, ‘Master Level Writing in Engineering and Productive Vocabulary: What does measuring academic vocabulary levels tell us?’, Akiko Okamura, ‘Philip Shaw’s Writing Expertise in Academic Discourse’, and Diane Pecorari, ‘Additional Reasons for the Correlation of Voice, Tense and Sentence Function’.

The three papers to follow address issues within the fields of dialectology and sociolinguistics, representing different speech communities in the English-speaking world: Joan C. Beal, ‘Tourism and the Commodification of Language’, Peter Sundkvist, ‘“Ridiculously Country”: The representation of Appalachian English in the Deliverance screenplay’, and Sandra Jansen, ‘“I don’t sound like a Geordie!”: Phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of Carlisle English’.

This naturally leads on to studies on World Englishes, represented by papers by Kingsley Bolton, ‘World Englishes, Globalisation, and Language Worlds’, Gunnel Melchers, ‘The North Wind and the Sun: A classic text as data for World Englishes’, Christiane Meierkord & Bridget Fonkeu, ‘Of Birds and the Human Species – Communication in Migration Contexts: English in the Cameroonian migrant community in the Ruhr area’, and Augustin Simo Bobda, ‘The Emergence of a Standardizing Cameroon Francophone English Pronunciation in Cameroon’.

The five final papers deal with a variety of linguistic topics all close to Philip’s heart but not so easily accommodated into the above sections. They are: Maria Kuteeva, ‘Tolkien and Lewis on Language in their Scholarly Work’, Karin Aijmer and Anna Elgemark, ‘The Pragmatic Markers Look and Listen in a Cross-linguistic Perspective’, Magnus Ljung, ‘Goddamn: From curse to byname’, Christina Alm-Arvius, ‘Opposites Attract’, and Erik Smitterberg, ‘Non-correlative Commas between Subjects and Verbs in Nineteenth-century Newspaper English’.

This paper discusses the genre membership of the twelfth-century Middle English exegetical work named by its author Orrmulum. The work is usually described as a homily collection, but a closer analysis shows that it combines properties of two contemporary text genres. On the one hand it exhibits some typical features of a homiliary (homily collection), such as a verse-by-verse exegesis of gospel texts (while lacking others, such as following the arrangement of the gospel texts (lections) in the Missal, as these are presented chronologically for each Mass throughout the liturgical year). On the other hand the work exhibits some properties of a gospel harmony, a kind of text whose aim is to combine the narratives of the four gospels into one coherent story (while it lacks other properties, such as independence of the Missal).

The Preface of Orrmulum can similarly be shown to be of mixed genre member-ship. On the one hand it has all the properties of a Ciceronian praefatio, in that it comments on the relationship between the author and various other people, such as his patron, his readers, his copyist, and his detractors. On the other hand it shows the typical features of the prologue of a twelfth-century exegetical work (a “type C prologue”, Minnis 1985): it presents the name of the author and of the work, it states the usefulness of the work, etc.

This paper also outlines the textual organisation of Orrmulum, since the marking of these matters in the author’s holograph manuscript is only poorly represented in the standard edition (Holt 1878), and therefore unknown to any reader of the text who does not go back to the manuscript.

Homily xxii of the twelfth-century Middle English homily collection Ormulum by the Augustinian canon Orm deals with the calling of the first disciples. In the account given in Matthew 4:18-22, we are told how first Peter and Andrew, then James and John, are made to leave their nets where they have been fishing in the Sea of Galilee in order to follow Jesus and become fishers of men. Much play is made in the Latin homiletic literature of the use of nets in fishing as metaphors for preaching and conversion.

Orm, however, takes his text for Homily xxii from John 1:35-51, where the story is told differently: John the Baptist saw Jesus walking past and said, "This is the Lamb of God", whereupon two of his disciples left him and followed Jesus. One of these was Andrew, who then brought his brother Simon to Jesus. The next day Jesus called Philip, whao came from the city of Bethsaida, just like Andrew and Simon. Philip then told Nathanael that they had found him of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. No mention is made here of anybody's occupation, only of their home town (Betsaida, domus venatorum, 'the house of the hunters', according to Orm's source texts). Consequently, Orm plays down the role of 'fishers of men' and instead discusses the disciples as 'hunters for men's souls'. The only nets occurring in Orm's exposition and forming the source domain for his metaphor spelless nett ('net of preaching') are hunting nets for catching deer, not fishing nets.

In his exposition of the name of Bethsaida in Homily xxii Orm develops an extended 'hunting' metaphor representing successful preaching as part of proselytizing activities, taking the interpretation of Bethsaida, 'the house of the hunters', as his point of departure. The metaphor involves 'hunting' [hunntenn] and 'chasing' [slætenn] as well as 'catching' [lacchenn], 'net' [nett] and 'hounds' [hundess, racchess]. Apart from the analysis of this metaphor, the paper also discusses the possible impact of such a metaphor on a contemporary audience in the light of other representations of hunting, nets and hounds in medieval literature and art.