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. 

Beowulf is perhaps the most studied of all Old English texts. It is a common text in undergraduate literature courses, and translations or adaptations are released at a rate approaching once per year. These publications differ from each other dramatically in form and structure, from scholarly editions to fantasy films. It is unusual, however, for the actual content of the translations to differ, and this is what one would expect. They are, after all, interpretations of a single source, one which has invariably been a part of all OE scholars’ educations. This inevitably means that all translators and editors approach Beowulf with preconceived ideas, usually informed by research. However, some notions about the events in Beowulf are still based on traditions stemming from influential early editions and interpretations that created a certain kind of storyline featuring certain kinds of characters. These are well established in the minds of OE scholars...

This article analyzes the discourse of what have been termed ‘predatory publishers’, with a corpus of emails sent to scholars by hitherto unknown publishers. Equipped with sociolinguistic and discourse analytic tools, we argue that the interpretation of these texts as spam or as legitimate messages may not be as straightforward an operation as one may initially believe. We suggest that English L2 scholars might potentially be more affected by publishers who engage in these email practices in several ways, which we identify and discuss. However, we argue that examining academic inequalities in scholarly publishing based exclusively on the native/non-native English speaker divide might not be sufficient, nor may it be enough to simply raise awareness about such publishers. Instead, we argue in favor of a more sociologically informed analysis of academic publishing, something that we see as a necessary first step if we wish to enhance more democratic means of access to key resources in publishing.

This study describes the verse design of Old English poetry in terms of modern phonological theory, developing an analysis which allows all OE verse lines to be described in terms of single metrical design.

Old English poetry is typified by a single type of line of variable length, characterised by four metrical peaks. The variation evident in the lengths of OE metrical units has caused previous models to overgenerate acceptable verse forms or to develop complex typologies of dozens of acceptable forms. In this study, Metrical phonology and Optimality theory are used to highlight some aspects of the relationship between syntax, phonology and verse metrics in determining how sentences and phrases interact with the verse structure to create variation.

The main part of the study is a metrical model based on the results of a corpus analysis. The corpus is centred on the OE poems Genesis and Andreas, complemented by selected shorter poems. A template of a prototypical line is described based on a verse foot which contains three vocalic moras, and which can vary between 2 and 4 vocalic moras distributed across 1 to 4 syllables. Each standard line is shown to consist of four of these verse feet, leading to a line length which can vary between 8 and 16 vocalic moras. It is shown that the limited variation within the length of the verse foot causes the greater variation in the length of lines. The rare, longer ‘hypermetric’ line is also accounted for with a modified analysis. The study disentangles the verse foot, which is an abstract metrical structure, from the prosodic word, which is a phonological object upon which the verse foot is based, and with which it is often congruent. Separate sets of constraints are elaborated for creating prosodic words in OE, and for fitting them into verse feet and lines. The metrical model developed as a result of this analysis is supported by three smaller focused studies.

The constraints for creating prosodic words are defended with reference to compounds and derivational nouns, and are supported by a smaller study focusing on the metrical realisation of non-Germanic personal names in OE verse. Names of biblical origin are often longer than the OE prosodic word can accommodate. The supporting study on non-Germanic names demonstrates how long words with no obvious internal morphology in OE are adapted first to OE prosody and then to the verse structure. The solution for the metrical realisation of these names is shown to be patterned on derivational nouns.

The supporting study on compound numerals describes how phrases longer than a verse are accommodated by the verse design. It is shown that compound numerals, which consist of two or more numeral words (e.g. 777 – seofonhund and seofon and hundseofontig) are habitually rearranged within the text to meet the requirements of verse length and alliteration.

A further supporting study discusses the difference between the line length constraints controlling OE verse design and those for Old Norse and Old Saxon verse. Previous studies have often conflated these three closely related traditions into a single system. It is shown that despite their common characteristics, the verse design described in this study applies to all OE verse, but not to ON or OS.