In The Rhythm of Beowulf Professor John Pope has presented a convincing case for reading Beowulf as a structure of language ordered not only by stress-patterns but by stress-patterns within strict time-sequences. According to Pope's thesis the rhythm of most Old English poetry can be described as a series of measures equivalent in length (isochronous) though varying in the number of syllables they contain and in the stress-patterns enforced upon these syllables.

Magere Ergebnisse fördert zutage, wer die echten Schelme in der deutschen Dichtung aufspüren will and dazu die üblichen bibliographischen Handbücher, die zusammenfassenden Darstellungen motiv- und stoffgeschichtlicher Art und die nach Gattungen geordneten Sachbücher befragt. Josef Körner nennt in seinem Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums nur eine geringe Anzahl von wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen unter dem Stichwort “Schelmenroman”, wovon die meisten sich auch noch auf das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und die Lazarillo- und Don Quichote-Nachahmungen beschränken. In seiner durch ungeheuren Fleiß ausgezeichneten Anhäufung von Material, The Literature of Roguery (1907), teilt Frank W. Chandler der deutschen Schelmenliteratur nur neun Seiten zu, wobei sie sich diesen Platz auch noch mit der Diskussion des Genres in Holland teilen muß. Außer kurzen Hinweisen auf die deutsche Schwankliteratur, Meier Helmbrecht, Wittenweilers Der Ring, das Liber Vagatorum, Sebastian Brants Das Narrenschijf und auf einige Barocksatiren werden nur Grimmelshausens Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und seine späteren Simplicianische Schriften einer knappen Besprechung für würdig erachtet. Chandler schließt mit der Erwähnung mehrerer Robinsonaden und dem bezeichnenden Satz: “as elsewhere in letters, the ideal and the sentimental replaced picaresque realism. And so for a time the spirit of Rousseau and Richardson ruled.” Gero von Wilperts Sachwörterbuch der Literatur zählt einige der deutschen Übersetzungen und Nachdichtungen der Gattung im Barockzeitalter auf und nennt au der neueren deutschen Literatur Wincklers Der tolle Bomberg, Thelens Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts und Thomas Manns Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Das klassische Werkzeug aller Germanisten, der Merker-Stammler, räumt dem Schelmenroman auch nur verhältnismäßig wenig Platz ein. Es wird hingewiesen auf den Bayern Ägidius Albertinus, den “Vater des deutschen Schelmenromans” und seine Bearbeitung des “Gusman von Alfarache” und auf einige obskure Verfasser und Bearbeiter. Man beeilt sich jedoch hinzuzufügen: “Von einem deutschen Schelmenroman kann …kaum gesprochen werden.” Und weiter unten heißt es: “Sowohl die Schelmenromane wie die Romane Grimmelshausens haben … wenig Nachahmung gefunden.”

In my boyhood—more years ago than I care to remember—we used to define an expert as “a damned fool a thousand miles from home.” Since I am considerably less than a thousand miles from where I grew up, and stand but a few minutes from my residence in Hyde Park, it behooves me to avoid any claim to expertness about the problems faced in practical situations where the dialect of the school child is sharply divergent from what is expected of him in the classroom. For many of these situations, neither I nor any other working dialectologist knows what the local patterns actually are; for some, there has been no attempt, or at best a partial and belated one, to find out the patterns. Nevertheless, the implications of dialectology for the more rational teaching of English in the schools—and not only in the schools attended by those we currently euphemize as the culturally disadvantaged—are so tremendous that I am flattered to have John Fisher ask for my observations. The problems are not limited to Americans of any race or creed or color, nor indeed to Americans; they are being faced in England today, as immigrants from Pakistan and the West Indies compete in the Midlands for the same kinds of jobs that have drawn Negro Americans to Harlem and the South Side, and Appalachian whites to the airplane factories of Dayton. In fact, such problems are faced everywhere in the world as industrialization and urbanization take place, on every occasion when people, mostly but not exclusively the young, leave the farm and the village in search of the better pay and more glamorous life of the cities. In all parts of the world, educators and politicians are suddenly realizing that language differences can create major obstacles to the educational, economic, and social advancement of those whose true integration into the framework of society is necessary if that society is to be healthy; they are realizing that social dialects —that is, social differences in the way language is used in a given community—both reflect and perpetuate differences in the social order. In turn, the practicing linguist is being called on with increasing frequency to devise programs for the needs of specific groups—most often for the Negroes dwelling in the festering slums of our northern and western cities; and generous government and private subsidies have drawn into the act many teachers and administrators—most of them, I trust, well meaning—who not only have made no studies of dialect differences, but have ignored the studies and archives that are available, even those dealing with their own cities.

Perhaps the most fruitful and exciting development in Old English studies in recent years has followed from F. P. Magoun's discovery that the Parry-Lord theory of oral verse-making can be applied to Old English poetry. This theory has caught the imagination of critics and has produced a “kind of revolution in scholarly opinion” not simply because it shows us that the style of this poetry is traditional—that has been known for many years—but because it offers a new and useful way of approaching the problems raised by this style, because it provides a new way of considering some of the relations between these poems, and because it casts light on an area that we thought was forever darkened, the pre-literary history of Germanic and Old English verse.

In the Parliament of Fowls, the elder Scipio, who is a Roman officer and conqueror of Carthage, takes the younger Scipio, civil servant and little more than a common soldier, on a trip to the heavens to view the great cycles and our little world beneath the cycles, and to place our cities within the cycles and world. The point of the examination is that the younger Scipio should learn from the contemplation of natural law what we men are and how he can serve “our common profit” and so take his place among those founders and makers of the laws of commonwealths who are the most blessed of men. In Chaucer's succeeding spring dream, the same elder Scipio takes Chaucer, who is a civil servant and little more than a common squire, to a vision of the speaking together of people-birds who are working out the order of their common weal in parliament and exercising the faculty which is the natural footing of Aristotelian and medieval civil society: “Men are civil beings by nature made for speaking together (parlement) since nature makes nothing in vain and men by nature have the capacity for speech.” The point of Chaucer-the-dreamer's contemplation of the natural bird-human congregation, as it searches and finds its common weal in speaking together in the presence of Nature's order, is, I think, both that the civil servant must know what is what to serve the commonwealth and that the scholar-contemplative must, in some sense, serve the civil if he wishes to know with more than private vision. For vision based on the search for private advantage does not anywhere in Chaucer's world come to the court of Nature. I would like to suggest that Chaucer may be right, that the gates of his vision are not ivory. Their accuracy may be turned toward our present school situation and there suggest what is a reasonable relationship between the civil and the scholarly.

Recent Books and articles on John Gower have laid stress on his role as a moralist and as keeper of the king's conscience during a particularly brilliant and bloody era. He has been presented to us as a fearless critic of the corruption of his time and as the exponent of a moral philosophy which remains consistent throughout his three major works, the Mirour de l'Omme, the Vox Clamantis, and the Confessio Amantis. Gower himself would not have quarrelled with this image; indeed it is one that he tried to cultivate, as we see from some Latin verses which prefix the Vox Clamantis in certain manuscripts:

Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto;
At ubi iustus erit, nulla sagitta ferit.
Sed male viventes hos vulnero transgredientes;
Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi.

During recent years, despite—or possibly because of—T. S. Eliot's commendation, George Chapman's verse has appealed to a fit audience, though few indeed. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the inaccessibility resulting from insufficient knowledge of the tradition and technique of platonic allegory in the Renaissance. Since Battenhouse's pioneering effort at explicating The Shadow of Night, other scholars equipped with a fuller knowledge of platonic iconography and mythology have attempted to part the veil of obscurity by reestablishing a coherent intellectual and historical context and have enhanced our understanding of several of the more difficult poems, notably Hero and Leander and Ovids Banquet of Sence. It may be time to examine a poem which has not been noted for artistic accomplishment in order to determine to what extent such a context reveals a consistent poetic mode in Chapman's verse.

The story of Sigebryht, Cynewulf, and Cyneheard—the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755—is frequently cited as a unique and dramatic specimen of the pre-Alfredian Chronicle. Historians as well as English language scholars have attested the value of the passage, and it has been used to illustrate the pre-feudal heroic ideal. Unified and rather detailed, the entry is an account of political strife. Events spanning twenty-nine years are condensed into a short narrative, and the author's conciseness is complicated by an involved pronomial reference not uncommon in Anglo-Saxon literature. Primarily because of the difficulty with pronouns, the translation of the text and the discernment of its larger meanings have been points of continuing debate.

To begin at the beginning, proficiency tests, like paper, printing, and gunpowder, were invented by the Chinese. As early as 2200 B.C. the emperor of China was using tests to decide which of his officials should be promoted and which should be fired. A thousand years later the Chan dynasty had developed a series of examinations in which every candidate for public office demonstrated his competence in the five basic arts: music, archery, horsemanship, writing, and arithmetic. Tests for teachers arrived in the Western world with the establishment of the medieval universities. The probationary discourse was the essential step by which a student proved himself fit for membership in the tightly held guild of university professors. Today tests are a normal requirement for admission to the practice of law and medicine, not to mention barbering, the selling of real estate, and the calculation of insurance risks. Both the pervasiveness and the ancient lineage of proficiency tests argue for the possibility that they are producible and for the probability that they are useful.

It has long been known that Chaucer translated portions of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis for use in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, but his artistic reasons for doing so have never been determined. If the translated passages from the De Miseria were short and all in one place, there might be no compelling reason to search for an artistic purpose: Chaucer may simply have wanted to insert a passage from a work that he was translating at the time out of his love for authorities—a love shared by almost all medieval writers. But the facts are that Chaucer made more extensive use of the De Miseria in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale (nearly fifty lines) than anywhere else in his works, that the translated passages are from five different chapters and two different books in the De Miseria, and that they are scattered in five places throughout the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. It is therefore highly likely that Chaucer added the passages from the De Miseria for particular artistic reasons, and it is the purpose of this paper to determine what those reasons were.

The discussion which follows of two dark passages in Beowulf rests fundamentally on habits of composition which are idiomatic to and generally pervasive in Old English poetry. Among these habits variation, and what I have previously called ‘generation,‘ are commonplace. And because they are commonplace and because Old English poetic language is by nature and tradition extremely conventional, it would seem a reasonable assumption that familiarity with these habits may guide us to predictions or probabilities of what a poet intended in a scribally confused passage. Such an assumption is based on the fact that Old English poets tend to repeat words, prefixes and suffixes, head-words and base-words in compounds, word clusters or phrases, and that in some poems, such as Beowulf, there is a marked tendency to repeat these lexical elements closely together in bound contexts, such as speeches, set descriptions of person or place, and episodes. The debut of Wealhtheow in lines 612b–641 is an excellent instance of multiple repetition throughout with an accumulation of repeated elements at the end.

Our knowledge of medieval and Renaissance theory of allegory is largely governed by two traditions, the rhetorical definition inherited from Quintilian and the exegetical method of reading on two or more levels of meaning, a method traceable to Augustine and usually illustrated by Dante's letter to Can Grande Della Scala. The rhetorical view of allegory as inversio and extended metaphor is mostly useful for examining the figure on a narrow scale, normally as part of a larger context. It describes an element of style but not a fictional structure. The exegetical tradition, though widely employed as a technique of reading, was, if one is to judge by Renaissance critical theory, seldom discussed or fully analyzed after Petrarch. When it was, as in Harington's Apology prefaced to his translation of Orlando Furioso, the result could be confusing. Generally critics were equipped with the handy assumption that all literature was susceptible to the figurative readings habitually given to Scripture, and the method was convenient to the allegorical interpretation of myth.

Durante la Edad Media y sobre todo en los primeros siglos, en las palabras de Pablo Luis Landsberg: “La fe en el orden preestablecido de la historia y en su forma eterna y limitada, originó, pues, para la conciencia medieval, la inclusión de la historia, por modo profundo, dentro de la gran realidad eterna. La historia fué considerada no en los accidentes del acontecer exterior sino en la necesidad de la esencia interior. No se buscaba la comprobación de los hechos ‘tal y como habían sido realmente’ (Ranke) sino que, en lo acontecido, buscábase lo eterno. El historiador de la Edad Media es el escritor de leyendas, que manifiesta en historias, acaso ‘falsas,‘ la esencia de las personas y los acontecimientos.”

Widsith is the only Old English poem concerned exclusively with a scop and Deor the only one specifically attributed to a scop. In both a scop is represented as speaking, and in each he tells something of what had befallen him—Widsith, the far-wandering and richly rewarded scop, and Deor, the court scop who had lost his long-held and lucrative post to a rival. These poems are therefore similar and also the only ones which give us a first-person account of a scop's career. It is usually for the sake of the information thus provided that the poems are discussed together. This information is precious little, however, and some of it is dubious.

Romance is one of the most abused generic terms of medieval literature. For a good many scholars it serves as a commodious bottom drawer which will hold almost anything that could not be stored elsewhere. Having been enlarged to mean nothing less than “imaginative fiction,” the term romance communicates very little, especially when it is applied to such a conglomerate body of works as “The Middle English Romances.” Apparently indifferent to the possibilities of greater clarity and meaning through a more circumspect application of the word, scholars have wasted little time on morphological problems in the Middle English romances, and yet they would not discountenance discussions of whether The Scarlet Letter is a novel or a romance. There, indeed, labelling the work with one or the other term becomes a matter of making a statement about the area of meaning of the work and about the techniques with which this meaning is conveyed. In medieval studies, the latitude in application of the term romance and its consequent diminishing usefulness for descriptive purposes might have been felt more keenly if it were not for the assumption that the tracing of the sources of a given work has contributed the most significant part to its understanding. However, the variety of forms that the same story material can demonstrably assume, e.g., the Arthurian tradition, should make us more sensitive to the opinion of some scholars that generic patterns have a more important influence than story material upon the shape of a literary product. Moreover, the concept of genre acts as a kind of perspective which one assumes towards the work one is examining, and depending upon its appropriateness, it can make the structure more or less meaningful. The few writers who have ventured to deal with the whole body of the so-called romances and to make judgments on their respective merits have ignored the possibility that, without finer and more specific terminological distinctions, they may be mistaken about some of the ugly ducklings. Such has been the lot of the Middle English version of the story of Amis and Amiloun, because the perspectives of romance and saint's legend are not identical.