In this article I consider the possibility of using vocabulary to determine the original dialect of Old English poems later than Cynewulf and choose two poems on the same theme, Judgment Day I, reputedly Anglian, in the Exeter Book, and Judgment Day II, reputedly West Saxon, in order to illustrate the application of this method and test its validity.

The poem 57 is one of the simplest and shortest of the whole collection of Old English Riddles, a gem of a riddle, if correctly understood. In my opinion the last line should be interpreted as ending with the statement that the little creatures “name themselves.” As yet no satisfactory solution has been found.

Revaluating one of Professor Nitze's earlier suggestions, I have tried to use the concept of sovereignty for the understanding of the composition of Chrétien's Erec. This controversial concept, a husband's patriarchal sovereignty in the atmosphere of Arthurian courtliness, will be shown in this paper to be a constituent factor in Yvain, the most mature of the romances completed by Chrétien himself. Hitherto not discussed in the impressive literature, this question, one of sens, cannot be developed without some discussion of the several widely divergent views on the matière and will seem less confusing, if we begin by studying the final phase (vss. 6527 ff.), and, then, work retrospectively toward the main plot and the beginning of the romance.

Das großangelegte Werk Martin Werners “Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas”1 hat mir einen starken Eindruck gemacht. Wenn ich auch den wichtigen theologischen Streitfragen gegenüber mir kein Urteil anmaße, so weiß ich doch, was eine scharfe und klare Beweisführung ist, die ohne vorgefaßte Meinung gerade auf ihr Ziel losgeht. Vor allem aber ist mir eines dabei deutlich geworden: daß die Geschichte kein einfaches Continuum ist, in dem Sinne, daß das Neue einfach an das unmittelbar Vorhergehende anknüpft, sondern daß sich Gegenwärtiges, Vergangenes, Vorvergangenes und Längstvergangenes zu einem unentwirrbaren Zauberknäuel verflechten, den so und so oft die menschliche Phantasie mit ihren buntesten Fäden umspinnt.

The influence of Italian writers on Chaucer has been described by the use of such general terms as “renaissance,” “humanism,” or “Italian atmosphere,” and also by the enumeration of borrowed passages and the recognition of similarities of plot. Some critics believe that the Italian journeys opened new vistas for Chaucer in literature and life, while others hold that from Italy he derived only certain lines and stories. Consideration of this problem in terms of just one poem, Boccaccio's Teseida, is narrow and inconclusive, but has the advantages of being specific and of permitting an evolutionary—as opposed to a static—point of view; for of all Italian writings except Dante's Commedia, the Teseida served Chaucer the most widely. It formed the basic material out of which he created the Knight's Tale, and was the source of passages in Anelida and Arcite, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Franklin's Tale, and possibly the House of Fame.

It is quite natural that most mediaevalists who have up to the present dealt extensively with problems presented by the Oxford version of the Chanson de Roland should not have had an active personal interest in mediaeval Hispanic studies per se. True it is that members of the last generation of Roland specialists, notably the historian P. Boissonnade in extending J. Bédier's theories, have brought into sharp focus the importance for Roland studies of the eleventh- and early twelfth-century French crusades into Spain against the Moors, especially in aid of, or collaboration with the Cid's overlord, Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile. And in this connection Bédier added his voice to those who have admitted the possibility that the Oxford Roland may have been composed after the turn of the century.

In a study of the use of the verb haber as an impersonal expression of existence, it was found that the twelfth-century Spanish of the Poema de mío Cid tended not to use the locative adverb y in the present tense, contrary to present usage, and to retain it in other tenses. It was also found that the language tended to place the y before the verb.

Did Wolfram have any other sources beside Chrétien? Opinions are still divided. According to Fourquet, he used only two different Chrétien Mss. Weber assumes three additional sources, one for the “Enfances Perceval,” another for books i and ii, and a third one, which he considered an alchemistic writing, for the Grail. Schneider, summing up the investigations of scholars in his history of MHG literature, holds that Wolfram must have known, beside Chrétien, a Grail story in Oriental setting. My own research has gone in a similar direction and like Schneider, I am indebted to the pioneers in this field, to Veselovskij and Singer, founders of the Ethiopian theory.

Extraña condición. Ni el árabe ni el español reducen el grupo consonántico st dentro de su propio material, pero lo hace cada uno si la palabra procede del otro idioma.

In preparing my edition of the Middle English Epistle of Othea attributed to Stephen Scrope, I have chanced upon some details which apparently have not been previously noticed. The conclusions to be drawn in this paper must necessarily be tentative until exhaustive search in Italian and French libraries can once again be undertaken with the hope of providing the necessary evidence for the satisfactory solution of the present problem. The points which I propose to make, however, are of sufficient importance and interest to present them in their present form to students of comparative literature.

In Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, and taken over from it into Malory, is a story of how Sir Lancelot by craft is brought to lie with Elayne, thinking she is Queen Guinevere. The Queen, discovering it, thinks her lover has been false to her and with violent words banishes him from her presence. Lancelot swoons, then departs from court and runs about “wylde wood as euer was man” (Book xi, Chap. 3). At last he is bound when asleep and taken to a castle where he is cured.

In 1941 I published and translated in this periodical an early Irish text which I called “The Exile of Conall Corc” because owing to a defective beginning the title had not been preserved. In the introduction to the text I listed among the sources dealing with Conall Corc, who as an early and semi-historical king of Munster supposedly reigned about 400 A.D., an account of him which the editor Kuno Meyer entitled “Conall Corc, and the Corco Luigde,” since, being an extract from a larger work, it lacked a separate heading of its own. Various reasons now prompt me to attempt a translation of it. One of them naturally is the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, for Conall Corc, who is a vivid and picturesque member of “The Royal Cycle” of ancient Ireland, had a varied career which deserves to be better known than it actually is. Another reason is that several scholars, especially in recent years, have urged me to make an English rendering so that those who are not familiar with the Irish language at least may have access to the legendary as well as folkloristic elements that are implicit in “Conall Corc and the Corco Luigde.” And the third reason is that more than a decade ago having received the aid of the late Professor Thurneysen in the elucidation of some of the difficult passages, an aid which I here gratefully acknowledge, I feel that the present translation, now that he is dead, will preserve at least to some extent his interpretation of the text.

The present study of Chaucer's unaccented final -e, particularly his final -e in rhyme, must clearly be understood to be a study in phonology, not one in morphology. The question is not whether or not most of the forms surviving in spelling were at one time pronounced; it is the question of whether or not they were still pronounced in Chaucer's day (particularly by Chaucer in his poetry), and whether or not the grammatical forms furnish the best hypothesis for a possible pronunciation. An acceptable hypothesis, I think everyone would agree, not only should explain the majority of cases covered by it, but should not be unduly hampered by exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions. I believe that the generally accepted hypothesis of pronunciation on the basis of historical grammar is so hampered. When originally enunciated, this was not the case. Child recognized certain exceptions, Kittredge greatly expanded these, and recently Mrs. McJimsey has enlarged them still more. Material now available, though not available to the early investigators, warrants a thorough reinvestigation of the entire theory. Enough rules for the suppression of final -e within the verse have been accepted until at the present time only about 20 per cent of such final -e's are pronounced. The supporters of a theory that demands so many suppressions should be willing to examine a hypothesis based on additions rather than suppressions, especially when the exceptions to the basic rule are only 20 per cent of the whole rather than 80 per cent, and that 20 per cent can be simply explained.

Edward Fairfax, Elizabethan poet and translator, is most famous for his version of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Opinions of this book have varied so greatly that Fairfax critics alone afford an interesting cross-section of English taste. We may see the author admired by his contemporaries for his Italianate richness of description, praised by the seventeenth century for his smoothness and heroics, neglected by the eighteenth for his lack of elegance and rime (i.e., of couplets), revived by the romantics for his touching passages of emotion, and left on the shelf today because, perhaps, we have other things to think about.

Le livre ii,—on l'a souvent remarqué,—manque d'unité. Des trois parties dont il se compose, la première se rapporte à l'enfance et à la jeunesse fabuleuses de Pantagruel, la seconde à son séjour à Paris, la troisième à son expédition en Utopie. Ce qui marque le début et la fin du roman, c'est le caractère extraordinaire des personnages et de leurs aventures, et le ton familier du récit. Ces deux parties, note M. Abel Lefranc, semblent avoir été rédigées avant la seconde. Dans celle-ci, il ne reste guère plus rien d'anormal, plus d'incidents surnaturels. On oublie presque que le héros est un géant. C'est dans cette seconde partie que Rabelais a exprimé des idées graves et nobles en des pages enthousiastes qui sont remarquables au point de vue littéraire. Ces contrastes ne se retrouvent pas dans les autres livres du roman rabelaisien. Gargantua, le Tiers et le Quart Livres sont mieux composés et mieux écrits. L‘élément mythique y tient moins de place. Pantagruel s'y présente sous d'autres traits: il se fait plus digne; sa bonhomie, de spontanée, devient réfléchie. Non seulement le livre II est moins harmonieux que les autres, mais ce qui le distingue, ce sont les scènes d'une vulgarité de fableau, dénuées souvent de portée, et simplement plaisantes. Par sa première et sa troisième parties, tout imprégnées d'esprit populaire, le livre n tient encore des récits traditionnistes dont les autres livres se dégagent plus nettement. C'est l‘étude des relations qui existent entre Pantagruel et les Chroniques gargantuines qui va nous occuper.

Critics on occasion have remarked the peculiar unity of tone which distinguishes Richard II from most of Shakespeare's other plays. Walter Pater wrote that, like a musical composition, it possesses “a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. … It belongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form approaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a song, a single strain of music.” And J. Dover Wilson, in his edition of the play, has observed that “Richard II possesses a unity of tone and feeling greater than that attained in many of his greater plays, a unity found, I think, to the same degree elsewhere only in Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.”