Friday, February 22, 2008

Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems finished at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

It seems like forever ago when I started recording volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, but that volume is now finished and every single poem, fragment, charm, etc. is now recorded, edited and posted at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I hope you enjoy them.

The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems is a somewhat misleading name, because although the volume contains much that is "minor" in the regular sense of the word ("A Prayer" or "Latin-English Proverbs," for example), some of the most "major" and well-studied poems in the corpus are in this volume, including The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh and Cædmon's Hymn. But I guess that the title Anglo-Saxon Poems that Aren't in one of the Major Poetic Codices wouldn't have fit on the spine of the book.

Now I go back to volume V of the ASPR The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius and start working through that volume. And since I'm violating chronological order anyway, I'm going to do the Boethius first, because that gives me more time to work up to trying to sing the Psalms. I think Boethius will take three weeks and the Psalter will take five (if I only do one psalm per day), so that would have Anglo-Saxon Aloud finishing up right around Kalamazoo time (which was why I was going to give a paper on it, but, oops. I will be chairing a session on something totally unrelated).

What will be next, I'm not sure. On the one hand, I've kind of gotten used to spending time recording and editing. It's good, fun, somewhat mindless work and gave me the excuse to read through the entire ASPR carefully (twice, actually: once when I recorded each poem and then again while editing). I've got more research questions to answer and new ideas about the poetry than I'll ever get to address. But it's also been tiring at times, so I don't know how much I'll continue. The prose sections of the Charms were harder to record than the poetry (less obvious breath points, for one thing), so I would hesitate to jump into a large prose project. But I'll almost certainly do the Sermo Lupi, and perhaps I'll start doing daily readings from the Chronicle.

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