Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) is a six-volume edition intended at the time of its publication to encompass all known Old English poetry. Despite many subsequent editions of individual poems or collections, it has remained the standard reference work for scholarship in this field.

Contents and bibliographic details

The series was published in the USA by Columbia University Press and in the UK by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The year of publication is not always clear on the UK editions, leading to some variation in citations. The series was reprinted by Columbia University Press in 1961. The volumes, cited in MHRA style in their first Columbia University Press printing, are:

• The Junius Manuscript, ed. by George Philip Krapp, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931)
• The Vercelli Book, ed. by George Philip Krapp, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932)
• The Exeter Book, ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936)
• ‘Beowulf’, and ‘Judith’, ed. by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953)
• The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius, ed. by George Philip Krapp, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 5 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932)
• The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942)

Scholars waver, when citing the ASPR, over whether they regard it as six works in a numbered series (as above) or as a single work in six volumes. When cited in MHRA style as a single work, it appears as:

• The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53)

History

The edition was conceived by George Philip Krapp (1872–1934), who edited volumes 1, 2, and 5 while Professor of English at Columbia University, with the assistance of his student and colleague Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie. Krapp died partway through editing volume 3, and Dobbie completed this edition before going on to complete the series by editing volumes 6 (which came out in 1942) and 4 (which emerged in 1953).^[1] According to Henry Wiggins, the long gap before the publication of Volume 4 was partly due

to Elliott's feeling that there was no urgency about completing the Beowulf volume, because there were so many competent editions. The Press, like any publisher, was troubled about the absence of Volume V [recte Volume IV] from a six-volume set, and I was assigned the duty of "prodding" Elliott. Despite all my efforts, he gave us the manuscript when he wanted to---when he felt he had something to contribute.^[2]

In 1960, the ASPR became the basis for J. B. Bessinger, A Short Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: In a Normalized Early West-Saxon Orthography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), and a concordance to the ASPR was published in 1978: A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. by J. B. Bessinger, jr., programmed by Philip H. Smith, jr., with an index of compounds compiled by Michael W. Twomey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

The Old English texts in the ASPR were digitised, rather inconsistently, by Greg Hidley under the auspices of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English project; this text was then corrected by Duncan Macrae-Gibson, though still with a few divergences from the ASPR text, and is now widely circulated on the Internet.^[3]

External links

• Oxford Text Archive digitisation: http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009

References