Page:Blickling Homilies - Morris.djvu/8

 PREFACE.

Blickling Homilies, though now for the first time published, have not been altogether unknown to old [sic] English scholars. Godwin, in his life of St. Andrew from the Cambridge MS. CCC. S. 8, published in the Transactions of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1851, gave variant readings from the Blickling MS. His version, corrected by the manuscript, has enabled me to complete the missing parts of the present text, pp. 237-249.

From some notes in our manuscript in the library of Blickling Hall, Norfolk, it is evident that Thorpe had made a careful examination of the original, but, curiously enough, had overlooked the passage which mentions the very year in which the manuscript was written, 971. This date, however, does not necessarily mark the exact point of time in which the present Homilies were composed, but may be a later insertion of the transcriber; that is to say, the date 971 only gives us the age of the MS., and not that of the author or compiler.

If we compare the Blickling Homilies with the corresponding discourses in Ælfric's Collection (Ælfric Society, ed. Thorpe), we see at a glance how very materially they differ both in vocabulary and syntactical structure. In Ælfric's the vocabulary is comparatively modern, as compared with the English of Alfred's age, and the sentences are less complex, though more coherent and closely connected. In the Blickling Homilies we