Page:Gospel of Saint John in West-Saxon.djvu/12

viii, and with an advantage of minor corrections and additions.

Following the Introduction to this volume is a description of the plan according to which the text has been prepared.

The Notes, although reduced from their original form, occupy more space than the plan of the volume at first provided. Several methods of annotation were considered before the conclusion was reached to use so much of the available space for the citation of the passages from the Gospel of St. John that have been collected by Professor Cook from the Anglo-Saxon prose writers. These complete in a significant way the Gospel of St. John in Anglo-Saxon, and constitute, as a whole, an important commentary on the text of the Version.

It must, however, be kept in mind that the prose writers translate and paraphrase from a variety of sources, and that therefore many of the differences between their passages and the Version furnish a clue to prevailing variants in the original text. In each instance it would be necessary to trace the complete history of the passage to arrive at its exact significance for comparison with the Version. But such points of exactitude do not greatly interfere with the more general value of these passages in supplying illustrations of individual modes of translation and paraphrase, and in thus extending our view of the resources and of the conventionalities of the language.

Inasmuch as the Latin manuscript used by the translator of this Gospel has not yet been identified, the text has been compared with that of Wordsworth and White's critical edition of the Vulgate. Only a portion of the results of this comparison have been recorded in the Notes; but at many places the critical text has been cited to elucidate the Version, and at many other places indications