Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/148

 142 Reviews and Notes Thorpe's Diplomatarium p. 230, 16, I do not know whether the .discrepancy from Th.'s print is due 1o arbritary change of spelling or because the passage is actually taken from C.D. Ill 125, 13. At any rate, only Kemble prints the second sentence of the quota- tion 1he way it is exhibited in the Supplement, apart from his fiat appearing there as 'Set. Thorpe certainly has plainly: 7 f> werfi cereafe. In the preceding sentence of the quotation note that the Supplement leaves out two words of the text without indicating the omission and otherwise unnecessarily shortens the sentence. I can see no reason why the full sentence as Thorpe prints it should not have been given: forpan pe hi (sc. mother and son) drifon [i]serne stacan on Alsie Wulf stones feder. The omitted [i]serne is a very essential part for the proper understanding of the interesting pas- sage nor has it been left out in the Dictionary sub staca where the same passage is quoted and commented upon. To the information conveyed there concerning this method of witchcraft reference ought to have been made and the reader ought to have been told that iserne printed sub staca should read [i]serne, the MS. having serne-, iserne is Kemble's emendation which Thorpe failed to credit to its author. For An wyduwe and hire sune in the quotation sub staca substitute: Hi [sc. an wyduwe and hire sune]. Of blunders committed in the Dictionary, but not rectified in the Supplement I have noticed the following instances: Sub a-fyran the Dictionary has this as first quotation: (l Afyred olfend ' a drome- dary, a kind of swift camel'; dromeda MS." No source of the quotation is indicated nor is there indeed any proper base for it. It is simply a mixture of two glosses, Corpus Glossary ed. Hessels, D 361, Dromidus, afyred olbenda, and ^Elfric's Vocabulary, Wright - Wulcker I 119, 7 Camelus uel dromeda. olfend? Of this state of things the Supplement ought to have duly informed the reader. All it does, however, is to quote the Corpus gloss from Sweet's Oldest English Texts, without any comment, sub dfyran and add in brackets the reading of the Erfurt, afyrid, without, however, telling the reader so. Nor is the reader put in possession of the fact that the Corpus gloss reappears again in the llth century collection of glosses in MS. Cotton, Cleopatra A III, Wright- Wulcker I 385, 39, Dromidus, ofyrit olfenda* The omission of this gloss sub dfyran is all the more regrettable since it affords proof for the transition of long a to 0. 5 It ought to be entered under the letter O and preliminary attention should be drawn to o-fyrid here. From the foregoing it is plain that the entry a-fyran in the Supplement ought to have been preceded by the following correc- tion: l A-fyran MS. Dele and substitute d-fyran etc.' Just so the wrong a-bredan of the Dictionary ought to be adverted to as rectius legendum d-brdan and with its quotations referred to 3 Quoted in the Dictionary sub olfend. 4 Quoted in the Dictionary sub olfend. 6 As to that transition, compare olfata 'cocula/ Wright-Wiilcker 1 122, 35.