Old English Tradition contains eighteen new essays by leading scholars in the field of Old English literary studies. The collection is centered around five key areas of research—Old English poetics, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, codicology, and early Anglo-Saxon studies—on which the work of scholar J. R. Hall, the volume’s honorand, has been influential over the course of his career.  

The volume’s contents range from fresh insights on individual Old English poems such as The Wife’s Lament and Beowulf; new studies in Old English metrics and linguistics; codicological examinations of individual manuscripts; fresh editions of understudied texts; and innovative examinations of the role of early antiquarians in shaping the field of Old English literary studies as we know it today.

Introduction - by †Fred C. Robinson, Yale University
J. R. Hall: A Bibliography - by Joseph B. Trahern, Jr., University of Tennessee, Knoxville
I. Old English Poetics
To Commemorate Friendship: The Life and Times of Old English Wine - by Roberta Frank, Yale University
Death the Grim Hunter - by Jane Roberts, King’s College London
The Wife’s Lament and the Poetics of Affect - by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, University of California–Berkeley
Progress in Old English Metrics - by Thomas M. Cable, University of Texas at Austin
II. Anglo-Saxon Christianity
Figures of Enoch in Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 - by A. N. Doane, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Christ III and “Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini” - by Frederick M. Biggs, University of Connecticut
The Long Shadow of Alcuin: Cambridge, Pembroke College 25 - by Paul E. Szarmach, Emeritus
The Eucharistic Dance of the Angels: I Cnut, iv, 1–2 - by Thomas D. Hill, Cornell University
An Edition of Two Old English Homilies: “The Capital Sins” (HomM 2) and “Good Friday” (HomM 10) - by R. D. Fulk, Indiana University
III. Beowulf
Verbal Confusion Chiefly in Beowulf - by † E. G. Stanley, University of Oxford
Ironic Use of Laf and Three Swords of Doomed Inheritance in Beowulf - by Lindy Brady, University of Mississippi
Beowulf 3074–75: Problems of Interpretation - by Howell Chickering, Amherst College
IV. Codicology
MS CUL Kk 3.18 and the Tremulous Hand of Worcester - by David F. Johnson, Florida State University
A New Light on the Vercelli Book: Textual Science and Manuscript Recovery - by Gregory Heyworth, University of Rochester
V. Early Anglo-Saxon Studies
The Enlightened Innocence of Franciscus Junius Encounters The Meters of Boethius - by Daniel Donoghue, Harvard University
Laurence Nowell and the Old English Bede - by Carl T. Berkhout, University of Arizona
Benjamin Thorpe’s Influence on Joseph Bosworth’s Editions of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Orosius, and the Gospels - by Dabney A. Bankert, James Madison University
Who Wrote the Non-Racist Essay “The Anglo-Saxon Race”? Longfellow and Nineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism - by John D. Niles, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Bibliography