After a preface and dedication, the work consists of homilies explicating the biblical texts set for the mass throughout the liturgical year. It was intended to be consulted as the texts changed, and is agreed to be tedious and repetitive when read straight through. Only about a fifth of the promised material is in the single manuscript of the work to survive, which is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Orrm developed an idiosyncratic spelling system. Modern scholars have noted that the system reflected his concern with priests' ability to speak the vernacular and may have helped to guide his readers in the pronunciation of the vowels. Many local priests may have been regular speakers of Anglo-Norman French rather than English. Orrm used a strict poetic metre to ensure that readers know which syllables are to be stressed. Modern scholars use these two features to reconstruct Middle English as Orrm spoke it.[2]
Origins
Unusually for work of the period, the Ormulum is neither anonymous nor untitled. Orrm names himself at the end of the dedication:
Early Middle English
Modern English
Icc was þær þær i crisstnedd was
Where I was christened, I was
Orrmin bi name nemmnedd
named Orrmin by name (Ded. 323–24)
At the start of the preface, the author identifies himself again, using a different spelling of his name, and gives the work a title:
The name Orrm derives from Old Norse, meaning worm, serpent or dragon. With the suffix of "myn" for "man" (hence "Orrmin"), it was a common name throughout the Danelaw area of England. The metre probably dictated the choice between each of the two forms of the name. The title of the poem, Ormulum, is modeled after the Latin word speculum ("mirror"),[3] so popular in the title of medieval Latin non-fiction works that the term speculum literature is used for the genre.
The Danish name is not unexpected; the language of the Ormulum, an East Midlands dialect, is stringently of the Danelaw.[4] It includes numerous Old Norse phrases (particularly doublets, where an English and Old Norse term are co-joined), but there are very few Old French influences on Orrm's language.[5] Another—likely previous—East Midlands work, the Peterborough Chronicle, shows a great deal of French influence. The linguistic contrast between it and the work of Orrm demonstrates both the sluggishness of the Norman influence in the formerly Danish areas of England and the assimilation of Old Norse features into early Middle English.[6]
The interior of the church of Bourne Abbey, where the Ormulum may have been composed: the two nave arcades, although now whitewashed, remain from the church Orrm would have known.
According to the work's dedication, Orrm wrote it at the behest of Brother Walter, who was his brother both affterr þe flæshess kinde (biologically, "after the flesh's kind") and as a fellow canon of an Augustinian order.[7] With this information, and the evidence of the dialect of the text, it is possible to propose a place of origin with reasonable certainty. While some scholars, among them Henry Bradley, have regarded the likely origin as Elsham Priory in north Lincolnshire,[8] as of the mid-1990s it became widely accepted that Orrm wrote in the Bourne Abbey in Bourne, Lincolnshire.[9] Two additional pieces of evidence support this conjecture: firstly, Arrouaisian canons established the abbey in 1138, and secondly, the work includes dedicatory prayers to Peter and Paul, the patrons of Bourne Abbey.[10] The Arrouaisian rule was largely that of Augustine, so that its houses often are loosely referred to as Augustinian.[11]
Scholars cannot pinpoint the exact date of composition. Orrm wrote his book over a period of decades and the manuscript shows signs of multiple corrections through time.[12] Since it is an autograph, with two of the three hands in the text generally believed by scholars to be Orrm's own, the date of the manuscript and the date of composition would have been the same. On the evidence of the third hand (that of a collaborator who entered the pericopes at the head of each homily) it is thought that the manuscript was finished c.1180, but Orrm may have begun the work as early as 1150.[13] The text has few topical references to specific events that could be used to identify the period of composition more precisely.
Manuscript
Only one copy of the Ormulum exists, as Bodleian LibraryMS Junius1.[14] In its current state, the manuscript is incomplete: the book's table of contents claims that there were 242homilies, but only 32 remain.[15] It seems likely that the work was never finished on the scale planned when the table of contents was written, but much of the discrepancy was probably caused by the loss of gatherings from the manuscript. There is no doubt that such losses have occurred even in modern times, as the Dutch antiquarian Jan van Vliet, one of its seventeenth-century owners, copied out passages that are not in the present text.[16] The amount of redaction in the text, plus the loss of possible gatherings, led J. A. W. Bennett to comment that "only about one fifth survives, and that in the ugliest of manuscripts".[17]
The parchment used in the manuscript is of the lowest quality, and the text is written untidily, with an eye to economical use of space; it is laid out in continuous lines like prose, with words and lines close together, and with various additions and corrections, new exegesis, and allegorical readings, crammed into the corners of the margins (as can be seen in the reproduction above). Robert Burchfield argues that these indications "suggest that it was a 'workshop' draft which the author intended to have recopied by a professional scribe".[18]
It seems curious that a text so obviously written with the expectation that it would be widely copied should exist in only one manuscript and that, apparently, a draft. Treharne has taken this as suggesting that it is not only modern readers who have found the work tedious.[19] Orrm, however, says in the preface that he wishes Walter to remove any wording that he finds clumsy or incorrect.[20]
The provenance of the manuscript before the seventeenth century is unclear. From a signature on the flyleaf we know that it was in van Vliet's collection in 1659. It was auctioned in 1666, after his death, and probably was purchased by Franciscus Junius, from whose library it came to the Bodleian as part of the Junius donation.[21][A]
Contents and style
The Ormulum consists of 18,956 lines of metrical verse, explaining Christian teaching on each of the texts used in the mass throughout the church calendar.[22] As such, it is the first new homily cycle in English since the works of Ælfric of Eynsham (c.990). The motivation was to provide an accessible English text for the benefit of the less educated, which might include some clergy who found it difficult to understand the Latin of the Vulgate, and the parishioners who in most cases would not understand spoken Latin at all.[23]
Each homily begins with a paraphrase of a Gospel reading (important when the laity did not understand Latin), followed by exegesis.[24] The theological content is derivative; Orrm closely follows Bede's exegesis of Luke, the Enarrationes in Matthoei, and the Glossa Ordinaria of the Bible. Thus, he reads each verse primarily allegorically rather than literally.[25] Rather than identify individual sources, Orrm refers frequently to "ðe boc" and to the "holy book".[26] Bennett has speculated that the Acts of the Apostles, Glossa Ordinaria, and Bede were bound together in a large Vulgate Bible in the abbey so that Orrm truly was getting all of his material from a source that was, to him, a single book.[27]
Although the sermons have been deemed "of little literary or theological value"[28] and though Orrm has been said to possess "only one rhetorical device", that of repetition,[29] the Ormulum never was intended as a book in the modern sense, but rather as a companion to the liturgy. Priests would read, and congregations hear, only a day's entry at a time. The tedium that many experience when attempting to read the Ormulum today would not exist for persons hearing only a single homily each day. Furthermore, although Orrm's poetry is, perhaps, subliterary, the homilies were meant for easy recitation or chanting, not for aesthetic appreciation; everything from the overly strict metre to the orthography might function only to aid oratory.[30]
Although earlier metrical homilies, such as those of Ælfric and Wulfstan, were based on the rules of Old English poetry, they took sufficient liberties with metre to be readable as prose. Orrm does not follow their example. Rather, he adopts a "jog-trot fifteener" for his rhythm, based on the Latin iambicseptenarius, and writes continuously, neither dividing his work into stanzas nor rhyming his lines, again following Latin poetry.[31] Orrm was humble about his oeuvre: he admits in the preface that he frequently has padded the lines to fill out the metre, "to help those who read it", and urges his brother Walter to edit the poetry to make it more meet.[32]
A brief sample may help to illustrate the style of the work. This passage explains the background to the Nativity:
Rather than conspicuous literary merit, the chief scholarly value of the Ormulum derives from Orrm's idiosyncratic orthographical system.[33] He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously.[34]
Orrm's chief innovation was to employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long.[35] For syllables that ended in vowels, he used accent marks to indicate length. In addition to this, he used three distinct letter forms for the letter g depending on how they sounded. He used insular <ᵹ> for the palatal approximant[j], a flat-topped <ꟑ> for the velar stop[ɡ], and a Carolingian <g> for the palato-alveolar affricate[d͡ʒ],[36] although in printed editions the last two letters may be left undistinguished.[37] His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous. For example, he originally used eo and e inconsistently for words such as beon and kneow, which had been spelled with eo in Old English. At line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all the eo spellings in the book, replacing them with e alone (ben and knew), to reflect the pronunciation.[38]
The combination of this system with the rigid metre, and the stress patterns this meter implies, provides enough information to reconstruct his pronunciation with some precision; making the reasonable assumption that Orrm's pronunciation was in no way unusual, this permits scholars of the history of English to develop an exceptionally precise snapshot of exactly how Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the twelfth century.[39]
Significance
Orrm's book has a number of innovations that make it valuable. As Bennett points out, Orrm's adaptation of a classical metre with fixed stress patterns anticipates future English poets, who would do much the same when encountering foreign language prosodies.[40] The Ormulum is also the only specimen of the homiletic tradition in England between Ælfric and the fourteenth century, as well as the last example of the Old English verse homily. It also demonstrates what would become Received Standard English two centuries before Geoffrey Chaucer.[41] Further, Orrm was concerned with the laity. He sought to make the Gospel comprehensible to the congregation, and he did this perhaps forty years before the Fourth Council of the Lateran of 1215 "spurred the clergy as a whole into action".[42] At the same time, Orrm's idiosyncrasies and attempted orthographic reform make his work vital for understanding Middle English. The Ormulum is, with the Ancrene Wisse and the Ayenbite of Inwyt, one of the three crucial texts that have enabled philologists to document the transition from Old English to Middle English.[43]
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages.
Sir Frederic Madden KH was an English palaeographer.
The Old English Bible translations are the partial translations of the Bible prepared in medieval England into the Old English language. The translations are from Latin texts, not the original languages.
Middle English Bible translations covers the age of Middle English, beginning after the Norman Conquest (1066) and ending about 1500.
The Junius manuscript is one of the four major codices of Old English literature. Written in the 10th century, it contains poetry dealing with Biblical subjects in Old English, the vernacular language of Anglo-Saxon England. Modern editors have determined that the manuscript is made of four poems, to which they have given the titles Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. The identity of their author is unknown. For a long time, scholars believed them to be the work of Cædmon, accordingly calling the book the Cædmon manuscript. This theory has been discarded due to the significant differences between the poems.
The Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is the title given to a homily composed in England between 1010 and 1016 by Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, who commonly styled himself Lupus, or 'wolf' after the first element in his name [wulf-stan = 'wolf-stone']. Though the title is Latin, the work itself is written in Old English. The Sermo Lupi is Wulfstan's most well-known work. In it, he blames a lack of moral discipline amongst his fellow English as the source of God's anger against the English, which has taken the shape of thirty years of Viking raids against England. Wulfstan exhorts the English to behave in a manner more pleasing to God, and specifically to live according to the laws of the Church and of the king. The Sermo Lupi is noted for its rhetorical achievements, and is considered to represent the height of Wulfstan's skill as a homilist and rhetor. The text of the Sermo Lupi has been critically edited many times, most recently by Dorothy Bethurum. The work contains one of several mentions of Old English wælcyrian, a term cognate to the Old Norse valkyrjur—valkyries.
Mercian was a dialect spoken in the Anglian kingdom of Mercia. Together with Northumbrian, it was one of the two Anglian dialects. The other two dialects of Old English were Kentish and West Saxon. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. Part of Mercia and all of Kent were successfully defended but were then integrated into the Kingdom of Wessex. Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little to no salvaged written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred the Great's unification, until the Middle English period.
Orrm, also known as Orrmin, was an Augustinian canon from south Lincolnshire who wrote the Ormulum, a collection of verse homilies that is the oldest English autograph and one of the most significant records of Middle English. His work is a successful example of homiletics translating Latin learning to balance the needs of his fellow canons, who likely spoke Anglo-Norman French, with those of lay English-speaking audiences.
The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy.
The Ayenbite of Inwyt —also Aȝenbiteof Inwit; literally, the "again-biting of inner wit," or the Remorse (Prick) of Conscience is the title of a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English.
Franciscus Junius , also known as François du Jon, was a pioneer of Germanic philology. As a collector of ancient manuscripts, he published the first modern editions of a number of important texts. In addition, he wrote the first comprehensive overview of ancient writings on the visual arts, which became a cornerstone of classical art theories throughout Europe.
Midrash Tanhuma, also known as Yelammedenu, is the name given to a homiletic midrash on the entire Torah, and it is known in several different versions or collections. Tanhuma bar Abba is not the author of the text but instead is a figure to whom traditions are frequently attributed to, though he may have preserved a collection of midrashim used by other midrash editors. The name Yelammedenu derives from the Hebrew phrase yelammedenu rabbenu, which initiates a typical textual unit in the text.
The Tremulous Hand of Worcester is the name given to a 13th-century scribe of Old English manuscripts with handwriting characterized by large, shaky, leftward leaning figures usually written in light brown ink. He is assumed to have worked in Worcester Priory, because all manuscripts identified as his work have been connected to Worcester.
The Cambrai Homily is the earliest known Irish homily, dating to the 7th or early 8th century, and housed in the Médiathèque d'agglomération de Cambrai. It is evidence that a written vernacular encouraged by the Church had already been established alongside Latin by the 7th century in Ireland. The homily is also the oldest single example of an extended prose passage in Old Irish. The text is incomplete, and Latin and Irish are mixed. Quotations from the Bible and patristic sources are in Latin, with the explication in Irish. It is a significant document for the study of Celtic linguistics and for understanding sermons as they might have existed in the 7th-century Irish church. The homily also contains the earliest examples in written Irish of triads, a form of expression characteristic of early Irish literature, though the text taken as a whole is not composed in triads.
The Lambeth Homilies are a collection of homilies found in a manuscript in Lambeth Palace Library, London. The collection contains seventeen sermons and is notable for being one of the latest examples of Old English, written as it was c. 1200, well into the period of Middle English.
The Trinity Homilies are a collection of 36 homilies found in MS Trinity 335 (B.14.52), held in Trinity College, Cambridge. Produced probably early in the thirteenth century in the Early Middle English period, the collection is of great linguistic importance in establishing the development of the English language, since it preserves a number of Old English forms and gives evidence of the literary influence of Latin and Anglo-Norman as well as of the vernacular used in sermons for lay audiences. The same manuscript, like that of the Lambeth Homilies, also preserves a version of the Poema Morale.
The Poema Morale is an early Middle English moral poem outlining proper Christian conduct. The poem was popular enough to have survived in seven manuscripts, including the homiletic collections known as the Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies, both dating from around 1200.
Hatton Gospels is the name now given to a manuscript produced in the late 12th century or early 13th century. It contains a translation of the four gospels into the West Saxon dialect of Old English. It is a nearly complete gospel book, missing only a small part of the Gospel of Luke. It is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as MS Hatton 38. The fullest description of the manuscript is by Takako Kato, in Treharne, et al., eds., Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1020-1220.
Dame Siriþ is the only known Middle English fabliau outside Chaucer's works. It uniquely occurs at folios 165 recto to 168 recto of Bodleian MS Digby 86, where it is preceded by a Latin text on truths and followed by an English charm listing 77 names for a hare. It appears that the text originally part of a separate booklet inserted into its current place in the manuscript when the volume was bound. Dame Siriþ is based on a traditional story that has analogue in a number of different languages and that might ultimately have been oriental in origin.
Bennett, J. A. W.; Smithers, G. V., eds. (1982). Early Middle English Verse and Prose (2nded.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN0-19-871101-8.
Burchfield, Robert W. (1987). "Ormulum". In Strayer, Joseph R. (ed.). Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol.9. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p.280. ISBN0-684-18275-0.
Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, Brian, eds. (2004). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol.41. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p.936. ISBN0-19-861391-1.
Parkes, M. B. (1983). "On the Presumed Date and Possible Origin of the Manuscript of the Orrmulum". In Stanley, E. G.; Gray, Douglas (eds.). Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. pp.115–27. ISBN0-85991-140-3.
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