dr hab. Anna Wojtyś

(University of Warsaw)

Glossing the unfamiliar in the Lindisfarne Gospels

Although interlinear glosses theoretically involve providing the most exact native equivalent for each foreign item in the text (cf., e.g., Nida 2004: 161), they often prove to be much more than a mechanical process of creating lexical correspondences. One of the best examples of glossing which is a “conscious, occasionally very careful “interpretative translation”” (Nagucka 1997: 180), is the collection of 10th century glosses added by Aldred to the Lindisfarne Gospels. This oldest existing translation of the Gospels into English consists not only of a word-to-word renderings, since Aldred also used multiple glosses, marginal notes, and occasionally left the words unglossed. Thus, particular Latin words are often translated in several different ways.

The present study focuses on words denoting objects and phenomena which were presumably unfamiliar or obscure to the Anglo-Saxon audience. Those include items specific to the society (e.g. Latin centurion, Pharisaeus, rabbi, sacerdōs), culture (e.g. Latin denarius, sabbath), fauna and flora (e.g. Latin camelus, locusta, lily) as well as place names. The study aims to show how the scribe attempted to handle such words, most of which did not have fixed equivalents in English, and whether he is consistent in his choice of lexemes. Such a comparative analysis is expected to reveal the methods employed by Aldred to familiarize the concepts to the readers.

Selected bibliography

Block, Abraham P. 1978. The Biblical and Historical Background of the Jewish Holy Days. New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc.

Brown, Michelle P. 2003. The Lindisfarne Gospels. Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Cook, Albert Stanburrough. 1969. A Glossary of the Old Northumbrian Gospels. Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms Verlag.

Nagucka, Ruta. 1997. Glossal translation in the Lindisfarne Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia XXXI: 179–201.

Nida, Eugene. 2004. On principles of correspondence. In The Translation Studies Reader, Lawrence Venuti (ed.), London/ New York: Routledge. 153–167.

Pons-Sanz, Sara and Julia Fernandez Cuesta (eds). 2016. The Old English gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Author, Language and Context. Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series, Vol. 51. De Gruyter.

Ross, Alan S.C. ⎯ Ann Squires. 1980. “The multiple, altered and alternative glosses of the Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels and the Durham Ritual” Notes and Queries 225: 489-495.

Stanton, Robert. 2002. The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Anna Wojtyś is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. Her research interests focus on historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and varieties of English. She has published mainly on the history of English with the focus on morphology and lexis. Her publications include two monographs, one devoted to the past participle marking in mediaeval English, the other to the demise of preterite-present verbs. She is also the author of the first Polish translation of The Two Noble Kinsmen, the play written by W. Shakespeare and J. Fletcher.

She is an associate editor of Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, the journal in literary, cultural and linguistic studies.