I am pleased to announce that I've come to an agreement with the Early English Text Society to publish our edition as #360 in their Original Series.

EETS edition order form 2022
EETS edition order form 2022

The Early English Text Society is perhaps the most respected and highest quality publisher of edition texts in historical English. As they are a society rather than a for-profit publisher, they only publish two books a year and their back catalogue remains in print for ever. Nils-Lennart once confided to a collague that he wanted the edition published with the EETS because "then, you are immortal." It's certainly humbling to see our names in a list of such luminaries as Henry Sweet, J.R.R. Tolkien and Walter Skeat.

The publication of this edition represents a long-term goal of the project, and one which Nils-Lennart worked on ceaselessly for over two decades. From the very start of the project, Nils-Lennart had the goal of producing a new complete critical edition to replace the outdated two-volume Holt-White edition from 1878. Technically speaking, a critical edition should be compiled from one or more source documents. It is usual that the editor chooses one manuscript as a copy text to form the basic structure and consults other manscripts to complement the copy text and build a complete picture of the text. Now, it is the case that our edition takes material from two manuscripts, which represent all of the known primary material from the Ormulum. However, Jan van Vliet's manuscript, MS 783, is not really a primary source, but a very early secondary source. Van Vliet was an early scholar of Germanic languages who copied some of the text into his own notebook before MS Junius 1 suffered some of the damage which makes it so difficult to work with. 

The first volume, text and glossary, will be available to members and from the OUP in autumn 2022. I am also planning a second volume including a general and linguistic introdution.

-Andrew