Hello chums,

The university news service have kindly done a little feature on the release of the edition which can be found here.

https://www.su.se/english/news/a-book-you-can-be-single-mindedly-obsessed-with-1.653061

My lovely colleague who wrote the article has chosen to focus on on the "single-mindedly obssessed" aspect of working with the Ormulum, which is fair enough. My favourite quote on this matter is from Robert Burchfield, who started working on his edition of the Ormulum at the knee of J.R.R. Tolkien in the '50s. Burchfield's work on the edition was interrupted by his becoming chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and it was still incomplete when he died in 2004. His transcript is however a very valuable source, and the main contributor to OED knowledge on the Ormulum, especially since it contains so many first uses of modern English words. The quote that always comes to mind is from Burchfield's appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1985, in which he chooses, bizarrely, the Ormulum manuscript as his luxury, including the wonderful quote:

"That would be my luxury, manuscript Junius 1, which I could pore over without fear of anyone wanting to look at it, poke about with it, it would be mine.”

-Andrew