A little break never does any harm. One wonders how many Orm took during the production of his manuscript. He presumably had a lot of pastoral work to do and read out his sermons to people and so on. Not that different to the life of a modern university lecturer. History does not record if he had to compete with his fellow monks for tenure and grant money, mind you the abbot was his brother, which probably made things easy for him.

Since the beginning of the Spring term, I've been working on an article about the runic inscription in the manuscript. I'll write about it in this blog once its accepted in its final form. You never know what the peer-reviewers might notice, so I don't want to give away anything in advance. Starting today, it's back to producing the critical edition, which should be with the publishers later this year. Apart from the text itself, which I'm accommodating to their house style, I need to write a linguistic introduction, so that students and other researchers can have access to collated knowledge about the language in the text. The idea with a critical edition is it presents a text in what we think was the author's intended final form. "We" in this case, is pretty broad. Project directors do not yet use the royal pronoun. I have to edit the thing alone, but I am able to rely on a lot of publications from over the years to direct me in understanding Orm's mind as it is reflected in the manuscript. One of the things I'm starting on is an annotated bibliography of published work on the Ormulum. This will include what is basically a short review of every publication which has added to our knowledge about the Ormulum. The best way to represent this is probably in the wiki, and I'm hoping that once the project is online and the materials are available, users will contribute and cross-reference their own publications. This will be of much help to anyone starting to study the Ormulum, especially from a linguistic point of view. Of course it helps if you can read late modern High German, which I sort of can't. Still, you get by, one word at a time.

-Andrew