Public-domain ebook
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Subjects
In: Early English Text Society·Poetry·Classics of Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #33768.
The volume presents the Middle English poem Erthe upon Erthe in a scholarly edition produced by Hilda M. R. Murray for the Early English Text Society. It opens with a detailed front matter that explains the manuscript tradition, listing twenty‑four sources ranging from early‑fourteenth‑century Harleian folios to fifteenth‑century commonplace books and even a wall inscription from Stratford‑on‑Avon. The introductory essay outlines the two principal textual families, the short “A” version and the longer “B” version, tracing their origins, variations, and the poem’s widespread popularity in England and southern Scotland. The editor supplies a descriptive list of manuscripts, a comparative Cambridge text, extensive notes, and a glossary, all aimed at clarifying the poem’s complex transmission and its thematic link to medieval “memento mori” motifs.
The poem’s voice is stark and didactic, employing a grim word‑play on “earth” to remind readers of mortality, a tone echoed in contemporary “Dance of Death” literature. Its language is firmly Middle English, with occasional Latin parallels, and the verse ranges from concise riddles to extended stanzas that alternate English and Latin. Scholars of medieval literature, students of Middle English poetics, and readers interested in the devotional and moral poetry of the 13th–15th centuries will find this edition a valuable resource for exploring the poem’s textual history and its cultural resonance.
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Other diacritics (rare) as shown as [~e] (e-tilde) and similar.
Mid-word italics representing expanded abbreviations are shown in {braces}. Whole-word italics are shown conventionally with lines. Braces are also used with ^ (caret) for mid-word superscripting (rare); superscripts that continue to the end of the word use ^ alone. Boldface is shown with #marks#.
Text in [[double brackets]] was added by the transcriber. Except for footnotes and the unpacked characters listed above, single brackets are in the original.
The pointing-finger symbol is shown as -->. The combinations m~, n~ and d~ represent letters with a decorative curl.
In the editorial material, some text formatting has been simplified or omitted to reduce visual clutter:
--Footnotes were italicized, with emphatic words in Roman (non-italic) type; this has been "toggled" to plain type with italic emphasis. --Glossary entries were shown in #boldface#, as were all references to "#A# version" and "#B# version". --In the Glossary, page-and-line references in the form "15.33" gave the line number in smaller type.
The author's father was James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary.]
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