In this paper, I examine a set of early English ‘microtexts’ that survive outside the traditional codex: single-leaf documents (including scrolls), and inscriptions on stone, wood, metal and bone. I will show how the linguistic features of these texts – including features not traditionally seen as part of ‘linguistic’ study, such as marks of punctuation or choice of script – can be related to the socio-cultural functions these texts performed. My discussion is informed by recent approaches to philological research, notably the paradigm known as historical pragmatics.

Conocido hasta el momento gracias a seis copias manuscritas, no todas completas, de los siglos IX-XV, el Liber monstrorum de diuersis generibus, Liber de monstris, o simplemente Liber monstrorum, fue compuesto a finales del s. VII o principios del s. VIII en algún ambiente monástico hibérnico y/o anglosajón. Es un liber e libris, un compendio de breves capitula sobre monstra y prodigia de diversa naturaleza tomados en su mayoría de la tradición mitopoética clásica, de la materia alejandrina apócrifa y de la etnografía fantasiosa de los mirabilia Orientalia, al que el autor incorpora capitula procedentes de fuentes cristianas (principalmente Agustín, Jerónimo, Isidoro) y un número reducido, pero significativo, de descripciones cuyo origen no puede ser otro que el propio folklore insular. Su singularidad, por tanto, radica en la confluencia tres tradiciones: la clásica (aprendida y libresca), la cristiana (impuesta y beligerante) y la autóctona (heredada y repudiable).

The OE Rhyming Poem, one of the most intricate in the Exeter Book (fols. 94r-95v), is beset with a high number of more than usually severe textual problems, which have required emendation in all editions and nearly all discussions, usually by finding a suitable rhyme, in order to present a readable text. This lecture will suggest a different procedure. Building on the poem's opening rhyming pattern and the contributions of Christopher Abram (2007) and A. N. Doane (1998), I will try to reconstruct not the text but the metre of this poem, for which the closest parallels are to be found in Old Norse skaldic eulogies starting with Egill's Head-Ransom in around the mid-tenth century. Particularly the stanzaic form of this poem enables us to assess how the OE Rhyming Poem was constructed before it was (mis)copied by the Exeter Book scribe, probably with the loss of at least ten lines.