The Old English Physiologus — Albert S. Cook
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : The Old English Physiologus Translator : Albert S. Cook Author : Cynewulf Translator : James Hall Pitman Release date : December 30, 2004 [eBook #14529] Most recently updated: October 28, 2024 Language : English, Old English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14529 Credits : Produced by David Starner, Ben Beasley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team *** START OF Cook , Editor LXIII The Old English Physiologus Text and Prose Translation by Albert Stanburrough Cook Professor of the English Language and Literature in Yale University Verse Translation by James Hall Pitman Fellow in English of Yale University New Haven: Yale University Press London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press MDCCCXXI [Facsimile] Preface The Old English Physiologus , or Bestiary , is a series of three brief poems, dealing with the mythical traits of a land-animal, a sea-beast, and a bird respectively, and deducing from them certain moral or religious lessons. These three creatures are selected from a much larger number treated in a work of the same name which was compiled at Alexandria before 140 B. C., originally in Greek, and afterwards translated into a variety of languages—into Latin before 431. The standard form of the Physiologus has 49 chapters, each dealing with a separate animal (sometimes imaginary) or other natural object, beginning with the lion, and ending with the ostrich; examples of these are the pelican, the eagle, the phoenix, the ant (cf. Prov. 6.6), the fox, the unicorn, and the salamander. In this standard text, the Old English poems are represented by chapters 16, 17, and 18, dealing in succession with the panther, a mythical sea-monster called the asp-turtle (usually denominated the whale), and the partridge. Of these three poems, the third is so fragmentary that little is left except eight lines of religious application, and four of exhortation by the poet, so that the outline of the poem, and especially the part descriptive of the partridge, must be conjecturally restored by reference to the treatment in the fuller versions, which are based upon Jer. 17. 11 (the texts drawn upon for the application in lines 5–11 are 2 Cor. 6. 17, 18; Isa. 55.7; Heb. 2. 10, 11). It has been said: ‘With the exception of the Bible, there is perhaps no other book in all literature that has been more widely current in every cultivated tongue and among every class of people.’ Such currency might be illustrated from many English authors. Two passages from Elizabethan literature may serve as specimens—the one from Spenser, the other from Shakespeare. The former is from the Faerie Queene (1. 11.34): At last she saw, where he upstarted brave Out of the well, wherein he drenched lay; As Eagle fresh out of the Ocean wave, Where he hath left his plumes all hoary gray, And deckt himselfe with feathers youthly gay, Like Eyas hauke up mounts unto the skies, His newly budded pineons to assay, And marveiles at himselfe, still as he flies: So new this new-borne knight to battell new did rise. The other is from Hamlet (Laertes to the King): To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms; And like the kind life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood. [1] However widely diffused, the symbolism exemplified by the Physiologus is peculiarly at home in the East. Thus Egypt symbolized the sun, with his death at night passing into a rebirth, by the phœnix, which, by a natural extension, came to signify the resurrection. And the Bible not only sends the sluggard to the ant, and bids men consider the lilies of the field, but with a large sweep commands (Job 12.7,8): ‘Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee; or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.’ The text as here printed is extracted from my edition, The Old English Elenc, Phœnix, and Physiologus (Yale University Press, 1919), where a critical apparatus may be found; here it may be sufficient to say that Italic letters in square brackets denote my emendations, and Roman letters those of previous editors. The translations have not hitherto been published, and no complete ones are extant in any language, save those contained in Thorpe’s edition of the Codex Exoniensis , which appeared in 1842. The long conjectural passage in the Partridge is due wholly to Mr. Pitman. A. S. C. March 27, 1921. Physiologus Physiologus I The Panther Monge sindon geond middangeard unrīmu cynn, [ þāra ] þe wē æþelu ne magon ryhte āreccan nē rīm witan; þæs wīde sind geond wor[ u ]l[d] innan 5 fugla and dēora foldhrērendras, wornas widsceope, swā wæter bibūgeð þisne beorhtan bōsm, brim grymetende, sealtȳpa geswing. Wē bi sumum hȳrdon wrǣtlīc[ um ] gecynd[ e ] wildra secgan, 10 fīrum frēamǣrne, feorlondum on, eard weardian, ēðles nēotan, æfter dūnscrafum. Is þæt dēor Pandher bi noman hāten, þæs þe niþþa bear[n], Of living creatures many are the kinds Throughout the world—unnumbered, since no man Can count their multitudes, nor rightly learn The ways of their wild nature; wide they roam, These beasts and birds, as far as ocean sets A limit to the earth, embracing her And all her sunny fields with salty seas And toss of roaring billows. We have heard From men of wider lore of one wild beast, Wonderful dweller in a far-off land Renowned of men, who loves his native glens And dusky caverns. Him have wise men called Many, yea numberless, are the tribes throughout the world whose natures we can not rightly expound nor their multitudes reckon, so immense are the swarms of birds and earth-treading animals wherever water, the roaring ocean, the surge of salt billows, encompasse