can only stand for s has been replaced by læcecræftes. Yet, with the exception of the sign œ which has been silently normalized into æ wherever it occurs[1], I have never ventured to correct a word without mentioning it in its incorrect form in the footnotes, the form substituted being always that of ms. V, unless otherwise noted.[2] Besides those necessary substitutions, which are regularly indicated by an asterisk, I have had recourse to ms. V wherever the obscurity of ms. O made it desirable. In such cases I have inserted the reading of ms. V within brackets in the text (with no asterisk) and quoted that of ms. O in the notes. Parentheses have been used only when a letter was faint or had altogether disappeared from the text, f. i. scínla(c) 165. I have allowed myself a free hand with regard to the separation of words, often uniting what is separated and separating what is united: thus I have written wif-þingun 1016 1017 instead of wifþingun which is the reading of the ms.; my principle in that respect has been to write as two words united by a hyphen the compounds which bear an accent upon the first element, f. i. setl-gange 62, heafod-ece 102, and as one word those in which the first element, accented or not, is merely a prefix.[3] The glosses and also the peculiarities of writing
- ↑ This holds good of the Introduction and the Notes except in the case of 86 where the correction made by the scribe would be unintelligible without the œ. The spelling of the ms. is also mentioned in the case of *lœcedom 613 where it is not læcedon but laecedon.
- ↑ cf. p. XIII for a comparison between the ms. printed here (ms. O) and ms. V prined by Cockayne in his Saxon Leechdoms. My corrections are taken from Cockayne’s prined text which has been collated with the original and I follow his spelling whether it agrees with my principles or not. Words quoted from the ms. only in the notes are transcribed unchanged.
- ↑ However words in which the compound is less felt are written as one word: thus ladedome 222 *morbeames 621.
