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Monday, March 05, 2007

Lindsfarne Gospels 7

And his fame went
throughout all Syria:
And they brought unto him
all sick people that were
taken with divers diseases
and torments,
And those which were
possessed with devils,
and those which were
lunatick, and
those that had the palsy;
and he healed them.
And there followed him
great multitudes of people
from Galilee,
and from Decapolis,
and from Jerusalem,
and from Judaea,
and from beyond Jordan.
Matt. 4:24-25 KJV

This is a comparison of the Latin Vulgate and the KJV. Look at how the ampersand has been placed at the beginning of several lines. The ampersand, which is still at this point a fairly transparent 'et' ligature, is attached onto the word which it precedes, as are the prepositions. This is about as close as I can get to the manuscript using the KJV. Here is the same passage in the TNIV.

    News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. 25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.

Greek manuscripts do not usually space words in a line strategically; they usually just run on from one line to the next without much spacing. However, there are paragraph breaks and some organization of larger units. But I wonder if the visual organization of the text in the Lindisfarne manuscript might give us some idea of how the scribes perceived the passages they were writing.

Once again I don't want to read too much into this. However, I will show you one more example.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord
came upon them,
And the glory of the Lord
shone round
about them:
and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them,
Fear not

PS The spacing is not going to come out right in blogger, I can't predict the length of a line so I will have to fool around with this a bit. I think that I am going to be reasonably happy with this draft. I have wanted to know how to represent poetry better in blogger for some time. Here goes.

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2 Comments:

At Tue Mar 06, 04:18:00 AM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Suzanne, thanks for this. But I am puzzled by your apparent translation of the Latin "and they were sore afraid". Or maybe this is the KJV of the verse. But the Latin text of this part appears to be "&amaerunt amore magno". Now my Latin is not very good, but I do remember "amo, amas, amat" from more than 40 years ago and so would translate this "they loved with a great love" (although "amaerunt" doesn't seem correct). The Anglo-Saxon of this seems to be something like "ondreurdon mið ondo miclo", which is puzzling because according to this dictionary "on-drǽdan", past "-dreard" or "-dreord", means "fear" (cf. "dread"). Indeed this dictionary lists "Ondreardon timuerunt, Mt. Kmbl. Lind. 9, 8." which is presumably a reference to another use in the Lindisfarne translation. So is the Latin in fact not "amaerunt amore..." but "timuerunt timore..."? I suppose it just could be, but dotless I's, serifs shared between adjoining letters, and completely closed U's are very confusing!

 
At Tue Mar 06, 10:15:00 AM, Blogger Suzanne McCarthy said...

Ouch. In IE 7 the lines look nicely offset, but in IE 6 the spaces are filled with little 'missing glyph' boxes.

How many people are still using IE 6 to view this blog? I would be interested because I haven't been testing it in IE 6 recently and you could be looking at quite a mess.

PS When I was in high school we worried more about memorizing the irregular Latin verbs like parco, parcere, kissi, smoochum.

Maybe later I will post the Latin vulgate text for this and the OE.

 

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