The Project Gutenberg EBook of Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew, by Unknown

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Title: Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew

Author: Unknown

Release Date: March 1, 2005 [EBook #15225]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANDREAS: THE LEGEND OF ST. ANDREW ***

Produced by S.R.Ellison, David Starner, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.

YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH

ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR

VII

ANDREAS:

THE LEGEND OF ST. ANDREW

TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD ENGLISH

BY

ROBERT KILBURN ROOT

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1899

ERRATA.

p. IV. For _Angelsaechsen_ read _Angelsachsen_.

p. V. " Fritsche " Fritzsche.

p. IX. " homilest " homilist.

p. 18, 1. 550. " has " hast.

p. 27, 1. 835. " 'Till " Till.

P. 57. " Siever's " Sievers'.

PREFACE

It is always a somewhat hardy undertaking to attempt the translation
of poetry, for such a translation will at the best be but a shadow of
that which it would fain represent. Yet I trust that even an imperfect
rendering of one of the best of the Old English poems will in some
measure contribute towards a wider appreciation of our earliest
literature, for the poem is accessible to the general reader only
in the baldly literal and somewhat inaccurate translation of Kemble,
published in 1843, and now out of print.

I have chosen blank verse as the most suitable metre for the
translation of a long and dignified narrative poem, as the metre which
can most nearly reproduce the strength, the nobility, the variety and
rapidity of the original. The ballad measure as used by Lumsden in his
translation of _Beowulf_ is monotonous and trivial, while the measure
used by Morris and others, and intended as an imitation of the Old
English alliterative measure, is wholly impracticable. It is a hybrid
product, neither Old English nor modern, producing both weariness and
disgust; for, while copying the external features of