Project Gutenberg's The Departing Soul's Address to the Body, by Anonymous

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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

Title: The Departing Soul's Address to the Body
A Fragment of a Semi-Saxon Poem, Discovered Among the
Archives of Worcester Cathedral

Author: Anonymous

Editor: Thomas Phillipps

Translator: Samuel Weller Singer

Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19937]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEPARTING SOUL ***

Produced by Taavi Kalju and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)

THE

DEPARTING SOUL'S

ADDRESS TO THE BODY

A FRAGMENT OF

A SEMI-SAXON POEM,

DISCOVERED AMONG THE ARCHIVES OF WORCESTER CATHEDRAL,

BY SIR THOMAS PHILLIPPS, BART.

WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION,

BY

S. W. SINGER.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY LUKE JAMES HANSARD & CO.

M.DCCC.XLV.

[Transcriber's note: The Middle_English character yogh is transcribed as
[gh]. Other letters or words in brackets are as in original.]

_The student of our early literature and language is indebted to the
zeal of Sir Thomas Phillipps, for the discovery of the following
interesting Fragment, which appears to have formed part of a volume that
contained AElfric's Grammar and Glossary, probably of the Twelfth
Century. The fragments were discovered among the archives of Worcester
Cathedral; and in 1836 Sir Thomas Phillipps printed the whole of them in
folio. I know not whether the form or the typographical arrangement has
been the cause of the neglect of this publication; but it has escaped
both Mr. Wright and Mr. Thorpe. The former, in his interesting edition
of "The Latin Poems of Walter de Mapes," where he has given the literary
history of this legend with extracts, has not even referred to our
fragment; nor has Mr. Thorpe adverted to it in his publication of the
"Codex Exoniensis," which contains an Anglo-Saxon poem of the same kind,
with which it is interesting to compare this later version of the
legend. There is a portion of another semi-Saxon poem, entitled "The
Grave," printed in Mr.