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STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY Volume 102 Fall, 2005 Number 4 by ROM the point of view of studying the author's poetic practice, the fact that the Morte Arthure is extant in only one manuscript presents an obvious difficulty. Using single witnesses to provide evidence for the practice of alliterative poets has been the object of a certain amount of recent criticism. Hoyt N. Duggan, in his discussion of Old English metrics (where conclusions are necessarily drawn from single witnesses), declares it unsatisfactory to assume that the extant copies of Old English poems are ``texts'' in the sense of documents marked with the graphs, words, and punctuational features that the poet intended. Instead, they are simply, he points out, flawed copies.1 Thorlac Turville-Petre observes that any statement about the alliterative patterns in the existing manuscript of the Morte Arthure is true only of the text as it stands in this unique manuscript and is likely to misrepresent the practices of the poet himself.2 One of the things we would like to do in this essay is to explore the types of evidence which might nevertheless enable us to make judgments about the poet's metrical practice, judgments based not only on
Studies in Philology – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Mar 10, 2005
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