Glossary

My reading of the ‘Faerie Queene’, announced at reference 1, is proceeding slowly, and I am now into the second pass of Book I (of VI). It so happens that the edition I am using, that at reference 2, comes with very little annotation, very little apparatus. It is a book intended for those who are already familiar with Spenser’s language – a lot more different from ours than that of his contemporary Shakespeare, not to mention Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’, a lot nearer to Spenser in time than it is to us, but which reads modern in comparison. For those who are reading an old friend, for pleasure.

While I have been using the glossary to be found at reference 3, but it is far from complete. Furthermore, printed off on sheets of A4, it is not particularly convenient to use.

So this morning the hunt was on for something better and I asked Bing for dictionaries of early modern English. I thought that maybe Oxford – the home of ancient English studies and to people like the late Tolkien – published such a thing. But nothing doing.

I did turn up reference 4, which almost certainly contains the information that I need, but again not particularly convenient as a reading aid. Learning on the way that the Department of English at the University of Toronto has made deep studies into early English. Perhaps they have pinched that particular crown from our Oxford.

It then occurred to me that my full-on OED (reference 5) probably contained the information that I need in book form, rather than on the computer. A brief inspection suggested that this was indeed the case, and, for the words I tested, Spenser was often the source cited. Which was all well and good, but at a dozen or more fat volumes, not particularly convenient either.

Then I had the bright idea that what I wanted was not a general purpose dictionary at all, but rather an annotated edition of the book in question. From where I rapidly get to an annotated edition from Longman (reference 6), a page from which is snapped above (with thanks to the Amazon preview feature) , and now bought from Abebooks. It appears to be very much the Spenser equivalent of the Arden Shakespeare. Quite possibly the sort of thing that BH was supplied with when she did Spenser at school. She also reminds me that it is all so much easier to understand when you read it aloud. Don’t really understand why this should be so, but it is. With the snag being that reading aloud is not something that people of our generation are much into; need to go back 150 years or so, when neither electric light nor spectacles had been invented.

So the plan now is to read from the reading edition, but to turn to the annotated edition when I get stuck. Which should work much better than having to get up and go and consult either the computer or OED.

The perils of adult learning at home. Maybe I would have got there rather quicker with a teacher.

I associate first to the little books that some schools used for the teaching of Latin. So you got a chunk of Caesar’s ‘Gallic Wars’, for example, complete with all the vocabulary and notes needed by the schoolboy to decipher the Latin text. Some at the bottom of the page, some at the end. I used some of them as a adult, at the time I was (unsuccessfully) trying to revive my O-level knowledge of Latin.

And second, the Spenserian characters like ‘Despair’, who strike me as doing in allegorical clothes what a modern analytic – not to say Freudian – psychiatrist might do with a patient: Spenser is going over at least some of the same ground. Maybe the same could be said of Burton (of melancholy) or Bunyan (of progress).

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-second-monument.html. 

Reference 2: The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser – 1590. My edition that in two volumes, of 1909 from OUP, via Parker’s of Oxford. Edited by J. C. Smith.

Reference 3: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene_(unsourced)/Book_I/Glossary. 

Reference 4: https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/search/word. Inter alia, a huge online dictionary of early modern English. 

Reference 5: Oxford English Dictionary - Murray and others - 1879-1915.

Reference 6: Longman Annotated English Poets: Spenser: the Faerie Queene - edited A. C. Hamilton - 2001. Revised second edition. Text edited by Horoshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. So not just the Canadians getting in on the early English act, we have the Japanese too. Although I suppose it is possible that these two are actually Japanese-Canadians, based in Toronto rather than Hiroshima or somewhere like that.