About Con2

About This Edition
Craig Branham
Saint Louis University

Contents:
Background
The Design of Printed Editions
Con2 as Hypertext
A Work in Progress

Background
For students of the history and transmission of the seven extant texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, formulating a cogent model of the relationships between the texts is necessarily followed by an equally challenging task: trying to explain these relationships intelligibly in academic prose. Janet Bately's monograph ^[c1] on the Chronicle texts provides many examples of how difficult this task can be. In her description of the relationship between texts B and C in the "common stock" of the chronicle, she writes:
It must be borne in mind that if the first section of C is derived not from B itself but from a manuscript behind B in which the entry of annal-numbers stopped with 652, then reversion by C in the second section to 'original forms' that are not recorded in either B or C in the first section must require us to rule out the possibility that the C2²'s immediate exemplar was also that of B.^[c2]
Charles Plummer, though lucid in much of his introduction to his edition of the Chronicles, relative to the critics that followed him, also succumbs to entangling sentences while describing textual relationships:
Thus the agreement of E with H. H. or the Ann. Wav. is evident for the reading of e; that of E and F (E and a) implies e; while that of E and D implies d. On the other hand, where D and E differ, if E has the truer reading, then the corruption has occurred in the passage from d to D; if D is more original, then the error (or alteration) may be due to E or B, or e; a comparison with H.H. or Ann. Wav., and with F or a will sometimes enable us to decide.^[c3]
In a footnote, he goes on to list the variants of five annals in six manuscripts, of which four do not appear in his edition. Both examples have sentences that contain more than the seven plus or minus three items that readers can process at once ^[nc4]. Without great imaginative effort, or first hand experience with the texts themselves, readers may reach the end of these sentences having already forgotten the information that had to be "borne in mind" at the beginning. Admittedly, these quotes were chosen for their particular difficulty, but they illustrate a basic rhetorical problem in textual criticism driven to an almost absurd extreme. Though it is clear enough that the authors of these examples knew what they wanted to express, the abstractions they must use to convey their ideas make their prose difficult to understand without access to the appropriate original texts ^[nc5]. In all such studies, critics must express relationships between manuscripts that most of their readers have never seen or cannot readily visualize. In short, these critics' discourse began as essentially demonstrative, but because of the need to express these ideas in print and books, it has had to be reduced to a descriptive discourse. There is, one would expect, a natural "as you can see" suggested before each of the statements from the critics quoted above. Because of the design of books and the exigencies of book publication, the manuscripts, texts, and translations, have to be "ghettoized" in their own volumes. To make matters worse, in the case of the Chronicles, there are currently facsimiles of only three of the six major manuscripts ^[c6], and only one complete edition ^[c7] of all of the texts that was published in one volume.
Creating an edition that can show such relationships in the form of a kind of "demonstration" is difficult. Unlike other texts that have multiple extant copies, the Chronicles are "patchwork" documents. Annals are usually copied from at least one main source document at a time (either the so-called "Common Stock" of the Chronicles, the "Mercian Register," or the two "official continuations"), and may have material from several other minor sources and spurious entries which are often mixed together indistinguishably. Since the documents were maintained, in the case of the earlier texts, every few decades over the course of as many as four centuries, they also contained performances from scribes with varying levels of attention to the texts they copied. Thus, in this case, the use of the "copy text" or "best text" method for editing, as Ingram seems to use for his 1823 translation ^[c8], would result in a sense of unity of purpose in the manuscripts that is clearly not there. Creating an edition with each of the Chronicles printed consecutively would also be unsatisfactory, as this method would make comparisons between specific annals very difficult.

The Design of Printed Editions
Editors of printed editions have solved this problem in ingenious ways. Perhaps the most effective solution was devised by Thorpe ^[c9] for his 1861 edition. He divided each page into three columns and printed the six major manuscripts across the open page. He followed the accepted convention of his time by printing alliterative verse with each half-line on a separate line of the text, this made it possible to fit the verse annals into the narrow columns. The second volume of Thorpe's edition contained a full apparatus, a glossary of the text, and a glossary of names. This design allowed the reader to examine each of the texts side by side with the commentary spread out next to them. Though most of Thorpe's work has been superseded, his edition is still the most comprehensive and has probably the most effective design.
John Earle's edition, Two of The Saxon Chronicles Parallel ^[c10], is another major edition of the Chronicle texts that grappled with these problems. This edition attempts to print the A and E texts side by side on facing pages. Like Thorpe's edition, it includes a separate volume for its daunting introduction and footnotes, so that the reader could refer to the texts as they read the introductory material. Apart from the problem that the edition does not contain most of the texts, the facing page technique is counter-intuitive. The edition does not conform to most readers' habits of reading left-right and top-bottom so that it is often easy to follow one text into the middle of the other by mistake. It is also inconsistent. In cases where one text has a large portion of material that does not appear in the other (E's annal 963, for instance), the edition resumes regular sequential presentation. In cases where Earle brings in a third text for comparison, he has to print two texts on the same page. This lack of consistency can become confusing, and it is difficult to develop a comprehensive idea of the relationships between texts, because one is "submerged" in reading the individual annals.
The next major attempt to create an version of the Chronicle that would afford comparing annals is Dorothy Whitelock's 1961 translation ^[c11]. Whitelock's is a slightly oversized book, which contains annals set out in 1-3 columns per page. To save space, she does not reprint any annals that are substantially the same in multiple texts, but she is often forced to add supplementary material in what appear to be new annals ^[n12]. This strategy can make reading the texts occasionally rather complicated. It is also not an edition but a translation made specifically for historians, so its introduction to the texts is not, and is not meant to be, comprehensive.
In each of these cases, the publication offers a well translated or edited text, but the text cannot contain or display everything that the reader may need at once. Usually, studying the Chronicle requires that the researcher use several publications in concert. There are also some cases where the reader may want to look at a facing page translation, then switch in the middle of a task to compare two texts. In another possible situation, a reader may follow a footnote or a reference in a critical text. In either case, the reader may follow a reference, or look over to another version of the text, and find that they have lost their place in the original manuscript. As with other kinds of editions, readers may find that they spend an inordinate amount of time caught up in the process of reading.

Con² as Hypertext
These concerns inspired this hypertext edition of the Chronicles . Electronic hypertext applications are designed to manage exactly these large sets of heterogeneous data and help the reader comprehend the data with its connective "rhetoric". With a hypertext application, it would be possible to create a more powerful parallel edition that would not just make the texts available for reading, but would allow readers to compare the texts, and features within them, more quickly and easily than if they were using the printed texts.
The original purpose of this project was to examine the relationships between the 10th Century chronicle poems (at annals 937, 942, 973, and 975). Traditionally, the poems have been neglected by scholars on justifiable aesthetic grounds. In a note in her translation of "The Death of Edgar," annal 975, Dorothy Whitelock remarks, "The entry in A, B, C is in alliterative metre of a quality that makes one glad that the chroniclers mainly used prose"^[c13]. The alliterative prose passages at 959 and 975 in the Northern recension, however, have attracted general interest as important specimens of late "poetic prose" style. Where they are edited, these short poems usually appear in miscellanies, such as the ASPR volume of Minor Poems ^[c14]. Consequently, the relationship between the alliterative prose, prose, and verse versions of the poems have rarely been studied. One reason, and perhaps the main reason, that such studies are rare is that critical editions in print generally discourage these types of comparisons. The critical edition, one is often reminded, is designed to represent one text only, the version of the text that represents the author's intention better than any other, even if this version is not actually found in an of the manuscripts. Editors will often include "variants" at the bottom of the page to refer to different manuscript versions, or to show what the chosen "copy text," an alias for "the manuscript," of the edition actually reads. Complete alternative versions have to be reconstructed by the reader, or sought in other publications. Another consequence of the anthologizing of the Chronicle poems (as distinct texts, with titles given by the editors) which has affected critical work with them is that readers generally do not study the poems in their context within the Chronicle, or as species of annalistic writing. The potential for work with the chronicle as a rhetorical context for these poems, like Paul Dean's research with the Chronicles and "Maldon"^[c15], suggests that there is a need for an essentially new kind of publication containing this material. This text would be shorter than a book but longer than an article: it would be an edition of the poems that would include the annals that surround them, a full translation, manuscript facsimiles, and an account of the relationships between the manuscripts.
This archive of Con² makes use of the power of electronic hypertext to break collections of texts into meaningful nodes and link related features within them. The objective in designing the archive was to appeal to three audiences at once: general readers who would desire only a view of the Old English text but would read the translation for the most part, those concerned with translating the Old English text itself, and those who wish to study the manuscripts. To make the texts "run parallel," so that there is a direct correspondence between each text, its translation, and the page of the manuscript it came from, the first step was to decide how to break the text into logical units that would both orient the reader within the texts and make the files technically easier to manage on-line than long scrolling versions of each text. Chronicles themselves are intrinsically well-suited to this type of presentation, since they are divided into distinct annals, which even the Anglo-Saxons read and presumably referenced much like hypertextual "nodes". Since the object of creating this archive was to compare the manuscripts, however, the natural choice for the logical boundary of a node of text or translation, was the manuscript folio. Using the manuscript page would also make it easier for the reader to refer to the appropriate pages of the archive while reading journal articles or monographs which make reference to folio as well as annal numbers. The resulting hypertext could be read as a manuscript facsimile, a facing page translation, or a parallel edition, depending on the user's preferences and screen arrangement.
The next step in the process of designing this web site was to determine the "boundaries" of the archive. The poems had to be captured in a mostly self-contained unit of the text. I chose 924 as the first annal because it marks the death of Edward and the accession of Æthelstan, the protagonist in "The Battle of Brunanburh." 924 is also the first annal in a new gathering in the A text, where Ker's scribe 3 begins after a long hiatus in the Chronicle. This is also the annal, as it happens, where the so-called "Mercian Register" material ends abruptly in MSS BCD. There is not as clear a coincidence of such events after the "Death of Edgar" poems at 975, but I chose 983 as the final annal in the archive. The choice of 983 was not entirely arbitrary, however, because it is the first annal of a new source in A, and it is the first annal of a section where texts C, D, and E cease to be independent.
Since the archive is meant to facilitate comparison between texts, the individual files were designed for viewed with Frames, a feature of the Netscape Navigator, generation 2.x or higher. The design and arrangement of the Frameset came about quite naturally. The archive is designed with four independent frames. There is a complete index of every text annal in the edition in a thin frame that runs down the entire far left side of the screen. Extending to right of this frame, and taking up the entire top of the screen, is a frame that displays graphic images, commentary, and variants. This frame also displays any pages with foreign URLs that are linked into the archive. In the space just below this frame, there are two frames that display the texts themselves. Regrettably, though it is technically possible, the average size of a computer monitor makes it impossible to display all of the Chronicle manuscripts at once, in the style of Benjamin Thorpe's edition. If larger monitors become the standard for home computers, more frames may be added in later versions of the archive.
I chose the World Wide Web to present this research for several reasons. First, though it is both tedious and time-consuming, marking up pages with HTML is remarkably easy; it can be done with a standard wordprocessor and about a weekend of training with a good manual. Another reason was that text files in HTML can be viewed with a wide range of software that most university labs and personal computer users already own. Since I am a relative newcomer to hypertext design and to editing Old English, and specialists in both of these disciplines reside in different departments, or (as I have learned) often in different universities, presenting the research on the web also makes the process of peer review, and the process of upgrading the archive, much easier and more immediate.

A Work in Progress
On the other hand, presenting this research with the web has made it necessary to make the material conform to the unique constraints of the web environment, and the software used to access it. The web, after all, was not devised for the study manuscripts, its designers had originally envisioned it as a network that would facilitate collaborative work among scientists who needed to share reports and technical documentation. Until recently, the web paradigm of pages, anchors, and references has restricted the repertoire of possible functions for the special demands of reading literary texts. Technical developments that have come about since the explosive growth of the web's less esoteric applications have had little impact on textual studies on the web. When designing a web site to afford comparative reading tasks, ones where ideally the user would access two or more texts at once and display them together, the text encoder or web editor is still constrained to the "back and forth" paths represented within typical web browsers. If development of Frames will continue, and more applications like Con2 are moved to the web to make use of them, there will be a need in future versions of Netscape's supplementary element set, or in future versions of HTML, to have specialized anchors with new capabilities (an example that comes to mind is a single link that will bring up to several URLs at once).
It is obvious from using the Con² archive that tools like Mosaic and the Netscape Navigator are still rather crude front-ends for reading literary texts, and especially those in foreign or ancient languages. These browsers were really designed for commerce and for "viewing" linked documents and not strictly for reading. As a result, scholars are still constrained to study heavily linked literary documents with tools that were designed for on-line shopping and downloading software. Specialized features for archives like Con2, such as automatic glossaries and "smart" search tools, still have to be developed by experts as "plug-in" applications.
By making a serious attempt at creating the most powerful web-accessible edition of the Chronicles possible, it is hoped that this archive might bring some of the limitations of the web environment, and the conventions that are currently used in the creation of on-line editions, to light (either by positive or negative example). If the unique benefits of having such public hypertext collections on the web are realized, and are considered worthy, the design and usability issues discussed in this thesis will assume greater importance.
Thus the archive is still an evolving representation. It is an attempt to represent a set of possible tasks with a "vocabulary" of functions limited by some inexperience, the HTML tag-set, and the constraints of available web browsers. It is also a representation of one student's limited understanding of the tasks of Anglo-Saxon Studies. This understanding will undoubtedly undergo further development and open new avenues for redesign in the future.

Notes

¹ Janet Bately, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Texts and Textual Relationships. Reading Medieval Studies 3. (Reading: U of Reading, 1991). [Back]
² Bately, Texts 21.[Back]
³ Charles Plummer, ed., Two of The Saxon Chronicles Parallel with Supplementary Extracts from Others. A Revised Text on the Basis of an Edition by John Earle. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1892-9; rev. imp., by Dorothy Whitelock, 1952) lxiii.[Back]
⁴ This claim is not yet supported scientifically, to my knowledge, though it is confirmed by general experience. For an introduction to the theory on short term memory and comprehension, see George A. Miller, "The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Three." The Psychological Review 63.2 (1956): 81-97, and for a look at the wider context of memory and cognition, see Donald A. Norman, Explorations in Cognition. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1975, and Donald A. Norman, Learning and Memory. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982).[Back]
⁵ David Dumville, "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and The Origins of English Square Minuscule Script." Ed. D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1992) 55n., warns the reader: "I assume that anyone reading this chapter will have to hand a copy of The Parker Chronicle, facs. edd. [sic]." [Back]
⁶ Robin Flower and A. H. Smith, eds., The Parker Chronicle and Laws. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941). Dorothy Whitelock, ed., The Peterborough Chronicle (The Bodleian Manuscript Laud Misc. 636). (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1954). David N. Dumville, ed., Facsimile of MS. F: The Domitian Bilingual. Eds. David N. Dumville and Simon Keynes. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. 1. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996).[Back]
⁷ Benjamin Thorpe, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle According to the Several Original Authorities. (London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, 1861).[Back]
⁸ Rev. James Ingram, Trans., The Saxon Chronicle: AD 1 to AD 1154. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, and Brown, 1823).[Back]
⁹ Thorpe, op sit. [Back]
¹⁰ Earle and Plummer, op. cit. [Back]
¹¹ Dorothy Whitelock, et al., eds., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961). [Back]
¹² The entry for 975, where D and E have a separate version than the "Main Chronicle," and D has extra material, is a good example. [Back]
¹³ Whitelock et al. 77 n.5. [Back]
¹⁴ Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (New York: Columbia UP, 1942) xxxii-xliii, 19-23. [Back]
¹⁵ "History Versus Poetry: The Battle of Maldon," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93 (1992): 99-108. [Back]

© 1996 Craig Branham
Saint Louis University
22-Jun-96

URL for this Document: http://www.slu.edu/departments/english/chron/About.html

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