Untangling the strands: The spelling of the Épinal glossary

Abstract

This paper focuses on a group of some twenty-five Old English glosses from the Épinal glossary (c. 700). The Old English interpretations stand out due to one graphemic feature: they all use one of the runic characters wyn or thorn, which were adopted into the Old English alphabet to represent the phonemes /w/ and /θ/. A careful investigation of the sources of the lemmata reveals that, with three exceptions, these glosses stem from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae or from Paulus Orosius’ Historiae Adversum Paganos, but not from any of the other numerous sources of the glossary. This confirms the hypothesis that different orthographic systems were in use among the glossators contributing to the Épinal/Erfurt family of glossaries. The study thus uncovers one chapter in the earliest history of English spelling and contributes to a better understanding of the composition of Épinal/Erfurt.