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It is of course generally recognized that the carvings on medieval misericords, in England as elsewhere, are preponderantly secular in subject, including only a slight sprinkling of biblical and other religious motifs; according to a recent study, ‘only about 4.5 per cent of Britain's almost 8,600 surviving centrepieces and supporters have primarily religious significance, and 1.5 per cent are Scriptural, as compared with over twice that in France.’ To this basic situation we must add that of all medieval art forms, misericords are among those most completely lacking in context, and so are likely to be among the most mute about their own intended meanings. As M. D. Anderson remarks on another of their enigmatic aspects, ‘Between the clearly identifiable subjects and those as clearly not intended to convey any particular meaning lies a mass of work presenting a wide variety of iconographical puzzles’; and while she is referring to the difference between the purely decorative and the iconographically significant in any way, a similar no-man's land must surely be allowed to exist between the clearly non-biblical and the biblical or possibly biblical. An instructive example can be found in a fifteenth-century French misericord now in the church of St.-Cernin, which shows a ‘handsome dancing man with … oriental turban and earrings’ and is identified by its editors — attractively though by no means conclusively — as David dancing before the Lord in 2 Kings (Vulgate) 6.14–16.

In the Exeter Book, the poem now known as The Descent into Hell begins with an account of the women finding the empty sepulcher on Easter morning (1–16); describes Christ's resurrection and descent into hell (17–55), including a brief anticipatory speech by John the Baptist (26–32); and then reports a longer speech by John the Baptist (56ff.), apparently extending without interruption through the final lines of the poem: Swylee ie pe halsige, hælend user,fore [.]inum cildhade, cyninga selast,120 ond fore ϸære wunde, weoruda dry[….…….] ϸinum æriste, æϸelinga wyn,ond fore ϸinre me[… ……….]ian nama,ϸa ealle hellwara hergað ond lof[….………….]lum ϸe ϸe ymb stondað,125 ϸa ϸu ϸe lete sittan [……………] hond,ϸa ϸu us on ϸisne wræcsið, weoroda dryhten,ϸurh ϸines sylfes geweald secan woldest,ond fore Hierusalem in Iudeum,(sceal seo burg nu ϸa bidan efne swa ϸeah,130 ϸeoden Ieofa, ϸines eftcymes),ond for Iordane in Iudeum,(wit unc in ϸære burnan baϸodan ætgædre),oferwurpe ϸu mid ϸy wætre, weoruda dryhten,bliϸe mode ealle burgwaran,135 swylce git Iohannis in Iordanemid ϸy fullwihte fægre onbryrdonealne ϸisne middangeard. Sie ϸæs symle meotude ϸone!(118–37) I read this difficult passage, except for the final half-line, as a single long sentence, with oferwurpe (133) construed as the second-person singular present subjunctive of oferwurpan, a possible variant of oferweorpan: ‘Likewise I beseech you, our savior, by …, by …, by …, by …, and by …, and by Jordan among the Jews (we two bathed ourselves together in that stream), may you sprinkle with the water….’

A fresh attempt on the two most formidable puzzles in the Divina Commedia, by one who cannot even profess to be a Dantist, may seem peculiarly open to what a contemporary scholar has called ‘the mild raillery that attends those who persist in offering solutions of problems apparently worked to death.' Yet a survey of the massive bibliography surrounding Dante's DXV and Veltro produces the strong impression that no explanation proposed for either of them so far has won for itself any real core of acceptance. If this one-sentence summary of six hundred years' scholarship is accurate, it suggests that a fruitful approach is less likely to emerge from comparative re-assessments of the existing theories, than from an exploration of some of the all-but-forgotten corners of medieval Christian tradition, in search of an interpretation that will fit the two prophecies and their contexts more precisely. In the present study, Part I will offer an interpretation of the DXV which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been proposed; Part II will demonstrate the compatibility of this interpretation with other crucial parts of the Commedia; Part III will offer a somewhat less original interpretation of the Veltro; and Part IV will examine the relationship between the two prophecies as I have interpreted them.

To propose a unified religious allegory in what hitherto has been accepted rather generally as two distinct Old English poems, and universally as secular poetry carrying no meaning beyond the literal, is to risk being categorized as a ‘pan-allegorist’ in literary theory and an evangelist in temperament. Let me begin, therefore, by protesting that if the corpus of Old English poetry should ever be unmasked as a series of impeccably Christian allegories, no one will be more astounded or dismayed than I. It would be difficult to deny, however, that the great scholars who laid the foundations for our study of this poetry were, in most instances, more interested in Germanic antiquity than in Latin Christianity; and that as a result, a disproportionate number of our own major discoveries are likely to come out of the once-neglected Patrologia Latina. If this observation is accurate, we may do well to suspend temporarily our belief in certain universal negative conclusions—like, for example, the familiar pronouncement that Old English poets characteristically do not employ allegory—and to inquire whether some of the ‘secular’ poems that have puzzled us for so long may not become less puzzling in the light of early Christian thought. Much as we may revere the spirit of Germanic antiquity, we shall do it small service by attributing to it attitudes or works that it might not have cared to claim.

In the Middle English Pearl, the maiden's explanation of heavenly equality through the Parable of the Vineyard (497–588) is followed by a fresh objection of the dreamer

I suppose it would be generally admitted these days that the interpretation of Old English literature can often draw profitably upon Christian Latin writing of the first millennium: the Latin Bible and its commentaries, the New Testament apocrypha, and the enormous and varied corpus of patristic and later Latin literature. In addition, there are occasional signs that Old English poetry learned and unusually early as it is may owe something to a colorful body of writings no longer current in the later Middle Ages, which for present purposes can be conveniently labelled "Old Testament apocrypha." I refer, of course, not to books like Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and I and II Machabees, which in the Middle Ages were generally accepted as canonical, but to what one is tempted to call the "real apocrypha," or more conventionally the pseudepigrapha for example the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Book of Adam and Eve, the Assumption of Moses, and so on.l Often enough, it would appear, such works have been permanently lost; witness the greatly lamented "Liber de Ogia nomine gigante," known to us only through a disapproving reference in the sixth-century Decretum Gelasianum.2 Sometimes they survive in early Greek or Latin translations or fragments, but usually the only complete early versions we possess are in languages calculated to dampen the enthusiasm of the honest Anglo-Saxonist Ethiopic, Syriac, Armenian, Slavic, and the like. Even so, books of this kind seem to have had some currency in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, presumably in early Latin translations

The four-hundred-odd lines of Beowulf1 between the defeat of Grendel and the attack by Grendel's mother contain two brief digressive passages, set with some appearance of symmetry on either side of the longer Finn Episode (1071—1159): a lay by one of HroSgar's thanes, contrasting the glorious deeds of Sigemund with the downfall of Heremod (874-915); and a pair of allusions introduced by the poet through the device of the torque given to Beowulf, concerning a mysterious exploit of Hama and the fatal expedition of Hygelac (1197-1214). The four basic references which make up these two passages seem designed as piecemeal allusions to stories more or less lost to us—a fact that must necessarily deprive us of much that the lines were meant to convey. Yet even allusion, if it is developed at all, is normally developed in the direction of its intended meaning, so that its general drift can sometimes be understood without a full knowledge of its underlying story. In this paper I will try to show that the Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac passages are each organized around a clear thematic contrast, closely related to its context in the narrative; that they are meaningfully related to one another, and together express a theme of importance in this part of the poem; and that their significance grows naturally out of the great heroic ideal of sapientia et fortitudo which I believe lies at the heart of Beowulf? Section I will analyze the two passages themselves and their immediate contexts; Section II will explore their relation to the poem and its governing ideal.

AMONG the treasures discovered in the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo are a pair of silver spoons of late-classical design, presumably Byzantine in origin, inscribed with what appear to be the Greek words SAULOS and PAULOS respectively. In an important early symposium on Sutton Hoo, Ernst Kitzinger refers to the existence of other spoons similarly inscribed with the names of saints, and adds, "They are often thought to have been used for liturgical purposes, and the fact that they are sometimes inscribed with sacred names seems to support this view. The new find, however, presents difficulties in this respect, for the Saint's [i.e., St Paul's] pre-apostolic name Saul would hardly have been inscribed on a liturgical object."' Scholarship of the past twenty-five years, while tending to accept a symbolic meaning of some sort in the inscriptions, has to the best of my knowledge left this fundamental objection unanswered. One might, I suppose, conjecture that the inscription "SAULOS" is to be associated with unregenerate man (typified by Paul before his conversion), and the inscription "PAULOS" with regenerate man; but even so, it is difficult to imagine by whom, or for what liturgical purpose, the spoon marked "SAULOS" might then have been used. Though I cannot speak with much authority as an epigrapher, I believe a comparison of the two inscriptions in the accompanying photograph (top, "SAULOS"; bottom, "PAULOS")2 will show clearly that, far from being of identical workmanship, they are about as different from one another as such things well could be. With regard to their general features, it is obvious that while "PAULOS" as a whole is well formed, consistent in style and size, and symmetrically laid out, "SAULOS" is crude, inconsistent, and executed with no regard for symmetry. For example, in "PAULOS" the knobs at the ends of the individual lines composing the letters are themselves well proportioned, and are consistent in size and shape; in "SAULOS" they are overly prominent, and are inconsistent in size and shape. In "PAULOS" the letters are upright and of regular size; in "SAULOS" they lean slightly to the left and become progressively a little smaller from left to right. In "PAULOS" there is a fairly regular margin between the tops and bottoms of the letters and the top and bottom edges of the surface on which they are engraved; in "SAULOS" the first four letters touch these edges, and the final letter is so placed that it touches the top edge but has an unusually wide margin beneath it. In "PAULOS" the letters are rather evenly spaced, with respect both to one another and to the right and left edges of the surface on which they are engraved; in "SAULOS" they are crowded toward the left edge, leaving an unsymmetrical blank space at the right. Still more striking are the differences presented by the individual letters. In "PAULOS" the cross

In 1953, R. J. C. Atkinson made the first discovery of prehistoric carvings on Stonehenge: a dagger and several ax-heads on the inner face of sarsen stone no. 53. Since then a number of other carvings have been identified, including two additional daggers on the west side of stone 53 and the south side of stone 23. In May 1972, on a casual visit to Stonehenge, I noticed what appeared to be an incised cartwheel with eight spokes, low on the southeast side of stone 30, within the main entrance; this same apparent design was immediately recognized by my wife and son, with no prompting from me. When I re-examined the area in July 1974, I was astonished to find not only that I could see no cartwheel, but that I could see nothing which might plausibly have led me to think of a cartwheel. This striking discrepancy between two clear visual impressions of the same surface made me suspect that some delicate trick of lighting must be involved, and I accordingly visited Stonehenge at night to explore the problem with the help of crosslighting.