The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)

PCMEP Text Information



Bestiary

Back to PCMEP texts


About the text:
Text name: Bestiary
Alternative names: The lion stands on the hill; Physiologus; Middle English Bestiary; Middle English Physiologus
Content: Texts of the Physiologus tradition narrate (largely ficticious) characteristics, the so-called "nature," of real or fabled animals and offer an interpretation, the "significance", of these qualities in terms of Christian doctrine. The Physiologus idea was highly influential in the Middle Ages. Probably originating as a Greek text during the 2nd century, Physiologus texts have survived in many vernaculars of medieval Europe and the Middle East, including Armenian and Syrian, and via translations from Latin, Old French, Old English, and Old and Middle High German. Chaucer refers to Physiologus explicitly in his The Nun's Priest's Tale and there are numerous other allusions to the text in medieval literature. The Middle English Bestiary is the only complete text of the Physiologus tradition surviving in Middle English.
The animals that are included in the Middle English Physiologus are (in that order): Lion, Eagle, Serpent, Ant, Hart, Fox, Spider, Whale, Siren, Elephant, Turtle-Dove, Panther and Dove.
Genre/subjects: bestiaries, animals, allegory, Christian doctrine
Dialect of original composition: East-Midlands
"It is from the East-Midlands (some authorities say the South-East, others the North-East, Midland)" (Wells 1916: 182).
"The author of the Bestiary lived in East Anglia, sufficiently near its northern border to allow such rhymes as loð : sloð [...]. The large Scandinavian element also points to the northern parts of East Anglia" (Hall 1920: 590). For a description of the phonology, see ibid.: 581-586, for the Scandinavian vocabulary ibid: 590.
Date of original composition: 1175-1275
The poem dates from "1200-1250" (Wells 1916: 182).
"[I]t is possible that the Physiologus was composed before 1250, but this cannot be proved. It is not possible to determine how many layers of transmission there are between the author's text and the surviving manuscript, but the degree of corruption we find in Arundel 292 suggests that the Physiologus had passed through the hands of several copyists before it reached our scribe" (Wirtjes 1991: lii). Hence it is in fact likely that the archetype originates from a time considerably earlier than the late thirteenth century date of the manuscript.
The poem shows relatively few non-Germanic words (Mätzner 1867: 56) (though some Scandinavian loans appear), transitions between old alliteration and new rhyme not unlike the metre found in Layamon (ibid.: 57), as well as numerous mistakes, misspellings and missing words. These facts, too, point to a date of composition considerably earlier than the late thirteenth century manuscript witness.
Suggested date: 1225
PCMEP period: 1b (1200-1250)
Versification: complex versification; there is alliteration, with frequent rhymes, including couplets, ballad stanzas and septenaries
"Its 802 lines exhibit an interesting stage of transition from the older alliterative verse to the new rimed forms." (Wells 1916: 182)
arranged in 296 verses (Mätzner 1867: 55)
see Halle (1920: 591-594) for extensive commentary on the metre
Index of ME Verse: 3413 (IMEV), 3413 (NIMEV)
Digital Index of ME Verse: 5377
Wells: 2.24
MEC HyperBibliography: Bestiary


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscelany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. 1-25.
Manuscript used for edition: London, British Library, Arundel 292, ff. 4-10v
Online manuscript description: LAEME
British Library: Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
Manuscript dialect: East-Midlands
There is no evidence of mixture between the dialects of the original East-Midlands composition and the language of the scribe copying its manuscript witness. The manuscript is therefore also classifiable as East-Midlands. Perhaps it was made in Norfolk (Wirtjes 1991 : xl).
Manuscript date: s. xiii-ex
The manuscript comes from the "late 13th century" (Wells 1916: 182)
The manuscript "can be dated around 1300" (Wirtjes 1991: ix).


About the file:
File name: M1b.Bestiary
ID: Bestiary,w.x.y.z: w=token, x=page, y=line, z={[animal name_nature/significance]}
Each animal has a nature part and a significance part. Some animals have more than one nature or significance. The Dove section combines nature and significance. The ID indicates in squared brackets animal name and nature or significance separated by an underscore (e.g. [Lion_Nature]). The Latin chapter titles do not include a line count but indicate the beginning of a nature or significance part instead (e.g. First_Nature instead of a line number).
Word count: 4,259
Token count: 471
Line count: 802


Other:
General notes: The Middle English Bestiary is a free translation of the Latin Physiologus by Theobaldus. However, the Middle English rendition slightly shifts the order of the animals, adds the chapter on the Dove and omits the chapter on the Centaur (Wells 1916: 182). The Latin text of Theobaldus' Physiologus is preserved in MS. Harley 3093. The Latin text is printed in Morris' edition (1872: 201-209) as Appendix I. See also Mätzner's (1867: 55-75) commentary for frequent references to the Latin vorlage, the content of which appears to have often been rendered into Middle English with astonishing accuracy.
Remarks on parses: The manuscript contains the Bestiary as one block of text. The line breaks of the electronic file follow Morris' (1872: 1-25) edition. Sometimes, the conjectured line breaks are supported by rhymes, but often they are not self-evident. Different editions might use alternative linearization of the poem.
The Modern English headings, A BESTIARY (p.1 ), THE LION (p.1), THE EAGLE (p.3) etc., are not included in the parsed file.
The text includes very many null subject pronouns. Researchers interested in pro-drop should handle this text with care. The empty subjects are indicated as (NP-SBJ *con*) wherever they are co-referential with the subject of the immediately preceding token, even if the sentence is not introduced by a conjunction. Otherwise, the empty subjects are (NP-SBJ *pro*).
Orthographical peculiarities (e.g. acute accents) and word splits (e.g. atthe as at the) are tracked in comments, but not other forms of emendations.
There is no direct speech in this text. Even authorial intrusion (e.g. "I will speak of the nature of the eagle", l. 53) and direct address to the readers or listeners ("hear how he renews himself", l. 61, "remember, women, her life!", l. 699) are not parsed as direct speech.
Hortative subjunctives with 1st person plural verbs but without an over subject pronoun (meaning roughly "let's") (e.g. in the Hart, wurðen stedefast his wine 'let us become steadfast to one's friend') are tagged as matrix clauses with a (NP-SBJ *pro*) subject, not as imperatives without an overt subject.
The text often poses particularly complex parsing problems. Some of the most difficult readings are the following:
- l.12 þat he ne cunne is finden. Either is is a pronoun ('that they not can him (=the lion) find'). Or the structure is a modal passive with cunne as a non-finite form of a modal ('that he not be-able is to-find', i.e. 'that he cannot be found'). The latter option is parsed with cunne as MD0.
- l. 58: his bec is al to-wrong. Either to-wrong is a past participle ('his beak is entirely distorted') or to is a degree adverb ('his beak is entirely too awry'). The latter option is parsed with to as ADVR and the hyphen ignored (see Hall 1920: 597).
- l. 66 ðurg skies sexe and seuene. This expression either means "through skies by chance" with "six and seven" as an adverbial idiomatic expression similar to "cinque et six", the highest throw at dice (Bennett & Smithers 1968: 165-73) or "through skies number six and seven (on his way to the highest, eighth sky, heaven)" (Hall 1920: 597). The latter option is used, hence the phrase sexe and seuene is an attributive NUMP rather than a clausal ADVP.
-l. 73 and he dun mide to ðe wete falleð. This sentence means 'and he falls down, therewith [i.e along with the feathers, previous token] into the water'. The best parse might be to take mide as a verbal particle RP. mid-fallen 'fall along with something else' does exist in the MED, but the PPCME2 manual doesn't specify mid as a verbal particle. The word is therefore tagged as an adverb forming an ADVP. A similar problem occurs in l. 363 Alle ðe oðre cumen mide 'all the others come with'. Here, too, mid is tagged as an adverb projecting ADVP.
-ll. 253-4 Mete in hire hule ðat / ðat ge muge biliuen. Literally, this passage reads 'food in her cave, that / that she may survive.' The first "that" is problematic. Mätzner (quoted in Hall: 1920: 604) divides biliuen up in bi as a stranded preposition, liuen as a verb, and one of the ðat"s as a demonstrative. Then, either the first "that" is fronted inside the subordinate clause, "(so) that [that] she may live by _" or appositive on mete 'food' followed by a relative clause, "food ... [namely] that, [which] she may live [_by]". Hall disagrees and thinks that the first ðat is an object of the verb in the preceding line. For the parse used here, the first ðat has simply been omitted (Wirtjes 1991: 30, for line 163 in her edition), 'food in her cave, so that she may survive'.
- ll. 456-461 are particulary hard to parse. A literal translation reads, 'Creatures created our Lord / seen is in world / hateful and loathsome / thus we it believe / of-many-kinds things / man to instruction.' Halle suggests that "seen in world" is parenthetical ("as [it] is seen in the world") with a missing dummy subject. Mätzner believes that the subject of "seen in world" is "things of many kinds" three lines down. This would make the parse very discontinuous as a parenthetical clause would include a displaced subject. The parse used here splits the passage up in three tokens, (i) ll. 456-458 with "seen in world" as a parenthetical clause with an empty subject as proposed by Halle, (ii) l. 459 as an independent clause ("thus we believe it") and (iii) ll. 460-461, which inlcude an empty verb form of "to be" ("things of many kinds [exist] for man as instruction").
- ll. 535-537 are very hard to parse. The passage narrates a story of sailors mounting a whale, thinking it to be an island, and lighting a fire on its back. A literal translation reads, 'From stone with steel in the tinder / well to burn on this wonder / warm themselves well.' The phrase [stone with steel] is parsed as one constituent. The infinitival clause in the beginning of the second line is parsed as a purposive infinitive, CP-EOP, on "tinder".
- l. 684 alle ounder steuene. This phrase seems to be meaningless. Morris' editions suggests alle wonder or alle on der as emendations for ounder. Halle suggests ðo ludere steuene 'in a loud voice', Mätzner mid ane steuene 'in one voice.' In the text file, ounder is tagged as an adjective. A specific interpertation is not thereby intended for this expression.
In general, the commentaries in Mätzner (1867) and Hall (1920) have been taken into consideration for the parsing decisions of complicated passages in the text file.


References

Bennett, Jack A.W. & Smithers, Gavin V. 1968. Early Middle English Verse and Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Joseph. 1920. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Oxford: Clarendon. (Part I: Texts - available online), (Part II: Notes - available online)
Mätzner, Eduard A. F. 1867. Altenglische Sprachproben nebst einem Wörterbuche. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. (available online)
Morris, Richard. 1872. An Old English Miscellany. EETS o.s. 49. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Wirtjes, Hanneke. 1991. The Middle English Physiologus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.