Proverbs of Hendyng

The Proverbs of Hendyng are a later thirteenth-century poem in which one Hendyng, son of Marcolf, utters a series of proverbial stanzas. They are in a tradition of Middle English proverbial poetry attested in the Proverbs of Alfred and the two texts include some proverbs in common.[1] The rhyme-scheme is aabccb.

Marcolf appears as an interlocutor with Solomon in some German poems in the Solomon and Saturn tradition,[2] while ' "Hendyng" seems to be a personification generated from the word hende ["skilled, clever"], and seems to mean something like "the clever one" '.[3]

The Proverbs are also noted for containing the earliest attestation of the word cunt in English outside place- and personal-names.[4]

Manuscripts

Ten manuscripts are known to attest to the poem in whole or in part (sometimes only one stanza or couplet).[5] The most complete include:[6]

The others are:

Editions

References

  1. Specimens of Early English, ed. by Richard Morris and Walter W. Skeat, 4th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II 35-42 (p. 295).
  2. Specimens of Early English, ed. by Richard Morris and Walter W. Skeat, 4th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II 35-42 (p. 294).
  3. Christopher Cannon, Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
  4. "cunt, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 March 2015.
  5. Joanna Bellis and Venetia Bridges, '“What shalt thou do when thou hast an english to make into Latin?”: The Proverb Collection of Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS F.26', Studies in Philology 112 (2015), 68-89 (p. 85 n. 51).
  6. Cf. Specimens of Early English, ed. by Richard Morris and Walter W. Skeat, 4th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II 35-42 (pp. 35, 294).
  7. Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, Michael Benskin, and others, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ([Aberdeen]: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I 67.
  8. Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, Michael Benskin, and others, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ([Aberdeen]: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I 147 [LP 7790].
  9. Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, Michael Benskin, and others, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ([Aberdeen]: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I 111 [LP 9260].
  10. Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, Michael Benskin, and others, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English ([Aberdeen]: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I 66.
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