The Project Gutenberg EBook of Genesis A, by Anonymous

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Title: Genesis A
Translated from the Old English

Author: Anonymous

Release Date: April 13, 2005 [EBook #15612]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GENESIS A ***

Produced by David Starner, Jason Isbell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.

Transcribers Note: Typographic errors in the original have been
retained. In the table of contents there are two sets of page numbers.
The first appears to be the page numbers from the original MS. The
second set in parentheses are the page numbers from this facsimile.
As the body of the text is referred to by line numbers, that section
has not been rewrapped.

YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH

ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR

XLVIII

GENESIS A

TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD ENGLISH

BY

LAWRENCE MASON, PH.D.

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1915

PREFACE

The purpose of the translator in offering to the public this
version of the _Genesis_ is to aid in forwarding--be it by but one
jot or tittle--the general knowledge and appreciation of Old English
literature. Professed students in this department will always have
an incentive to master the language; but to the public at large the
strangeness of this medium will prove an insurmountable barrier, and
the general reader must therefore either remain in ignorance of our
older literary monuments or else employ translations. The present
contribution[1] to the growing body of such translations possesses,
perhaps, more than a single interest or appeal, in that it renders
accessible not only a poem of considerable intrinsic worth, a poem
associated with the earliest of the great names in English literary
history, and a forerunner and possible source of _Paradise Lost_, but
also an important example of a literary _genre_ once immensely popular,
though now quite fallen into abeyance--namely, the lengthy versified
Scriptural paraphrase. For some idea of the prominent part played by
this form, even so late as the seventeenth century, the reader is
referred to any comprehensive manual of English lit