The Online Corpus of Old English Poetry (OCOEP)
General Editor: Murray McGillivray
This is the home page of the Online Corpus of Old English Poetry, an Internet publication project at the University of Calgary. When completed, the project will present all known Old English poems and poetic lines in bare-bones editions with clickable glosses (each word of each poem will be clickable and connected to a glossary) and minimal, mainly textual notes. The texts will include all of the poems in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, together with additional poetic texts, including principally Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. The purpose of this project is to make useable and reliable texts of Old English poems available in convenient form for students and scholars around the world, whatever the resources of their local community or school. The project follows in the footsteps (or stands on the shoulders) of C.W.M. Grein, Richard Wülker, George Philip Krapp, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie.
There are currently hardly any OCOEP editions available on this site, and the ones that are available are not complete. For an explanation of the reason for this sorry state of affairs, an update on the parts of the project that have reached some state of completion, and some insight into the likely future progress of the project, click the link to “Project History” below. Because the vast majority of OCOEP texts are not yet available, we provide links to existing online texts of Old English poems. The origin of the texts we link to at the Labyrinth Library (Georgetown University) and their role in the current project is also discussed at “Project History.” [The Labyrinth Library was disabled in June 2007 by server changes at Georgetown University, and it was not clear for a while that students and scholars would continue to have access to the files there; links on the site here were therefore reconfigured at that time to point to locally-cached copies of the Labyrinth files, creating a full mirror of the Labyrinth Old English poetry section. When time permits, the links to the Georgetown files will be restored. MM]
Texts of Old English Poems (most from the Labyrinth Library, but including a few OCOEP texts at various stages of completion).
This site is under construction. Check back in a few weeks for updated content.
