The Old English Physiologus

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Albert S. Cook
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Title: The Old English Physiologus
Author: Albert S. Cook
Release Date: December 30, 2004 [EBook #14529]
Language: English and Old English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD
ENGLISH PHYSIOLOGUS ***
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including a, e, i, o, u, y, and æ with macrons, which are represented by
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YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH
ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR

LXIII
THE
OLD ENGLISH PHYSIOLOGUS
TEXT AND PROSE TRANSLATION
BY
ALBERT
STANBURROUGH COOK
Professor of the English Language and
Literature in Yale University
VERSE TRANSLATION
BY
JAMES HALL PITMAN


Fellow in English of Yale University
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON:
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCXXI
[FACSIMILE]
PREFACE
The Old English Physiologus_, or _Bestiary, is a series of three brief
poems, dealing with the mythical traits of a land-animal, a sea-beast,
and a bird respectively, and deducing from them certain moral or
religious lessons. These three creatures are selected from a much larger
number treated in a work of the same name which was compiled at
Alexandria before 140 B.C., originally in Greek, and afterwards
translated into a variety of languages--into Latin before 431. The
standard form of the Physiologus has 49 chapters, each dealing with a
separate animal (sometimes imaginary) or other natural object,
beginning with the lion, and ending with the ostrich; examples of these
are the pelican, the eagle, the phoenix, the ant (cf. Prov. 6.6), the fox,
the unicorn, and the salamander. In this standard text, the Old English
poems are represented by chapters 16, 17, and 18, dealing in succession
with the panther, a mythical sea-monster called the asp-turtle (usually
denominated the whale), and the partridge. Of these three poems, the
third is so fragmentary that little is left except eight lines of religious
application, and four of exhortation by the poet, so that the outline of
the poem, and especially the part descriptive of the partridge, must be
conjecturally restored by reference to the treatment in the fuller
versions, which are based upon Jer. 17.11 (the texts drawn upon for the
application in lines 5-11 are 2 Cor. 6.17,18; Isa. 55.7; Heb. 2.10,11).
It has been said: 'With the exception of the Bible, there is perhaps no
other book in all literature that has been more widely current in every
cultivated tongue and among every class of people.' Such currency
might be illustrated from many English authors. Two passages from
Elizabethan literature may serve as specimens--the one from Spenser,

the other from Shakespeare. The former is from the Faerie Queene (1.
11.34):
At last she saw, where he upstarted brave
Out of the well, wherein he
drenched lay;
As Eagle fresh out of the Ocean wave,
Where he hath
left his plumes all hoary gray,
And deckt himselfe with feathers
youthly gay,
Like Eyas hauke up mounts unto the skies,
His newly
budded pineons to assay,
And marveiles at himselfe, still as he flies:

So new this new-borne knight to battell new did rise.
The other is from Hamlet (Laertes to the King):
To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms;
And like the kind
life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood.[1]
However widely diffused, the symbolism exemplified by the
Physiologus is peculiarly at home in the East. Thus Egypt symbolized
the sun, with his death at night passing into a rebirth, by the phoenix,
which, by a natural extension, came to signify the resurrection. And the
Bible not only sends the sluggard to the ant, and bids men consider the
lilies of the field, but with a large sweep commands (Job 12.7,8): 'Ask
now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and
they shall tell thee; or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the
fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.'
[Footnote 1: Alfred de Musset, in La Nuit de Mai, develops the image
of the pelican through nearly thirty lines.]
The text as here printed is extracted from my edition, _The Old English
Elenc, Phoenix, and Physiologus_ (Yale University Press, 1919), where
a critical apparatus may be found; here it may be sufficient to say that
Italic letters in square brackets denote my emendations, and Roman
letters those of previous editors. The translations have not hitherto been
published, and no complete ones are extant in any language, save those
contained in Thorpe's edition of the