‘The Unglossed Words of the Lindisfarne Glosses’

Abstract

The Old English glosses to the Gospels in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.iv represent one of the largest interlinear apparatuses to a single Latin text in the vernacular. However, about one thousand words of the Latin text are left unglossed both in the Gospels and the prefatory material. The largest number of omissions concern proper names (personal names, place-names and ethnonyms), but also words such as camelus or ventilabrum were left unglossed whether always or just sometimes. This paper investigates the number and the distribution of these unglossed terms as well as their nature.