Friday, August 14, 2015
Marginalia
W.M. Lindsay (1858-1937), quoted in Kuno Meyer, "Neu aufgefundene altirische Glossen," Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 8 (1912) 173-177 (at 175):
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All these entries are written in the top margins of the pages as clearly and carefully as the text itself. And that is a curious thing. How came the head of the scriptorium to allow his monks to spoil a manuscript by so prominent insertions of trivialities? It almost makes one guess that he must have been ignorant of Irish, i.e. that the MS. was written in a continental monastery where the authorities were continental, and that the Irish strangers felt they could play pranks with impunity. When asked what he had written the scribe would point to the Latin pious sentences on the preceding top margins and say "merely the Irish equivalents of sentences like these".
