The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, edited by Craig Williamson

The Glossary

Making Williamson's Glossary available here on-line has proved a more formidale task than I had anticipated. My early efforts to scan the columns created files with an enormous amount of formatting garbage that was very difficult to deal with, but getting the letters A through E manually copied into Word files consumed many hours of the Kenyon English department's student assistance time for the last semester. I was lucky enough to discover that I could cleanse the files scanned into Word simply by copying them into a Dreamweaver file and then copying them back into Word for formatting and inserting special characters. It was still laborious, but manageable.

The style of the presentation is here, as elsewhere on the web site, reminiscent of ecclesiatical texts on parchment with some illuminated letters and words. It is a labor very similar to that of the scribe, but the result here is, I think, quite readable on the screen.

One painful inadequacy in the presentation is the absence of marking for the long vowels. That will require the use of graphics to make them readable in different browsers. Maybe one day when a workable procedure is found this it will be fixed. I am also tempted to include, in the fashion of Clark Hall, common inflected forms in the alphabetical listing. Finally I hope to make the glossary "searchable," if that is possible. In the meantime it is necessary to scroll through each of the completed alphabetical files. The alphabet below provides the links.