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RUNES AND RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS: COLLECTED ESSAYS ON ANGLO-SAXON AND VIKING RUNES. By R. I. Page. Edited by David Parsons with a bibliography by Carl T. Berkhout. Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 346. L49.50/$89.
Rene Derolez, the doyen of manuscript runology, is quoted (p. xi) as asking, "Where would runic studies in the British Isles stand now if it had not been for Ray?" Indeed, serious study of English runes without Raymond Ian Page, sometime librarian and professor at the University of Cambridge, is simply inconceivable, which makes this collection of essays all the more valuable and welcome. Most of the previously-published papers assembled here have been given postscripts by the author to bring them up to date, but two essays appear here for the first time: "Quondam et Futurus" (pp. 1--16) is a kind of general updating of Page's views on runic studies written for this volume, and "Runeukyndige risteres skribter: The English Evidence" was presented at a conference in 1987 but not published. The volume contains a Foreword by David Wilson (p. vii), a Preface by the editor and his collaborators (pp. ix-xi), References and Abbreviations (pp. xii-xiii), the twentythree essays themselves (pp. 1-338), and The Published Writings of 1.Page to 1994 (pp. 339-46). Unfortunately, there is no index of topics or inscriptions, which would have been extremely useful for a collection of this kind.
The previously published papers are "Northumbrian wefter (= in memory of) + Accusative" ( 958), "An Early...