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The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994). 817 pp. ISBN o-8598-436-3. $45.00.
Nearly sixty years have passed since Krapp and Dobbie's edition of the Exeter Book for Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records; a new complete edition has been a desideratum for some time. In this two-volume work Bernard J. Muir builds on the work done in preparation of his 1992 bibliography of the Exeter Book, and the detailed study he has made of the manuscript, to produce a magisterial edition.
Muir's extensive work with the actual manuscript - by contrast to Krapp and Dobbie, who edited the Exeter Book from facsimile - bears fruit in the noting of over 400 alterations and corrections which bear on the...