Climb Every Gehu?

While working on the final chapter of my dissertation (speaking in terms of the table of contents, not in terms of my work schedule), I concurred with academics who had previously goggled over a seemingly inexplicable gloss by the Tremulous Hand, but my "internal external" examiner (as opposed to the external external examiner, you see) made a point at my defense that led me to a possible explanation of this gloss. I am planning to write this up, but I'd been afraid that it would be nothing more than the merest, barest note. At this stage of my career, to be frank, I'd prefer a nice, meaty treatise. As I was listening to a lively MLA discussion on editing Old English, I saw another way that I could fit this merest, barest note on the Tremulous Hand into the context of some of the larger editorial questions we are facing today. This is not going to become my magnum opus, but I think that it will be a little more substantial now, for which I am very thankful.

We tend to see a divide between two styles of editing, and this editing dilemma could be posited as a tension between the maintenance of standards, on the one hand, and the cultivation of storytelling, on the other hand. How do we tell the story of the stages in a textual history without removing our regard for a deep knowledge of, in this case, the Old English language? Similarly, we wonder how to take advantage of the openness that the internet and digital tools make available to us without sacrificing the benefit of long experience with the language and materials, as offered by traditional academic study. For the Tremulous Hand, the trick is to tell the story of the layers of accretion in the manuscripts and printed texts without losing sight of the fact that we believe some of the glosses to be inaccurate. In fact, this is the same problem faced by parents who hope that their children will meet the world with confidence but who shrink from a culture in which we all seem to believe ourselves to be Very Special. That last bit probably won't be in my article.