The Lay of Havelok the Dane: Re-Edited From Ms. Laud Misc. 108 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. First ed. thus. Small octavo in polished dark green-brown cloth; lx, 171 pages: illustrations; 18 cm. Includes index and notes. About very good with minor wear to exterior and prerlims; binding tight, leaves clean. frot free andpaper appears to be glued to front board (possible bindery flaw). Hardcover.

First Clarendon Press edition of the early Middle English romance, re-edited by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (1835–1912) from its unique manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, which dates from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. The poem tells of Havelok, the Danish heir whose treacherous guardian Godard orders the fisherman Grim to drown him. Grim instead flees with him to England and founds Grimsby. Havelok grows up working as a porter in Lincoln and is married off to the dispossessed English princess Goldborou. She recognizes his royal birth by the light that streams from his mouth as he sleeps and by the king-mark on his shoulder, and he recovers both kingdoms. It is one of the earliest surviving English romances, unusual for its low-life settings and its sympathy for fishermen, kitchen boys, and common people. Skeat had first edited the poem for the Early English Text Society in 1868. That edition, as his own preface admits, drew its notes, glossary, and much of its introduction from Sir Frederic Madden’s editio princeps, printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1828. This 1902 Oxford edition is a fresh re-editing with a substantial lx-page introduction. In 1915 Kenneth Sisam revised it into a second edition with the introduction cut to xl pages, which was reprinted into the 1950s and 1960s and remained standard until G. V. Smithers’s edition of 1987. So the 1902 printing preserves Skeat’s fuller introduction and is the scarcer of the Clarendon issues. | English poetry -- Middle English. Skeat, Walter W; 1835-1912; (Walter William. MIddle English