Scribal Corruption: A general term referring to errors in a text made by later scribes rather than the original authors. In many cases, these mistakes are obviously the result of human error while copying, such as accidentally repeating or leaving out a word or line(s) from the original manuscript. 'Eye skips,' for instance, are errors that result when a scribe's eye drops from the original word or line he was copying to a different word or line that begins with the same letter or word, causing him to leave out the intermediary material. Other scribal errors come about when a scribe attempts to 'correct' or 'simplify' a text he doesn't understand well. One of the more amusing examples of scribal corruption comes from the Anglo-Saxon monks of medieval Britain. There, a monk was copying a text that referred to heaven as the 'Isle of Joy.' The word joy in Anglo-Saxon was gliw. (It's the word that gives us the modern word glee.) Unfortunately, an Anglo-Saxon monk misread the final letter. This final letter was wynn--an Anglo-Saxon letter that looks sort of like the modern letter p, but which represents a /w/ sound. You can see samples of the letters by clicking here. The scribe mistakenly thought he was viewing the letter thorn, which represents a -th sound. Thus, he miswrote the word as Glith in an Anglo-Saxon educational poem called 'Adrian and Ritheus.' The error had its consequences. Hundreds of this scribe's newly Christianized and newly literate students therefore diligently learned that heaven was located on 'The Isle of Glith.' This no doubt caused some confusion initially among the early Christian converts. The problem of scribal corruption was still prevalent five hundred years later in Chaucer's day. Chaucer complains about the 'negligence and rape' done to his poetry at the hands of his own scribe, Adam, in his short poem, 'Chaucer's Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scrivyen.'

 

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Scribal Corruption: A general term referring to errors in a text made by later scribes rather than the original authors. In many cases, these mistakes are obviously the result of human error while copying, such . . . View Full Definition

Scribal -E: When a scribe adds an unpronounced -e to words for reasons of manuscript spacing, this is called a scribal -e. This practice was common in the days before English orthography became standard . . . View Full Definition

Textual Variant: A version of a text that has differences in wording or structure compared with other texts, especially one with missing lines or extra lines added. In some cases, textual variants reflect th . . . View Full Definition

Ur-Text: A hypothetical 'best' version of a lost literary text based on correlating later manuscripts and examining the differences between them. An Ur-text is not an actual physical manuscript we ca . . . View Full Definition