An Alliterative Poem Edited with Introduction and Notes By JAMES HOLLY HANFORD, Associate Professor of English in the University of North Carolina and JOHN MARCELLUS STEADMAN, R., Instructor in English in the University of North Carolina Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando; Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus. CHAPEL HILL DEATH AND LIFFE: An Alliterative Poem PREFACE A new edition of this unique and beautiful alliterative poem has long been felt to be a desideratum. The Hales-Furnivall reprint of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, published in 1868, where Death and Liffe is edited by Professor Skeat, is out of print, and Arber's modernization of the piece in the Dunbar Anthology is of little use for scholarly purposes. No other reprint exists, though an edition was promised some years ago by Professor Gollancz as a future number of his excellent series, Select Early English Poems. The present edition aims to make the poem accessible with a somewhat more extensive critical apparatus than falls within the scope of Professor Gollancz's plan. The publication, since the HalesFurnivall reprint, of various important alliterative poems, with further studies of the alliterative style and meter, and the accumulated comment of several scholars, notably York Powell, Brotanek, Holthausen, and Miss Edith Scamman, have made possible a fuller illustration of Death and Liffe and a more accurate account of its literary relations than have heretofore been given. The poem is well worth study, both from the scholarly and from the purely literary point of view. There are few finer things in the whole range of Middle-English poetry. The author has brought to his didactic theme a lofty imagination and a sense of poetic phrase which make Death and Liffe rank high even among the most powerful productions of the alliterative school. Its noble solemnity and religious fervor are touched with a romantic grace, and the subject is handled with the artistry of a poet bred in the traditions of such matchless works as Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pearl. The unusual combination of conventional materials gives to the work an exceptional degree of originality, a fact which has been somewhat obscured by undue insistence on the author's debt to Piers Plowman. Unfortunately the text of Death and Liffe is corrupt beyond the powers of a modern editor to restore, or even, in some places, to explain. Originally written in the archaic diction affected by writers of the alliterative school, the piece was copied by a scribe or scribes to whom many of the expressions were unintelligible. The latest copyist, moreover, was very careless. As a result the manuscript is a chaos of modernization and sheer blunder. A striking example is the line & I ffayrlye befell, so fayre me bethought, |