Monday, January 05, 2009

Anglo-Saxon Aloud: The Home Stretch
(and poems that aren't in the ASPR)


Apologies for my absence from the internet world. Just before Christmas I recorded a new course for Recorded Books (The Anglo-Saxon World) and am now finishing writing the course book and, with the holidays and family life, I had to put other things on hold for a while. But now it's back-to-work time.

I've finished recording the final ten Psalms in the Paris Psalter and will be posting them, two per day, for the rest of this week, so by Friday recordings of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records will be on line except for the whole of Beowulf, which for economic reasons is only up in a few select pieced ("economic reasons"= I had to pay a lot for studio time to record it, so I sell the complete Beowulf at here at Beowulf Aloud).

Now it's time to tie up some loose ends. I'm going to go back and re-record the Psalms that I sung instead of recited (Psalms 50-68) and have both versions, spoken and sung, up on the site. That will be next week's project. And then I want to put up those remaining poems that are not in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.

I want to make sure that I have a complete list (and texts), so I'm using the Dictionary of Old English corpus to look for anything in the Verse category that I haven't recorded. Here's what I came up with so far. Is there anything missing?

A44 Instructions for Christians
A45 Cnut’s Song
A46 Godric’s Prayer I and II
A47 The Grave
A48 Distich on Kenelm
A49 Distich on the Sons of Lothebrok
A50 Psalm 17:51
A51 Metrical Psalms 90:16 - 95:2

With a little luck, I will manage to get the re-done Psalms (50-68) and these miscellaneous poems all recorded, edited and posted before the 2-year anniversary of Anglo-Saxon Aloud on February 21 (I thought it would take about a year to do the whole project, and I'd like to not be wrong by a full factor of two).

Once the podcasts are all finished, I will be working to put the whole thing together on a CD-set, an iPod shuffle, or a memory stick for those who want to own a complete copy rather than doing two years of downloading. In the meanwhile, you can get the 2-CD set of Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits (which also has modern English translations and brief commentaries) at the link.

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