PREFACE


The purpose of the translator in offering to the public this
version of the _Genesis_ is to aid in forwarding--be it by but one
jot or tittle--the general knowledge and appreciation of Old English
literature. Professed students in this department will always have
an incentive to master the language; but to the public at large the
strangeness of this medium will prove an insurmountable barrier, and
the general reader must therefore either remain in ignorance of our
older literary monuments or else employ translations. The present
contribution[1] to the growing body of such translations possesses,
perhaps, more than a single interest or appeal, in that it renders
accessible not only a poem of considerable intrinsic worth, a poem
associated with the earliest of the great names in English literary
history, and a forerunner and possible source of _Paradise Lost_, but
also an important example of a literary _genre_ once immensely popular,
though now quite fallen into abeyance--namely, the lengthy versified
Scriptural paraphrase. For some idea of the prominent part played by
this form, even so late as the seventeenth century, the reader is
referred to any comprehensive manual of English literature.

In this translation, prose has been employed instead of verse, for two
reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which,
in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English
the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in
the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should