“The Ormulum”

  A series of Homilies, in an imperfect state, composed in metre without alliteration, and, except in very few cases, also without rhyme; the subject of the Homilies being supplied by those portions of the New Testament which were read in the daily service of the Church. Of the personal history of the author no record remains beyond the bare statement contained in the Dedication, in which he informs us that his baptismal name was Ormin, and that he was a Canon Regular of the Order of Saint Augustine. He adds, that at the request of his brother Walter, also an Augustinian Canon, he had composed these Homilies in English for the spiritual improvement of his countrymen.

  Usually assigned to the same, or nearly the same, age with the Brut of Layamon. It exists only in a single manuscript, which there is some reason for believing to be the author’s autograph, now preserved in the Bodleian Library among the books bequeathed by the great scholar Francis Junius, who appears to have purchased it at the Hague in 1659 at the sale of the books of his deceased friend Janus Ulitius, or Vlitius (van Vliet), also an eminent philologist and book-collector. It is a folio volume, consisting of ninety parchment leaves, besides twenty-nine others inserted, upon which the poetry is written in double columns, in a stiff but distinct hand, and without division into verses, so that the work had always been assumed to be in prose till its metrical character was pointed out by Tyrwhitt in his edition of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” 1775. Accordingly no mention is made of it by Warton, the first volume of whose History was published in 1774. But it had previously been referred to by Hickes and others; and it has attracted a large share of the attention of all recent investigators of the history of the language.

  I consider it as the oldest, the purest, and by far the most valuable specimen of our Old English dialect, that time has left us. Layamon seems to have halted between two languages, the written and the spoken. Now he gives us what appears to be the Old English dialect of the West; and, a few sentences further, we find ourselves entangled in all the peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon. But Ormin used the dialect of his day; and, when he wanted precision or uniformity, he followed out the principles on which that dialect rested. Were we thoroughly masters of his grammar and vocabulary, we might hope to explain many of the difficulties, in which blunders of transcription and a transitional state of language have involved the syntax and the prosody of Chaucer.

  The most remarkable general characteristic of the syntax is its regularity, which, in spite of the temptations to licence, common to all modes of versification, is greater than is to be found in any other English composition, except those of modern date…. Considered as a poem, the Ormulum has no merit but that of smooth, fluent, and regular versification, and it exhibits none of the characteristic traits of English genius.

  Whatever we say of Layamon, we have no charge to bring against Ormin, who in Layamon’s day kept up the succession of our sacred poets in honest English.

  Reflections, it may be, of a glory long set, serving too well to show that the sceptre has departed from the ancient speech.

  First English spelling reformer.

  Of the literary merits of the Ormulum little can be said, for it has none whatever. The author was, in fact, a spelling-reformer and philologist who mistook his vocation. The Old English picturesqueness and power disappears entirely from his verse together with the traditional alliteration, and the only compensation is a dry, practical directness of style and metre which is anything but poetical.