April 15, 2020

Up, and coffee and two toasted sesame seed bagels from Dunkin' Donuts, which I brought to AR's, where I spent the day working. I spent most of the day reading a paper for Politics & Society that our copyeditor had copyedited--quality control. The paper was on the dual pension system in China. (We publish a lot of papers on China.)

After work we worked on a puzzle together for a few minutes.

Lunch was a sandwich from Randy's (delivered). Went for a 40-minute walk around 3:00. Home by 6:00. Read from Heaney's Beowulf and studied French. Have re-committed myself to learning French, and then I want to learn Old English.

Notes on Beowulf. One surviving manuscript dating from late tenth century. Originally part of a collection of medieval manuscripts made by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631). Manuscript damaged by fire in 1731; several lines and words were lost. Manuscript now in the British Museum. Poem contains many hapax legomena: words recorded only once in a language. Poem originally composed in dialect of what was Mercia but converted to West Saxon dialect of the southwest. The one datable event--Hygelac's raid on the Franks--occurred in 520.

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