The Ormulum is an early MIDDLE ENGLISH poetic
text of some 20,000 short, unrhymed lines, produced in the North East Midlands (possibly in the
abbey of Bourne in southern Lincolnshire) late in
the 12th century. Its author, who was apparently
also the scribe of the poem’s surviving manuscript
(Oxford Bodleian ms. Junius 1), identifies himself
as Orm (an Old Norse name meaning “Serpent”),
and says that he is an Augustinian canon. He addresses his manuscript to his brother and fellow
Augustinian Walter, who seems to have been in an
administrative position in the abbey in which Orm
lived and worked. At Walter’s request, Orm says in
his dedication, he is producing an English translation of the entire year’s gospel texts as listed in the
Mass book, with each text accompanied by an interpretive homily in English verse. Perhaps the
book was intended to be of use to preachers in the
vernacular.
Orm lists 242 texts and homilies in his table of
contents. The extant manuscript, however, contains only 32 entries. Possibly part of the manuscript has been lost, but most scholars believe that
the prodigious task Orm set for himself was never
finished. The text is arranged chronologically
around the life of Christ as presented in the chosen
Gospel texts, except for a few intended homilies on
Peter and Paul that were to have appeared near the
end of the manuscript. It is possible that those particular saints had some special connection to
Orm’s and Walter’s abbey. At any rate, Orm must
have worked on this major project for many years,
perhaps decades, and the manuscript shows signs
of both large-scale revisions and smaller corrections. It may have been abandoned upon the death
of Walter, or Orm may have grown too old or weak
to finish the task.
Readers are generally agreed that The Ormulum is a very tedious work. But whatever its shortcomings as a literary text, The Ormulum is of great
interest to linguists, especially because of the
spelling system adopted by Orm, who consistently
doubles consonants after short vowels.
Bibliography
Fulk, Robert D. “Consonant Doubling and Open Syllable Lengthening in the Ormulum,” Anglia 114
(1996): 481–513.
Mancho, Guzmán. “Is Orrmulum’s Introduction an
Instance of an Aristotelian Prologue?” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 477–492.
The Ormulum. Edited by Robert Holt, with notes and
glossary by R. M. White. 2 vols. 1878. New York:
AMS Press, 1974.
Parkes, M. B. “On the Presumed Date and Possible
Origin of the Manuscript of the ‘Ormulum’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 1,” in Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for
Eric Dobson, edited by E. G. Stanley and D. Gray.
Cambridge: Brewer, 1983, 115–127.
Worley, Meg. “Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and
Postmedieval Vernacularity, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, 19–30.