Literary and Editorial Study of the Middle English Poem “Robyn and Gandelyn”

Abstract

My thesis is based on an analysis of the Middle English poem “Robyn and Gandelyn” as a result of my studies in the fields of historical linguistics of the Germanic languages and editorial linguistics. The study will approach the text in two ways: literary and editorial. First from a literary standpoint, I will look at the definition of the term “ballad”, review the themes, structure and metrics of the poem and then analyze the reasoning behind its inclusion in the distinguished ballad collection by Francis James Child, “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads” (1882-1898). Second, from an editorial standpoint, I will examine the editorial tradition of the text, focusing on the single extant manuscript version of the poem - found in the British Library (Sloane MS 2593) - and provide a paleographic description of the text as it is found in the original manuscript, as well as a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) compliant textual representation of “Robyn and Gandelyn”.