Lacuna (manuscripts)

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For other uses, see lacuna.

A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or a musical work.

The state of old manuscripts or inscriptions which have weathered or been damaged sometimes gives rise to lacunae — passages consisting of a word or words that are missing or illegible. In order to reconstruct the original text, the context is to be considered. In archaeology and literary criticism this may sometimes lead to competing reconstructions and consequent interpretations. Published texts containing lacunae often mark the section where the missing text is with a […]. For example, "This sentence contains 20 words, and […] nouns." Another example is "one kilogram equals one […] grams" where the word 'thousand' is lost in a lacuna in the manuscript.

[edit] Famous examples

A famous Old English example of a lacuna is in the manuscript British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, the poem Beowulf:

hyrde ich thaet [... ...On]elan cwen. (Fitt 1, line 62)

This particular lacuna is always reproduced in editions of the text, but many people have attempted to fill it, notably editors Wyatt-Chambers and Dobbie, among others, who accept the verb "waes" (was). Malone (1929) proposed the name Yrse for the unnamed queen, as it would then alliterate with Onela. This is still hotly debated amongst editors though.^[1]

Another notable lacuna is the eight-leaves-long Great Lacuna in the Codex Regius, the most prominent source for Norse mythology and early Germanic heroic legends. Luckily parts of it survived in independent manuscripts and in prose form in the Völsunga saga.