The second volume of A grammar of Old English, begun by Richard Hogg and completed by R. D. Fulk after Hogg's untimely death in 2007, fills a gap in the scholarship of Old English and in Germanic historical linguistics. For decades the grammars of Brunner & Sievers (Reference Brunner and Sievers1965) and Campbell (Reference Campbell1964) have served the field, but despite their obvious virtues so much work has been done on morphology in the intervening years that a new comprehensive grammar is more than warranted. To give just one example of the way the field has changed: because nearly the entire Old English corpus is available in digitized form, it is possible to mount exhaustive searches for forms, and the result is a clearer idea of the empirical evidence behind each claim made in any study of the language. The greatest virtue of Hogg & Fulk is its coherent analysis based on clearly demarcated principles, largely historical, yet at the same time it incorporates the results of many studies up to the present day. From the bibliography of over 300 items one of the studies most frequently cited, to no one's surprise, is the companion volume on phonology (Hogg Reference Hogg1992).

At the time of his death Hogg had completed a draft of most chapters in the morphology volume, leaving unfinished part of the chapter on pronouns and the entire chapter on verbs. Fulk completed these two (chapters 5 and 6), and made ‘extensive’ though ‘superficial’ revisions throughout Hogg's chapters, changes that consisted primarily of references to and discussion of relevant scholarship.Footnote ¹ The result preserves the impressive coherence of Hogg's initial plan and yet takes account of various strands of scholarship in the notes. In particular, Fulk shows a great deal of tact in those sections where he might disagree with Hogg (e.g. 3.15 n. 3; 3.56 n. 2). In at least one passage, however, a note seems to work at cross-purposes with the main text, where an argument favors ‘the spread of the an-inflexion -an to the dat.pl. of n-stem nouns’, which then ‘spread’ as a morphological substitution to other classes (3.9), while note 1 speaks of variations in unstressed vowels in different inflections, which may lead to the impression that the change from -um to -an is likewise phonological. But the scarcity of such apparent discrepancies, even as minor as this one, serves to show how well and thoroughly Fulk revised Hogg's initial draft. From one chapter to the next, one comes away with the impression of a single authorial voice pursuing a unified project.

Because morphological inflection changed so extensively from Proto-Indo-European to Old English, the authors must carefully define the terms used in their analysis. In an opening chapter, ‘Preliminaries’, they prefer ‘n-stem’ to ‘weak’ nouns, for example, and ‘definite’ to ‘weak’ adjectives. The analysis of nouns is organized not by their stems (from PIE) but by the characteristic inflections they take; so we have the -as declension, a-declension, and an-declension (3.2). The reason for this latter decision is that by late PGmc the theme vowel had fused to the inflectional ending, so it makes less sense to refer to OE nouns as a-stems, i-stems, and so on (see 2.1 and note 6). On the other hand, the discussions in each chapter do not dispense with the IE categories altogether; they simply do not use them as an organizing rubric. Another decision faced by Hogg & Fulk was the crucial one of defining the object of their study. Old English was not static and uniform. The inflectional morphology of nouns in particular changed extensively as they emerged from early Germanic. So the authors adopt the innovative expedient of dividing the discussion of nouns so that chapter 2 traces their emergence into early West Saxon and chapter 3 details ‘how that system was restructured during the OE period’ (1.6). The latter singles out specific varieties, such as Northumbrian, Kentish, Mercian, and the late West Saxon of Ælfric, among others. As a broad generalization one might say that chapter 2 takes a diachronic approach, while chapter 3 is synchronic. The same organizing principle, moving from diachronic to synchronic, informs the chapters on Adjectives, Adverbs, and Numerals (4), on Pronouns (5), and on Verbs (6). Let me use the discussion of indefinite (strong) adjectives within chapter 4 as a convenient example of the organization of each major category (4.4–4.56). It opens with a discussion of the historical origins in PGmc; surveys other early Gmc languages, notably Gothic; and sketches out the features of early West Saxon. A separate section surveys the inflections, including a paradigm reconstructing the early stage of PGmc (4.10), which leads to the set of inflections for eWS given in a separate paradigm (4.13); this is the paradigm familiar from most textbooks. Then it moves to short summaries of late West Saxon, late Northumbrian, Kentish, and the Mercian dialect of the gloss on the Vespasian Psalter. It concludes with twenty pages on allomorphic variations driven primarily by phonology. Each section follows the same organization, moving from PGmc to eWS for the historical background, followed by a synchronic survey of different varieties.

The Vespasian Psalter and its glosses (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1965) emerge as a key text for identifying Mercian features, but throughout it is identified by the inscrutable abbreviation – PsGlA – given it by the Dictionary of Old English project (Healey & Venezky Reference Healey and Venezky1980). A note included in the List of Abbreviations on p. xi explains this practice, but for the uninitiated reader it will take some sleuthing to figure out. The first volume, Hogg Reference Hogg1992, used a more ad hoc system of identifying texts: there the Vespasian Psalter is called Ps(A), which adds another layer of obscurity for readers. While I understand the need for streamlining textual references, it would have been a kindness to the reader to develop a more transparent system that included an indication of the edition cited, even if it is cited second-hand from the DOE's electronic corpus – especially for prominent sources like the Vespasian Psalter.

As will be the case with many who use this book, I come to it with limited training in historical linguistics (although a good deal of interest), and so certain terms like ‘uter’ (2.79, 2.95, 5.17) will send us searching for a definition. Potentially more puzzling are the competing systems of transcription that have developed in different fields. (In 3.33 note 3 the authors signal their awareness of the potential confusion.) It is conventional for Indo-Europeanists to use <y> to transcribe the sound /j/ in reconstructed forms, while historical Germanic philology uses <j> for the same sound, which in OE orthography is spelled with <ġ>. For example, in 6.105 a passage employs all three options for transcribing the history of the /j/ that emerges in OE lufiġan. Similarly, for the velar fricative /γ/ it is customary in Germanic philology to use the character yogh, as in the masculine ja-stem noun *sa jaz. This reconstruction appears in a paradigm of PGmc forms in 2.22, followed in 2.23 by a pre-OE paradigm that renders it as *sai, the predecessor of OE seċġ. So far so good, but the immediately following paragraph explaining the absence of gemination reverts to <g> in saying ‘*sagjaz > *sagi’ (2.23), which I suspect is an error. It can become confusing, especially for a reader not already accustomed to the differing conventions of transcription.

Slips like *sagi are few in number. The text seems carefully prepared, which is no small accomplishment for a book full of special characters and diacritics. I note that ‘nouns’ appears for ‘adjectives’ in 4.38 and 4.39; the right-most column in the table for pronouns in 5.17.1 is superfluous and should be deleted; and the tables in 6.137 and 6.139 have segments out of alignment. Fortunately, these are unlikely to confuse anyone.

Not only is the material structured in a transparent way that incorporates previous studies and invites further research, but it includes many observations that readers will find revelatory – or will appeal to their curiosity, such as a calculation of the relative frequency of various parts of the language. For example, n-stem nouns constitute 10 to 15 percent of the total number of nouns. Of the 100 most common verbs, 39 are strong verbs; and those 39 are further broken down for each of the seven classes. No one will be surprised to learn that eight of the twelve preterite-present verbs are among the 100 most common verbs. The result of this number-crunching may not convey much grammatically useful information, but it can be fascinating for confirming or correcting one's impression.

Other highlights: the opening chapter, ‘Preliminaries’, contains a concise account of the salient features of OE as a Gmc and an IE language, which, although magisterial in its overall command, I would not hesitate to give to an undergraduate. The short section on ‘Nominal compounding’ (3.144–3.147) succinctly lays out the differences between true compounds and derived compounds. A section on ‘The anaphoric pronoun’ synthesizes what is known about the form serving as the OE third-person pronoun, hē, hit, hēo, etc., which is derived from the stem PIE *ki-, a demonstrative (5.14–5.17). Chapter 6 lays out a wealth of interesting details about verbs, such as the presence of an adhortative inflection in late West Saxon (6.6); the IE aorist behind the 2 sing. pret. of strong verbs (6.8); a revision of the PGmc stem formative for Weak II verbs (6.108); a surprisingly large number of surviving verbs that originally had inflections as Weak III verbs (6.130) but migrated elsewhere; a demonstration that the dental suffix of the preterite of preterite-present verbs ‘does not reflect the PGmc *-ð- that is found in the weak verbs but *-þ- < PIE *-t-, suggesting that the preterites to this class were formed before the rise of weak preterites in *-ð- in PGmc’ (6.141). For preterite-present verbs, this separate development suggests that their preterites are an older innovation than that for weak verbs, and the next section adduces more evidence of antiquity in this class of verbs.

In the preface to the first volume of A Grammar of Old English, Hogg deploys the modesty topos in saying ‘I do not expect, or even hope, that this present book will supersede those already written’ such as Brunner & Sievers and Campbell. But he was too modest by half because the two volumes do indeed supersede their predecessors (though without rendering them obsolete). Old English has a new authoritative grammar that will take its place as a reliable resource for decades to come and inspire more studies on the language. It is a striking accomplishment.