An Anglo-Saxon runic coin and its adventures in Sweden
Margaret Clunies Ross a1
a1 University of Sydney
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In the years 1741–3, two scholars of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, one an
Englishman and the other a Swede, were engaged in correspondence. The
Englishman was the Reverend Edward Lye (1694–1767), then rector of
Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire, and the Swede was Eric Benzelius the
Younger (1675–1743), bishop of Linköping and, in the last year of his life,
archbishop-elect of Uppsala. For many years Benzelius had been preparing an
edition of the ‘Codex Argenteus’ of the Gothic gospels, which had been in
Uppsala University Library since 1669, but he had been unable to complete the
work on account of his many other commitments and also through the lack of
suitable publishers for such a volume in Sweden. In his frustration, he sought
the help of his many highly-placed friends in England, who included Sir Hans
Sloane and John Carteret, first Earl Granville, a former Ambassador to
Sweden. They directed him to Edward Lye as the only man in England competent
to complete the edition, and the University Press at Oxford, as the only
publisher able to handle the diffcult commission, as it still possessed Junius's
type fonts for printing Gothic, Old English and runic characters.
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