The metrical version of the psalter in Old English is extant principally in Paris, Bibliothéque nationale MS lat. 8824, but fragments from the text and parallel versions of verses appear in three other medieval manuscripts. Chapter One of this thesis describes the manuscript of the Paris Psalter, and discusses its compilation. Chapter Two looks at the other versions of the metrical psalter, in Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter, in the Menologium, and in the Benedictine Office. The changes made to the source by the translator in the course of transposing a sacred Latin text into the vernacular are considered in Chapter Three. These alterations include additions, omissions, the use of doublets and epithets, and rearrangements of material, especially those invoiving shifts of tense, person, case and aspect. The chapter attempts to identify when in the psalm verse the poet was likely to add to or delete from the source in his translation. In Chapter Four a word-by-word analysis of the Latin text studies the way in which individual parts of speech are handled by the poet in his rendition. While these chapters provide no conclusive answers, they reveal some of the methods used to render the Roman psalter into Old English.

How the metrical psalter can be compared to the glossed psalters of Anglo-Saxon England is considered in Chapter Five. In Chapter Six the text is compared to other works of Old English poetry. The syntactic, metrical and alliterative structures used by the psalter poet are explored. In particular, the chapter considers the occurrence of hapax legomena in the text, and compares their incidence here with the appearance and structure of coinages in several other Old English poems. The role of the Paris Psalter is considered; perhaps it is merely bad poetry, or it may be one of the few surviving examples of liturgical poetry--a kind of poetry concerned primarily with the transmission and comprehension of sacred texts in the vernacular, and not to be judged by neo-Romantic standards.