For over seventy years there has been no new English edition of the lively and vigorously-written Middle English verse romance of Hauelok, despite the need for a text to meet modern standards of editing. In this new and thorough edition of the poem. Professor Smithers has done much to elucidate the text, providing a detailed glossary, textual notes, and an introduction that contains an account of the main manuscript and of the Cambridge fragments, of the relations of Hauelok to the other main versions of the story, and of the language, the sources, the date of composition. In addition, Smithers supplies a full commentary which goes well beyond those of previous editions in range, scale, and detail.

"Raoul de Cambrai" is one of the most violent and passionate poems of the cycle of barons in revolt. The three relationships that structure medieval society - companionship, feudalism and the family - are here seen in crisis. Conflicts of interest, and the competition for resources, result in social disintegration, wholesale loss of life and the collapse of authority. The poem, probably composed around the turn of the 13th century, results from successive reworkings that weave a many-layered commentary on its own moral and political themes. This edition draws on some material unknown to the text's previous, 19th-century editors. It is prefaced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by an annotated translation in English prose.

"Hattatal" is a treatise in Old Icelandic on the metres and verse-forms of Old Norse poetry. It forms the third part of the "Edda" (known as the "Prose Edda") of the Icelandic historian and poet Snorri Struluson (1179-1241). The first part, "Gylfaginning", deals with the mythological background to the diction of skaldic poetry; the second, "Skaldskaparmal", with the language of poetry. "Hattatal consists of a poem in 102 stanzas in various verse-forms in praise of the rulers of Norway, the young King Hakon Hakonarson (1204-1263) and Earl Skuli (1188-1240), composed by Snorri in about 1222/1223, after he had just visited the Norwegian court, together with a commentary which points out the main features of the variety of verse-forms that the poem exemplifies.;As the earliest medieval treatise on the metres of poetry in a Germanic language, it is of great importance to the understanding of the metres not only of Norse poetry but also of those of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval German, and it also provides insight into the ways in which a medieval vernacular poet perceived his work. This edition, the first one with English apparatus, is in normalized spelling and comprises an introduction, notes and glossary and is intended to make the text accessible to students with some knowledge of Old Icelandic.