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The Editorial Board of The Heroic Age is very pleased to announce the
publication of our twelfth issue. Point your browsers to http://www.heroicage.org
and click on \"Current Issue.\" Information elsewhere on the site has also been
updated including the staff, links pages, and the Call for Papers. Please take a
look; comments are always welcome. I have taken the liberty of pasting below the
Letter from the Editor which has some items of interest in it.

§1. Sumer is icumen in! Or so said the poet, in agreement with the weather
prognosticators for once. It is both a frustration and an embarrassment that the
Winter issue is seeing the light of day as summer is fast approaching, but
regrettably that is too often the state of affairs in academic publishing. But it
isn\'t for lack of trying.

§2. So, I\'d like to begin by mentioning the important people who volunteer their
time to make The Heroic Age happen each issue. First, and foremost, there are three
people who work very hard to make each issue come together, edited, polished, and
coded. Deanna Forsman, our webster, formats and codes each page on our website,
including each issue, taking time from her own academic duties and courses, family,
and leisure to do so. Without her efforts, there would be no The Heroic Age. Eileen
Joy has done an enormous amount of work for the journal. Not only is she now editing
a column for us, but she has been a reader, an editor, and copy editor. It is not as
if she is not busy elsewhere: in addition to her work for us, she has been editing
volumes of essays (http://www.siue.edu/babel/ProspectusFragmentsVolume.htm), putting
together a new journal (www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/), blogging at In the Middle
(www.inthemedievalmiddle.com), and other
activities. I am very grateful for all her efforts with The Heroic Age. Last but
certainly not least, Bill Schipper is our archivist and is another of those
wonderful people whose helping hand is everywhere. In addition to his work with us,
Bill is planning and hosting the next meeting of The International Society of
Anglo-Saxonists, hosts and manages several well-known email lists in early Medieval
Studies, and of course has his own work to undertake. My very grateful thanks to
each of these three for their very hard work on my behalf.

§3. In addition to those three, others have had a hand in producing this issue who
should be mentioned: Rolf Bremer, Tim Clarkson, Michael Treschow, Linda Malcor, Rolf
Bremmer, Dan O\'Donnell, and Michel Aaij have all undertaken editing at several
levels. Finally, I will mention our readers, who will remain nameless for obvious
reasons, but they know who they are. The only reward I can offer all these people is
my sincere gratitude. If you have a moment whether via email or at a conference,
please say \"thanks\" to these folk who have made this issue possible.

§4. Before turning to the issue itself, there are some exciting developments in
connection with the links pages hosted at the journal\'s site. For this issue, the
Anglo-Saxon links have been culled, weeded, and expanded. Ten years ago, in winter
1999, when I first split the Anglo-Saxon links off into their own subpage, I had
grand plans to do the same for other subfields within the journal\'s purview. While
it won\'t make it for Issue 12, there is at least one subsection and possibly two in
development that will make debut appearances in Issue 13.

§5. More importantly, and in my view far more exciting, is a new development for
some older but useful tools. As many know, the Richard Rawlinson Center at the
Medieval Institute (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval) of Western Michigan University
once hosted several online bibliographies and other projects that covered a range of
subjects in Early Medieval Studies. A few years ago, some decisions were made that
caused the removal of these tools from the Richard Rawlinson Center website, at that
time intended to be a temporary situation. Several years later, however, the
bibliographies remain inaccessible to the medieval researcher. These bibliographies
are now in the process of being migrated to The Heroic Age site and will be linked
off the HA links pages. There are many to thank for these developments. First, and
foremost, Paul E. Szarmach, now Director of the Medieval Academy of America
(http://www.medievalacademy.org), James M. Murray and Elizabeth
Teviotdale of the Medieval Institute, and Bill Schipper and the good folks at
Memorial University of Newfoundland (http://www.mun.ca) are all owed a deep debt of
gratitude for allowing this to happen and making the migration possible. As of this
writing, the first such bibliography, Robert Fulk and Kari Ellen Gade\'s online
edition of A Bibliography of Germanic Alliterative Meters, is almost ready to go to
its new home and may be included in Issue 12\'s update links release.

§6. Turning to our regular features for this issue, I would like to draw your
attention to a new column: Philological Inquiry written by Michael Drout and Scott
Kleinman. The plan is for this to be a recurring column on philological approaches
to the field. This first foray examines the word \"Merovingian\" in Beowulf in order
to \"illuminate culture, history and politics and shed new light on an old problem.\"
Please join me in welcoming Mike and Scott and this new contribution to our columns.

§7. Eileen Joy has edited a second offering in our still new \"babelisms\" column.
The column is devoted to publishing essays that explore convergences between early
medieval and modern texts and ideas. In this issue\'s column, Helen T. Bennett offers
a meditation on halls in Beowulf: \"The Postmodern Hall in Beowulf: Endings Embedded
in Beginnings.\"

§8. In Michel Aaij\'s Continental Business column, Michel reviews and discusses
recent scholarly works on Rabanus Maurus, and Dan O\'Donnell returns as columnist of
Electronic Medievalia with \"Byte me: Technological Education and the Humanities.\"
This rounds out our recurring columns.

§9. Elsewhere in this issue\'s Forum, Jonathan Jarrett, well-known to many as the
blogger behind A Corner of Tenth Century Europe (http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com)
and author of the forthcoming Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia:
Charters and Connections on a medieval frontier from the Royal Historical Society,
contributes to our ongoing series about current developments in subfields of
medieval studies. He offers us \"Digitizing Numismatics: getting the Fitzwilliam
Museum\'s coins to the world-wide web.\" As this issue\'s installment of our series
introducing projects in the field, Margaret Cormack introduces us to her site and
asks for readers\' aid in a column titled \"Saints and Sacred Space: An Interactive
Database—A Call for Collaborators.\" Howard Wiseman offers a review essay on a
fiction novel, Albion. Finally, Cullen Chandler offers a review essay discussing
several recent books on things Carolingian in his contribution titled
\"Regna et Regnum: Studies of Regions within the Carolingian Empire.\"

§10. We have three excellent articles in this issue. Karmen Lenz examines the
liturgy for St. Cuthbert in her Liturgical Readings of the Cathedral Office for
Saint Cuthbert. This is followed by Douglas Simms who contributes an article focused
on linguistics titled Heavy Hypermetrical Foregrounding in the Old Saxon Heliand and
Genesis Poems. Rounding out the General Article section is a team-sponsored article
titled King Alfred\'s Scholarly Writings and the Authorship of the First Fifty Prose
Psalms by Michael Treschow, Paramjit Gill, and Tim B. Swartz that examines the
attribution of these psalms to Alfred. These three very solid and interesting
articles complete the issue.

§11. Looking ahead, Issue 13 is already well under way. Originally imagined as an
issue to focus on medieval manuscripts, as it turns out, the issue will instead
focus on translations from early medieval texts! Nonetheless, the issue will also
include articles on Old Norse, Hincmar, and Arthur plus our usual columns.

§12. Issue 14 is in development as well. Its a twin-themed issue guest-edited by
Andrew Rabin and Eileen Joy. Andrew is collecting and editing a group of essays on
Early Medieval Law. Eileen has gathered and is editing a number of essays on the
topic of theory and early medieval literature. I myself enjoy the juxtaposition of a
traditional topic with a more cutting-edge, perhaps even edgeless topic and placing
these in conversation. If all goes well, this issue should be published in early
2010.

§13. The Heroic Age will celebrate its first decade in 2010. We formed the board in
late 1999 and published our inaugural issue in Spring 2000, imagined then as
appearing quarterly. That first issue was all about Arthur. Our fifteenth issue is
scheduled to be published in mid-2010 and is seeking papers on \"Arthur-related\"
topics, revisiting the edges of that first issue. The three sections currently
planned for that issue will cover the world of Late Antique Britain and Gaul,
connections with the rest of the continent in Late Antiquity, and new views of the
Adventus Saxonum. The second section will examine Arthur and Arthurian literature.
The third section will include studies of Late Antique and Early Medieval authors.

§14. Even further ahead, Issue 16 is already gathering papers. A special section on
Alcuin is being guest-edited by James LePree. Issues 17 and 18 are in the planning
stages as well. One will be guest-edited by Jonathan Jarrett, mentioned above, on
\"Carolingian Border-lands\" and Issue 18 will focus on Old French/Provencal/Occitan
studies. That takes the editorial planning up through the beginning of 2012.

§15. As always, feedback is appreciated. I now turn you over to the issue itself,
lest this note become as long as what it introduces! On behalf of the editorial
board, our readers, and editors, I hope you the reader enjoy the issue.