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Lacuna (manuscripts)

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Gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work

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For other uses, seeLacuna (disambiguation).

First page of theCodex Boernerianus with lacuna inRomans 1:1–4.

Alacuna^{[Note 1]} (pl. lacunae orlacunas) is a gap in a manuscript,inscription, text, painting, or musical work. A manuscript, text, or section suffering from gaps is said to be "lacunose" or "lacunulose".^{[citation needed]}

Weathering, decay, and other damage to old manuscripts or inscriptions are often responsible for lacunae - words, sentences, or whole passages that are missing or illegible.Palimpsests are particularly vulnerable. To reconstruct the original text, the context must be considered. Inpapyrology andtextual criticism, this may lead to competing reconstructions and interpretations. Published texts that contain lacunae often mark the section where text is missing with a bracketed ellipsis. For example, "This sentence contains 20 words, and [...] nouns," or, "Finally, the army arrived at [...] and made camp."^{[citation needed]}

Notable examples

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In theBritish Library manuscriptCotton Vitellius A. xv, theOld English poemBeowulf contains the following lacuna:
hyrde ich thæt [... ...On]elan cwen.
— Fitt 1, line 62
This particular lacuna is always reproduced in editions of the text, but many people have attempted to fill it, notably editors Wyatt-Chambers and Dobbie, among others, who accept the verb "waes" (was). Malone (1929) proposed the nameYrse for the unnamed queen, as that would alliterate withOnela. This, however, is still hotly debated amongst editors.^[3]
The eight-leaves-longGreat Lacuna in theCodex Regius, the most prominent source forNorse mythology and early Germanic heroic legends. Parts of it survived in independent manuscripts and in prose form in theVölsunga saga.
InCodex Leicester, the text skips fromActs 10:45 to 14:17 without a break; possibly because a scribe rewrote it from a defective manuscript that was missing those sections.
Most of Tablet V of theEnūma Eliš, theBabylonian creation myth, has never been recovered.
The didactic Latin poemAstronomica (Marcus Manilius, c. AD 30–40) contains a lacuna in its fifth book; some^[who?] believe that only a small portion is missing, while others^[who?] believe that whole books are lost.
Cantar de mio Cid contains several lacunae.^[4]