> ...I wonder how many just ended up in the dump... The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as tr

> ...I wonder how many just ended up in the dump... The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as trash by later generations. We have what are now priceless artifacts that were used as cutting boards or had pages ripped out to be used as food wrapping. I think this is especially bad with Old English, because once it became a dead language, hardly anyone saw value in preserving the manuscripts. What we have today of Anglo-Saxon literature mostly survived by accident.