Field dictation, reel 1

— Alistair Wren. Fourteenth of November, nineteen seventy-three. I am making this recording because my written notes are no longer consistent with one another.

— That is not, I should say at once, a remarkable circumstance. I have kept notes for thirty years and I have corrected them for thirty years. What is inconvenient is the particular form the inconsistency takes, which is that the two sets agree in every particular except the order.

— I have therefore adopted the practice of dictating, because a tape cannot be revised without the revision being audible.

— On the material itself. I decline for the present to describe the text as belonging to any of the three families to which it has been assigned by others. The correspondences are strong, but correspondence is cheap in this field; every compiler read the same handful of exemplars and every copyist made the same handful of errors.

— What I would note, and note only, is a recurrence. Certain passages appear in copies that ought, on the provenance, to be independent. I do not draw an inference from that. I record it.

— I will collate properly in the spring, when the department has released the second copy. End of dictation.