The West Virginia University Press will make a 1,200-year-old book available for the first time in an English edition. Heliand: Text and Commentary, edited by University of Massachusetts Professor James E. Cathey, represents the first edition of this early 9th century life of Christ published for English-speaking students.

Georgetown University Professor Ronald Murphy is considered an authority on Heliand, which presents Christ and Christian principles to non-Christian Germans during the period of European conversion to Christianity.

“Nothing quite like it exists anywhere in the world,”said Murphy, reflecting on Cathey and the WVU Pressnew project.”How rarely does one find an editor who with equal grace presents the reader with explanatory commentary that encompasses both the scientific and the poetic, and treats them both with equal felicity!!”

Murphy said the volume also contains something that is exceptionally valuable and simply cannot be found in English: a compact and extremely serviceable grammar of Old Saxon and an appended glossary that defines all vocabulary found in the edited version of the Heliand.

“I cant tell you how genuinely helpful Catheys work will be,”Murphy said.”It will be the version for student in North America and quite possibly abroad as well.”

Other academic works published recently by the WVU Press include Oxford University Computing Services Guide to Digital Resources in the Humanities by Francis Condron, Michael Fraser and Stuart Sutherland; Paradise Lost: A History of Game Preservation in East Africa by Thomas Ofcansky; and forthcoming in a new series dedicated to West Virginia and Appalachia, Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Work Communities in the Industrial Era, edited by Ronald Lewis and Ken Fones-Wolf.

All WVU Press books currently in print may be purchased on-line atwww.wvupress.comor by calling 304-293-8400.