Old English Texts

12 Key excerpts on "Old English Texts"

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  Key Concepts in Medieval Literature

  • Elizabeth Solopova, Stuart Lee(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2   Old English

  (a) Old English Literature: An Overview

  Old English literature could be initially defined as the texts created in England, and in English, by the Anglo-Saxons (see Chapter 1(a) for a summary of the Anglo-Saxon period). It represents a relatively small collection of texts in comparison with other periods (e.g. Victorian literature), though chronologically it covers approximately one-third of the history of English, from the 5th century to the 11th century. A rough estimate suggests that there are around 3 million words surviving in Old English. These are extant in various manuscripts held around the world, but predominantly in the major collections in the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Exeter Cathedral’s Library, and Corpus Christi College’s Library in Cambridge. These manuscripts have been studied by scholars for centuries, and editions of the texts they contain have been appearing since the 16th century. Three million words may sound a large amount but we must recognise these are not unique words (many, for example, are repeated). Furthermore, when one considers that Charles Dickens’s Bleak House alone, with its more than 300,000 words, would account for around 10 per cent of the entire Old English corpus, we can see the parsity of the collection. However, contextually, compared with other languages from the early medieval period (with the exception of Latin), this is one of the largest extant corpora from that period. As Greenfield and Calder note:

  Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry are the major literary achievement of the early Middle Ages. In no other medieval vernacular language does such a hoard of verbal treasures exist for such an extended period (c.700–1100). (Greenfield and Calder, 1986, p. 1)

  Yet we must recall that this is just what survives to us, nearly a thousand years after the close of the Anglo-Saxon period. Thus we need to make two assertions:

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  Writers of the Reign of Henry II

  Twelve Essays

  • R. Kennedy, S. Meecham-Jones, R. Kennedy, S. Meecham-Jones(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Conclusion The aim of this overview of Old English textual activity in the latter half of the twelfth century has been to show that, if textual culture in England in this period is to be mapped accurately, a significant body of material is in urgent need of scholarly attention alongside Anglo-Norman and Latin pro- ductions. The range of types of Old English Texts copied in the period— including preaching texts, saints’ lives, Gospels, the Psalter, monastic rules, patristic texts, prognostications, and medicinal texts—and the evidence offered by detailed studies of individual examples, such as the adaptations to and recontextualization of pre-Conquest English texts in Lambeth 487, show that Old English textual production in these decades is varied and purposeful. This highlights the central questions of who produced and used Old English Texts in the Henrician period, and of the place of those texts relative to those in Latin and Anglo-Norman that were produced and used alongside them. A fully rounded picture of literature of the plurilinguistic reign of Henry II will be alert to the nuances of language as a signifier of affiliation and identity, and to the place of the continuing production of MARY SWAN 164 Old English Texts in the carrying over of old traditions and identities and their transformation into new ones. Notes 1. See Susan Irvine, “The compilation and use of manuscripts containing Old English in the twelfth century,” in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 41–61 (at 47). 2. The Old English Life of St Nicholas with the Old English Life of St Giles, ed. Elaine Treharne, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 15 (School of English, University of Leeds: Leeds, 1997).

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  Old English

  • Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The corpus of Old English may not be extensive, but there exists a considerable variety of text types. The range is well summarized by DOE’s editor, Antonette diPaolo Healey:

  The body of surviving Old English Texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints’ lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms. (http://doe.utoronto.ca/pages/index.html ; last accessed 5 January 2017)

  Some historical linguists appear to assume that one text is broadly equivalent to another in terms of the evidence it supplies; texts are too frequently mined for individual forms generally without discussion of their status, value, or circumstances relating to their production; the tendency to take such shortcuts is no doubt exacerbated by the way in which online search engines present their results. Further sections in this chapter elaborate on some of the issues relating to individual text types and their study.

  2Dialect materials and methodology

  Old English dialectology as a discipline is compromised by the fact that diatopic investigation is hampered by the patchy survival of texts and their diachronic diversity. Crowley’s summary of the situation makes for depressing reading in this regard:

  There is no evidence for Northumbrian of the ninth century and the early tenth; for Mercian before c.750, or of the later two thirds of the eleventh century; for Kentish before c.800 and after c.1000; and for West Saxon before c.850. Relatively few witnesses date before 950. Those that do are quite important, because texts after 950 are usually affected by the standard Late West Saxon literary language. (Crowley 1986: 103)

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  A Social History of English

  • Mr Dick Leith, Dick Leith(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IV: Evidence, interpretation and theory

  Passage contains an image

  8 A critical linguistic history of English texts

  Published histories of English are usually illustrated with textual extracts drawn from different periods. It seems that there are two broad categories of text. Those of the first kind exemplify the linguistic features of central interest to the historian of language. The second kind embody particular attitudes to English. Linguistic historians have often interpreted the latter for the light they throw on the linguistic features exemplified in texts of the first kind.

  In many cases, histories of English have made the same selection of textual extracts. In fact, there exists a canon of texts which allegedly ‘shows’ how modern English has developed from Anglo-Saxon (or Old English, as it is now more usually called). The impression is given that the history of English emerges, as it were, from close inspection of the texts. But does this put the cart before the horse? When the systematic study of the history of English began in the last century, there was a strong tendency to view that history as the story of standardisation. Accordingly, the appropriate texts were selected and interpreted so as to illustrate that story, as we shall see in discussing the Oxford English Dictionary below.

  Both textual categories involve problems of interpretation. In the first, there is a tendency to concentrate on linguistic features, which, in varied ways, support the story mentioned above. In practice, texts have often been arranged in chronological order to show increasing intelligibility the more ‘modern’ they are, almost as if English developed in a purely linear fashion from one unified state to another. In the second textual category, statements embodying particular attitudes have often been taken at face value, almost as though they were the authoritative products of a purely disinterested observation. Editing texts for an anthology tends, moreover, to obscure their many different kinds of social functions, audiences and communicative effects. In the discussion that follows I have tried to highlight these issues of interpretation.

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  The Germanic Languages

  • Ekkehard Konig, Johan van der Auwera(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Old and Middle English Ans van Kemenade 5.1  Introduction

  The terms Old English and Middle English refer to the vernacular language recorded in England in the period from c. AD 600 to c. AD 1500. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the group of dialects imported by the immigrants from the continent in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, who drove back the native Romano-Celtic population to Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. The transition to Middle English is usually somewhat artificially marked by the date of the Norman Conquest of England as 1066.

  For Old English, two main dialect groups are distinguished: West Saxon and Anglian (see Figure 5.1 ). West Saxon is the dialect in which the bulk of Old English manuscript material was written. West Saxon is very poorly documented until the literary activity of King Alfred in the late ninth century. In the literary tradition instigated by Alfred, ‘early West Saxon’ is represented in the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until 924 and the Alfredian translations of the Orosius and Pope Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis (both c. 900). Late West Saxon is attested in the works of Ælfric, those of Wulfstan, the Abingdon manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the A manuscript of the Benedictine Rule. Apart from these, a number of texts that display more dialect mixture are still usually classified as West Saxon: the Old English translations of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Pope Gregory’s Dialogues and Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, the Blickling Homilies and the D text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Anglian dialect group is subdivided into two: Northumbrian and Mercian. The Northumbrian dialect is identified, above all, by rune inscriptions on Ruthwell Cross and further found in three eighth-century poems (Caedmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song and the Leiden Riddle) and in three extensive tenth-century texts (the glosses on the Lindisfarne Gospels, part of the Rushworth Gospels and the Durham Ritual). In the Mercian dialect from before 900, there are charters from Mercian kings. Further, there is the ninth-century gloss of the Vespasian Psalter, the tenth-century partial gloss of the Rushworth Gospels and some minor glosses. Usually, a fourth Old English dialect is distinguished: Kentish. The material from Kentish is limited to the Kentish Glosses

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  Introducing the History of the English Language

  • Seth Lerer(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Old English Period

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003227083-4

  Old English (OE) describes the Germanic vernacular spoken and written in the British Isles from roughly the middle of the fifth century until the early twelfth century. OE shared features of grammar, sounds, and vocabulary with other early Germanic languages and many modern ones. It was highly inflected, using word endings to determine the relationships among words in a sentence. Nouns had grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter); they belonged to certain groups or classes (depending on their sound histories of their roots); they were declined in a variety of cases, depending on their grammatical function; and there had to be agreement with adjectives that modified them (that is, similar endings depending on the number, case, and gender of the noun). Verbs were conjugated according to tense and number; verbs were also grouped into classes depending on their sounds and sound histories; and certain verbs formed their tenses by changing the root vowel (strong verbs, such as drink, drank, drunk) and others formed their tenses by adding a suffix (weak verbs, such as live, lived). OE had a distinctive sound (one that has been reconstructed, with reasonable accuracy, by scholars over the past three hundred years) and a distinctive way of forming letters in writing (adapting old runic letters for sounds not found in the Latin alphabet). It was the medium of prayer, scholarship, history, poetry, and philosophy for more than four hundred years.

  This chapter illustrates the distinctive features of OE and gives students basic reading knowledge of the language so that they may understand its place in English linguistic history and the literary imagination. We will also see how studying OE gives us access to a political and social world, to myth and religion, and to creativity and culture. OE was not a single, static language, however. Over the seven centuries of its use, it changed: new words came in from Latin and Scandinavian languages; word endings appear to have been leveled out or even lost; patterns of word order and particulars of literary style evolved. In addition, OE varied in sound and sense across the British Isles. Scholars have identified four major regional dialects by examining the spelling of words in surviving manuscripts. Old English was the language of kings and agricultural workers, poets and monks. It was a vernacular marked by nuance and variety, depending on the who, when, and where of its use.

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  The Stories of English

  • David Crystal(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Abrams Press

    (Publisher)

  1 shows that the entire body of Old English material from 600 to 1150 in fact consists of only 3,037 texts (excluding manuscripts with minor variants), amounting to a mere 3 million words. A single prolific modern author easily exceeds this total: Charles Dickens’ fiction, for example, amounts to over 4 million. Three million words is not a great deal of data for a period in linguistic history extending over five centuries, and it is a tiny amount when it comes to looking for signs of dialect variation, which by their nature are going to be occasional. That scholars have been able to find evidence of even four major dialect areas is quite an achievement, under these circumstances. In reality, there must have been many more. East Anglia is an example of a major gap. There would have been many dialects in this area, from what we know of early patterns of settlement, but there are no Old English Texts which represent them. Doubtless thousands of manuscripts were destroyed in the Viking invasions.

  The texts which do exist are thinly scattered throughout the period and around the country (see panel 2.1). They fall into three broad types. The first category comprises glossaries of Latin texts, where scribes added Old English equivalents to the Latin words between the lines or in the margins. Such glossaries vary greatly in size from just a few words to several thousand; for example, the Corpus manuscript (from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) comprises over 2,000 glossed words; the Book of Psalms (the Vespasian Psalter) over 30,000. The second category comprises a varied range of prose works, several of which are associated with the names of King Alfred, Abbot Ælfric, and Bishop Wulfstan. These include charters, laws, local records, recipes, medical texts, inscriptions, cryptograms, lists of names (of kings, bishops, saints, abbots, martyrs), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , translations, homilies, devotional and liturgical texts, letters, dialogues, and imaginative writings. The third category comprises the poetry of the period, mainly found in four collections dating from around 1000 – the Vercelli, Exeter, Beowulf, and Junius texts – and including the major poems: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon , and The Dream of the Rood

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  Changing English

  • David Graddol, Dick Leith, Joan Swann, Martin Rhys, Julia Gillen, David Graddol, Dick Leith, Joan Swann, Martin Rhys, Julia Gillen(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Englisc ('English') was first used to denote both people and language under his auspices.

  In the tenth century there was another revival of learning and literary activity, this time associated with the influential Benedictine monasteries. The scriptorium of the monastery at Winchester, producing texts in the West Saxon dialect, seems to have made considerable efforts to regularise spellings and this has been seen as a move in the direction of standardisation in English. (See another book in this series, Graddol et al, 2007, for further discussion of this issue).

  Most extant Old English manuscripts date from the late Old English period and they preserve, not only translations of learned Latin texts, but also an important body of vernacular literature in prose and poetry. Some of the poems are religious, following the example set by Caedmon, and others (such as Beowulf) stem from inherited Germanic traditions.

  So far we've looked at Old English: where it came from, what it was like, how certain aspects of it changed, and how the process of change might be explained. We now move on to a different period of the English language, that known as 'Middle English'.

  2.6 The transition to Middle English

  We have seen that the English language was undergoing significant change during the early part of the tenth century. In 1066 an event occurred that was to have a profound effect on this process. In that year a French-speaking dynasty from the dukedom of Normandy was installed in England. This external event has long been seen as decisive, not only for the history of England (and consequently Britain) but for the English language as well. For scholars who have viewed the history of England and English as one of unbroken progress, the Conquest has often been a milestone on the road to 'civilisation', playing a key role in the development of Modern English. But another view, perhaps more widely held, sees the events of the Conquest in terms of (an at least temporary) decline: as the wrecking of a relatively sophisticated 'native' Anglo-Saxon culture by a 'foreign' and tyrannical French one, so that the continuity of English culture was ruptured and the continued existence of the English language threatened.

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  English Poets in the Late Middle Ages

  Chaucer, Langland and Others

  • John A. Burrow(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  There are also, as one would expect in a period of more than four centuries, substantial changes over time, especially in the status and uses of the two vernaculars. An attempt must now be made to sketch the outlines of this very complex history, taking it century by century, and starting with the years before c. 1200. The relatively few foreign-speaking strangers who came over with the Conqueror presented no challenge to the survival of English as the mother tongue of the native population; but as a written language, English lost the commanding position it had gained in the last years of the pre-Conquest monarchy and Church. Texts in Anglo-Saxon—charters and religious prose in particular—were still copied in some centres such as Worcester (on copies of Anglo-Saxon texts, see Ker 1957; Swan and Treharne 2000); but Standard Late West Saxon, already in its time a conservative written form of the language, became increasingly hard for English readers to understand, and its texts began to need glossing, as by the so-called Tremulous Hand of Worcester (Laing 1993: 6–7). Meanwhile the now deregulated form of the vernacular was not yet ready to take its place as the language of written texts. Indeed, rather few new writings in English survive from before 1200 (see catalogue in Laing 1993), scholars being now inclined to date such notable early ME works as The Owl and the Nightingale and Laʒamon’s Brut, along with Ancrene Wisse, to the early or even the middle thirteenth century

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  Redesigning English

  • Sharon Goodman, David Graddol, Theresa Lillis(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 English manuscripts: the emergence of a visual identity

  David Graddol

  5.1 Introduction

  Chapter 4 focused on the increasingly visual nature of English, and the growing interest in developing analytical frameworks for analysing visual and multimodal texts. While there is evidence that new technologies are creating greater opportunities for multimodal text design and production, it is important to recognise that written English has always had a multimodal dimension: most obviously, written English is visual in that it has a particular set of letters or characters but is also multimodal in nature in that it is often produced alongside other types of visual representation, such as decorative illustration, and involves a range of materials in terms of its production. In this chapter, I take a historical look at the development of written English and explore how written English developed from early Anglo-Saxon inscriptions on bone and stone, to a wide diversity of manuscripts from the eighth century onwards. I will illustrate how changing technologies influenced the kinds of writing and texts produced and consider an issue that continues to generate debates, notably the standardisation of spelling and the question of spelling reforms.

  5.2 The origins of written English

  No one is very sure what the ‘original’ language of Britain was, or even if it is sensible to ask such a question. The early history of Britain is one of successive invasions, of the arrival of new populations who spoke new languages which displaced or mixed with existing ones. In this section, I consider the emergence of the earliest writing systems in this changing social linguistic and cultural context.

  The Anglo-Saxon futhorc

  When did written English emerge? What did the first words look like? The oldest known piece of writing in English (see Figure 5.1 ) is a carving on a roe deer’s ankle bone found in a cemetery site at Caistor-by-Norwich, Norfolk. It dates from circa AD 400 and appears to read raïhan (‘roe deer’). This is only a single word, so it may be disputed that it represents English rather than some other, closely related, Germanic dialect. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the runic script in which the earliest English was written. This is known as the ‘futhorc’ after the first few letters of its alphabet (see Figure 5.2 ). The letters are based on simple lines that can be cut easily with a blade. The origins of the runic writing system are obscure – it appears to be modelled loosely on the Latin or Greek alphabet, but exactly where and when it was devised is unclear. It is known, however, that runes were used in various Germanic languages from the third century AD

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  English Historical Linguistics. Volume 1

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  With an English translation, the Latin text, notes, and an introduction. (Early English Text Society 45.) London: N. Tru ¨ bner & Co. Wollmann, Alfred. 1993. Early Latin loan-words in Old English. Anglo-Saxon England 22: 1–26. Zupitza, Julius (ed.). 2000 [1880]. Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar . 3rd edn, with a new introduc-tion by Helmut Gneuss. Berlin: Weidmann. Gernot R. Wieland, Vancouver (Canada) 24 Old English: Standardization 1 Introduction 2 Establishing a norm: earlier scholarly approaches to standardization in Old English 3 Theoretical and descriptive frameworks in current research 4 Major forms of standardization in Old English 5 Further instances of standardization 6 Summary 7 References Abstract Despite the ongoing debate about the appropriateness of the concept of standardization in an Old English context, scholars concur that the earliest stage of the English language exhibits clear traces of language regulation. Two major processes that differ in their lin-guistic character and geographical extension have been identified: (1) the so-called “ Winchester vocabulary ” , a lexical norm taught and practiced at Winchester cathedral school in the late 10th and in the 11th century, and (2) “ Standard Old English ” , an ortho-graphic norm based on the West-Saxon dialect, whose regulating effect on spelling and inflexional morphology manifests itself in late Old English manuscripts originating in all parts of England from the late 10th to the early 12th century. The sociolinguistic turn brought about by the Norman Conquest deprived the normative tendencies manifest in Old English of their linguistic foundation and their institutional support.

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  Studies in the History of the English Language

  A Millennial Perspective

  • Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell, Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics Herbert Schendl 1. Introduction It is common knowledge that medieval England was a multilingual country, where a number of languages, especially English, Latin and French were used, partly side-by-side, partly in specific geographical, social or dis-course areas. 1 Twentieth-century research has looked into the changing status and roles of these three languages, and equally, the importance of language contact for linguistic change has been investigated by historical linguists, with particular emphasis on lexical, less so on structural borrow-ing. This research has, however, been almost exclusively based on data from monolingual English-language texts, while mainstream historical lin-guistics has completely neglected the analysis of mixed-language texts, i.e. of texts which show alternation and mixing of languages in various forms. This is the more surprising since there is a large number of such texts both literary and, particularly non-literary, from most of the attested history of England. 2 While historical linguists are often unaware of the large number of such texts, philologists, medievalists, and literary scholars have tended to hold them in low esteem and not worthy of serious examination. These so-called “macaronic” literary texts were frequently regarded as instances of artifi-cial, sometimes highly artistic language-play or as exercises of clerics and students, while the non-literary mixed-language texts were predominantly seen as reflecting the insufficient language competence of some medieval writer or scribe. 3 This negative attitude towards mixed-language texts mirrors nineteenth-century views that languages are distinct, clearly separate and separable en-tities, and that any mixing of languages leads to corrupt texts. As late as 1932, R.W. Chambers expresses this view when he complains that after the Norman Conquest “the English people (...) began to conduct their legal

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