Old English

12 Key excerpts on "Old English"

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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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  English Literature from the Old English Period Through the Renaissance

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, J.E. Luebering(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 THE Old English PERIOD E nglish literature, defined here as the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day, has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts. Ideas of Augustan literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin, infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university departments

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  History of English Literature, Volume 1 - eBook

  Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625

  • Franco Marucci(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  The accepted chronology is as follows: literature in Old English4 up to 1150, in Middle English up to 1500, in Early Modern English afterwards. In macro- 4 ‘Old English’ is synonymous with ‘Anglo-Saxon’, but is the more extensive term, including all the various dialects spoken on the island until the advent of Middle English. § 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon 7 historical terms the watershed between the second and the third phase is represented by the Reformation and the Renaissance (though the conven- tional date usually chosen is 1485, i.e. that of Henry VII’s accession to the throne); but the Reformation is a northern event that most closely affects England, while the absorption of the Renaissance is not synchronic but later, with the medieval period being prolonged, one could say, until the Romantic period.5 After all, one may easily find or posit an opposition (and a very clear-cut one, as does Yuri Lotman’s typology of culture) between the two cultural types, medieval and Renaissance, as well as some form of continuity. We owe the notion of a Renaissance flowering in the Middle Ages, before its official inception and definition in France and in Italy, to the English, or at least to some of them, like Pater and Ruskin. The perti- nence of Old English literature to the English literary canon is, in effect, anything but taken for granted, and even today two theories confront each other, one of which can be defined as atomistic, the second as organic. According to the first, Old English literature must be kept separate from the study of both English language and literature; for the second, it is a part of an integral whole, inasmuch as it is a moment of its development – not unlike texts in poetry and prose, historical and religious, written in Latin or in Anglo-Norman before the advent of Chaucer.

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  Art, Architecture and Culture of Anglo Saxon Era

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  Old English literature is among the oldest vernacular languages to be written down. Old English literature began, in written form, as a practical necessity in the aftermath of the Danish invasions—-church officials were concerned that because of the drop in Latin literacy no one could read their work. Likewise King Alfred the Great (849–899), wanting to restore English culture, lamented the poor state of Latin education: So general was [educational] decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could...translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not many beyond the Humber —Pastoral Care, introduction ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ King Alfred proposed that students be educated in Old English, and those who excelled would go on to learn Latin. In this way many of the texts that have survived are typical teaching and student-oriented texts. Much of the corpus of Old English poetry consists of poems already circulating in oral form at the time they were first written down. The bulk of the prose literature is historical or religious in nature. There were considerable losses of manuscripts as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Scholarly study of the language began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I when Matthew Parker and others obtained whatever manuscripts they could. Extant manuscripts The Peterborough Chronicle ,in a hand of about 1150, is one of the major sources of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ; the initial page ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ In total there are about 400 surviving manuscripts containing Old English text, 189 of them considered major. These manuscripts have been highly prized by collectors since the 16th century, both for their historic value and for their aesthetic beauty of uniformly spaced letters and decorative elements.

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  All About Standard English, English Spelling & History of the English Language

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  Literature Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent before AD 1000, is nonetheless scant. In his supplementary article to the 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader , Dr. James Hulbert writes: In such historical conditions, an incalculable amount of the writings of the Anglo-Saxon period perished. What they contained, how important they were for an understanding of literature before the Conquest, we have no means of knowing: the scant catalogs of monastic libraries do not help us, and there are no references in extant works to other compositions .... How incomplete our materials are can be illustrated by the well-known fact that, with few and relatively unimportant exceptions, all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in four manuscripts. Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down. Some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are Beowulf, an epic poem; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of early English history; the Franks Casket, an early ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ whalebone artifact; and Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Caedmon. Comparison with other historical forms of English Old English is often erroneously used to refer to any form of English other than Modern English. The term Old English does not refer to varieties of Early Modern English such as are found in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, nor does it refer to Middle English, the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries.

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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 Routledge History of Literature in English

  Britain and Ireland

  • Ronald Carter, John McRae(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The beginnings of English Old and Middle English 600–1485

  A man will turn over half a library to make one book. (Samuel Johnson)

  The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted: and yet the great majority trust to nothing else. (Thomas De Quincey)

  Preface

  The very first writings in what is now Great Britain were in several different languages – Latin of course, since the Romans had occupied these islands for some four centuries; Gaelic and Irish and Welsh also found written expression. Of course most literature was part of an oral tradition, and it was rarely written down until much later.

  The first texts we have, from more than 1,500 years ago, come down to us in Old English, and over the centuries they show influences of Norse and Viking, Anglo-Saxon and French invaders, as well as local regional dialects. Only after about 1400, when what we call Middle English took over, does literature in English begin to sound, look and feel like the English we use today. By the time of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, published in 1611, the English language is recognisably modern.

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  Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages

  • Mark Chinca, Christopher Young(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole popula- tion – that would drive its development ever forward. Old English English literature has a traditional origin point, a strangely paradoxical beginning, characteristic of its close relationship with Latinity. Our earliest extant written English poem was not initially preserved in English, and is described in writing as an oral and illiterate production. We are told of it in one of the most famous passages of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in ), in which he recounts the story of a monk of St Hild’s abbey in Whitby (hence living before ), who was known for the inspirational beauty of his poetry and singing. Bede states that Cædmon, who had been an undistinguished cowherd, became a monk after he received his gift of poetic composition directly from God: a blessing ‘Vnde nil umquam    friuoli et superuacui poematis facere potuit’ (‘such that he could never make any trivial or empty-headed poem’), but only Christian verse.  Implicit in Bede’s dismissal of other kinds of poetry (as in his description of the singing at parties that the embarrassed Cædmon flees before his inspiration) is the existence of a lively oral culture of vernacular and secular song, a culture that is wholly ephemeral to the purposes of the monk- historian. Even as he tells of the first, divinely inspired English verses that Cædmon sang in praise of creation, Bede gives only a Latin paraphrase of the poem: ‘Nunc laudare / debemus auctorem regni caelestis, potentiam Creatoris et consilium illius .

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  A Companion to the History of the English Language

  • Haruko Momma, Michael Matto, Haruko Momma, Michael Matto(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  As discussed in earlier chapters, Old English was in some ways more elaborated than Middle English, and thus a variety of Old English with certain national functions had emerged by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period: Clas-sical Late West Saxon (see late Old English ). At the beginning of the period, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, material written in this variety continued to be copied, with comparatively little variation, in conservative scriptoria in the west of England. Many texts in Early Middle English, as described by Thorlac Turville-Petre (see early middle english ), attempted to recuperate this Anglo-Saxon past, albeit in locally restricted vernaculars (e.g., La amon’s Brut ). Towards the end of the Middle English period, English began to take on more functions and thus became more elaborated. English began to be used for some gov-ernment records; it took on more literary and other cultural uses, as described by Seth Lerer ( late middle english ). In short, it was beginning to develop a capacity for “eloquence” in the same way as French and Italian had done, even though Latin learn-ing remained a crucial cultural accomplishment. This elaboration of English had implications for its written form: it began to undergo a process of standardization. More belatedly, prestigious varieties of speech began to emerge, though much of the evidence for this latter process derives from the Early Modern period and is thus not strictly relevant for this chapter. (See varieties of early modern english .) In what follows, the issues raised above will be developed. First, the meaning of the term “dialect” will be examined. Some characteristic features of Middle English varieties will then be discussed. The chapter concludes with further discussion of the standardization processes which English underwent towards the end of the period.

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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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  Teaching English Language 16-19

  A Comprehensive Guide for Teachers of AS and A Level English Language

  • Martin Illingworth, Nick Hall(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The first thing that normally strikes students about Old English texts is that they can’t read them! This then should be a starting point. What is it about the text that makes it indecipherable?

  Eighty-five per cent of the vocabulary of Old English has fallen out of use. Students could examine the words that are familiar to them. What sort of words are they? Do they have anything in common? Are certain words, classes of words, more prevalent than others?

  There are some unfamiliar letters of which we no longer make use. Can we find reasons why some letters have fallen out of use over time?

  Another observation might be that it has a ‘harsh’ sound or that it sounds like German. Clearly, we have here a language derived from invading Germanic tribes. To take Beowulf as an example, the language is ‘muscular’, full of fricatives and plosives. It is a real workout for the modern mouth.

  The grammatical orders are not always what a modern reader would anticipate. As noted above, word order was not the significant feature in creating the function of words in Old English sentences.

  As well as these ‘internal’ features of the texts of Old English, you could discuss with your group how they feel about having become detached from the origins of their language. I would suggest that most merely feel that it is mildly irritating not to be able to read texts in museums. It perhaps makes the past feel even more distant and strange. You might reflect with your class upon the plight of languages which are becoming extinct, subsumed by bigger languages like English. For example, the last speaker of the language Kasabe, spoken in Cameroon, died in November of 1996 before the language had been documented by linguists (there are many languages in the world that do not have a written form). It would surely be more than ‘mildly irritating’ if that speaker were a relative of yours and he took with him all of your family history. Languages are the repositories of history, the gateposts to identity and cultural understanding.

  Middle English Period 1150–1500AD

  The Canterbury Tales

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  The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

  • Violeta Sotirova(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  However, this homily, like many other Old English texts, shows that the educated Anglo-Saxons were familiar with the tropes and schemes of the classical tradition (which they probably learned as part of their study of grammar as a tool for religious exegesis), and were able to bring together inherited and newly acquired techniques in order to transmit very powerful messages. 22 This paper has attempted to explain and exemplify the main stylistic features that characterize Old English literary compositions. Alliteration, apposition, variation, poetic compounds and the use of formulas brought the work of the Anglo-Saxon scops close to the poetic views of their Germanic ancestors. Yet, the Anglo-Saxons moved their native poetic language forward by also incorpo-rating figures of speech more commonly associated with the classical tradition. When prose started to be composed, particularly as a result of King Alfred’s (d. 899) educational policies, this successful amalgamation was adapted to new literary contexts, as we have seen. The arrival of a French-speaking elite after the Norman Conquest (1066) moved the epicentre of the mainstream poetic style away from the Germanic models and closer to the Medieval Latin tra-dition: rhyme and syllabic count replaced alliteration as the main structural devices in poetry, and the appeal of some traditional features (e.g. variation and poetic compounds) plummeted, while other stylistic trends, such as the exploi-tation of loanwords, gained ground. A new chapter in the history of English stylistics had started. Old English Style 579 Notes 1. On the language of the inscription, see Nielsen (1998, 52–5). 2. For an edition of Beowulf , see Mitchell and Robinson (1998). For a more thorough account of the traditionally accepted Old English rhythmical types and their com-binations, see Bliss (1958) and Scragg (1991). See, however, Bredehoft (2005) for a reconsideration of the traditional patterns.

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