Old English Metre: A Brief Guide
Although the Anglo-Saxons left no accounts of their metrical organisation, statistical and linguistic analysis of the poetic corpus has allowed us to come up with a good idea as to how their verse...
View ArticleInsular Script
Here is a basic listing of letters in an insular script. The letters are from a manuscript of the early eleventh century.
View ArticleHow to Study Old English (or Latin or any other dead language) for a Test or...
So how should you study in Old English class? Here are some tips I’ve compiled from personal experience and asking other scholars of my generation who have studied ancient or medieval languages (e.g....
View ArticleTranscription Guidelines
The following is a list of typographical conventions to use when transcribing medieval manuscripts in my classes.
View ArticleAn Anglo-Saxon Timeline
This contains a link to an experiment in constructing a timeline of the Anglo-Saxon period using XML. It is very much a work in progress at the moment. The ultimate goal will be to have a synoptic...
View ArticleThe Pronunciation of Old English
The sounds of Old English should not prove difficult, with a few exceptions, for speakers of Modern English. It can be hard at first to get used to some of the spelling conventions, such as the fact...
View ArticleBasic Old English Grammar
Old English and Modern English can be deceptively similar from a syntactic point of view. In particular, word order frequently is the same in the two languages (though Old English is actually probably...
View ArticleThe Old English Alphabet
Old English texts were copied in manuscripts by scribes. These scribes used an alphabet based on the Latin alphabet, but with some native additions and occasionally runes…
View Article