An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

Old English
PDE
cg, gg
dg(e), gg
sc
sh, sk
hw
wh
hr, hl, hn
r, l, n
Of the correspondences, the ones which will give you most difficulty
are and , which each have two very distinct values, even when
they are part of a digraph. In order to help you distinguish the cases, I
shall follow a very common editorial practice and place a dot over ,
i.e. .
>, when it corresponds to PDE . Similarly, when
represent the equivalents of  respectively, I shall place the
same dot over and when it corresponds to , i.e. .
g
.
,
sc
.
>.
There can be no doubt that at first sight Old English orthography
can be confusing. It certainly adds to the difficulties in studying an un-
familiar language. The differences, however, should not be exaggerated,
and often these differences are quite transparent. Here are some
examples of Old English words:
drifen
hætt
g
.
ear
t
æt
lytel
e
e
and here are their PDE equivalents:
driven
hat
year
that
little
the
One or two spelling conventions which I have not mentioned may cause
initial difficulty. For example, the doubling of consonants in hætt and
the reverse situation in PDE little is confusing. Nevertheless the basic
patterns should be easily understood.
1.5 Vowels
When we look more closely at vowels, then we quickly come across more
serious problems. Whereas today we regularly distinguish between long
and short vowels, so that long vowels often (but not always!) have dis-
tinctive spellings, such as , in Old English there
were no distinctions made between long and short vowels. Editors often
distinguish between long and short vowels by placing a dash or macron
over long vowels, so that we find rı¯se ‘I rise’ but risen ‘risen’.
Even with long vowels, however, it is possible to give some guidelines.
Thus, if the Old English spelling is , then respell it as either
or + consonant + , and if the spelling is  respell it as .
Many of the other correspondences can be solved with a little ingenuity.
ORIGINS AND SOURCES
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Take, for example, the following sentences:
Hwı¯ stande g
.
e he¯r ælne dæg
.
æmtig
.
e?
T
a ara¯s he from 
t
æm sle¯pe
Wæs he se man in woruldha¯de g
.
eseted
If we try only to replace the Old English spellings with corresponding
PDE ones, and don’t attempt any translation, then those such as the
following should result:
Why stande ye here allne day amtiye
Tha arose he from tham sleep
Was he se man in woruldhood yesetted
It is true that for any beginner there are still a number of mysteries,
but the number is significantly reduced, to the extent that a plausible
attempt at translation may be possible.
It is important to emphasise what we have not done so far, as well as
what we have done. I have avoided too specific a discussion of pronun-
ciation, preferring to suggest some relatively straightforward way of
respelling Old English to make the relationships between Old English
and PDE more transparent. Broadly speaking, the pronunciation of
English did not change drastically between Old English and Middle
English. Therefore, if you know what Chaucer’s pronunciation was
like, this will be a good, if approximate, guide to how Old English was
pronounced.
1.6 People, places and texts
I shall return to the question of pronunciation at the end of this chapter,
but it is also necessary to fill in a few more details about Anglo-Saxon
England. The consolidation of the settlement is symbolised by what we
call the Heptarchy, or the seven kingdoms of Wessex, Essex, Sussex,
Kent, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Whether the Heptarchy
represents a reality or a fiction remains up for debate, but the location of
these areas suggests that by far the heaviest concentration of settlement
was in the south and the east.
Nevertheless, the most powerful area by about 700 was probably
Northumbria, where the most important centres were Durham and
York. Northumbria had as its arch rival the kingdom of Mercia, whose
centre was Lichfield, about twenty miles north of Birmingham. During
the next century Mercia gradually became dominant. However, after the
first quarter of the ninth century the north and midlands became more
and more under Viking attack and the principal southern kingdom,
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AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH
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Wessex, began to assume dominance as the only area capable of resisting
these attacks. This was particularly true during the reign of Alfred
(871–99), who signed the Treaty of Wedmore. This established peace
with the Danes, who controlled the area known as the Danelaw.
One of the best pieces of evidence for the extent of Viking settlement
comes from place-names. In areas where the Vikings settled they named
places with their own names. These can still be identified today, for
example by the use of the suffix -by, the Danish word for ‘farm’, and
a fairly common Norwegian suffix is -thwaite ‘a clearing’. Thus it would
be very difficult to find a more south-westerly example of -by than Rugby
in Warwickshire, and -thwaite is virtually restricted to Cumbria (West-
morland and Cumberland) and North Yorkshire (although there is an
odd patch of this suffix in East Anglia).
The various patterns of settlement have an enormous influence on the
distribution of the texts which survive from the Old English period. The
vast majority of texts come from the southern part of England, especially
from the upper Thames valley and around Winchester, the principal
town of Wessex. Other major centres include Canterbury, Lichfield,
Worcester and Durham. In every case we are talking about texts which
are almost all written in ecclesiastical centres.
In this book, as is common in initial studies of Old English, our main
focus will be on West Saxon texts, that is to say, on the texts which
originate from around the Winchester area. It is customary to divide
West Saxon texts into two major groups: Early West Saxon and Late West
Saxon. The texts belonging to the first group were written round about
the time of Alfred or just after. In this group there are three fundamental
texts: Pastoral Care, a translation of a major Christian treatise; the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicles, or , rather, the parts of the Chronicles associated with
Alfred; and Orosius, again a translation (and rewriting) of a text written
by a late Roman historian. For Late West Saxon the most important texts
are those of Ælfric, a monk writing at the end of the tenth century.
Although Ælfric was trained at Winchester, he probably came from
further north in Wessex. He wrote a compilation of Lives of Saints and
a great many homilies. Ælfric is particularly important because he
obviously took great care in composition, style and language, so that
the regularity of his language begins to approach the level of a standard