In the final year of my undergraduate degree I took a course entitled “Old English Language and Literature.” Unfortunately the professor assumed that everyone had signed up only because they needed the course to fulfill their degree requirements.

The truth was that I had been looking forward to studying Old English ever since I started university.

I read and memorized and translated my way through the two semesters and in the final weeks I spent so much time studying passages from Beowulf that my sister joked that I was earning my Bachelors of Beowulf.

Why am I fascinated by the study of Old English?

• Old English was spoken in England from the 5th through the 11th centuries, so its study involves both language and history.
• Since Old English died out after the Norman invasion of 1066, long before the invention of the printing press, original manuscripts (sermons, lives of saints, history, laws, and poetry) are hand-written and relatively rare.
• The Old English alphabet includes three characters no longer used in Modern English: ð (eth/edh), þ (thorn), and æ (ash/aesc).
• According to some research 26% of Modern English words are derived from Germanic languages (which includes Old/Middle English and Dutch).
• Modern English has over 200 commonly used irregular verbs; almost all of them come directly from Old English.
• Old English poetry is based on alliteration (repeated sounds at the beginnings of words), and each line is made up of two halves with a caesura (pause) in the middle.
• Old English poetry is full of kennings (conventional figurative phrases), like whale road = sea, world’s candle = sun, and ring-giver = king.
• The interplay of pagan and Christian elements in Old English writings makes them particularly intriguing.
• J. R.R. Tolkien! He was an Anglo-Saxon scholar, who gave an influential lecture titled “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics” in 1936. The influence of Old English language and culture pervades his fiction.

If you’re interested in learning more about Old English, check out the bilingual edition of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000). The Old English text is presented on each left-hand page.

(Featured image: The Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, in an initial in the ‘Lacnunga’, BL MS Harley 585 via Things Medieval)